oh no, it was actually worse because the exposition dump in Legend was painful too…
After a sleep on it, I’m still a little disappointed with Sutekh overall and how he was just defeated easy peasy. Idk, I liked it but I didn’t think it was revolutionary, which I think is how I feel about this whole season. It’s fine but it isn’t going to be at the top of my rewatch list any time soon
Although, to be fair, the defeat of Sutekh in Pyramids is literally just a case of “we got back before you”. It does work, but it’s also very perfunctory. The Doctor has lost, except because he has a time machine, he can get back to Earth quicker than the signal.
I long ago got used to the fact that most DW resolutions are far less than the sum of their episodes. It’s lovely when they’re not, but it isn’t a requirement for me - as long as the journey is a blast. Just as well, because otherwise I’d have to bin a heck of a lot of classic and 2005+ DW.
And, hey, the ood are back! (Kind of)
6,5/10
Deus Ex Machina that isn’t even explained.
Sutekh’s scheme just gets undone, I didn’t even understand how
That was a boring conclusion.
The corniness meter was off the charts, and there was too much “sitting/standing around and talking” for me. I love scenes like that in dramas/slice of life shows, but in other genres it’s incredibly uninteresting to watch.
What teenager drops off their unwanted kid at a church wearing a cloak and points dramatically at a sign? And the Fifteen Scream is obnoxious and I wish that wasn’t a thing. He can cry all he wants, but stop with the screaming. It comes across as amateur theatrics to me.
I was glad to see that Ruby’s a normal human as I love those types of companions. The last five minutes was the most enjoyable part.
Sorry, RTD, but seeing a glimpse of Six’s coat (and waistcoat) will not make me like this episode.
I have to contest this idea that Ruby’s mother being nobody was the best possible thing that could have happened. Red herrings are good, as is misdirection, and fundamentally the idea that Ruby’s mother is nobody, but became so important because of all of the collective thought and concern about her is a sound one. It’s so sound that it’s almost completely lifted from Rings of Akhaten, in fact. The most important leaf in the universe, anyone? But the difference between that and this is that Akhaten did work in the visual storytelling and text to make us feel that beat when it happened. It was set up, and more importantly, it felt like the story had been building up to this.
There was absolutely no build-up to the idea that Ruby’s mother might be nobody, and that would be OK. It didn’t come off like a big reveal, though. A red herring plot relies on an inherent level of trust that the reveal of the red herring itself will be something not only plot critical, but narratively satisfying. For me, stuff like that only works when you can watch the entire series, for example, and realize that the misdirect was always there. Now, I’m prepared to eat my words if, on a re-watch, there are signs, but for me there simply weren’t. We were being primed for a big reveal. The whole cock-tease moment with Ruby and the screen that was stretched on for five minutes was nothing but an obvious signpost that Russell painted himself into a corner and was playing for time. I do not trust that from the start, Ruby Rose’s mother was going to be a normal person. I don’t have that level of faith in his plotting, considering his first big arc plot was literally written on the fly because people noticed his little easter egg. I think he’s been riding high on the fumes of Bad Wolf’s success for a while now and thinks that as long as you put in all of the attendant mysteries, whatever happens at the end will be worth it for people because they followed and invested. But when you invest in something only to get to the end and realize that you were more invested in it than the people who created it, that’s a recipe for disappointment. This doesn’t feel like a long-planned reveal, this feels like incredibly lazy writing, which is starting to become the most noticeable hallmark of the RTD2 era - excellent writing when he’s actively trying, and then half-arsed vagaries the rest of the way combined with visual dressing to make us ignore the ropey plot.
Actually, I think for me the hallmark of RTD2 is “What if the Moff era but done badly.”
Well it’s why Pyramids suffers also; it’s basically the original sin of bringing in elder godlike beings for The Doctor to fight. The Celestial Toymaker was naff because Brian Hayles wasn’t smart enough to figure out a good way to defeat a God. Same thing for Bob Holmes, which is why the last episode of Pyramids suddenly turns into a riddle game. And now, for maybe the third time, we have proved again that massive godlike beings make terrible villains, because if you defeat them with a half-arsed solution, people will notice and it will undermine basically the entire plot.
Same thing with the DNA testing. Like, I don’t understand how or why UNIT had that information available? Was it in The Doctor’s sonic? It was so perfunctory.
It makes you wonder why they didn’t go that route from the beginning and save themselves the trouble. (Looking in the records, I mean)
Well if they did that there would be no reason for them to pipe in scenes from 73 Yards and pretend that they all add up and make sense.
Which is another thing that annoys me, to be honest. Trying to make it seem like this season was more than a series of disjointed stories with the barest thread of connective plot tissue was bad enough, only to then tell us at the end that most of that plot tissue was bullshit that didn’t matter.
My question is, what about this story did matter?
I don’t want to sound overly negative here, so I thought I would bring up something we surely all can agree to be happy about:
The Spoon Agenda is still alive and well in Doctor Who 
The fact that he didn’t slap that spoon against his thigh even once though. Heartbreaking.
I didn’t hate the spoon subplot that much. It felt cute, it made sense, it was a nice nod to the past.
The less said about the whistle, the better.
For me, it’s a variation of Rose’s Dad in ‘Father’s Day’. If I remember correctly, the Ninth Doctor says something along the lines of ‘an ordinary person is the most important thing in the world’. In this case, it’s padded with some additional reasoning (memory, magic, etc. → badabum 
).
I am curious: are there any earlier instances of this premise in Doctor Who?
I see where you’re coming from, but in both Rings and Father’s Day, the fact that these people are ordinary and unimportant are basically pillars of the episodes that they’re in. We’re told from the start that Pete is ordinary, that Clara’s mum and the leaf are ordinary; they are then made extraordinary through the context of the story that they are in.
This is almost the other way around. We’ve been told for six episodes that Ruby is extra super special and there must be a reason why. Except there isn’t. In both of those prior episodes, the climax is a moment of emotional satisfaction, where the things the script has been telling you all tie together and it ties into a knot at the end that wraps the story. Notably, these eps are written by Neil Cross (who has proved he knows how to plot, Luther is excellent) and Paul Cornell (primarily a novelist, so 'nuff said about his ability really.) Russell wants to be able to do this, but can’t seem to because he’s a writer skilled in a lot of other areas, but big meta-plots that pay off in an emotionally and narratively satisfying way, he cannot do.
If Ruby Sunday was meant to be a red herring from the start, the reveal would have sparked feelings of “OMG I KNEW IT!” and from the response I’m seeing, it didn’t. The responses I’m seeing range from “Well, I liked it” (perfectly valid but hardly an a-ha moment) to “That’s it?”. If the reveal of your red herring doesn’t get ecstastic revelation from folks, and instead gets sort of nice smiles at best and incredulous disbelief at worst, your red herring plot has failed at its task.
I’ll start by saying I am a huge Moffat fan, and I love his era hugely, but I completely agree with this. Ruby has a lot of the same fairytale aspects as Amy, but the reason why series 5 worked is because the whole thing was a fairytale. It wasn’t perfect but the whole season leaned hard into that aspect, and the crack in time and space gave the narrative some leeway to allow for weirdnesses like where are Amy’s parents?
I have liked RTD2, but I don’t think it’s quite as clever as it is pretending to be, which is a shame because there have been a lot of fun moments in there. And I don’t think Ruby’s mother being normal wasa bad choice, but that whole ending where she brought her birth mother home to Carla… idk, it didn’t sit fully right with me how everything was basically just fine now.
The reason why Pyramids works too is because Sutekh is already trapped, and so we can get a sense of how powerful he is without really having to be shown it. The big Set Creature on the TARDIS and the dust and the destruction means that word play and puzzles was never going to work in Empire, regardless of how much RTD wanted his strange maths to work.
And honestly I feel anyone else being Ruby’s mother at all would have been an anticlimax because they were making way too much a big deal of it, so any answer was going to be dissatisfying
I’m still, even after sleeping on it, not sure where exactly I fall on this story. I liked it on initial viewing and had fun with it. I was a bit surprised with the everybody dies bit and wasn’t very happy that Mel turned out to be an agent of Sutekh. I enjoyed the ride but am still… I don’t know. I liked that Ruby’s parentage was just ordinary, and thinking about it more now, appreciate that a fifteen-year-old decided on adoption and not abortion.
I also liked how the cliffhanger reprise was just the last little bit of the previous episode, similar to the Classic Series, as opposed to the short collection of scenes from throughout the previous episode that the Modern Series had done previously.
I’m just glad we didn’t get a Pertwee era cliffhanger where they just played the entire Time Window scene again like in Sea Devils.
Tangential, I’m still thinking about Lenny. And Ruth Madely, tbh. Does Russell think that like, being disabled sucks because you don’t have guns in your wheelchair? I find it hilarious how he removed the one disabled character in the show who is actually written with nuance and doesn’t have his disability centered as part of who his character is in favor of two hyper-smart quip factories whose mobility aids are also like, weapons platforms? I don’t understand how that’s better for representation tbh.
I’m still working through my full, proper review of this episode, but I want to throw in my two cents about Ruby’s bio parents - I said here before how much I wished they’d make her parents ordinary people, and I was honestly a little giddy when they made that reveal, but I also said it’s basically impossible that would happen. Honestly, as happy as I am to have a perfectly normal adopted human, I really don’t think it works with this season and how much they built up her mother. The pointing is stupid, there’s absolutely no reason for this girl who’s trying to hide what she’s doing to make a big statement like that, especially when there’s no one around to see and be made aware that she’s naming the child. There’s no reason for the Doctor’s memory to suddenly change, and no explanation is made of the impossible snow. I even said in that original post that the mystery could be explained with all the timey-wimey-ness around that night, but that was very much from the perspective of rewriting all those moments to make more sense. I can fully understand why people are unhappy with this reveal. I wanted this to be the truth and I’m unhappy with it. It just doesn’t work.
I see things much the same. RTD has always had a thing for the ordinary person, and this is a facet that makes a lot more sense to me than companions who are super special 'cos… reasons. Not much time to post today, but I’ll write more when I can.
This is the main body of my point - even you, who wanted Ruby to be normal and have normal parents, and was suspicious of it throughout, were disappointed by the reveal, not excited, because the groundwork wasn’t laid appropriately. It felt like a rushed, lazy resolution when a writer realized they had no good way to wrap things up.
Well I was deflated by The Legend of Ruby Sunday but kept an open mind for this one. However, I found it just as (if not more) frustrating. What a shame to leave the series this way after having enjoyed it more than I was expecting to…
For any curious, I did manage to get a video up for Legend of Ruby Sunday but only the other day so here are my thoughts on both parts of the finale, should it interest you of course. No obligation, naturally.
