Doctor Who: The Legend of Ruby Sunday

We learn her identity at last! Millie Gibson, Ncuti Gatwa and Bonnie Langford in the Legend of Ruby Sunday.
Photograph: Sophie Mutevelian/Bad Wolf/BBC Studios

Finally, we discover the identity of the mysterious woman who has been appearing with the Doctor and Ruby all through this season’s adventures, and it turns out that Susan Triad (Susan Twist) has been a pawn all along. It was also very amusing that a lot of things that had been the subject of frenzied online speculation – was S Triad an all-too obvious anagram of Tardis? – were dealt with in the first couple of minutes, with everybody standing around essentially saying to the viewer “Well … obviously!”

This was very much the act one set-up of a two-part story. Mel (Bonnie Langford) had far more to do than she did when she returned for the 60th anniversary, and having her undercover in the Triad technology company was a good way of illustrating how Unit utilises the Doctor’s former companions once their travels have ended. Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) again flashed some of the anger and disgust we saw when she rejected Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) in 73 Yards.

It was a little obvious that the two members of the Unit bridge crew we had not encountered before were going to end up Sutekh-fodder. And the fact that both Rose (Yasmin Finney) and Morris Gibbons (Lenny Rush) were working for Unit does raise some questions about child labour laws in the Whoniverse.

Having a VHS cassette as the vital bit of tech to drive the plot forward was a lovely nod to the series’ own wilderness years, when VHS was the only medium Doctor Who existed on – even if the time window then being able to extrapolate a 3D hologram environment from the tape was quite the technobabble stretch.

There has been some criticism that Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor has leaned too much into his emotional vulnerabilities – the character has ended up crying in nearly every episode – but this was a commanding turn from the moment he arrived at Unit. He might have been all smiles and hugs, but there was no doubt he was instantly in charge.

Sum it up in one sentence?

The Doctor and lots of people we’ve already met this season spend 48 minutes gathering together for a cliffhanger reveal.

Life aboard the Tardis

It was not so much life aboard the Tardis as life around the Tardis, as we discovered that the Doctor’s time ship has been hijacked by the immortal god of death, Sutekh. There have been some grumblings in fandom that although this run of the show has the largest and arguably most spectacular Tardis interior set in the show’s history, Gatwa and Gibson have barely shot a scene in it.

Fear factor

So much was invested in building up to the reveal at the end that this episode lacked any real chills along the way. For younger viewers, though, the sequence with Ruby’s creepily hooded mysterious mother and the subsequent death of Col Chidozie (Tachia Newall) may have offered some frights.

Mysteries and questions

With all the misdirection about whether Susan Triad would turn out to be the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan, it is easy to forget that Mrs Flood (Anita Dobson) is upstairs with fellow EastEnders alumni Cherry Sunday (Angela Wynter), and being menacingly weird. She couldn’t be, could she?

And there is still little clarity about who or what the Vlinx is, and whether it is just rights issues that has stopped that talking computer analysis role being played by, say, K9 or Mr Smith, the supercomputer from the Sarah Jane Adventures.

Deeper into the vortex

Ruby Sunday is not the first companion to get her name in an episode title. Rose, Smith and Jones, Amy’s Choice and both The Wedding of River Song and The Husbands of River Song have previously bestowed that honour. The first time it happened was in the William Hartnell era, with a 1965 Christmas Day episode called The Feast of Steven which featured Peter Purves as companion Steven Taylor.
Gabriel Woolf is reprising his role as the voice of Sutekh, which he last played in the Pyramids of Mars in 1975. He’s 91!
Kate tells the Doctor he expressly forbade time window technology in the 1970s, throwing further confusion into the Unit dating controversy about whether the Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker Unit stories were set in the 70s or 80s. Of course, since the Grand Serpent time-travelled his way through Unit’s established history in Survivors of the Flux, maybe the answer is … both?
No fandom obsesses over TV ratings more than Doctor Who. Dot and Bubble had consolidated seven-day viewing figures of 3.38m … among the worst Doctor Who has ever had. It was also the overall highest rated show in the UK that day. Make of that what you will.
Some extra-curricular activity this week. The animated version of lost 1966 story The Celestial Toymaker is out on DVD. Central villain the Toymaker returned in Gatwa’s debut last year, The Giggle. In the UK, there is a new Tales of the Tardis on BBC Four at 8pm on Thursday 20 June, with the synopsis “Far away in time, on board an old Remembered Tardis, the Doctor and Ruby pause in battle to reflect on their recent adventures.”