Wow. Just: wow.
A Doctor Who episode that will win over even people who hate Doctor Who. 73 Yards is a stone-cold classic piece of British TV sci-fi that will be discussed long after this Saturday night.
A kind of mash-up of The Wicker Man, The Dead Zone, The Ring, and It Follows, 73 Yards is genuinely disturbing in the way psychological horror can only be, touching upon primal fears of abandonment and death as it wraps you up in a looping fugue storyline that will leave viewers stunned.
This series needed it. The tone so far has been overly giddy and the new Doctor a little too trite. Not Ncuti Gatwa, but the character of his Doctor, who is more vulnerable, scared and fun-focused than we are used to, for all his obvious charm. But of course, this may all be part of Russell T Davies master plan for the development of him and his increasingly mysterious companion, Ruby Sunday.
And in fact, this episode pulls the old trick – as seen in David Tennant’s debut, The Christmas Invasion – of depriving us of the Doctor for most of the running time, thereby making us miss him as desperately as the bereft companion. For 73 Yards is one of those exciting stand-alone episodes that break with the usual weekly format and heads off on its own path, as with that modern classic Blink, with its weeping angels.
But 73 Yards may actually surpass Blink’s high-water mark, due its formal excellence, wrapping itself up in a perfect one-off masterpiece.
It begins as a folk horror, with Ruby and The Doctor landing on a remote Welsh clifftop. The pair chat about Wales, and the Doc references a dangerous Welsh politician who became PM, Roger Ap Gwilliam, before correcting himself in looking at Ruby and realising that that wasn’t happening until 2046. Then he steps on a weird kids’ folk fairy trap thing on the ground. And disappears.
Ruby looks around for him, but all she can see is a mysterious old woman in the distance – 73 yards away in the distance, as it turns out – gesturing unsettlingly but never coming closer. The woman maintains the precise distance even as Ruby heads to a nearby pub for a bit of local hostility in true Wicker Man, American Werewolf, style.
They are alarmed to hear that Ruby and her missing friend disturbed a fairy gate and may have unleashed the spirit of local devil-man, Mad Jack. Except the locals are taking the piss. Kind of. When Ruby shows them the woman haunting her, one of the man goes out to speak to her – but Ruby watches in alarm, when, having done so, he looks back at Ruby and runs away in terror.
However, expectations of us ending up in Midsommer territory are subverted, as Ruby makes the intelligent decision, with the Doctor still gone and the TARDIS locked, to simply catch the train back to London to get away from this mad woman. Except, in another in a succession of chilling sequences, when she looks out the window of the speeding train, she sees the woman in every field and every street, always maintaining the distance between them.
Ruby goes to see her mum, who of course says she’ll go to confront the old woman, while keeping Ruby on the phone so she can hear what transpires.
But, in one of the most heartbreaking moments seen on the show, Ruby’s mum too, speaks to the woman and runs away. Ruby chases after her but her mum is already in a cab, blanking her. Later, we see Ruby locked out of her mum’s flat, having her calls unreturned, except once, and only for her mum to say to her adopted child, “You’re not my daughter. Even your own mother didn’t want you.”
Now this is heavy stuff to watch being played out. The child’s fear of abandonment played out in haunting fashion. And it’s not restricted to her own family, anyone who looks like they might help Ruby get rid of the woman, soon turns and runs away from her.
Startlingly, the episode accelerates and the years pass. Ruby turns 25, 30, 35, and the woman still remains and Ruby is alone, except for a succession of male dates moaning that she is too distracted all the time.
But then, in a bar, Ruby notices a politician on the TV, one Roger Ap Gwilliam, the nationalistic leader of the Albion party who is gunning for a general election triumph, despite an apparent fixation on nuclear weapons. His nickname? Mad Jack.
Ruby thinks she may have figured out what this whole mystery is about. And in Travis Bickle-style, heads to the MP’s campaign HQ to get close to him.
Without going into the full blow-by-blow account of the episode, what follows combines The Dead Zone’s assassination plot to avert Armageddon, before heading off into revealing the mystery of who exactly the old woman is.
Safe to say, that this is a series which is now fully embracing multi-verses, and the need for characters to sacrifice their lives to halt disaster along certain timelines, as well as the supernatural, with eerie goings-on that seem to be centred around Ruby.
And this is Millie Gibson’s episode, with her Ruby truly coming-of-age as a character with huge meaning for the show. She is not some gauche wide-eyed companion, there is more to her. A lot more.
It is a bravura performance from Gibson, deeply moving and noble, and puts to bed any speculation that her departure from the show after this series is to do with her abilities – rather, it is Ruby’s fate that is at work here.
For while the episodes solves its own mysteries – and really does benefit from repeated viewing to pick up on every detail and clue – it does leave many questions unanswered. Where exactly did the Doctor go? What’s so special about Ruby? And why are some people so afraid of her?
In this manner, 73 Yards is not simply an isolated masterpiece, but an accelerant for the rest of the series. When the Doctor finally returns to join her, we are damn glad to see him, but mostly because it means Ruby is no longer alone. For, despite the furore around the new Doctor, this is very much her story.
