Episode Discussion: The Legend of Ruby Sunday

Television Doctor Who (2023-)
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Double-posting because I just remembered my favourite part of the episode, one which ironically showed more connective tissue with the series as a whole than any amount of rambling about Susan or an (admittedly very impressive) shiny Sutekh could manage:

The moment where The Doctor has had his tantrum, punching the elevator and sinking to the floor because the situation is getting out away from him and he’s also being forced to confront one of the earliest and most stinging abandonments he has ever committed. And Mel comes over, and you think for a minute she’s going to give a happy shiny pep talk like we might come to expect from this era. But instead, she puts steel in her voice, and is short and sharp when she tells him to “Fix it.”

Now, that’s a badass moment in general for Mel, but when you add it to this piece of context, it elevates the character and shows us that an actress who has spent decades with Mel Bush in her mind can drop so much nuance into single lines. Because remember, before 14 and 15, which Doctors did Mel spend the most time with?

6 and 7. Of course she has first of all absolutely no patience for The Doctor lamenting that his scheming and adventures have put his friends in danger. Her time (albeit mostly in the EU) with Seven showed her enough about him to know that this is an almost compulsive behaviour. Her time with Six, the most pompous, garrulous of all the Doctors, has well equipped her to know what The Doctor needs when they are at their most self-indulgent, and self-pitying. Not a kind hand, or a pep talk, but a swift kick up the backside and an emphatic challenge to do better. It’s amazing, that moment packs so much in. But then we have the entire Time Window sequence, which might be some of the most boring television I’ve seen recently. This is very meh episode for me, but there are moments, like so much of this season, where actors bring their A game and thus elevate what are some quite mediocre scripts on paper.

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Okay thinking back: Yeah no this Episode really will be go down mainly how the pay off, while I think there is a lot of good in it, there are certain things and moment that felt a bit like padding or setting up things, where we dont even know the future of those things (the whole Time Window Thing). Not to say there isn’t good, I really enjoyed a lot of the small moments or the ending, but I feel like the time here could have spent a bit on something else. Bringing Sutekh back is a lovely move and can pay off quite well, but I am already a bit. I will say maybe my feelings are also a bit mixed on it now that we are so close to the end of a short season, which to be honest, while I understand why it’s shorter does leave some stuff to be desired (for example Carla, pretty much perfectly summarized by @turnoftheearth ).

Overall it really depends on the second part, there are things I like, but also at some points it ironically kinda feels like RTD didn’t know how to the fill the runtime and therefore making it feel like it needs to be shorter??? (This is also not me saying RTD= bad, often when I had issues with his finale, it was actually the Opposite than that, which leaves me mixed. He is a great Writer, of course, no doubts on that.) It feels wrong for me to say that when most of the time I’d wish a lot of revival episodes were longer, but yeah, let’s see how it all wraps up next week I suppose!

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i’m really into this one, i mean it’s mostly buildup so yeah we’ll see how it goes next week but i found the buildup immensely enjoyable. i haven’t seen the original serial with sutekh but i do have some questions about how they’re adapting/using mythology… but i have to think about it more (and probably see the next episode) to really put words to it.

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Okay, okay, after sleeping on this and reading lots of other people’s thoughts, I think this was a pretty good part one, but a lot of it will hinge on how part two sticks the landing. Let’s start by saying I did have a lot of fun and was glued to the screen the whole episode. Ncuti’s excitement and joy at a mystery to solve is quite infectious. No matter what you think of this season and the direction the show is going, I don’t think anyone can deny that Ncuti is a great actor. I see him going places after he leaves the show, which hopefully won’t be for a while. While I enjoyed where they might be going with the Susan Foreman angle, I’m glad it was a red herring, because I would feel cheated if we didn’t get a regeneration scene. I liked the time window as a neat idea, though again, I’m kinda waiting and hoping Part 2 sticks the landing on that particular mystery. As has been pointed out by other fans, the scene with the Doctor punching the wall in frustration and breaking down before Mel comes at him with such steel is, rightly, a highlight of the episode. The revelation of Sutekh, despite being a Fourth Doctor villain and not a Third Doctor villain like was hinted, was almost a masterpiece of unnerving dread. I was on the edge of my seat during those last ten-fifteen minutes as the tension slowly built to the reveal.

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Yes. Yes indeed. Not that much of an excuse is needed on that score, mind. Just utterly fantastic DW!

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Ah I wasn’t imagining things, Harriet Arbinger did indeed say that the camera was 66 meters away. There’s the 73 Yards :slightly_smiling_face:

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Hmmm, I’m still mulling this all over pretty hard. I’m struggling to decide if I really liked it or not tbh, because I had fun but I also think the setup was too contrived, and the reveal was pretty dumb. And I know this is Doctor Who, I know what I signed up for, but, idk. I guess it was just very flashy. And I’m not sure that I like that. Also I don’t think I’m a fan of making Sutekh a big CGI dog, but that’s not that deep, really.

I wonder what this episode would be like if you were a Revival only fan, or even if this was your first ever series. Like, I defintely am the fan being pandered to every time the show gets accused of doing that, but I know I’m in too deep. I wonder if you aren’t as steeped in it as I (and I assume, all of us) are, how much would be confusing or lost on you entirely.

I think also this whole series has felt very ‘oh it’ll be good if the finale is good’, and I still feel that about this episode, and I’m not sure that that means the series was good - if it requires the finale to make it all seem not pointless, then what’s the point in appearing episodic? And as well, I think at this point if Carole Ann Ford doesn’t make a surprise appearance, why in the world have we been going on and on about Susan?

I didn’t dislike it. This possibly sounds more negative than I really feel, but I’m trying to process what I think about it. And I guess we’ll have to see next week if all this set up really does have the payoff we seem to be being promised.

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ALSO nothing RTD can do can ever be as iconic as two mummies crushing a guy to death between their ample bosoms. Sorry RTD, you’ve got nothing on that. Unless he does it again. Now THAT would be icon behaviour.

Also also, am I still delusional for wanting the Trickster to show up :sob: I just think pointing cloaked figure cannot be anything else :frowning: But I will take the mention! I am happy for that at least. But Pyramids is one of Sarah’s most iconic episodes… it’s all connected… (it doesn’t even remotely connect)

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What’s weird to me is that this entire episode was also laser-directed at me, Supreme Canon-Welder, who will take literally every opportunity to grab things that seem disparate and yank them all together in my grubby fist saying “This is what Doctor Who means!”

But the pandering, where it exists overtly in the text (and here I’m talking about Sutekh, I’m talking about Mel, I’m talking about the overt references to the show’s mythology, Susan, etc) all just leave me feeling like it’s nothing but lip service. Like the narrative and the writing is trying so hard to wear the mythology on its sleeve. They canonized Shalka, you know? But none of it felt as important as Mel telling The Doctor to buck his ideas up and fix it. Nothing that’s meant to feel poignant and emotionally compelling (here I am talking about the Time Window scene, which I think suffered horribly from the fact that they were all just actors working on a blue screen with the most perfunctory dialog; no one was able to invest in where they were or what they were doing, and the disconnect meant that portion lagged terribly) in the text actually does. Even the Moffat script with the Anglican Marines and the Villengard Weapon Forges, which are two of the most Revival Series fan-wanky references you could shoehorn in, just felt like painting by numbers. I drift off at the resolutions because I know it’ll involve some sort of Power Of Love resolution that the script will tell me is important but won’t feel it, because none of the work has been done.

Ironically the two best episodes for me this season have been Doctor-lite episodes. In a sense, they aren’t even Doctor-lite; 73 Yards has the negative space The Doctor would occupy looming over it, and Dot And Bubble has the benefit of being able to literally shut The Doctor out the entire episode because it gets tied up with the payoff of an entire narrative. Meanwhile, every episode that has featured The Doctor and Ruby together has just felt like a series of set pieces that hang off their charismatic lead performances with no real sense of what it wants to be or say, and this felt much the same. It was leading us down garden paths, took us right to the gate, and said “Trust us”. I don’t know if I can.

This season feels more Big Finish than the show has ever felt, I think. The experimental format screws combined with some pretty bog-standard plotting, and look, what do we have here at the end? A finale with a returning classic villain that is otherwise juggling the silverware with a bunch of nonsense scientific process and the most literal emotional dialog that you could sling together in an afternoon. It’s like Nicholas Briggs ghost-wrote it.

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Yes, fully agree - thank you for being more articulate about what I think than me! And you are so right, it does feel like the Big Finish tombola, which I ought to love! But something about it just isn’t clicking for me, and it could be, as you say, dialogue that feels like it’s explaining to us what it wants us to feel and sticking in some flashy references for people to focus on. And I think the fact that the references are a lot of what we’re talking about is very telling - I think I feel like a lot of these episodes are lacking any substance.

Again, I am enjoying it and I don’t want to be a hater about it, but it feels very much like the later 9DA Big FInish boxsets feel - fine, enjoyable enough, but full of fluff and tidbits for hardcore fans and not really an actual Story of their own. Experimental can be good, and it often is! You’re right that 73 Yards is one of the best stories in a while, but I don’t feel like I am going to get the real emotional hit or narrative satisfaction that it seems to be promising because at the end of the day, we already know how this will end - Sutekh defeated, the next bigger and badder thing revealed, and Ruby finding whoever dropped her at the church (if that even was her mother at all).

All that said, I am looking forward to the the finale, and I really do hope the Susan stuff doesn’t get forgotten.

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Another thing I want to bring up about the Sutekh reveal, and why I think it’s a misstep to have introduced him like this, is that the Pantheon is supposed to make the universe of Doctor Who feel bigger, more unknowable, more unpredictable. We know this because Russell himself has explicitly told us how many of the rules he wants to break. But what rules is he really breaking here?

The Toymaker existed already, all you did was make him look twice as ineffectual as he was last time we saw him, and you gave him a child. The Maestro was great, the episode was fun, but what does it really add to the universe that hadn’t already been done in The Crooked Man? Or even The Mind Robber? Or even, God forbid, The Black Guardian/White Guardian season? The idea that there is this pantheon of gods that exist (and they cement it here by rattling off some Neil Gaiman poetry, as El Sandifer put it [hilarious, and so true]) isn’t making the universe any more mysterious, you’re actively slapping more rules onto it. And now, Sutekh, who previously had enough going on for him as a character already, what with the background of the Osirians, AND the background he has with The Doctor, stands to get shoehorned into this Rogue’s Gallery as the generic “God of Death” instead of just a godlike being from an advanced race of aliens. And OK find, if that’s what you want to do, do it, but you ballsed up doing it. It doesn’t make Sutekh any scarier.

ALSO AGAIN THE FENDAHL IS LITERALLY THE PLATONIC CONCEPT OF DEATH
WHY WOULDN’T YOU
you could even have had Millie in the cool fun gold makeup

I digress

Making Sutekh just a generic God of death is a misstep because it’s mining the classics for a flashy bit. Now, if they stick the landing and link it all up, that’s great, fantastic, but the fact that they were teasing Sutekh as an ancient evil from the Third Doctor’s era does not fill me with a tremendous amount of hope that lorekeeping is higher on the list of priorities than “whizz bang setpieces with enough canon references to keep the anoraks following along”. I’m fully expecting the reason Sutekh broke free (or was revived? I can’t remember how Pyramids ends) to be “Toymaker did it. Or salt did it.”

If it happens, it’s gonna give “Somehow, Palpatine returned”, which considering we just got bought out by Disney, would be apt.

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Very interesting points. I have a feeling that the discussion of next week’s episode will be very interesting indeed. And it all stands on whether next week sticks the landing. If Sutekh truly is “The One Who Waits”, then it’s interesting that he scares the Toymaker when the Black Guardian didn’t. I’m eagerly awaiting next week because I can’t wait to see what happens, but I’m also dreading that we’ll be super let down by the resolution and the answers (or lack there of) that we’ll end up getting.

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The makes me think of the stupid potions from The End of Time…

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as others have said, difficult to judge this on just one part, so far i’d say a perfectly servicable part one, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating of part 2

one thing i don’t get is why the doctor wanted to find out who ruby’s mum was all of a sudden

like why does he think its relevant to the susan twist situation, or if he doesn’t and its a two birds one unit shaped stone kind of thing, surely he should have put the ruby stuff to one side once it looked like the susan twist stuff was potentially pretty serious

more importantly

Here’s how it can still be the trickster

when the trickster got name dropped it was as “the god of traps”, and what was morris saying throughout the episode, 95% chance of being a trap, 96% chance of being a trap, 100% chance of being a trap.

Ruby’s mum is The Trickster, Ruby is the Trickster’s trap for the Doctor, just as in the original plan with Sky

The Trickster is more likely than ever before

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YAYY HERE’S HOW THE TRICKSTER CAN STILL WIN!:tada::tada: I love that theory, I didn’t even spot it!

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I do just want to note that I don’t actually believe myself, I’ve just been on the it’s the trickster hype train since space babies and I’m not giving up now

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It also just occurred to me that it’s cruelly ironic that RTD, the man who on multiple occasions has stated that the Time Lords are boring, you can’t do anything with them, and Gallifrey is a huge burden on the show, when given the chance to add his own things to the canon, decides to go for the most generic “God of Thing” plotting you could have expected.

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nevermind, she said tricks not traps
EDIT: tardis wiki was lying, subtitles do say traps, trickster fans its back on

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Skimmed through all the responses as I process what I just watched. Think I agree with both sides to some extent.

I’ll be back with more thoughts but…

As soon as I heard that voice, I knew. So cool.

Trying to explain to my daughter who Sutekh is though.

And I bloody love Bonnie Langford.

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The perfect excuse to bring out Pyramids of Mars.

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