Good episode, maybe a little obvious where it was going. Way too much unexplained.
this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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I honestly did not peg the reveal on this one, only because it felt too obvious at the top of the episode, and made less sense as the story went on. Why was the old woman causing people to abandon Ruby? There was no hint I could figure as to why that might be happening. The ending felt almost like an “it was all a dream” twist, and didn’t feel satisfying.
I will think about this episode a lot, it had a lot of interesting ideas, and I always love a doctor-lite episode, but it did not stick the landing.
On the BTS ep Russell said that he didn't want to reveal it because the audience thinking "What could someone say to make a mother reject her daughter" is so much creepier than any reveal could be. It's got me thinking.
But by the conclusion we know who the woman is. We never learnt anything that she might know that would make people hate Ruby.
The more I think about it, the more annoyed I am. The very specific 73 yards. The ability to teleport. The repeated gestures. The inability to see her face. Her power of suggestion. Even the clothes she was wearing. It was all set up to create a creepy and mysterious stalker. But in the end none of it was paid off.
The way I see it, it doesn't matter what she said, it was only happening to make her creepy. If Ruby's guess near the end is right, the whole point of her being there, haunting her, making people run away, was to make specifically this one man run away in terror, and there's no way whatever that was had anything to do with anyone else abandoning Ruby. She simply says something so terrifying that people run away, that's it, it doesn't matter what exactly, and it doesn't even have to be the same thing for everyone. Same with the teleport: she did it the same way she time travelled back into her past. How? We don't know either, and it doesn't matter, it's just here to make her creepy.
The Doctor told her about this terrible Welsh minister, and she made it her life's mission to get rid of him, and then went back to her young self. Why did the Doctor vanish? Why 73 yards? Why did her mom and Kate turn on her? We don't know, it's magic. Or it'll be revealed later, maybe, or maybe it won't. The creepiness, the distance, is to make her afraid, to make others afraid, and to make her realize she has an easy way to make the guy run away. It doesn't make sense, it just has to work for her to think "I can weaponize that" and connect the dots. I'm fine with the details not making sense personally, it's not that kind of episode, I thought it was well executed.
Only thing I would have hoped to see at the end is the Doctor again realizing that his memory changed between telling Ruby about Robert and then Robert disappearing from History in the future. Just to tie with the previous one.
Which makes me think that perhaps it's like psychic paper: she could say anything (or even nothing), and the experience would be the most horrifying, disgusting, or terrifying thing to the listener, enough to drive them away from Ruby forever.