Jordan’s Season One Round-Up Reviews – Episodes 3-7

Hey, Who fans. After reviewing the first two episodes, Jordan has been putting his thoughts down on the remaining episodes from Season One. Here are his reviews from Episode 3: Boom through to Episode 7: The Legend of Ruby Sunday. Enjoy…

Boom

The first two episodes of this new series, Series 1 or Series 14 or even Series 40 if you want to get technical have been a little uneven, luckily could it be the third time’s a charm with Boom, written by Steven Moffat?

Let’s just say that Moffat is probably one of the best writers the show has ever had in the twenty-first century. I had my issues with his tenure as the showrunner but he’s definitely at his best when he spreads himself too thin, trying to prop up an entire series. His one-off entries in the previous Russell T. Davies era have to be some of the best Doctor Who to have ever Doctor Who-d. The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, The Girl in the Fireplace and Blink are so fantastic, and while he wrote some great Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi stories, working on Doctor Who and Sherlock at the same time is going to take its toll.

Boom felt like a leftover script from his time as showrunner. I could easily hear Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman delivering the lines he gave to Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson and one might say this is a bit of a Moffat painting by numbers episode. We’ve got polite but sinister robots like The Girl in the Fireplace, the Church of the Future having become soldiers like Time of the Angels and Flesh and Stone, future ambulances going wrong like The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances, but that didn’t bother me too much because the dialogue and tension was there from the script which was very simple with the Doctor having to stand on a landmine the whole time. Might have wondered if this story was going to be boring but instead things come across really well thanks to the tight script he delivered.

But there were also some references to the classic era, the ambulances shooting wires reminded me of Styre’s robot from The Sontaran Experiment and it looked just as ropey and seeing all ambulances arrive was very similar to the ending to episode 5 of Frontier in Space when the Daleks wobbled into view and the ambulances wobbled just as badly here so the more things change, the more they stay the same.

In keeping with the timey-whimey-ness that Moffat is famous for, in the guest cast we get Varada Sethu who has been cast at the new companion in the next series. She does a tremendous job here, lifting what could have been a pretty boring guest character off the page and turning her into someone who genuinely feels like a human being. While it hasn’t been revealed if she’ll be playing Mundy Flynn again in the next series, she quickly showed how much chemistry she had with Gatwa and Gibson so if she’s anything there like she was here, we’re in for a great treat with another great companion.

For the Doctor, we’ve had two stories where he gets to show his fun side for most of the runtime but Boom is the first to show his more serious side. Gatwa is a fantastic actor and Moffat has given him his first opportunity to prove his metal. Gatwa steps up brilliantly and while one might think this was the easiest episode to shoot, standing in one place when you’re as much of an expressive and energetic actor as Gatwa is couldn’t have been easy for him to. Gibson once again however doesn’t get too much to do, even if she also feels a little more grown up here, telling the Doctor off in a way that would make Clara proud. My main issue with Ruby is that we haven’t had much mystery around her character in a way we haven’t seen before and if Russell wants the ending to pay off we need to have some seeds of the finale now to follow things back. She would also work if she didn’t have that plot thread and was just someone along for the ride, I do miss the days when companions would turn up, have a laugh and then go on their way.

Religion is the big topic here and Moffat doesn’t so much as take a swipe at it, as he does argue why faith and religion have no place on a battlefield. I’m not religious in the slightest but I did see a few people online had been offended by some of the dialogue, especially the line about faith being a word to stop people from thinking for themselves. Is the Doctor entirely wrong there? Well, that’s up to the viewer but maybe drama isn’t the place to discuss a writer’s views on religion and the ethics surrounding them. Because of the time, classic Who never really went near the topic except in stories like Planet of the Spiders.

Famously the unmade First Doctor story, The Masters of Luxor was cancelled because of its religious tones because it would have given the Doctor a religious stance. But the modern era has skipped around the subject altogether so far and pretty much made the Doctor atheist while being perfectly happy with other people being religious.

So maybe I can see why some viewers might have found this uncomfortable and I wonder how many viewers who have a religious view and belief system would have winced at some of the Doctor’s comments as the story went along. But Mundy rightly tells the Doctor off at the end for telling Splice to “Keep the faith” when doesn’t believe in it, so maybe this was Moffat trying to balance the argument, as the Doctor explains, “I might not believe or like it but that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes need it.”

The episode closes with a touching scene between the Doctor and Ruby who discuss the concept of death and how people deal with it. The Doctor quotes from Philip Larkin’s An Arundel Tomb, “What will survive of us is love.” It’s a lovely quote to finish on and too many people, it is true when someone is gone the love we had for the person doesn’t just go away, the survives in stories and memories, though I suspect as a person the Doctor wouldn’t have liked Larkin as a person who’s views are pretty similar to those shared by groups like the National Front today so he would find him repellent as a person.

But before we open another can of worms, Boom could mark a return to form for the RTD2 era, it took the 2005 series a moment to find its feet and this could be the same this time around. Once again though my main issue is that there is no exploration as to who Ruby is and I’m concerned that the reveal will feel a little tacked on at the end because we haven’t had a lot of the seeds we need so far.

73 Yards

Ever since the show’s creation, we fans have gotten used to strange phenomena happening in our favourite stories thanks to the involvement of time travel. Previous series showrunner Steven Moffat even gave it a term – Timey Wimey – because sometimes time travel can get a little wrapped up and messy and can even be over the heads of those characters in the stories. We fans though are just happy to watch and enjoy what we’re seeing whether it thrills us or scares us, we accept the things we don’t necessarily understand because it’s Doctor Who after all.

And that is my reaction to 73 Yards, I didn’t understand many aspects of it but it hasn’t stopped me from enjoying it. As a huge horror fan and someone who has a keen interest in the supernatural and paranormal in real life, 73 Yards was right up my street, from the moment the TARDIS arrives we’ve got witchcraft circles and spells, fairies and a spectre that begins to follow Ruby throughout the story. Because Ncuti Gatwa was finishing filming Sex Education for Netflix, 73 Yards had to be a Doctor-lite story which is strange this early into the run and he seemingly vanishes leaving Ruby Sunday alone and actress Millie Gibson earns her companion stripes here an even more brilliant feat given how this was the first story that was filmed for the new series.

It opens like An American Werewolf in London with two people chatting about how wonderful the landscape is before something starts to follow them. The Doctor is very excited about landing in Wales, though one wonders how excited he would have been when Ruby goes into a pub and is taunted by the mysterious locals, I did like however how excited the Doctor was at seeing the fairy circle and the childlike wonder in his eyes at the sight, proving that even after thousands of years of time travel, he can still get excited about things.

When we first got the fleeting glimpses of the mysterious woman in the leaked location photos from fans, people speculated if this woman was going to be the Susan Twist character we know differently now because Susan Twist plays the hiker that Ruby bumps into, this time not having anything to do with the plot except being scared away by the mysterious woman. As this series is progressing I’m beginning to believe we’ve got a sort of WandaVision situation going on where someone outside is manipulating the situation inside.

The mysterious woman played out like the spirits used in the film It Follows, always just in the very distance of the frame but always following the main character. One of the best aspects of this character was the way she would make people freak out and abandon Ruby, obviously so that Ruby would stay on the path to defeat the villainous Roger Ap Gwilliam who had become Prime Minister and wanted to start a nuclear war. According to Doctor Who Unleashed she was saying things like “Thank You,” but I don’t necessarily buy that, surely that wouldn’t frighten a warmonger or even Carla Sunday who abandons Ruby, the daughter she loves so much to live a life on her own. The woman even communicates to Kate Stewart and UNIT through their headsets and given what UNIT has seen, surely a “Thank You” wouldn’t make them turn on one of the Doctor’s companions without just cause?

Maybe the witchcraft aspects of this story meant that these words get scrambled in people’s heads and make them freak out because of some kind of flight or fight instinct. Unfortunately, the fleetingly brief runtime here doesn’t allow for much exploration and this is where the story starts to lose its cleverness. Something else that was confusing was who was Mad Jack? It’s made clear that it’s probably Roger Ap Gwilliam but no explanation is how he came to be. Does he essentially swap places with the Doctor when he vanishes or was he the result of a new Witchy timeline created when the Doctor broke the circle?

I believe that Ruby Sunday has some Wanda Maximoff-level powers from the Marvel Cinematic Universe but she doesn’t know she has them and when the Doctor mentions the future warmonger she subconsciously makes it her mission to stop him, removing the Doctor from the picture so that she can do whatever she can to stop Gwilliam in the future. This would also make a bit of sense with some of the other things we’ve seen so far in the series and then later with the revelation of the older woman Ruby using her powers to go back in time and stop the Doctor from setting Mad Jack free in the first place. Maybe when older Ruby is in hospital this is her powers going haywire just before she dies and sends herself back to the place she started from?

But we still have to wait and see and with Russell T. Davies not giving us any seeds of the revelations to come I’m not entirely sure how the ending will stick, it seems like he’s got all these mad ideas but no idea how to glue them together yet. I did enjoy 73 Yards, from its creepy beginning to the science-fiction version of It Follows it became. It wasted Dame Sian Phillips though Millie Gibson put in a fantastic performance proving to us why Ruby does deserve a place in the TARDIS.

73 Yards was certainly bold but maybe its strange ending was a little too much for what we’d already seen in the episode and it crumpled under the weight, just a few more lines were all we needed to explain things and I’m hoping in the future we will get the opportunities to see all the episodes from this series with their cut scenes reinstated, maybe then and only then, will we truly know what 73 Yards was actually about!

Dot and Bubble

Dot and Bubble is the first time that we’ve had two Doctor-lite episodes in a row and this time, Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday was pretty absent at the same time, though she does get more to do than the Doctor here. Instead, we follow Lindy Pepper-Bean and her social media followers and friends on the planet Finetime as an invasion is underway, but can they look up from their screens for long enough to notice?

Dot and Bubble was first pitched as an Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond story, though for its faults, it works better here, social media as it depicted in this story wasn’t as big as when Matt Smith was the Doctor as it is now, then it would have felt more like a story about the future fears of what it could be used for. By putting it out on air now, we get a much more accurate representation of how social media has consumed people’s lives and the dangers of using it.

I don’t want this to be a bashing review but for me, the first problem with this story comes from the lead character of Lindy Pepper-Bean. Actor Callie Cooke does a great job with a rather thankless role and she does manage to make the character feel real, despite being completely incompetent, naïve, privileged and a bit idiotic. Somehow she has to escape the teeth of the giant slugs called Mantraps and follow the instructions of The Doctor and Ruby to do it.

I’ll give Russell T. Davies his due, this story has an interesting set-up, but the loss of Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson is felt in this story, it might not be as much of an issue if the series was still thirteen episodes, but with only eight episodes this series, having two episodes where the leads don’t feature too heavily feels like a mistake and it makes the worse episodes of the series stand out even more. I also feel sorry for Gatwa who puts in a tremendous performance in the final scene which was the first one for this series he shot, he has to make the most of this scene which could have a lot more weight behind it had he been in it more and the script had leant more into the show’s strengths while trying to imitate things that work well in other shows.

However that doesn’t undermine the power of that final scene, Ncuti is fantastic here as the social commentary on social media finally comes into play. However for more casual viewers who might not have any social media, a lot of the micro-aggressions don’t mean anything to them. Some people like me have become a bit of a technophobe of late, especially since tech seems to getting even more superpowered lately and I’m struggling to keep up, but the exploration of addiction to social media and living your life entirely online was something that interested me and Russell managed successfully make this the darker aspect of the story against the superficial glitz of the Finetime backdrop.

Unfortunately, though, too much emphasis might have been put on the commentary, so much so that the monstrous Mantraps don’t get much screen time. They look great and have the campy quality that I like about my favourite monsters and I was pleased to see them devouring the inhabitants of the planet. There was something slasherish about them, like when you’re watching Michael Myers or Jason Voorhes stalking an irredeemable character and a maniacal joy when they finally get them.

It’s a shame that the only redeemable character Ricky September gets killed off spectacularly in what is easily the best sequence in the whole episode. I actually really liked that aspect of this story, unlike stories like Blink where we like Sally Sparrow, we instantly take a dislike to Lindy and are kind of rooting for the dot to kill her, but instead, she manages to manipulate her way into surviving and the character we are supposed to like bites the dust instead, it was a great inversion of what we’ve seen previously.

I’ve alluded to the fact the commentary on social media and people’s habits on it aren’t subtle and things ramp up quickly with swipes being taken at upper classes who think the world revolves around them and literally live in their little bubble with no desire to look at what be happening in the world around them for fear it might not fit with their world view. This is something that Doctor Who has always done, looking at the greed of various characters and the extent people will go to keep their wealth.

But Dot and Bubble go one step further, gleefully pinching from series like Black Mirror for its inspiration even if it feels like a pale imitation of the source material. I’m always up for the show experimenting with its format, indeed many of the best episodes do just that, but there are always bound to be a few that fail to reach the bar, Dot and Bubble easily fall under that bracket even though I must commend their guts to try.

And perhaps the biggest tragedy here. It’s a story with plenty of ambition and pluck, but none of the issues and problems raised here glue together well, it’s like trying to assemble a jigsaw with the pieces the wrong way up. And as great as the final scene is, people who aren’t online might feel a little alienated for not picking up the undertones of the story because social media isn’t an aspect of the world they are used to and so the end result is a bold if deeply flawed episode, going for style over substance and a story which leaves a lot to be desired in its execution.

Rogue

From its very inception, Doctor Who has been progressive, both on screen and behind the scenes and Rogue continues that trend sixty years on from 1963. From the original producer Verity Lambert who worked on the show creation in an era when women didn’t normally get given that much power in the film and television industry, to the first director who was a gay man to the first Doctor who is both the first person of colour to play the title role and is also a gay man, the show has never backed away from taking up the mantle for many a good cause and like the Doctor themselves, always does what is right.

Looking at the final two acts of the episode first, it’s clear this will be a polarising episode dealing with current social commentary and politics and no doubt leaving some of the viewing public seething with rage. However, for many of us, this was a great episode and will praised as another example of the show having the savvy to keep up with the changing culture and not being afraid to show us things that shouldn’t be an issue in the twenty-first century, most notably two men falling in love with one another.

The Doctor meets and very quickly falls for the enigmatic Rogue, played with charm by Jonathan Groff and the pair share an instant chemistry, even if I felt it took Groff a minute to get the show, but by the end of their scene in Rogue’s ship, I felt he nailed the character and relationship with the Doctor perfectly. It has been said that there are obvious Captain Jack vibes about him and people are right, he’s a strange time traveller in the past, he’s investigating something and initially wants to deal with them in a morally loose way and he dances with the Doctor this time and not Rose.

Authors Kate Herron and Briony Redman should be praised for their handling of the LGBTQI+ aspects of the show and the scene where the Doctor and Rogue dance together much to the shock and disgust of the people in 1813 not only breaks the conventions of the early nineteenth century but also the stigma of nowadays where something as harmless as two men dancing together is still viewed with the same nasty and outdated opinions as those in 1813, you only have to look at the constant backlash shows like Strictly Come Dancing gets for having same-sex couples and real-life events like the Pulse shooting in America to see how this is still viewed.

But Herron and Redman don’t just form the episode around this, we get a new villain in the Whoniverse too in the form of the bird-like  Chuldur, who travels through time and space cosplaying as people they like by literally taking their form and killing the original. It’s a funny and tongue-in-cheek look at Cosplay and people who dress up as their favourite characters from across all media. As the script spends much of its time looking at the Doctor and Rogue, the more bloodier parts of the Chuldur gruesome pastime get swept under the rug but that’s fine because they make for a fun one-time baddie and upped the ante nicely towards the end giving us a genuinely tense conclusion.

The Chuldur in question are obsessed with Netflix’s hit Bridgerton and are enjoying the period setting from person to person as those characters in Bridgerton swap their dresses for different occasions. Indira Varma does a particularly great job as the Dutchess, and of course, she’s known to us as Suzie Costello in Torchwood having appeared throughout the first series in various episodes and then on audio too. She is having a ball in the bird makeup.

Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson are having a ball too, Gibson, in particular, proving why she is making for a great companion even if the relationship between her and the Doctor hasn’t been explored particularly very well so far. Ruby has the right mix of intelligence and instinct and is caring and brave. While I do long for the days when companions would just join the Doctor without having an “Impossible Girl” or a “Meta-Crisis” special thing about them I’ll wait to pass judgement for the last two episodes of this series first but I do hope that we can get a few companions in the future who just show up have a few laughs and then go on their way.

Rogue might have had its ups and downs including the convenient psychic earrings but it has to sit as one of the best episodes this series has to offer. On the surface, it’s a fun run-around with a brilliantly designed monster and its fun to finally get the Doctor and Ruby together properly in this story for the first time in a long time. But its heart lies in the LGBTQI+ aspects and works as a way of the show not only celebrating intentionally or not, Pride month in June but also showing how far we’ve come since periods in history like the Regency and how far we have yet to come…

The Legend of Ruby Sunday

The Legend of Ruby Sunday had several nostalgic moments for me and in many ways was Doctor Who coming full circle for me, I’ll explain and explore that as we go on but The Legend of Ruby Sunday right off the bat does explain the problem with releasing the episodes on IPlayer first before its terrestrial broadcast. Given the ending of the episode, the notion of spoilers and not ruining things for the other viewers was everywhere.

Ever since Russell T. Davies took over the reins as showrunner again, he’s been pushing this new direction for the show which has been met happily by some viewers and with resistance from others. He has also given us several questions to follow throughout the series, who is Ruby Sunday’s mum? Who is the one who waits? Why does the TARDIS seem to be behaving erratically and why does Susan Triad keep popping up? For better or worse he has tried to give us little hints here and there, though for me, not enough seeds have been planted for all of this to pay off in this series.

With the episode opening with the TARDIS barrelling into UNIT Tower we are very quickly thrown into the mystery of Susan Triad. Very quickly, the Doctor discovers that S Triad is an anagram of TARDIS, this doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone but might come out of nowhere for some viewers as this is the first time we’ve met Susan  Triad properly outside of a little comment in The Giggle. And I’m not sure how happy I am about it because the character is called Susan and she has to be the Doctor’s Granddaughter.

Does anyone know how many people on the planet are called Susan? Surely the Doctor can’t think everyone with that name is going to be his granddaughter? And what technology was Susan Triad giving away to the world? I can’t help but think that if the series had the proper thirteen-episode runtime and not the reduced eight episodes there would be a lot more time to explain things and build up to the exciting ending.

It is nice though that the show has returned to having a proper UNIT family back again. With Kate Stewart in charge and Colonel Ibrahim seemingly her number two, we’ve got Harriet Arbinger, Morris Gibbons, Rose Noble and returning Bonnie Langford as Melanie Bush. It was a nice dynamic to have a group of characters who know one another and are friends and it will make a betrayal and possible future drama all the more dynamic to see because you got the sense that this was a group of people who work well together.

Russell rightly doesn’t focus too much on the Susan Triad aspect of the episode right off the bat though and instead begins to look at the titular legend of Ruby Sunday. I liked that the secrets of the episode came in the form of a grainy VHS tape, which also is the first nostalgic hit for me as my very first Doctor Who story was watched on a grainy VHS. And it also happened to Pyramids of Mars. We also get our first nod at who the villain might be with Carla Sunday mentioning the Beast. Given how that character was also voiced by Gabrielle Wolfe this was probably Russell trying to be clever and give us a little hint at the big bad revealed at the end.

I loved the whole effect of the time window and it reminded me of WandaVision. When the Vision gets to the edge of town, we see this television screen effect that stops him from leaving and the time window here had the lines that VHS tapes would have going up the screen, especially when they got pretty old. The grainy quality was a great effect, a little disorientating sometimes and some of the aspects and angles were off when the Doctor from The Church on Ruby Road was running towards the church, but we can forgive this because overall the effect was great.

It was also the scene which cemented how great Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson have been throughout this series, there is a real tenderness between the pair and the vulnerability the characters shown in these scenes helps sell the tonal shift the episode takes towards the end. There is a real power behind seeing both characters who are both foundlings holding on to each other for dear life while static and grainy snow falls behind them is beautifully haunting. Things then get spooky when the Doctor and UNIT come face to face with the main threat for the first time and it allows Russell to put a pin in the Ruby mystery for a moment and focus on the more pressing aspects of Susan Triad and what is going on with the TARDIS.

Let’s give the production crew some credit here because it must have been hard to make the TARDIS feel like a genuine threat and yet they succeed, the noise it makes a few times is genuinely frightening and things get even worse when we discover that the series big bad is Sutekh who has been hitching a free ride on the TARDIS for quite some time. This will be an interesting aspect going forward because we don’t yet know when Sutekh managed to get control of the TARDIS and a line for Harbinger who came as no surprise to be Harriet, she describes how Sutekh would whisper and promise and seduce the time machine and gradually twisted it to do his desires. So one wonders how this affects the relationship between the Doctor and the TARDIS going forward given how the show has always shown the ship as being the safest place in the universe, Russell has succeeded in finally stripping that away. And given how long the TARDIS has been with the Doctor will he be able to forgive this betrayal?

The return of Sutekh was a real nostalgic hit for me, he was my first Who villain when we watched Pyramids of Mars at junior school in 2005 on a grainy tape and captured my imagination so much that it made me seek out the rest of the series and start watching the show from David Tennant’s first adventure. The redesign was a surprise but for a welcome one, Sutekh in Pyramids works when he is sat down but when he stands the illusion does get shattered a little. And the new design is playing on his ancient Egyptian origins of being depicted as a jackal, though I’m hoping he gets a more human form in the next episode so he can interact with the characters a lot more freely. It was a real “Oh BEEP!” moment when I was watching this at 1 Am as I recognised the voice and Sutekh’s return made a welcome change from the revolving doors of the Daleks, Cybermen and the Master!

I’m not too sure how I feel on the whole anagram aspect of Sue Tech given how that’s not really how anagrams work and the reveal of the character in this way only works on long-term fans or people who have watched Pyramids of Mars. But if the Master can send the Toclofane to massacre millions of people to the Scissor Sisters then I can forgive the anagram problem too, maybe Sutekh does have a dramatic aspect to his being too and I liked how he took a swipe at the Tory government too with Susan Triad imitating the cringy dance Theresa May did. Sutekh may be the God of Death but at least we know he wouldn’t vote Conservative!

The Legend of Ruby Sunday does leave us with one little problem though, how will Russell T. Davies be able to wrap everything up in fifty minutes? I’m a little concerned that Sutekh won’t get much to do and there are still a lot of questions that need answering. But that doesn’t take away from the fact this is one of the best episodes of this series and the final fifteen minutes was Doctor Who being exciting in a way it hasn’t been for a long time!