Launch codes to nuke "73 Yards" from orbit - Doctor Who review

CW: discussion of rape

So I've been watching a lot of Moffat Doctor Who lately, which is broadly dogshit, but each new episode of Russel T. Davies' return to the show's helm is really pushing the boundaries of what it means to create bad television. I actually would believe that this is part of a grand plan to destroy the BBC from the inside, by blowing millions of pounds on a singularly dreadful Disney+ show, but RTD's original run on Doctor Who was also much worse than people are typically willing to acknowledge, so this is obviously nonsense.

"73 Yards" has apparently proven very divisive, with some people lauding it as one of the best Doctor Who episodes in ages (this means nothing to me, I didn't watch any of Chibnall's stuff), and some people taking a CinemaSins-esque "look at all these plot holes!!!" approach to criticising it. This essay definitely resembles the latter, but I want to clarify right away that I don't care about plot holes in and of themselves. If a story coheres on a metaphorical level, I can overlook nonsense plotting. Any given Doctor Who episode, including many of my favourites, will have at least a few major plot holes. It's like swiss cheese, the holes are the hole point!

The thing is, this episode is like a block of swiss cheese which is all holes. As in, there's no cheese there, just an empty plate. It neither furthers the overarching plot of the series, nor reveals anything substantive about the characters. If you watch Doctor Who for the vibes, you can perhaps get something out of the spooky images and buy into the intended emotional content of each scene. That has unironically always been the best way to watch Doctor Who and enjoy it without becoming incandescent with a kind of impotent, essay-provoking fury—so genuinely, good for you if you're able to do that. I just kind of think that it's possible for television to be good, so.

The episode is titled "73 Yards" for the distance our companion du jour, Ruby Sunday, finds herself at all times in this episode from a strange indistinct cognitohazardous woman, who follows her at a "semperdistance" (a word coined by the episode in an excruciating scene where an old lady goes, "well, I don't think there's a word in the English language like that, so to coin one from Latin, it would probably be 'semper distant', meaning 'always distant'"). I knew immediately what this title referred to the moment the woman appeared—great, I roll my eyes, at some point Ruby is going to walk past a really big ruler, and she'll go oh my word, why that woman, she's exactly 73 yards away from me!

At the start of the episode, the Doctor and Ruby step out of the TARDIS and—after a very conspicuous bit of exposition about a dangerous future Prime Minister from Wales—they almost immediately accidentally break a magic circle. Doctor Who has always struggled with one dissonant bit of narrative convenience, which is that no matter where the TARDIS goes, there's always some horrible ghastly supernatural alien shit going on. While writers have attempted to justify this in-universe, really it's just the anthropic principle of the show's narrative: if the TARDIS were to arrive in a normal boring inoccuous place, why would we watch that episode? We have to take it for granted that they're going to stumble onto something—and RTD increasingly seems disinterested in wasting time explaining the contrivance each episode—so in this case, it's that a magic circle happens to be right there underfoot and they step on it. Call it a "coincidence", fine, I gather that's what the series mytharc is about this time around. Now, later in the episode, the story seems to want to strongly suggest that the curse is a consequence of Ruby's actions—she has disrespected the magic—but as originally presented, it seems more like she's completely oblivious to the presence of the magic until it's too late. Ruby doesn't actually exert any agency in this introduction, nor in most of the episode, so the breaking of the circle fails to reveal anything about her character. By the same metric, I think most ordinary people would behave pretty much the same way, so this really tells us nothing about who Ruby is.

At this point, the Doctor disappears because of magic. The TARDIS remains, but without the Doctor, is inaccessible to Ruby. In just the preceding episode, "Boom", one of the many scenes in its already-bloated denouement saw Ruby being given a TARDIS key, which she tries in this episode, and it doesn't work, showing the viewer that this is spooky magic bullshit. I think this is bad showrunning, because the ending of "Boom" seriously needed trimming, so why bother if it only creates the narrative busywork of needing to show "and the key doesn't work" in this one? Why not have the Doctor give her the key after an episode with a beat similar to this, where Ruby needs to get into the TARDIS but can't, and he wants to stop it from ever happening again: "don't worry, the TARDIS doors will always open for you from now on!" As written, it strikes me as very clumsy plotting.

Ruby walks down the cliffside and encounters a hiker, who is actually the mysterious old lady who's recurred in every episode of this series in seemingly unrelated circumstances. This mytharc structure is the only kind I have ever seen RTD even attempt; Moffat rarely does better, but at least on occasion will take a token stab at tying the mytharc easter-egg into the themes of his series or individual episodes. (The crack is really, really good for this.) This time, Ruby recognises the woman on some level, to clue an inattentive audience into the fact that "ah, I guess this character was in the previous episodes, and maybe I was supposed to notice, because that might be relevant in some future episode!" No threat of it being relevant this episode, of course. Anyway, this hiker makes a bit of fuss about how Ruby's not dressed for the weather. I don't recall if the episode intends to suggest that the weather has suddenly turned evil after the circle was broken, or if Ruby and the Doctor arrived on a windswept cliff by accident, or if Ruby really is just ill-prepared—none of this is interesting.

Poor Millie Gibson has been given nothing but terrible material this episode, but where better actors have managed to salvage this kind of fare in prior episodes, she's not really up to the task here. Apparently this was the first episode she filmed for the show, which is a baffling decision—how is she supposed to establish the character without any series regulars to bounce off of? Why would you lead with an episode that's very pointedly building off a relationship developed over the course of the rest of the show? Regardless, between the script and Gibson's performance, not a single interaction where she talks about her stalkerly apparition to another person is remotely plausible as a way any real person would actually behave in this situation. I'm not even sure she tries to approach the follower at any point? She clearly tries to communicate with it, but it refuses to acknowledge her. This is Ruby's fifth adventure with(out) the Doctor, it should by this point be obvious that the woman is supernatural, dangerous, and related to the magic circle in some way: but the episode at this point seems to suggest this hasn't really occurred to her yet. Or, perhaps, that it has occurred to her, and she just thinks the hiker wouldn't believe her—but then if she does already think this is spooky magic, why does she throw the hiker under the bus by asking her to go talk to the entity? The entity ignores the hiker, and then lo and behold, the hiker is suddenly subjected to some kind of supernatural effect that causes her to flee screaming. How unexpected!

Oh well. Ruby continues to the village and goes into a pub, commencing the worst scene in the episode by a significant margin. In terms of set design, this pub is the kind of sterile nondescript establishment The World's End mercilessly lampooned, but I don't get the impression this was the intended effect. A half-dozen stereotypes inhabit the bar, all seeming to know each other, all dropping their individual interactions to singularly focus on Ruby from the moment she arrives. Again, they make fun of her for not having a coat. Ruby politely asks the innkeeper if they have any rooms going, and the innkeeper names a price. Ruby has no cash on her, so she asks if she can pay with her phone. Incomprehensibly, the innkeeper feigns ignorance of the entire concept. The idea here is that the episode is trying to trick you into thinking they've actually arrived in the early 2000s, before contactless payments were a thing. Ruby tries to rephrase the request, and the innkeeper remains committed to the bit. Finally, Ruby tries to explain that it's to do with online banking, and—this apparently being the desired reaction—the innkeeper at last reveals, ahah, it was all a ruse! Of course I have a contactless card machine. Everyone in the bar laughs at Ruby's supposed prejudice, and the innkeeper is implied to overcharge her £5 for a glass of Coke.

Look, I've been to pubs like this, and if the bartender tried to pull this shit on me, if everyone else in the room made it obvious they didn't want me there, I'd walk out and find another pub. And there'd be one, because I refuse to believe there's a single coastal village in this country with just a single pub, and if I told the people there what had just happened to me, they'd almost certainly be like—what the fuck? Or maybe, oh yeah, we know those guys, they're notorious freaks in the local area and everyone hates them. I'm sorry, who the fuck in any service job would pull something as mean-spirited like this? Like of course I could see it, if we're talking about an absolute scumbag customer, someone who walks in and spits on the counter and orders you to wipe it up. But I just don't think the scene as written remotely sells the impression that Ruby is behaving in a way that could possibly be construed as offensive towards anyone. Instead—and I realise why this isn't the case, but—it kind of does just create the impression that they're the ones prejudiced against this clearly-lost English girl?

And the episode isn't even done. Next, another old lady at the bar reacts to Ruby's fear of the magic circle by pretending to believe in the supernatural, rattling off a bunch of local folklore (which, in the wider context of the episode, turns out to be entirely true). At the mention of "fairy circle", a young girl laughs and points at her goth friend, saying "you can ask him about that!" to implicitly call him a homophobic slur. Everyone in the bar seems onboard with this old lady's yarn, and when there's a loud knock on the door, they all react with seemingly genuine terror. FUCK! It's Mad Jack, here to kill us all! The goth says something like, "He'll kill me first! You know why that is, don't you?" No, go on, Russel, why is that? Because he's gay, and he thinks that Mad Jack is homophobic?

Finally, the big surprise: this person outside, banging repeatedly on the unlocked pub door, is actually just a guy carrying a big tray of Cornish pasties. To a small Welsh pub. With like four customers in. In the late evening. And instead of, like, just barging in with the tray, or even setting down the tray to poke his head in and ask for some help, the guy has apparently loudly knocked multiple times while carrying this tray in both hands for some customer or member of staff to invite him in. What is he, fucking Dracula? Anyway, big laugh from everyone in the pub. Can you believe this Ruby girl thought that we believe in witchcraft! What a stupid twit! The old lady calls her a racist to her face. I can't believe what I'm watching. RTD is Welsh, of course, and I'm English, so maybe through some lens of demographic essentialism I have to assume that he is simply expressing something here which I can never understand, because racism is something which transcends my understanding, it transcends race, it's really just to do with when there's a foreigner. Isn't this all so very miserably misanthropic? Doesn't it just want to make you blow your brains out?

But fine, whatever, I can accept this stupid caricature land that we've suddenly been deposited into. Hey, maybe it's part of the mytharc, maybe breaking the magic circle has sideways transported us into a dimension where everyone is a prick. Genuinely, the allegory for this episode is meant to be something along these lines, but practically every other scene in the episode has people behaving perfectly kindly towards Ruby right up until the exact moment they directly confront the entity, so clearly this isn't even an attempt at interesting metatextual bullshit, this is just these people behaving according to their supposed nature. Taking all that for granted, we can imagine that perhaps the little arc for this sequence will be that Ruby makes peace with the Welsh, is meaningfully enlightened in some way about her own internalised bigotry, or whatever, and they finally warm to her.

Pff, so we can imagine! No, we cut to a day or two later, and the innkeeper insists with real venom that Ruby is forbidden from staying in the pub any longer, because one of the other regulars (scared by the following lady) refuses to return so long as Ruby is there. She takes a train back to London and we never see any of these characters again. Oh my fucking lord.

The next two sections are just recapitulations of the supernatural conceit. Arriving back at home, there's a lengthy scene where Ruby listens to her mum make misandrist remarks about how the Doctor, like any man, probably just wanted to lock himself in his shed, nevermind that the Doctor was literally just a woman, nevermind that the Doctor is totally nonbinary now for real in a way which will matter to the narrative and mean something. For some fucking reason, Ruby decides it'll be a good idea to experiment on the supernatural old lady who appears to strike mortal terror into anyone she talks to with her own fucking adoptive mum who she loves more than anything. The old lady strikes mortal terror into the mum, who flees from Ruby and kicks her out of the house. Next, Ruby meets up with Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, a character who for me is roughly equivalent to a walking textbox which spans the screen with a helpful disclaimer reading "THIS EPISODE OF DOCTOR WHO IS CURRENTLY PISS DRECK," so it's obvious to anyone watching that the episode is piss dreck. Kate, supposedly the most competent member of Britain's best government agency, idiotically sends a whole taskforce to intercept the cognitohazardous entity while remaining in contact to facilitate the spread of any cognitohazards. Hasn't she read There Is No Antimemetics Division? Steven Moffat certainly hasn't, at least according to his lawyers, but at least he seems capable of thinking about his fictional thought-hazards for more than two minutes to work out how characters might try to act around them. Where this kind of conceptual bullshit is usually a hallmark of one of Moffat's better episodes, for RTD it's definitely an indicator that shit's going to get very stupid. Kate Lethbridge-Stewart decides she wants nothing to do with Ruby. In a slightly better version of this episode, the soldiers literally holding guns would physically open fire on Ruby, forcing her to flee.

That's one of the things about Doctor Who which has always consistently floored me: even in earlier series where they're clearly straining against the budget, the show is constantly failing to thoughtfully devote its budget towards anything narratively compelling—speaking both on the micro-level here, within each individual episode, and in a more general sense of "why do they keep giving these hacks so much fucking money". It also floors me how, despite clearly having Disney bucks behind it, the show somehow looks worse than ever, desaturated to shit with flat lighting and sterile compositions. Despite being a present-day Britain episode—or perhaps because of that—the budget for this episode oozes off it, with countless sets polished to a mirror-sheen, tons of costume work for Ruby, a whole military taskforce. But woe betide we edit some stock muzzle flashes onto these guns in Adobe After Effects! Wouldn't want this episode getting too exciting, now would we?! I can see how this episode is attempting to say something about fear and alienation—basic themes which Doctor Who has explored countless times before in significantly better episodes, and even mid episodes by RTD like "Midnight" (see, it's even in the title)—but with that being the case, if you're going to do a whole thing about nukes anyway, why not just show the government just fucking shooting at the poor girl? Is that image too politically-charged for the BBC? No, actually, tell me, why exactly would the BBC object to such an image?

Ruby retreats oop Norf and we enter a montage intended to make it obvious to everyone watching that yes, Ruby is not going to be stuck here without the Doctor for hours, or days, but rather for years. In the same breath, of course, it immediately makes it obvious that nothing which happens in this episode will ever stick or matter in any in-universe sense, because it'll all be reset in some way, so the best we can hope for is that the events of the episode will teach us something about who Ruby is as a person. (In the formulaically-similar Rick & Morty, a consistently better-written and more thoughtful show than Doctor Who—stop booing me, I'm right, I'm not even going out to bat for Rick & Morty it's just that Doctor Who is usually rubbish—plotlines like this happen roughly once a season and will always, always stick... or if they don't, the fact that they don't will crush you somehow.) RTD's wondrous imagination fails to conjure a single idea of what Ruby does as a person in this time. She is depicted dating a series of interchangable men who are not the Doctor, being distracted by the apparition unceasingly signing at her from the corner of her eye. Finally, she catches a news report about a Welsh politician called "Mad Jack"—the name of the fae entity supposedly contained by the magic circle—which she takes as a sign that the plot is finally being allowed to begin.

She joins Mad Jack's campaign team and he immediately makes it clear that he is a slimeball who hates foreigners and really really wants to just fucking nuke everyone. Of course, Mad Jack isn't running for an actual real-world political party, he's running for some fake political party which has no realistic views whatsoever, even if yes I'm sure there's a lot of foreigners the Tories really would like to nuke if they thought they could get away with it. There's an incomprehensibly unconvincing news segment where Mad Jack delivers implausible rhetoric about phone apps and the cost of living, in 2046, which is so close to making some kind of meaningful satirical point that I'm going to scream. When Mad Jack speaks to Ruby for the first time, she practically sics him on this other woman in the campaign team. Again, the episode fails to commit to explicitly saying what it is that Mad Jack does to this woman, but it's probably that he rapes her. Later, the other woman vaguely tells Ruby that Mad Jack is definitely "a monster". Towards the end of this sequence, one of the male campaign members later suggests that Mad Jack is going to be hosting a "wild" party and that he's invited this specific woman by name, implying that he's planning on raping her again. Shortly after, that guy explains how Mad Jack is finally going to be getting the nuclear launch codes for real, and for some reason this is what makes Ruby go, oh fucking shit, it's go time babey! She gives a heartfelt apology to the other woman for not intervening against her presumably-rapist sooner. Then she walks out into the middle of the venue to stand exactly 73 yards away from Mad Jack, and finally he notices the old woman. The old woman strikes mortal terror into him and he resigns immediately, averting the bad future the Doctor recounted at the very start of the episode. Again, all of these characters basically disappear from the episode at this point.

I cannot stress enough how much I hate everything about the implied rape stuff here. After it happens, Ruby appears to be made aware of it, appears to already have a plan to send this guy to the shadow realm—and yet she does nothing! The narrative ultimately presented is that she chooses to overlook this for the greater good, to prevent a miscarriage of justice, because she has to be sure the guy is a horrible nuclear rapist. And the thing that really gets me, what really blows my mind, is that the way she plans on dealing with Mad Jack doesn't kill him, it doesn't send him to jail or anything, all it does is end his political career. Dude is fucking fine! She knows he'd be fine, because she's seen this before with dozens of other people by this point, with her own mum. And hell, she literally has foreknowledge that the guy will become the most dangerous Prime Minister ever. So why doesn't she just pull the trigger right away? Why couldn't she just have a modicum of female solidarity with this other complete non-character victim? Assuming I'm not completely insane, it's staggering to me how closely Ruby's behaviour mirrors the real-world narratives that get trotted out whenever some public figure is involved in a sexual assault scandal. It deeply depresses me that our protagonist, supposedly at forty, would make these choices.

Anyway, Ruby grows old, and finally they switch out her laughably-youthful forty-year-old makeup for an elderly actress. She revisits the TARDIS, which is now effectively a grave for this alien she went on four adventures with sixty years ago, and says some nondescript words. Then she's seen dying in a future care facility, and in what's maybe intended to be an ironic beat, a young nurse assumes that she doesn't know how voice-operated lights work. Ruby protests because obviously we had Alexa or whatever in 2024. The nurse leaves, and in what's definitely meant to be the big emotional climax of the episode, the old Ruby expresses feeling as if everyone in her life has always abandoned her, but that she nonetheless has constant company in the form of this inexplicable old lady ghost. In a genuinely spooky moment, the lights flicker on and off, and we see the old lady—now facing away from Ruby—slowly approaching her, like a Weeping Angel, until Ruby reaches out her hands...

...and finds herself back on that cliff in Wales. Except this time, she's looking at the TARDIS, at the Doctor and herself stepping out of it. She waves at herself, and we finally hear the old lady saying "don't step! don't fucking step you dumb ass!", and this time, young!Ruby notices the magic circle just in time to stop the Doctor from breaking it. Old!Ruby, her own ghost all along, disappears, her purpose apparently fulfilled at last, and it's implied young!Ruby has some vague awareness of her lifetime spent in this circle.

So hang on, if it was just Ruby all along, then what the fuck was she saying to all those people to strike mortal fear into their hearts? What the fuck did she say to that hiker? And why would she choose to say it? I legitimately don't give a shit what the answer is meant to be, I know there isn't an answer, what I'm saying is that if you're going to do a twist like this, then it needs to actually serve the narrative: it needs to recontextualise the events we've already seen. In this case, it's just not fucking good enough to say "ahah, it was Ruby all along!", because that's meaningless, there was nothing Ruby-like about the old woman's behaviour throughout the episode, and nothing to explain why her behaviour would've changed to be like this. In RTD's grand political morality play, what the fuck does it mean that Mad Jack's omnicidal campaign was undone by Ruby's old-lady future-self ghost saying something which we never get to hear? Maybe RTD means to suggest that it is impossible to stop these monsters in the real world, because of course, magic like this isn't real in the real world.

And seriously, why the hell did the Doctor disappear—the old lady didn't talk to him! Did she beam bad psychic thoughts at him or something so he'd flee in mortal terror despite being 73 yards away? The episode is uninterested in these questions, and certainly doesn't care to give us anything concrete about how the spell works. Look, I don't even care who Mad Jack is, obviously he's just another guy like the Toymaker or the Maestro or whoever the fuck is going to be the next one of these all-powerful impotent demons, but give me something. Everything that happens in this episode happens "just because", or through Ruby's passivity, rather than through character actions or self-consistent setting details.

I've seen it suggested that all of the inexplicable dialogue in this episode, from the point of the magic circle being broken, is actually just Ruby exerting her own beliefs on reality. Through this lens, the people in the pub go through such incomprehensibly wild behavioural shifts as a diegetic result of Ruby's own gut feelings about how they should be acting. Similarly, Ruby's mum and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart are only reacting the way Ruby feels they should, deep down. I find this argument unconvincing because it's never explicitly mentioned or alluded to in the episode itself, so if this were what was going on, it would immediately be an order of magnitude more subtle than any other bit of writing in RTD's entire series so far. There's been little to nothing in previous scenes with Ruby's family to suggest these kinds of feelings are even latently present; she seems quite secure with her adoptive mother, simply harboring natural curiosity regarding her biological mother. (My girlfriend, who watched this episode with me, and who I have promptly abandoned to write this incendiary review, suggested that a subtler approach with Ruby's mum could've been much more effective: perhaps her mum simply suggests that it's about time Ruby moved out, they can't really afford to keep looking after her, isn't she old enough, wouldn't it be good for her anyway?) Rather than it being some kind of deft narrative masterstroke, the simplest explanation for these scenes being uneven and unrealistic is that RTD is an uneven writer who has always written extremely wooden character interactions in this vein.

This episode invites comparisons to various fascist-Britain political pieces from RTD, such as his plotline with the Master/Harold Saxon. I generally don't think those episodes of RTD's were very good anyway, but this one is objectively worse. Ruby's plotline, meanwhile, is most closely reminiscent of "The Girl Who Waited", one of the better episodes from Moffat's tenure, written by Tom MacRae. In that episode, our companion at the time, Amy Pond, winds up stuck living out years of her life along in a facility. She plays directly off her younger self, and the episode revels in the dramatic irony that everyone involved—both Amys, Rory, the Doctor, and you, the viewer—know it's a foregone conclusion that the older Amy will be wiped away, sacrificed to the status quo. It's fucking fantastic stuff. It's visually arresting. It's emotionally harrowing. Yes, the makeup department struggled almost as much to make Amy look forty as it did with Ruby, but both effects are better than the CGI homunculus that the Doctor became in "The Sound of Drums", so who's to say if they're good or bad.

This episode depressed me thoroughly. I thought the implied rape was a flippant inclusion, and if RTD wasn't willing to do it justice, it shouldn't have been in the episode at all. I thought the stuff in the pub painted an unrealistic and uncharitable picture of what people on this island are like to one another. But these feelings aren't why I think this was an objectively bad episode. I just cannot conceive of a lens where this episode isn't objectively bad, because I believe I fully grasp the themes it was attempting to convey—xenophobia, superstition, abandonment—and reckon there are many aspects of the plot that fail to communicate those themes in a self-consistent way. The nonsensical object-level plot and the intended allegorical throughline are in constant conflict with one another, rather than supporting one another.

Worst of all, I think RTD has continued a running trend of failing to achieve even his most basic mission statement with this new series. He's been determined for Doctor Who to veer more towards fantasy, more towards escapism, more towards feelings of unrestrained joy and wonder. Yet practically everything decays towards deconstruction, if not the exact opposite of presumably the intended message. Nonbinary furby Beep the Meep is actually an omnicidal little monster. The episode about the joys of music is practically devoid of it. There's an episode entirely about the horrors of war and capitalism where like half the cast just die. Rape is something that it's best we don't talk about, at least not in anything more than veiled terms, because that might be inconvenient for people who are more important than you. Isn't this fantastic? Aren't you escaping? Look, "Space Babies" is by no means a perfect episode, but it has come closest to fulfilling the mission brief. At least it made me smile. "73 Yards" is no fun, and no good.

If you enjoyed this review, you can find more of my writing over on Letterboxd. If you didn't, then... sorry?