The Doctor steps on a fairy circle on a Welsh clifftop, vanishes, and doesn’t properly return for the rest of the hour. What’s left is Ruby, alone, with a woman standing exactly seventy-three yards away who follows her everywhere and never gets any closer. Anyone Ruby sends to talk to the figure comes back changed, refuses to say what they heard, and leaves her for good. “73 Yards” is the strangest thing this show has done in years, and I mostly admired it a great deal.
It’s also the episode that best shows both what this era can do and the thing it keeps refusing to do, which is explain itself. Nearly everything in the first forty minutes is superb. The last few minutes close a loop without telling me what was inside it. I’ve gone back and forth on whether that’s a flaw or the whole idea, and I still haven’t settled.
The rule is superb
Seventy-three yards is a specific, arbitrary, unyielding distance, and the episode gets enormous mileage from it. The figure is always there and always at that range: across a pub car park, at the end of a road, on the other side of a field. In wide shots I found myself scanning the background for her before the camera pointed her out, which is exactly the reflex good horror builds. The cruelty is in what happens to anyone who approaches. They walk over, they listen, and they come back looking at Ruby with an expression she can’t argue with.
That’s a genuinely frightening idea because it makes the threat social instead of physical. Nothing hurts Ruby, everybody just leaves. The scene where Carla, who has fostered dozens of children and been the warmest presence in this run, looks at her daughter with total revulsion is the most upsetting thing in the series. The camera stays with Ruby every time, so each conversation happens at a distance, in silence, while she watches somebody’s posture change. Holding that for the full hour is what turns a good gimmick into genuine dread, and by the fourth time somebody walked over there I didn’t want them to go.
Giving Ruby a whole life
The middle act is the ambitious part. Instead of resolving the situation, the episode lets years pass, and Ruby grows older, moves, takes a job and learns to live with the figure at the edge of every frame. Millie Gibson plays decades across an hour and is very good in the later stretches, which isn’t something the series had asked of her before. The Roger ap Gwilliam section is the strongest. He’s a populist politician on course to become Prime Minister and start a nuclear war, and Ruby’s plan is to get close to him and then step aside, so the figure is seventy-three yards from him instead.
Whatever the woman says sends him running and ends his career in an afternoon. That’s a properly clever use of the rule, turning the horror into something Ruby can wield without ever understanding it. Aneurin Barnard is genuinely unpleasant in the part, and the brief sketch of how quickly a country can be talked into something ugly works better for being sketched instead of lectured. Wales does a lot of the work too. The pub scene, where the locals wind Ruby up about the mad woman on the hill and then abruptly stop finding it funny, is the best-written exchange in the episode.
A Doctor-lite episode that earns the absence
The show has made these before out of production necessity, and the best of them turn the constraint into the point. Turn Left is the obvious comparison: remove the Doctor and find out what the world does without him, with the companion as the lens. This is doing something slightly different and slightly bolder. Turn Left is about the Doctor’s absence from history, while 73 Yards is about his absence from one person’s life, and it never lets Ruby become a hero in his place. She doesn’t solve the mystery or find him, she simply gets older with a thing following her, adapts to it, and uses it once.
Then Ruby lives out her whole life, and at the moment of her death she finds herself back on the clifftop, seventy-three yards from her younger self. She is the figure. She waves her past self away from the fairy circle, the Doctor never vanishes, and none of it happens. As an image that’s lovely, but as a resolution it’s a closed loop with nothing inside it. Why the circle did this, what the figure said and why the distance are never addressed, and the episode’s position is that the mystery is the point.
I’m genuinely torn. There’s a strong tradition of folk horror that works exactly this way, and the ambiguity really is the whole substance of it, so an explanation would probably have been worse. This show’s basic promise has always been that the Doctor arrives and works out how the trick is done, though, and an era that keeps replacing mechanism with mood is spending something it’ll want back. I’d still rather the show made this than another safe runaround, and an hour of family television where the hero is absent and a woman simply grows old being followed is a brave thing to broadcast. I finished it wanting one more scene.
Rating: 3.5/5. Really enjoyed most of this, and it’s the most interesting thing the era has attempted. The central rule is superb, the social horror is genuinely upsetting, Gibson carries a whole hour on her own, and the political sequence is sharp. It loses ground for an ending that closes the loop without ever making the loop mean anything. That’s becoming a habit with this run.
