73 Yards
Constraints make for interesting results. Ncuti Gatwa still had to finish Sex Education (which he was amazing in) and so Millie Gibson handles one episode all by herself, with Davies in full “Midnight” mode.
Rave: Just beautifully judged spookiness throughout the story. If I’m picking one bit (and I am supposed to, by the laws of this format), then I should pick the scene in the pub, but I will pick the scene with Kate Lethbridge-Stewart,[1] because I think this is the moment that I realised she’d become as reassuring a presence as her father... just before they pulled the rug from under me and had her and UNIT subject to Ruby’s curse.
Rant: I don’t really have anything particularly to rant about this time... I enjoyed trying to work out what happened, and to me, the trickiest part of that is figuring out why the Doctor kicking the circle makes Ruby special. Why does Ruby get her special 73-yard friend, if she didn’t interact with the circle? Does the curse latch onto your best friend? Has Ruby been shunted into some kind of bottle timeline because she’s a time traveller? Does the Doctor not exist during this episode? Surely not, because Kate also remembers him. Is he just trapped in the TARDIS?
Ah yes, the TARDIS. As we find out later on... the TARDIS’s perception filter operates at 73 yards. This kind of implies that Ruby’s special friend is connected to the TARDIS. So perhaps... the Doctor is the subject of the curse, and the TARDIS acts to give Ruby the power to help him? I quite enjoy all this, really, so it’s only a rant in the sense that you could totally read the above in the style of a raving lunatic and it would work quite well.
- Apparently this is the first time she’s introduced herself as Lethbridge-Stewart, according to Doctor Who Magazine. ↩︎
