The season 14 finale of Doctor Who was released into the world on June 21, and whereas The Legend of Ruby Sunday set us up for an epic experience, what we got instead fell flat. Fans are understandably upset, so what went wrong?
I’m not even sure where to begin, to be honest. It could be the terrible CGI effects of Sutekh as he was dragged behind the TARDIS inside the Time Vortex, or maybe it’s the anti-climax of discovering the true identity of Ruby’s mother. But maybe I’m getting a little ahead of myself. All of those things happened within the last 10 minutes of the episode, and Empire of Death was doomed from the start.
The episode began with Mel and the Doctor zipping across London on a Vespa to escape the fast-moving “dust of death” unleashed by Sutekh’s minions to devour all life across the universe.
After arriving back at UNIT, bizarrely unscathed considering the fact that literally everyone else in London is turned to dust, the Doctor and Mel head into the Time Window to join Ruby, who is still there asking for her Mummy while the rest of the world crumbles around her. Honestly, if you put a gas mask on that girl, you could consider this a season-long rerun of The Empty Child. Even the Doctor has to tell her that they’ve “got worse problems”.
As the trio are stumbling around in the Time Window, Sutekh appears before them and explains that he has been attached to the TARDIS since 1975, going everywhere that the Doctor did and spreading the image of Susan Twist throughout time and space to spread his “dust of death” on every planet the Doctor has ever visited. He also explains why he’s letting the Doctor live, and it’s a doozy.
Sutekh, the god of death and terrifying beast, is just a soap opera-loving giant dog, and the only reason he’s here is to find out who Ruby’s mother is. The same thing can be said for the majority of the audience. I wonder if Sutekh would have been as disappointed as us mere humans if he’d lived long enough to find out the answer.
Using Ruby’s memories to conjure up the Remembered TARDIS, the only living trio left inside UNIT escapes the wrath of Sutekh and takes off into space. Cue yet another emotional breakdown from the Doctor as he stands in the doorway to the TARDIS, screaming into the void, watching the universe crumble around him.
Thankfully, the Doctor is in possession of what amounts to a glorified iPad, and after a brief jaunt to a badly described planet to get a spoon (yes, you read that right), he hands the iPad off to Ruby. In her hands, the iPad picks up on her memories and we’re shown a clip of Roger ap Gwilliam. Remember him? In 73 Yards, he’s the Prime Minister in 2046 who takes the earth to the brink of nuclear devastation.
Well, this gives the Doctor an idea. During his campaign, Roger made DNA registration mandatory for everyone in Britain, and this meant that Ruby’s mother’s DNA would be on file. For some reason, 2046 still exists despite the fact that the world is ending today, so the Doctor, Mel and Ruby travel forward in time to get some answers.
Fast forward ten minutes. The iPad holds the information both the audience and Sutekh are still waiting for, and Mel is now a minion of Sutekh. I’m still not entirely sure how that happened, but it’s not the weirdest thing that happened in this episode, so I’m willing to gloss over it. Minion Mel takes the Doctor and Ruby to UNIT headquarters through the magic of teleportation, which is never explained, and the Doctor faces off against Sutekh for the second time.
Even if you gloss over everything else that was strange about this episode, there is no ignoring the fact that the Doctor’s “epic battle” with Sutekh amounts to nothing more than him attaching a leash to the oversized dog and taking it for another walk in the Time Vortex. The Doctor yells about taking “death to death” in order to “create life” – I’m not sure that’s how it works – and miraculously, everyone is back to life.
The episode is capped off with us finally finding out the identity of Ruby’s mother, and it turns out that she was nothing more than a 15-year-old girl who abandoned her daughter on the doorstep of a church. And the pointing? Well, she was never pointing at the Doctor at all, but rather the road sign behind him in order to give her daughter the name “Ruby”.
Ruby is emotionally overwhelmed that her mother gave her a name, but this is perhaps the most annoying thing about this episode. Even if she had been trying to name her baby, there was nobody around to see her abandoning her child, so how would anybody have known that she had wanted the baby to be called that? As a fellow upset viewer asked on Twitter, “Did Sutekh email social services and let them know?”
After a heartfelt message of “things are important because we make them important”, which is entirely lost in the weirdness of the rest of the episode, the Doctor helps Ruby to find her mother in a coffee shop. Despite his advice that her mother made her choices and had ample time to come and find her, Ruby runs into the cafe and all but throws herself at the woman who dropped her on a doorstep in the middle of winter.
Of course, there’s a happy ending, with Ruby reunited with her birth mother and the Doctor telling Ruby that she had “changed him” before a tearful but not permanent goodbye, but that’s not actually the end. The end is given by Mrs. Flood, who yet again appears to give us another ominous message. Dressed in a white fur coat (in what is presumably a throwback to former Gallifreyan companion, Romana) and holding an umbrella on the roof of Ruby’s house, she tells us that the Doctor’s story “ends in absolute terror”.
I can’t help but wonder what’s more terrifying than the not-so-gradual decline in the quality of the storywriting of Doctor Who. I’ve lost all faith in Russell T Davies at this point, and I can’t help but feel that with the incredibly anticlimactic reveal of Ruby’s mother done and dusted, viewership will absolutely suffer during season 15 unless radical changes are made.
Until then, I’m going to go back and start again in 2005, rewatching all of the old episodes to remind myself why I love Doctor Who so much. Season 14 has left a sour taste in my mouth, and I’m uncertain whether I’ll come back for season 15 or whether I’ll bother watching the Christmas special. I do have a sliver of hope for the Christmas special, with it being written by Steven Moffat. The man who brought us Weeping Angels can save Doctor Who, surely?
