Russell T Davies has certainly been digging deep into Doctor Who lore for his return to the beloved megafranchise.
We’ve had the Toymaker, who ushered out the era of David Tennant and in the one of Ncuti Gatwa. We’ve had returning companion Mel (played by Bonnie Langford). We’ve had UNIT and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave).
And now in the first part of the season’s two-part finale, there’s return of Sutekh, a name that will probably strike fear into the hearts of the over-50s and incomprehension into anyone younger (I had to Google who he was. Am I a bad fan?).
The big scary god of death and destruction hasn’t been seen on screens since 1975… until now, in this episode that sets up plenty of questions but delivers little in the way of answers.
We begin with a return to Earth: the Doctor is determined to finally uncover who the mysterious woman is that he’s been seeing across time and space. Turns out, she’s called Susan Triad (played by Susan Twist), and she’s a medical technology pioneer about to launch a brand-new product to the masses via TV broadcast.
Oh, but wait. Susan? Could it be… Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter? Davies has assiduously been dropping in hints about the Time Lord’s first travelling companion since episode two, and I’ll be honest, my heart skipped a beat when it was seemingly confirmed.
Not content with that bombshell, the episode then pivoted to address the issue of Ruby’s birth, which has been cropping up throughout the season two as well.
Due to some timey-wimey shenanigans, the Doctor couldn’t just whisk us all there in the Tardis (apparently, he’s “time-locked” himself out; where’s a time locksmith when you need one) – so instead UNIT were forced to use a ‘Time Window’ to stage an elaborate reconstruction of the moment Ruby was abandoned instead.
This went horribly wrong, because of course it did, paving the way for Sutekh to make his big entrance. And while I’m all for dramatic tension, it did give us a lot to be getting on with as an audience – and to be honest, certain plot beats were swept away as they were in the frenzy of activity.
At the heart of it all is Gatwa, of course, and it’s a joy to see him alongside not just Langford but newer faces like Yasmin Finney’s Rose Noble (who makes an appearance and coyly explains that her mum “works for UNIT”) and Lenny Rush, who pops up as a whizzkid with an annoying habit of explaining how screwed they are in percentages – “the probability of it being a trap is 95 per cent”. Okay!
Clearly, this is a project that has been years in the making, if not decades. Davies said in a Q&A prior to the series release that the finale was something he and Steven Moffat had been chewing over during their original run on Who – but lacked the budget to bring to life.
We certainly saw plenty of that budget here. The spooky Time Window, which rendered everything in shadowy shades of blue; the people turning to sand; the multiple avatars of Sutekh, one of which manifested as a massive Egyptian style dog-headed god, curled around the Tardis.
This being a two parter, there will no doubt be plenty of twists and turns (as well as pyrotechnics) to come. The answers are coming: strap in.
