The kind of writing that Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies does can be something of a precarious proposition. The tightrope walk he often makes that tries to tie together science, fantasy, mythology, and human instinct can veer into incomprehensibility, but when it works, it’s glorious.
Last week’s episode, 73 Yards is glorious. It ranks amongst the best of his Doctor Who writing and the best of NuWho as a whole.
The story weaves a fragile and intricate web around Ruby Sunday, a Welsh Faerie Circle that seems to be binding an evil spirit, a rising right-wing political figure, and a strange old woman who stands exactly 73 yards away from Ruby for the entire rest of her life. It’s an off-kilter story with real power, much of it derived from its folk horror core and its hazy, never quite explained, edges.
Davies has made no secret of his love for the often dismissed final years of the original run of Doctor Who, shepherded by its controversial producer John Nathan-Turner. Much has been made of JN-T’s lean into camp and pantomime during those years, but less credit has been given to the stranger, more mysterious, stories that came out during that run. Stories like Ghost Light (1989), Kinda (1882), and Warrior’s Gate (1981) tested the limits of how much exposition and explanation a story needed for the viewer to become intrigued, to feel something. 73 Yards is an episode that slots squarely into this tradition.
A “Doctor-lite” story (usually dropped into a season to give the lead a break), it has Ruby stumbling through a piece of what might be a magical protection circle on a Welsh hillside and suddenly finding that she is not only now always within the titular distance of a mysterious elderly woman, but also that anytime the woman speaks to a person who knows of Ruby, they run away from The Doctor’s companion in terrified revulsion refusing to ever speak to her again.
And “ever” in this context turns out to be exactly that.
Packed with barely explained, tantalizing, left turns, the plot explodes in scope, both in terms of time passing and consequence, with Ruby learning to deal with this albatross which she can’t understand and to turn it into a part of her life, and more. She has to decide what the truth of her experience is and how to best leverage the knowledge she’s accumulating — The Woman and her effect, the rise of racist Welsh nationalist politician Roger ap Gwilliam (Aneurin Barnard), the folklore of Mad Jack. As she pieces together something that amounts to a new destiny, she must occasionally make heartbreaking sacrifices to the “greater good” such as allowing her friend, Marti Bridges (Sophie Ablett), to suffer an avoidable assault in order to keep the pieces of her plan in play, but her drive to prove the veracity of and then achieve her singular goal becomes the entirety of who Ruby Sunday is.
As with the previous episode, Boom, the Nigel Kneale comparisons are relevant here with Davies going even further into the interweaving of folklore and science, leaving the viewer wondering about the human relationship to the sanctity of time as well as chicken-or-the-egg questions involving how stories grow into myths into ghosts into belief systems into time travel.
The viewer is given no clear answers here, but plenty to chew on. It feels like a kind of respect being paid to the show’s audience and it is something that I, as a long time Doctor Who fan, deeply appreciate.
Without the powerhouse that is Ncuti Gatwa for most of the episode, Millie Gibson’s Ruby Sunday has to carry the story, and she is marvelous. She proves that she can easily hoist this show on her shoulders when she needs to and giving her the platform to prove that does much to flesh out the new season of Doctor Who as a whole.
For completists, the mysterious Mrs. Flood returns – for the first time since Christmas – in this episode and, yes, actress Susan Twist continues her mysteriously unbroken series of appearances that began seven stories ago. (What is Davies up to?)
The future of Doctor Who seems brighter by the week!
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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times
