Doctor Who- The Legend of Ruby Sunday review

 

Let’s Twist again lol. The presence of Susan Twist in roles of varying sizes in every episode this season and even back into the specials has been one of the more fascinating things about the latest run. I laughed at RTD’s comment when asked about this that there was a shortage of actors even though I sort of wanted it never explained and she would just be in every episode and that was all. Inevitably the time has come for explanations though and for Susie T to step up and play a larger role in this first half of the season finale. Yet she is just part of an episode that has a lot of chatter and exposition in its first half before exploding into one of those archetypal RTD finale scenarios he specialised in during his first tenure which people either like or don’t like. Personally, I really like them as they tend to dispense with caution and have a momentum that carries all forward even if admittedly this is sometimes at the expense of logic.

 Big spoilers after the break. She's seen them. She's spooked.

It seems there have been some off screen Doctor/ Ruby adventures. The duo come back to UNIT to ask for help tracing both the identity of the mysterious woman they keep seeing and also Ruby’s mother and we see even more Susan Twist. The stills suggest we may have missed out on better stories than we’ve seen but anyway it turns out in the present day she is Susan Triad, a tech millionaire about to give away a technology gift to all. I can’t imagine even the latest super-duper Apple device would have its launch broadcast on tv but anyway. This is the moment to say again how good Susan Twist has been in these multiple roles even if some of them have been virtually cameos. Once again she rises to the occasion, this time with a more substantial stake in the story. Here she even gets to reprise the infamous Theresa May conference speech dance. UNIT is already on Susan Triad's case though courtesy of Melanie Bush, known as Mel, who is working undercover. I’m not sure in the end what makes the Doctor think Susan Triad might be his daughter never mind the fact he left her in the far future. This seems to be a red herring to keep the Doctor occupied and get him out of UNIT HQ to create a double climax.

The episode takes a while to settle down and because there are several concurrent mysteries even though they could be connected, it means a huge number of explanations, greetings, exposition, and technical chat that initially makes matters less involving partly because the viewer knows all this stuff already. Yet in this melee every one of the large cast has a purpose and gets their moment which is impressive. 

It is when we get to UNIT’s time window that things become really interesting. From an old videotape this re-creates the day of Ruby’s birth and the Doctor's subsequent visit, the idea being that she and the Doctor will finally be able to identify the mother. I love the fact that it is a video which sort of plays homage to the way we used to watch of episodes. Visually the appearance of this temporal image is very interesting looking like its underwater as the blue tinged images shimmer. And what it ultimately reveals is that there is something nestling around the Tardis.

Now there has been a lot of online speculation as to who the Big Bad of this finale would be and some of it, remarkably, has been right. There is a sense of RTD re-running his greatest hits- the name of the villain spelling out on a screen, the multiple cuts to different moments of jeopardy, the choral music upon the reveal but it remains an irresistible mix, the sort of all encompassing, straight forward thrill the show has always done well.

Its Sutekh! Forty-nine years later (which is nowhere near as long as the Destroyer himself has been waiting) he is back! Back! BACK!! When I first saw the rumours linking the character to Susan Triad, I got the Sue Tech thing right away but I assumed she would show up as that very scary looking image of the woman with the grey face and metal mask. It seems she is not actually Sutekh, just one of his harbingers though we still have to find out why she’s been seeing dreams of all her appearances around the Universe.

`Pyramids of Mars` has always been acknowledged as one of the best classic Doctor Who stories with Sutekh near the top of the list of enemies we only met once. Bringing him back fits with the God / fantasy themed period the show is going through but this is no Maestro or Toymaker who have wit and playfulness at their disposal. Sutekh, we remember, leaves nothing but dust and he finds that good. Plus over time he has clearly gown fond of a big entrance.  Re-imagined here as a massive Egyptian dog head with glowing eyes who can turn people to sand, he is still a fearsome presence even if he doesn’t look quite as scary as that grey Susan Twist image earlier. What he does next week will determine whether a return is a good thing or not. Best of all for a long-term fan he is voiced by the very same sonorous tones of the now ninety-one-year-old Gabriel Woolf!  He can still give the chills. This climax is five minutes of chaotic fast edits and a thunderous soundtrack that shows however many changes may have been made to the way Doctor Who is made or written you can’t get better than a huge supervillain reveal. The good thing about all this is that even if you have no idea who Sutekh is or have never seen `Pyramids of Mars`, the sequence would still work fanatically well.

Plus, we’d almost forgotten a scene with Mrs Flood, the neighbour who knows about Tardis’s suddenly developing a creep menacing demeanour when left alone with Ruby’s gran. Also worthy of note is a subtle change in Ncuti Gatwa’s performance in this episode. Whether this is from the experience of having done several episodes by the time this was filmed or a deliberate adjustment, he is playing it with more gravitas and determination. While he has warm greetings all round at the start he has a more commanding presence and his scenes with Jemma Redgrave’s Kate Stewart work  especially well. The chemistry between them is very different to that of Jon Pertwee and Nicholas Courtney yet it is still enjoyable to watch. Plus I should mention Bonnie Langford who is having a lovely opportunity to revisit a role and give it the gravitas it deserves. I wish they could do a Sarah Jane type spin off series with her actually.

Ultimately it will only be for one week that `The Legend of Ruby Sunday` will be judged solely on its own merit but a bar has been set for the second half of this story and, to use an football analogy (well the Euros are on now), let’s hope that `Empire of Death` does not squander this lead.

Check out some memories of `Pyramids of Mars` on the alt blog in a post from 2020- LINK HERE

Which of these is the scarier though???