Mel Bush

Penultimate episodes have a job to do and this one does very little else. “The Legend of Ruby Sunday” gathers everyone at UNIT headquarters, sets up the mysteries the finale will have to resolve, and spends most of its runtime with a room full of people looking at a monitor and reacting. Then the last two minutes produce a genuinely great reveal, and I went into the finale properly excited despite everything I’d just sat through. That’s an awkward thing to rate, because nearly all of the good bits are in the final stretch.

Penultimate episodes are a thankless format and always have been. Their job is to arrange the board, and arranging a board is less interesting than playing on it. The best of them get round this with a complete story of their own that happens to end badly, which is the trick The Stolen Earth pulls: the Earth is stolen, the Doctor is shot, and it’s a satisfying hour even without the follow-up. This has no story of its own, just a search conducted indoors that produces a name in the last ninety seconds.

The Time Window is a slow device

The centrepiece is UNIT reconstructing the night Ruby was abandoned, using a machine that projects the past into the middle of a laboratory. It’s a striking visual, a snowy churchyard rendered in light with technicians walking around it. The trouble is that it’s a scene about people watching a recording. Everyone stands at the edge of the projection making observations while the plot moves at the speed of the playback, and the episode keeps cutting to reaction shots to find tension it hasn’t otherwise built. The moment the hooded figure turns and points is effective, but the twenty minutes around it are a lot of standing.

The UNIT material is better. Kate Stewart is used well again, Mel gets a proper role instead of a cameo, and the base looks like a real facility with a real budget. Carla being brought in while strangers dig through the worst night of her daughter’s life gives Michelle Greenidge something proper to play, and it’s the only thread that isn’t about plot mechanics. The Doctor’s behaviour is the other interesting thing, and nobody comments on it. He’s evasive with UNIT, snappish with Ruby and increasingly desperate about a question that’s strictly none of his business, and Gatwa plays the fixation well enough that I wanted someone to call him on it.

UNIT and the Time Window in The Legend of Ruby Sunday

Susan Twist, finally explained

The running gag of the same actress appearing in every episode gets its payoff, and it’s the weakest of the reveals. She’s Susan Triad, a tech billionaire whose company is about to give free software to the world, and the Doctor spends a chunk of the episode convinced she’s his granddaughter Susan. That’s decent misdirection aimed squarely at long-term fans, and it worked on me. The actual explanation, that she’s a vessel for Sutekh scattered through time, is delivered at speed at the end. As a season-long puzzle the answer is mechanical, because the recurring face doesn’t mean anything about her, it’s just a signature the villain was leaving.

Running alongside all this is Anita Dobson’s Mrs Flood, who has been turning up since the Christmas special, talking to the camera and clearly knowing far more than she should. Dobson is enjoyable and the direct-to-camera gag still works. By this point I’d started counting, though: Ruby’s mother, Susan Twist’s face, Mrs Flood, and the Doctor’s own reaction to all three. That’s four unresolved threads with one episode left, and the show is still adding instead of closing. Planting questions is cheap and answering them is expensive, and I remember exactly how it went the last time this show tried to land that many things at once.

The last two minutes are terrific

And then the figure on the TARDIS turns, Sutekh is revealed to have been riding on the ship since 1911, and the dust of death begins to spread. Sutekh is a genuinely great choice. He’s from one of the best serials the classic show ever made, he has an enormous physical design, and Gabriel Woolf returning to voice him is proper casting. The idea that he’s been attached to the ship the whole time, spreading through every world the Doctor visited, is the kind of huge retroactive threat a finale should be built on. Gatwa plays the recognition well, less fear than the specific horror of realising the danger came with him.

The image helps enormously. Sutekh is a vast jackal-headed thing perched on top of the ship, completely still, and the shot of him unfolding is the best the era has produced. After a run of villains who are essentially charismatic people in good costumes, a monster that’s simply an enormous ancient animal is a welcome change of gear. So much of the episode is throat-clearing before this moment, and it’s the moment that makes it worth sitting through. I just wish the hour had given me a story on the way.

Rating: 2.5/5. Not my favourite. The Sutekh reveal is superb and the UNIT ensemble is enjoyable, but this is an hour of people watching a screen and explaining what they’re seeing. The season-long mystery of Susan Twist resolves into a signature instead of a story. It’s a trailer for the finale more than an episode in its own right.

The Toymaker is superb

Harris plays the Toymaker as a performer who’s never once been bored, and the constant costume and accent changes turn a fairly thin classic villain into something properly unstable. He isn’t threatening because he’s powerful. He’s threatening because he finds all of it delightful and genuinely doesn’t care how it ends. The toyshop sequence is the standout, a long run through a shifting workshop while he narrates the fates of people the Doctor failed, and the show has the nerve to let it play at length. The moment he brings up the Flux and the billions who died in it is the first time any story has made the Doctor answer for that.

And the dance number works. It shouldn’t, but Harris commits to it completely, and the episode has already established him as someone who would absolutely stop a global catastrophe to do a musical bit. The final game is the right shape too, because it isn’t a puzzle the Doctor can out-think, just a game of catch. Deciding the fate of everything with a children’s game is entirely in character for him. It also turns the whole special into the show negotiating with its own history, and the Toymaker suits that because he’s the one villain who treats everything as a game already. This is the most fun a Doctor Who villain has been since Missy.

UNIT and a genuinely good middle act

Kate Stewart finally gets real material, which is long overdue. Jemma Redgrave has spent a decade being handed a briefing and a corridor, and the stretch where the signal takes hold of her and she turns on the Doctor with complete conviction is the best thing she’s had to play. Mel turning up is a lovely bit of continuity handled lightly, and Bonnie Langford is used better here than she ever was in the eighties. She’s a competent adult with a job instead of a screaming companion, and the brief exchange where she and the Doctor acknowledge how long it’s been, without a speech, is the kind of low-key continuity the show should do more often. Shirley remains a good addition, and the middle act never stops moving.

The bi-generation is a cop-out

Then the Doctor is shot, regenerates, and doesn’t die. Instead he splits, with Tennant staying whole and alive while Ncuti Gatwa steps out of him as a second, separate Doctor. The Fifteenth goes off to have adventures, and the Fourteenth stays behind with the Nobles, gets a garden and a family and retires happily. My problem isn’t the new Doctor, it’s what’s been done to the old one. Regeneration has always been the show’s contract with itself: the Doctor loses, dies, and somebody else has to carry it on.

That cost is why the goodbyes land, and Twice Upon a Time is as affecting as it is because the man saying goodbye knew he was finished. Handing a Doctor a house, a family and a peaceful retirement doesn’t reward the character so much as take the stakes out of the mechanism. If one Doctor gets to opt out, every future regeneration has an escape hatch sitting behind it. I can see the argument for it, since Tennant’s Doctor died saying he didn’t want to go and there’s something to finally letting him stop. The show already told that story properly the first time, though, and telling it again with a happier outcome softens it instead of deepening it.

None of which is a complaint about Gatwa, who’s excellent from his first line. He gets about ten minutes and uses them properly: playful, physically expressive, and completely at ease sharing a scene with a predecessor, which isn’t an easy trick. The moment he tells Tennant to go and be well is generous instead of deferential. Wild Blue Yonder is the special I’d rewatch and this is the one that changes things, and I’d rather those had been the other way round. On the casting, at least, there’s nothing to worry about.

Rating: 3.5/5. Really enjoyed most of this. Neil Patrick Harris is magnificent, the signal premise is nasty and clever, Kate finally gets something to do and Gatwa’s arrival is genuinely exciting. It loses real ground for an ending that spares its lead the one cost this show has always insisted on. That’s going to be hard to walk back.

The Legend of Ruby Sunday: Everybody Stands Around Watching a Screen