I also guessed Ruby was the old lady immediately. I have a billion questions about how this works, but Russell T. Davies keeps insisting the show is more fantasy than science fiction now, and it’s increasingly obvious this means “let’s cut corners in the writing, running a show is HARD.”
Assigning a writer dedicated to the task of closing glaring plot holes would shore up the increasingly slipshod treatment of episode ‘mechanics’. Especially, the temporal paradoxes.
I think it's 73 yards, because that's (according to this episode) the distance at which someone with 20-20 vision can no longer make out the facial features of a person they're looking at. Kate Lethbridge-Stewart in this episode says that every picture they take (and Ruby agrees) no matter how good a camera shows the woman as if a person with 20-20 vision were looking at her at a distance of 73 yards and they all look blurry. You can't make out what she really looks like.
I will admit, the leadup to this episode was actually full of interesting expectations. The 'next time trailer' sort of edited it as in Ruby saw someone further away, then ended up in that same spot - then the pub locals were in the trailer warning her of danger. A press statement describing the episode initially viewed on the site 'Doctor Who: A Brief History of Time Travel' [good site btw] said 'in a rain-lashed pub, the locals sit in fear of ancient legends coming to life.' That also intrigued me in terms of folklore horror - which the episode didn't mostly end up being, but it was still a good, slow-paced, atmospheric episode. Plus, Ncuti Gatwa being absent so he could finish Sex Education and Barbie does certainly bring up the question of how good his Doctor is, but nevertheless Millie Gibson did a good job for the first filming of the series' production. I think another comment has said it, but the '73 Yards distance' is, apparently according to RTD, how far away we can see something with a decent amount of detail, which of course Ruby used to her advantage to move the 'old woman' next to the politician to scare him away. But...speaking of the 'old woman'... This brings me onto my biggest problems with the episode. I appreciate a 'interpret it as you want, not everything is explained' approach, but...what was implied or explained vs left deliberately ambiguous didn't work. How and why was the old woman scaring away people, least of all UNIT? Is there a potential 'grandfather paradox' where the politician the Doctor mentioned is no longer going to do something bad? Plus, the revelation of the old woman ultimately frustrated me rather than satisfied me. With 'Midnight', we never found out what that entity making people repeat words was, but it was too scary to find out and it worked. But trying to explain the whole thing at the end led to the frustrations. Sure, maybe this Mad Jack is the aforementioned ancient legend, or maybe this will play into a later episode, but a little more was needed. Whoo, TED Talk here, sorry.
I think this season of DW will be primarily a fantasy show rather than a sci-fi show because the 14th doctor did the thing with the salt at the edge of the universe injecting superstition into the universe and paving the way for the Toy Maker who stuck a crowbar into that crack and broke it wide open making this Whoniverse a supernatural one. Strap in! It's gonna be a bumpy ride!
The stakes were too low for most of the story. Unlike Donna, Ruby didn't die, she actually enjoyed longevity in the new timeline! She just had a less happy life, but are we invested enough in Ruby at this stage to really care? I also thought that the story should either have been a Welsh horror story or a UK political thriller. Mixing the two was jarring in tone and genre. You are SO RIGHT about the story's treatment of membership of "Tomato"! Does Roger ap Gwilliam's premiership endure now that the timeline has been aborted?
I'm watching around 10:15 and the "Old Man" is wondering why an episode of DW would have so little Doctor. Keep in mind, a lot of excellent Doctor Who episodes have been Doctor-lite episodes. Think of the episode Blink where Tennant's 10th Doctor was barely in it but it was GREAT! Both of you mentioned the episode Turn Left which was also a Doctor-lite episode and was wonderful. So there is a proud heritage of Doctor-lite Doctor Who episodes. It doesn't say anything negative about the Doctor, just that the people in the episode (Donna Noble, Sally Sparrow, or Ruby Sunday) can carry the episode without the Doctor.
Also, I'm told that this was the first episode they filmed and Ncuti Gatwa wasn't available except for the 2 scenes necessitating it be a Doctor-lite episode. Millie Gibson was only 18 when she filmed this episode and she was terrific! I enjoyed this episode. It left a lot of unanswered questions, but I can live with that.
This episode showed me how much I need my explanations and can’t ignore the details. I have seen other reviewers say we all live with something we can’t understand but learn to live with. Okay, but her adoptive parent locked her out of the house and that needs to be explained, because in real life we know why such things happen.
Yeah, there was no resolution to any of the themes in this episode. Why did all the people run from Ruby? Why didn't the soldiers protecting the prime minister switch to the weird old woman as soon as she was backing up as she was told? Why could nobody tell Ruby what the old woman said to make leave Ruby in disgust? If the woman was Ruby why did she manage wo warn her if the whole story revolves around the prime minister getting stopped as her warning prevents her from doing that. There are so many questions left open and the whole episode felt really bad for it. It was very interesting at first but it's funny how having the doctor not in an episode makes it better, even though over all the ending was very bad
Russell T Davies is Welsh himself. He was just having the people in the pub take the piss out of Ruby because non-Welsh people often think of Welsh people as backwards (not being able to accept payments via phone) and believers of magic (the fairy circle).
They could have done an Inner Light TNG type trope with this ep. At least Picard remembers the alternate life he lived. Ruby should have been allowed to remember her life.
There is an over-arching, deceptively deep meaning of this episode. A comment in another thread provided the key to the meaning of the ghost woman. Yes, she is Ruby’s future ghost, but she also represents something much more terrifying than that. She is (Ruby’s) death, personified. Which is why she frightens away everyone who tries to speak to her. Her purpose for the audience is as a metaphor for the death which awaits us all. Stalks us our entire lives, just as it does Ruby in the form of the ghost woman. While our own death is rarely at the forefront of our daily awareness, neither is it ever far away. You might say, that death is always 73 yards away. Close enough to be visible, but not so close as to be clearly so. The best that any of us can do is to ignore our self-knowledge that we will one day, die. Soon, living Ruby simply accepts the mysterious, but ever-present, older woman as an inevitable part of her daily existence. Realizing, that there’s nothing she can do about the woman anyway. Until, Ruby is at the end of life, and then the mysterious woman comes closer, to Ruby. Close enough to touch, when Ruby in her last moment of life in the nursing home bed, The medical monitor stops it regular beeps, and gives that dreadful flatline tone, as Ruby passes. Loses all anxiety, she embraces death with outstretched arms. Chills. All through her life, Ruby felt alone. Abandoned, and isolated. Which is bad enough, but she ends up dying alone, as well. Something which, sadly, is a feeling, and an ending for too many of us. Davies’ screen play touches on that fact. BTW, apparently, ghost Ruby was repeatedly signing; “bless you, thank you.” Contrary to the suggestion by some haters that this episode is pointless, it rather, contains many worthwhile ideas and messages. The episode’s main fault is that it’s too ambitious for a one-hour TV show. Which results in many unexplained plot elements. Further complicating matters is the ‘Mad-Jack’ sub-episode, contained within the larger ‘ghost story’. 73 Yards could have, and probably should have been made into a two-part episode. As for the time-paradoxes, those are explained by Tenant in the famous ‘Blink’ episode. Wibbly-Wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. In other words, don’t let such paradoxes interfere with the message of the story.
I don’t mind if they go down the supernatural route of story lines etc. _But_ there needs to be technobabble involved with the stories, as well as not forgetting the sci-fi aspect of the series. If they imply supernatural elements but bring the sci-fi element to the forefront I have no issue. However if RTD is going to add supernatural elements and purposefully ignore what the series based on from the beginning it’s going to fail. And while I do love when shows add supernatural elements to their shows when needed, it doesn’t work in Doctor Who. The episode The Devils Due from Star Trek: The Next Generation is a good example how to write supernatural elements with sci-fi
I didn't understand why the woman affected Mad Jack. The woman had a perception filter around her because otherwise in the course of 20 years there'd have been thousands of people would've passed by her in public; Ruby had to specifically point out the woman for people to notice her so Jack shouldn't have been aware of her presence. Plus if the episode happens in a separate timeline then who stopped Mad Jack from launching the nukes in the original timeline? Ruby's entire story was pointless if Jack never launched the nukes in the first place. A suspenseful episode that got worse as it went on unfortunately with no effective resolution.
generally the UK uses the smallest measurement possbile for visualisation- so yards or meters would work- no one says they're 72" tall, they say 6ft (i've not met anyone that uses metric for distance outside of engineering)
I'll check this out, thanks! Sounds a bit like Sapphire and Steel, a big fantasy show from the UK around 1980. Stories 2, 4 and 6 of S&S are quite compelling despite slow pacing...
This is the first one of this season that I have actually watched. It was not good but it was just OK and definitely because the extremely 'happy' Doctor(ess) was missing for like the whole episode.
The Old Man asked what was the future Ruby was telling that made everyone she knows to Disown her, what she said was "there are only two genders", Hay Hay Hay don't blame me 'that's what she said'.
RTD said he chose 73 yards only because it was the distance where you could see the person but not make out their features. They measured it on a dock or something. In other words, it had no real significance to story and was a weak idea. 😂😢
Hi. Thought I better watch your review before you do the one for next week, and no this one doesn’t sound as egregious, albeit that’s like saying something doesn’t sound as bad as the 8 car pileup. Several points. First, Turn left is a great episode of Doctor who, but it’s not the only time the series has done either alternative timelines, or stories where you see the companion’s lives play out without the Doctor which then get reset. For example, the fantastic big finish audio Death in the family, where the 7th Doctor is literally killed and his companions ace and hex must live on for several years, find out clues he left and eventually reset things without him. Similarly Doctor who has had its brush with occasional unexplained bits of the supernatural, albeit usually there is some attempt to tie them into a science-fantasy context and imply rules that affect the plot’s resolution, such as the carionites in the 10th Doctor story the Shakespear code whose magic was said to be an alternative science based on words, and who thus could be defeated by a wordsmith like Shakespear. One thing which I wondered with this episode though, in light of both the alternative timeline and none-explained fairy malarky, is what do we actually learn about Ruby? We get to see her mother disown her for no reason, we get to see an unsuccessful relationship where she sexually denigrates her boyfriend (thank you 2024 misandrist feminism), and we get to see her fake out a randomly evil future prime minister, but what do we actually learn about her? Turn left, for all it focused on a doctorless future actually told us far more about Donna, how she copes under pressure, and what she’s willing to sacrifice, indeed for all the story was focused on how bad the world was without the Doctor, it was Donna who was the true heart of the story. The Torchwood episode small worlds; the other occasion I can remember time monkeying fairies in Doctor who, dealt with the relationship between mother and daughter and how just plane scary the lengths that Captain Jack is prepared to go to to keep the world safe, literally allowing the fairies to tempt a young girl to run away with them and leave her mother forever, rather than have the fairies cause a new ice age. What does this story tell us about Ruby? This goes doubly if there’s no science fictional puzzle, or even playing with fantasy rules to go on, especially since the "it was me all alon”", resolution is pretty old hat in timeline stories, and thus needs some emotional resonance or character drama to prop it up. I don’t want to be too harsh about this, I’ve always liked the more experimental end of Doctor who (, and in fairness I haven’t seen this episode, it’s possible the acting and characterisation could carry you passed the logic and background gaps here, but this did strike me when I was looking up info on this one. Regarding the Welsh, Russel T Davies is actually Welsh himself, that was why the time space rift opened in Cardiff in the 9th Doctor story the unquiet dead, and why Torchwood was located There. There are two main stereotypes over here associated with the Welsh, that of straight laced Christian choir singers (thanks to the popularity of people like Catharine Jenkins and Aled Jones), and that they are backward, insular farming types who mistrust outsiders; especially outsiders who don’t speak Welsh. This was very much played with in the Torchwood story countryside. So, mmmm, great job Russel T Davies in portraying the Welsh as backward, insular farming types who mistrust outsiders, way to break down those stereotypes there! :D. Now the elephant in the room. As regards a certain treaty organisation. You probably aren’t aware just how major a thing Brexit still is in the UK, with those who were strongly opposed to it repeatedly blaming all the countries ills on it. Famously embroiled in the Brexit debate was UKIP, or the Uk independence party. Not sure if this also relates to a certain orange man, but if you are talking “independence”, in the UK< you mean one of two things, Scotland’s independence from England, or Brexit, and given this was a Welsh party it’s pretty clear what Russel was getting at, namely that “independence”, from a certain treaty organisation and the threat of nuclear war, was obviously a thinly vailed Brexit allegory, indeed the evil prime minister was said to belong to “the Albian party”, “Albian”, being an alternative name for England, which sounds a very blatant Ukip reference. This is further strengthened by the fact that currently it is an election year in the UK, and the one party nobody is talking about is the reform party, which includes the previous head of Ukip Nigel Farage. According to some people (including the BBC, and probably Russell T Davies as well), the reform party are an ultra-right wing mob of racists and nationalists. According to other people; including themselves, the reform party are a centrist party simply bent on redressing a lot of the issues currently embroiling the UK, especially; but not limited to, those concerned with matters such as immigration, the national health service and identity politics. So yes, when I heard the thing related to the treaty organisation, and the portrayal of this future independence loving prime minister as the usual war mongering, ultimately cowardly evil white man who of course molests his female aids (again, gotta love that 2024 feminism), this very much struck me as more of the same as last week, Russel and the writers having a very specific go at a very specific group of people! For that reason, for me, this one goes very much in the same bag as last weeks, far too blatantly agender pushing, on the nose having a go at specific groups and people the writers don’t like, even if it does have some semi-decent ideas behind it, and might be executed well. For me, therefore, another episode of Disney who I will not be watching.
Thank you for the explanation! I knew you had election coming up, but our news here really doesn't cover anything more than very surface level information. From the sounds of it, your election season is going about as well as ours. Although, it doesn't sound like you guys have one party trying to put the candidate of another party in jail, but I really don't know that for certain. They don't tell us anything here. I haven't watched Torchwood since it first aired, so it's been a while. I think it might be time to rewatch and read stories from the past, while I wait for this current hysteria of garbage to pass. Discussing the older plots that 73 Yards resembles really drives home how everything now is just a shadow of what it used to be. -Mollie
@@mollieandtheoldman The election over here is crazy enough, since we basically have one party who are almost guaranteed to lose, one party who think they're going to win; unfortunately a party which is even woker than the current government, and several others desperate to grab seats. Unfortunately, though the BBC have an actual charter to remain politically neutral; something which has burned them badly in the past (during the Iraq war there was a huge scandal over the subject), their bias has been pretty clear, in particular, the Bbc loves to castigate the English population for daring to vote for Brexit, indeed I even remember one wonderfully scaremongering news article which claimed supermarkets in the UK would no longer sell pizza, German sausages or croissants if we exited the European union! Needless to say that one aged about as well as you'd expect :D. In the past when Doctor who has done evil future politics, they've been either echoes of the past, or the likes of Harald Saxon, IE their own brand of evil, and if they've had political points to make they've been general rather than specific. Torchwood season 1 was pretty rough in places, especially with revelling in the adult side of being an adult program, but the series more than picked up it's feet in season 2, not to mention in season 3 children of earth, or season 4 miracle day. Big finish had an interesting setup for continuing torchwood with some extra stories, some of which have been Amazing, though as with several other things it's been going a little off the rails recently, not the least because where the series has always featured bisexual or gay characters; I first ran across the term Lgbt when looking up Torchwood in 2009, now, the audios have taken that side of things rather to the extreme and not in a good way! I'd still recommend Torchwood over all though, even if you do need to wade through some rather adolescent stuff in the first season.
i have to say there are only a view things worse than the "its all been just a dream" trope and that is when they pretend its something else. you say there has been character development but has there really? because as i understood it, nothing of what we saw actually happened, in the end they broke the timeline so hard, that even the Doctor did not realise it ever existed. and what are the consequences of that now? exactly NOTING cause nothing HAPPENED you enjoyed an Episode of nothing but with a lot of mystery boxes that never get opened and didnt have any meaning anyway. i also should not miss to point out another box this episode had placed, about that "mad jack" who, as the Doctor stated will be one of the worst people imaginable we even saw what he will plan once in power and only the timestuck Ruby was able to stop him nukeing the world. but in the end, she got out of the time loop? thing so... what? there actually now is going to be nuclear winter in 20 years? this sow is for people with the attentionspan of a goldfish.
For us, the character development was examining into Ruby herself (who was a blank slate before this). This episode showed us that she has larger abandonment worries than we thought which might explain why she chose to travel with the Doctor. She also showed us that she has a moral compass because she chose to stop the Prime Minister. These are things that shouldn't matter if things were reset. These are glimpses into her character. Did the time loop (was it?) reset everything? And there are numerous other plot holes that we brought up. But we recommended this episode based on the suspenseful atmosphere that was set up. We gave this a 5/10. At best, this was an average episode of television. If the things we liked didn't work for you then I can see why you'd have a much lower rating. Doctor Who is far from fixed here. We wanted to give credit for the effort put in. But it did fall well short of a "good" Doctor Who episode. -- Old Man
Yes, the story does rather pick on the Welsh. That is a shame. New Who has hitherto been much better on the portrayal of the Welsh than Classic Who (I wrote an analysis once).
So this had kind of Rod Serling aspect without entirely having the quality of a classic Rod Serling Twilight Zone? It sounds like it might have been more enjoyable if this story had been seen first and not have been reminiscent of other stories. The political part from the way you're describing it is a turn off. I love atmospheric stories but heavy handed reminders of present day politics would have jolted me right out of the atmosphere. If the absence of the titular character actually made the episode better then they have a real problem. I didn't see this because we have a limit on our budget for how many streaming services we're willing to pay for. Disney doesn't have anything really we want to see to justify the expense.
I don't think "Tomato" was a Brexit metaphor. I think it was about a certain US presidential candidate! But I don't like this. Dr Who is a BRITISH show. It should be about metaphors of British politics, not meddling in American politics! I don't care for this globalisation. (There is no mainstream British party campaigning for withdrawal from Tomato.)
I understand your point of view. But even as an American, I don't begrudge a "British show" the right to have an opinion on American politics when...let's face it...we are the biggest economy and the world's superpower. China is an emerging superpower, but their power is actually waning (and they know it). Russia is getting their butt kicked by Ukraine proving their Red Army is a paper tiger that is only as powerful as the periodic ammo superiority they can muster over a former satellite republic. Like it or not, the US is the most powerful nation on earth and to deny other nations an opinion on that is pretty much chauvinism. We need to have thicker skin with this regard or we risk being the snowflakes we accuse others of being. My $0.02.
Britain is a member of "Tomato"... and UN(IT)... When 73 Yards was filming Sweden and Finland had applied for Membership (and are members now)... In part because of World events which RTD might have hinted at filling out our/Ruby's Future... At almost 100 years old in 2046 "Tomato", the EU, and Britain might have experienced some interesting World events (22 years from now). Was seriously thinking we'd have gotten some "The Dead Zone" vibes...
No no no this no not Doctor WHO, It tries to copy Dona Noble turn left so bad, Now I am confirmed that Doctor Died on the Planet called Christmas, NO NO NO NO NO NO....
Yes, back in series 4 with Donna, in the far superior Turn Left episode. RTD also "borrowed" the idea of an invisible creature attached to someone's back from the classic series story Planet of the Spiders. I suspect that The Trickster may be making a return as the villain this season, as he was responsible for the previous encounter with the beetle. He is the most likely culprit to have laid this similar trap in 73 Yards.
I also guessed Ruby was the old lady immediately. I have a billion questions about how this works, but Russell T. Davies keeps insisting the show is more fantasy than science fiction now, and it’s increasingly obvious this means “let’s cut corners in the writing, running a show is HARD.”
Assigning a writer dedicated to the task of closing glaring plot holes would shore up the increasingly slipshod treatment of episode ‘mechanics’. Especially, the temporal paradoxes.
I think it's 73 yards, because that's (according to this episode) the distance at which someone with 20-20 vision can no longer make out the facial features of a person they're looking at. Kate Lethbridge-Stewart in this episode says that every picture they take (and Ruby agrees) no matter how good a camera shows the woman as if a person with 20-20 vision were looking at her at a distance of 73 yards and they all look blurry. You can't make out what she really looks like.
I will admit, the leadup to this episode was actually full of interesting expectations. The 'next time trailer' sort of edited it as in Ruby saw someone further away, then ended up in that same spot - then the pub locals were in the trailer warning her of danger. A press statement describing the episode initially viewed on the site 'Doctor Who: A Brief History of Time Travel' [good site btw] said 'in a rain-lashed pub, the locals sit in fear of ancient legends coming to life.' That also intrigued me in terms of folklore horror - which the episode didn't mostly end up being, but it was still a good, slow-paced, atmospheric episode. Plus, Ncuti Gatwa being absent so he could finish Sex Education and Barbie does certainly bring up the question of how good his Doctor is, but nevertheless Millie Gibson did a good job for the first filming of the series' production.
I think another comment has said it, but the '73 Yards distance' is, apparently according to RTD, how far away we can see something with a decent amount of detail, which of course Ruby used to her advantage to move the 'old woman' next to the politician to scare him away. But...speaking of the 'old woman'...
This brings me onto my biggest problems with the episode. I appreciate a 'interpret it as you want, not everything is explained' approach, but...what was implied or explained vs left deliberately ambiguous didn't work. How and why was the old woman scaring away people, least of all UNIT? Is there a potential 'grandfather paradox' where the politician the Doctor mentioned is no longer going to do something bad? Plus, the revelation of the old woman ultimately frustrated me rather than satisfied me. With 'Midnight', we never found out what that entity making people repeat words was, but it was too scary to find out and it worked. But trying to explain the whole thing at the end led to the frustrations. Sure, maybe this Mad Jack is the aforementioned ancient legend, or maybe this will play into a later episode, but a little more was needed.
Whoo, TED Talk here, sorry.
Disney doctor is a hilarious name!
I think this season of DW will be primarily a fantasy show rather than a sci-fi show because the 14th doctor did the thing with the salt at the edge of the universe injecting superstition into the universe and paving the way for the Toy Maker who stuck a crowbar into that crack and broke it wide open making this Whoniverse a supernatural one. Strap in! It's gonna be a bumpy ride!
The stakes were too low for most of the story. Unlike Donna, Ruby didn't die, she actually enjoyed longevity in the new timeline! She just had a less happy life, but are we invested enough in Ruby at this stage to really care?
I also thought that the story should either have been a Welsh horror story or a UK political thriller. Mixing the two was jarring in tone and genre.
You are SO RIGHT about the story's treatment of membership of "Tomato"!
Does Roger ap Gwilliam's premiership endure now that the timeline has been aborted?
I'm watching around 10:15 and the "Old Man" is wondering why an episode of DW would have so little Doctor. Keep in mind, a lot of excellent Doctor Who episodes have been Doctor-lite episodes. Think of the episode Blink where Tennant's 10th Doctor was barely in it but it was GREAT! Both of you mentioned the episode Turn Left which was also a Doctor-lite episode and was wonderful. So there is a proud heritage of Doctor-lite Doctor Who episodes. It doesn't say anything negative about the Doctor, just that the people in the episode (Donna Noble, Sally Sparrow, or Ruby Sunday) can carry the episode without the Doctor.
Also, I'm told that this was the first episode they filmed and Ncuti Gatwa wasn't available except for the 2 scenes necessitating it be a Doctor-lite episode. Millie Gibson was only 18 when she filmed this episode and she was terrific! I enjoyed this episode. It left a lot of unanswered questions, but I can live with that.
This episode showed me how much I need my explanations and can’t ignore the details. I have seen other reviewers say we all live with something we can’t understand but learn to live with.
Okay, but her adoptive parent locked her out of the house and that needs to be explained, because in real life we know why such things happen.
Yeah, there was no resolution to any of the themes in this episode. Why did all the people run from Ruby? Why didn't the soldiers protecting the prime minister switch to the weird old woman as soon as she was backing up as she was told? Why could nobody tell Ruby what the old woman said to make leave Ruby in disgust? If the woman was Ruby why did she manage wo warn her if the whole story revolves around the prime minister getting stopped as her warning prevents her from doing that. There are so many questions left open and the whole episode felt really bad for it. It was very interesting at first but it's funny how having the doctor not in an episode makes it better, even though over all the ending was very bad
Russell T Davies is Welsh himself. He was just having the people in the pub take the piss out of Ruby because non-Welsh people often think of Welsh people as backwards (not being able to accept payments via phone) and believers of magic (the fairy circle).
In three out of the first four episodes, somebody steps in something with unforseen circumstances. A pattern is forming.
They could have done an Inner Light TNG type trope with this ep. At least Picard remembers the alternate life he lived. Ruby should have been allowed to remember her life.
There is an over-arching, deceptively deep meaning of this episode. A comment in another thread provided the key to the meaning of the ghost woman. Yes, she is Ruby’s future ghost, but she also represents something much more terrifying than that. She is (Ruby’s) death, personified. Which is why she frightens away everyone who tries to speak to her. Her purpose for the audience is as a metaphor for the death which awaits us all. Stalks us our entire lives, just as it does Ruby in the form of the ghost woman. While our own death is rarely at the forefront of our daily awareness, neither is it ever far away. You might say, that death is always 73 yards away. Close enough to be visible, but not so close as to be clearly so. The best that any of us can do is to ignore our self-knowledge that we will one day, die.
Soon, living Ruby simply accepts the mysterious, but ever-present, older woman as an inevitable part of her daily existence. Realizing, that there’s nothing she can do about the woman anyway. Until, Ruby is at the end of life, and then the mysterious woman comes closer, to Ruby. Close enough to touch, when Ruby in her last moment of life in the nursing home bed, The medical monitor stops it regular beeps, and gives that dreadful flatline tone, as Ruby passes. Loses all anxiety, she embraces death with outstretched arms. Chills. All through her life, Ruby felt alone. Abandoned, and isolated. Which is bad enough, but she ends up dying alone, as well. Something which, sadly, is a feeling, and an ending for too many of us. Davies’ screen play touches on that fact. BTW, apparently, ghost Ruby was repeatedly signing; “bless you, thank you.”
Contrary to the suggestion by some haters that this episode is pointless, it rather, contains many worthwhile ideas and messages. The episode’s main fault is that it’s too ambitious for a one-hour TV show. Which results in many unexplained plot elements. Further complicating matters is the ‘Mad-Jack’ sub-episode, contained within the larger ‘ghost story’. 73 Yards could have, and probably should have been made into a two-part episode. As for the time-paradoxes, those are explained by Tenant in the famous ‘Blink’ episode. Wibbly-Wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. In other words, don’t let such paradoxes interfere with the message of the story.
When I moved to Rome some years ago, I had to adjust to using metric, so yes in the UK measurements were taught in imperial.
Old man: why 73 yards? RTD did research to determine how far you can see someone but not recognize them and whatever reason came up either 73 yards.
I don’t mind if they go down the supernatural route of story lines etc. _But_ there needs to be technobabble involved with the stories, as well as not forgetting the sci-fi aspect of the series. If they imply supernatural elements but bring the sci-fi element to the forefront I have no issue. However if RTD is going to add supernatural elements and purposefully ignore what the series based on from the beginning it’s going to fail. And while I do love when shows add supernatural elements to their shows when needed, it doesn’t work in Doctor Who. The episode The Devils Due from Star Trek: The Next Generation is a good example how to write supernatural elements with sci-fi
I didn't understand why the woman affected Mad Jack. The woman had a perception filter around her because otherwise in the course of 20 years there'd have been thousands of people would've passed by her in public; Ruby had to specifically point out the woman for people to notice her so Jack shouldn't have been aware of her presence. Plus if the episode happens in a separate timeline then who stopped Mad Jack from launching the nukes in the original timeline? Ruby's entire story was pointless if Jack never launched the nukes in the first place. A suspenseful episode that got worse as it went on unfortunately with no effective resolution.
generally the UK uses the smallest measurement possbile for visualisation- so yards or meters would work- no one says they're 72" tall, they say 6ft (i've not met anyone that uses metric for distance outside of engineering)
I'll check this out, thanks! Sounds a bit like Sapphire and Steel, a big fantasy show from the UK around 1980. Stories 2, 4 and 6 of S&S are quite compelling despite slow pacing...
Sapphire and Steel was a huuuuuuge influence on Stephen moffat.
This is the first one of this season that I have actually watched. It was not good but it was just OK and definitely because the extremely 'happy' Doctor(ess) was missing for like the whole episode.
The Old Man asked what was the future Ruby was telling that made everyone she knows to Disown her, what she said was "there are only two genders", Hay Hay Hay don't blame me 'that's what she said'.
Ok, if I'm hearing it right, the best episode of Dr Who from this series is the episode without the doctor in it.
Gotcha
20 minutes of story in a 45 minute bag. Misery porn galore. Steven Moffat, come back!
RTD said he chose 73 yards only because it was the distance where you could see the person but not make out their features. They measured it on a dock or something. In other words, it had no real significance to story and was a weak idea. 😂😢
In the UK we would have said feet. 219 feet.
It about rainbows!!! Did you not get it? When you try to get to the ends of a rainbow it just keeps receding away. This is about rainbows and lgbwt😮😅😊
Knowing what Tomato really is, its history, founding, and current events, Davies doesn’t understand the nuances surrounding it.
Hi.
Thought I better watch your review before you do the one for next week, and no this one doesn’t sound as egregious, albeit that’s like saying something doesn’t sound as bad as the 8 car pileup.
Several points.
First, Turn left is a great episode of Doctor who, but it’s not the only time the series has done either alternative timelines, or stories where you see the companion’s lives play out without the Doctor which then get reset.
For example, the fantastic big finish audio Death in the family, where the 7th Doctor is literally killed and his companions ace and hex must live on for several years, find out clues he left and eventually reset things without him.
Similarly Doctor who has had its brush with occasional unexplained bits of the supernatural, albeit usually there is some attempt to tie them into a science-fantasy context and imply rules that affect the plot’s resolution, such as the carionites in the 10th Doctor story the Shakespear code whose magic was said to be an alternative science based on words, and who thus could be defeated by a wordsmith like Shakespear.
One thing which I wondered with this episode though, in light of both the alternative timeline and none-explained fairy malarky, is what do we actually learn about Ruby?
We get to see her mother disown her for no reason, we get to see an unsuccessful relationship where she sexually denigrates her boyfriend (thank you 2024 misandrist feminism), and we get to see her fake out a randomly evil future prime minister, but what do we actually learn about her?
Turn left, for all it focused on a doctorless future actually told us far more about Donna, how she copes under pressure, and what she’s willing to sacrifice, indeed for all the story was focused on how bad the world was without the Doctor, it was Donna who was the true heart of the story.
The Torchwood episode small worlds; the other occasion I can remember time monkeying fairies in Doctor who, dealt with the relationship between mother and daughter and how just plane scary the lengths that Captain Jack is prepared to go to to keep the world safe, literally allowing the fairies to tempt a young girl to run away with them and leave her mother forever, rather than have the fairies cause a new ice age.
What does this story tell us about Ruby?
This goes doubly if there’s no science fictional puzzle, or even playing with fantasy rules to go on, especially since the "it was me all alon”", resolution is pretty old hat in timeline stories, and thus needs some emotional resonance or character drama to prop it up.
I don’t want to be too harsh about this, I’ve always liked the more experimental end of Doctor who (, and in fairness I haven’t seen this episode, it’s possible the acting and characterisation could carry you passed the logic and background gaps here, but this did strike me when I was looking up info on this one.
Regarding the Welsh, Russel T Davies is actually Welsh himself, that was why the time space rift opened in Cardiff in the 9th Doctor story the unquiet dead, and why Torchwood was located
There.
There are two main stereotypes over here associated with the Welsh, that of straight laced Christian choir singers (thanks to the popularity of people like Catharine Jenkins and Aled Jones), and that they are backward, insular farming types who mistrust outsiders; especially outsiders who don’t speak Welsh.
This was very much played with in the Torchwood story countryside.
So, mmmm, great job Russel T Davies in portraying the Welsh as backward, insular farming types who mistrust outsiders, way to break down those stereotypes there! :D.
Now the elephant in the room.
As regards a certain treaty organisation. You probably aren’t aware just how major a thing Brexit still is in the UK, with those who were strongly opposed to it repeatedly blaming all the countries ills on it.
Famously embroiled in the Brexit debate was UKIP, or the Uk independence party.
Not sure if this also relates to a certain orange man, but if you are talking “independence”, in the UK< you mean one of two things, Scotland’s independence from England, or Brexit, and given this was a Welsh party it’s pretty clear what Russel was getting at, namely that “independence”, from a certain treaty organisation and the threat of nuclear war, was obviously a thinly vailed Brexit allegory, indeed the evil prime minister was said to belong to “the Albian party”, “Albian”, being an alternative name for England, which sounds a very blatant Ukip reference.
This is further strengthened by the fact that currently it is an election year in the UK, and the one party nobody is talking about is the reform party, which includes the previous head of Ukip Nigel Farage.
According to some people (including the BBC, and probably Russell T Davies as well), the reform party are an ultra-right wing mob of racists and nationalists.
According to other people; including themselves, the reform party are a centrist party simply bent on redressing a lot of the issues currently embroiling the UK, especially; but not limited to, those concerned with matters such as immigration, the national health service and identity politics.
So yes, when I heard the thing related to the treaty organisation, and the portrayal of this future independence loving prime minister as the usual war mongering, ultimately cowardly evil white man who of course molests his female aids (again, gotta love that 2024 feminism), this very much struck me as more of the same as last week, Russel and the writers having a very specific go at a very specific group of people!
For that reason, for me, this one goes very much in the same bag as last weeks, far too blatantly agender pushing, on the nose having a go at specific groups and people the writers don’t like, even if it does have some semi-decent ideas behind it, and might be executed well.
For me, therefore, another episode of Disney who I will not be watching.
Thank you for the explanation! I knew you had election coming up, but our news here really doesn't cover anything more than very surface level information. From the sounds of it, your election season is going about as well as ours. Although, it doesn't sound like you guys have one party trying to put the candidate of another party in jail, but I really don't know that for certain. They don't tell us anything here.
I haven't watched Torchwood since it first aired, so it's been a while. I think it might be time to rewatch and read stories from the past, while I wait for this current hysteria of garbage to pass. Discussing the older plots that 73 Yards resembles really drives home how everything now is just a shadow of what it used to be. -Mollie
@@mollieandtheoldman The election over here is crazy enough, since we basically have one party who are almost guaranteed to lose, one party who think they're going to win; unfortunately a party which is even woker than the current government, and several others desperate to grab seats.
Unfortunately, though the BBC have an actual charter to remain politically neutral; something which has burned them badly in the past (during the Iraq war there was a huge scandal over the subject), their bias has been pretty clear, in particular, the Bbc loves to castigate the English population for daring to vote for Brexit, indeed I even remember one wonderfully scaremongering news article which claimed supermarkets in the UK would no longer sell pizza, German sausages or croissants if we exited the European union!
Needless to say that one aged about as well as you'd expect :D.
In the past when Doctor who has done evil future politics, they've been either echoes of the past, or the likes of Harald Saxon, IE their own brand of evil, and if they've had political points to make they've been general rather than specific.
Torchwood season 1 was pretty rough in places, especially with revelling in the adult side of being an adult program, but the series more than picked up it's feet in season 2, not to mention in season 3 children of earth, or season 4 miracle day.
Big finish had an interesting setup for continuing torchwood with some extra stories, some of which have been Amazing, though as with several other things it's been going a little off the rails recently, not the least because where the series has always featured bisexual or gay characters; I first ran across the term Lgbt when looking up Torchwood in 2009, now, the audios have taken that side of things rather to the extreme and not in a good way!
I'd still recommend Torchwood over all though, even if you do need to wade through some rather adolescent stuff in the first season.
666 cm is 73 yards
i have to say there are only a view things worse than the "its all been just a dream" trope and that is when they pretend its something else. you say there has been character development but has there really? because as i understood it, nothing of what we saw actually happened, in the end they broke the timeline so hard, that even the Doctor did not realise it ever existed. and what are the consequences of that now? exactly NOTING cause nothing HAPPENED you enjoyed an Episode of nothing but with a lot of mystery boxes that never get opened and didnt have any meaning anyway. i also should not miss to point out another box this episode had placed, about that "mad jack" who, as the Doctor stated will be one of the worst people imaginable we even saw what he will plan once in power and only the timestuck Ruby was able to stop him nukeing the world. but in the end, she got out of the time loop? thing so... what? there actually now is going to be nuclear winter in 20 years? this sow is for people with the attentionspan of a goldfish.
For us, the character development was examining into Ruby herself (who was a blank slate before this). This episode showed us that she has larger abandonment worries than we thought which might explain why she chose to travel with the Doctor. She also showed us that she has a moral compass because she chose to stop the Prime Minister. These are things that shouldn't matter if things were reset. These are glimpses into her character.
Did the time loop (was it?) reset everything? And there are numerous other plot holes that we brought up. But we recommended this episode based on the suspenseful atmosphere that was set up. We gave this a 5/10. At best, this was an average episode of television. If the things we liked didn't work for you then I can see why you'd have a much lower rating. Doctor Who is far from fixed here. We wanted to give credit for the effort put in. But it did fall well short of a "good" Doctor Who episode. -- Old Man
Yes, the story does rather pick on the Welsh. That is a shame. New Who has hitherto been much better on the portrayal of the Welsh than Classic Who (I wrote an analysis once).
What a complete waste of time this new doctor is.
And why would the Dr ask Ruby what year she was from if they were already in her 2024 time frame? Lazy writing!👎😟
So this had kind of Rod Serling aspect without entirely having the quality of a classic Rod Serling Twilight Zone? It sounds like it might have been more enjoyable if this story had been seen first and not have been reminiscent of other stories. The political part from the way you're describing it is a turn off. I love atmospheric stories but heavy handed reminders of present day politics would have jolted me right out of the atmosphere. If the absence of the titular character actually made the episode better then they have a real problem. I didn't see this because we have a limit on our budget for how many streaming services we're willing to pay for. Disney doesn't have anything really we want to see to justify the expense.
I don't think "Tomato" was a Brexit metaphor. I think it was about a certain US presidential candidate!
But I don't like this. Dr Who is a BRITISH show. It should be about metaphors of British politics, not meddling in American politics! I don't care for this globalisation.
(There is no mainstream British party campaigning for withdrawal from Tomato.)
Aye. Dr Who can be global... But that's because the British aspect is made accessible to the world to appreciate.
I understand your point of view. But even as an American, I don't begrudge a "British show" the right to have an opinion on American politics when...let's face it...we are the biggest economy and the world's superpower. China is an emerging superpower, but their power is actually waning (and they know it). Russia is getting their butt kicked by Ukraine proving their Red Army is a paper tiger that is only as powerful as the periodic ammo superiority they can muster over a former satellite republic. Like it or not, the US is the most powerful nation on earth and to deny other nations an opinion on that is pretty much chauvinism. We need to have thicker skin with this regard or we risk being the snowflakes we accuse others of being. My $0.02.
Britain is a member of "Tomato"... and UN(IT)... When 73 Yards was filming Sweden and Finland had applied for Membership (and are members now)... In part because of World events which RTD might have hinted at filling out our/Ruby's Future... At almost 100 years old in 2046 "Tomato", the EU, and Britain might have experienced some interesting World events (22 years from now). Was seriously thinking we'd have gotten some "The Dead Zone" vibes...
No no no this no not Doctor WHO, It tries to copy Dona Noble turn left so bad, Now I am confirmed that Doctor Died on the Planet called Christmas,
NO NO NO NO NO NO....
Didn't STD not long ago have an episode where a beetle caused some time travelling shenanigans ?
Yes, back in series 4 with Donna, in the far superior Turn Left episode. RTD also "borrowed" the idea of an invisible creature attached to someone's back from the classic series story Planet of the Spiders. I suspect that The Trickster may be making a return as the villain this season, as he was responsible for the previous encounter with the beetle. He is the most likely culprit to have laid this similar trap in 73 Yards.