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Season 1, Episode 7: ‘The Legend of Ruby Sunday’
Over six a long time, “Doctor Who” has launched many villains — together with large hitters just like the Cybermen (first launched in 1966) and memorable one-off monsters just like the gas-mask sporting Empty Child (2005) — because the Doctor’s most fearsome enemy.
But in “The Legend of Ruby Sunday,” the primary episode within the season’s two-part finale, it appears his final nemesis may lastly have been recognized — or moderately, rediscovered. It seems the mysterious villain who’s been pulling the strings this season (“the one who waits”) was first fought by Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor again in 1975.
This reveal is genuinely fear-inducing. But it’s the mixture of Russell T Davies’s pacey, tricksy script and the present’s newly lavish manufacturing values that makes Episode 7 such a bone-chilling journey — one far scarier, much more formidable, than I anticipated from the present’s Disney period.
As the finale opens, two mysteries, which Davies has threaded all through the season, grasp within the air. There’s the query of Ruby’s (Millie Gibson) again story, together with the identification of her delivery mom. And what concerning the mysterious lady (Susan Twist) who retains popping up wherever the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby journey?
These questions are on the Doctor’s thoughts because the TARDIS crashes into the headquarters of the United Intelligence Taskforce, or UNIT, Britain’s supersecret extraterrestrial job drive. He’s greeted by the group’s head, Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave), and her group, together with the 13-year-old scientific prodigy Morris (Lenny Rush).
Right on cue, the mysterious lady’s face flashes onto the display screen as soon as extra, this time recognized because the entrepreneur Susan Triad of Susan Triad Technology. Her title units off alarm bells for the Doctor. Not solely is “S Triad” an anagram of TARDIS (“Obviously, thanks,” Kate says sarcastically,) however Susan can be the title of the First Doctor’s companion and granddaughter.
First, although, the thriller of Ruby’s origins. The Doctor has all the time mentioned that they will’t return to Christmas Eve 2004, when Ruby was deserted, lest the Doctor mess with the timelines. But utilizing surveillance digital camera footage from that evening and a strong piece of know-how referred to as a Time Window, they may recreate that day.
The Doctor and Ruby, accompanied by the UNIT soldier Colonel Chidozie (Tachia Newall), journey again into the shimmering, glitchy previous. A hooded lady, presumably Ruby’s mom, seems, however she is much more shadowy than the remainder of the image and Ruby sobs within the Doctor’s arms, unable to see the determine’s face.
Amid the uncooked human emotion, an existential risk arrives. “What is that?” the younger Morris stammers on the Doctor, pointing at a cloud of mud billowing menacingly across the TARDIS.
The readings on Morris’s charts skyrocket. “That factor is sizzling. It’s chilly. It’s radioactive. It’s dead. It’s all the pieces. I don’t know,” he panics. Ruby’s adoptive mother Carla (Michelle Greenidge), instinctively is aware of its title. “It’s the Beast,” she says, an alien incarnation of Satan himself.
Realizing that Chidozie has gone lacking, the Doctor and Ruby name out his title and his distorted voice responds in a low, inhuman growl: “I’m in hell.” In the Time Window, the system overloads and the Doctor and Ruby are ripped out of the reminiscence. Chidozie’s corpse returns with them, turned to mud.
Unnerved, the Doctor calls for that his former companion Mel (Bonnie Langford) take him to Susan, who’s about to offer an essential speech on the United Nations in her function as chief govt of an enormous tech agency. If the Doctor is her grandfather, she doesn’t acknowledge him, greeting him pleasantly: “Nice to fulfill you, pet. Doctor, who?” offering a quick second of levity.
Susan tells the Doctor she’s been having “lot of desires” and the Doctor asks what she desires about. Is it Lindy, the spoiled influencer from the episode “Dot and Bubble”; or the abandoned planet from “Boom”? Her look of shocked recognition confirms that someway, Susan is a part of this.
At the UNIT headquarters, the TARDIS lets out a baleful groan. UNIT’s members look terrified as soon as extra; no one does wide-eyed terror fairly like Redgrave. Morris confirms that this isn’t simply occurring prior to now, and the enemy has woven itself into the Doctor’s ship.
A sense of dread pervades Susan begins her speech. She awkwardly dances onto display screen with a stiffness immediately paying homage to the awkward boogie by Theresa May when she was Britain’s prime minister. . But as Susan prepares to learn the phrases “I feel we are able to succeed” on the teleprompter, that very same sinister, echoing, demonic voice says them first.
At UNIT, the beforehand perky staffer Harriet (Genesis Lynea) begins talking like a girl possessed about “the king himself.”
“He has hidden within the howling void,” she chants. “The Lord of Time was blind and useless and knew nothing.” Her title, it’s revealed, is Harriet Arbinger, one other wordplay on “harbinger,” identical to Henry Arbinger in “The Devil’s Chord.”
“The gods deliver harbingers to warn us of their coming,” the Doctor whispers. But which god, he ponders, and Harriet lists gods of chaos from previous “Doctor Who” escapades: Neil Patrick Harris and Jinkx Monsoon’s father-child duo of Toymaker and Maestro; the Mara, a snakelike creature confronted by Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor; and the Trickster from the kids’s spinoff present “The Sarah Jane Adventures.”
With each god, and the fear they introduced, pressure builds. By the time Harriet warns that “standing on excessive is the mom and father and different of all of them,” the anticipation feels virtually as insufferable for the viewer because it appears for the characters. “Whatever it’s, right here it comes,” Kate says.
The “god of all gods” on the coronary heart of this story, Harriet explains, has “one true title” and it’s revealed as Sutekh.
For the primary time this episode, all sound recedes, save for the Doctor’s sharp, shallow panting. To newer “Who” followers, the title may not imply a lot, however erstwhile viewers could bear in mind Sutekh from the 1975 episode “Pyramids of Mars.” Inspired by the Egyptian god of violence and storms, he’s the “god of loss of life,” hell bent on destroying all life within the universe.
Before the TARDIS, the mud cloud coalesces right into a monstrous, dog-like beast with a number of pink eyes and sharp fangs. Susan’s head cracks again and her face turns into a skeletal horror, with pink glowing eyes peering from sunken sockets.
“Did you suppose I used to be household?” this new, horrifying Susan asks the Doctor. Her hand reaches out to pulverize the Doctor, who’s terrified.
“I deliver Sutekh’s present of loss of life for you, and for all of your tiny, vile, incessant universe,” she says, the episode ending on this cliffhanger. Has the Whoniverse ever been this scary?
