Doctor Who - 73 Yards

73 The Yard Way

Doctor Who - 73 Yards
Airdate: 25th May 2024
BBC 1

Warning: All the spoilers here.

So, Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson are back as The Doctor and Ruby Sunday in this fourth episode of the new series of Doctor Who entitled 73 Yards and, despite unpopular fan theory, this episode did not turn out to be connected to Ethel’s Sandwich Quiz on an old episode of No. 73. Instead, what we have is a bit of a dilemma for this reviewer because it’s easily one of the best (if not the best) of the current season but, when the final denouement is played out, it turns out that the main feature of the isolating element of Ruby Sunday’s character trajectory in this one makes... it has to be said... absolutely no sense whatsoever. I mean, what a load of codswallop!

But it did continue the tradition of a relatively ‘Doctor free’ episode being one of the strongest they’ve done. In fact, my two all time favourite episodes of the ‘new Who’ era, Blink and Love And Monsters, were very Doctor-lite, it has to be said.

So, basic set up and pretty much the whole of the story is (I said this was full on spoilers, right?)... The Doctor and Ruby land on a cliff in Wales and The Doctor accidentally breaks a man-made (or something-made) witchcraft style circle. With the least biggest surprise in the episode made completely predictable because of the odd way the camera holds the focus and movement on Ruby in close up for a longer than average length of time, she looks around and The Doctor has just disappeared. The TARDIS is locked and for the next 60 plus years, it doesn’t move. A strange woman who is making signs and is always standing exactly 73 Yards away from Ruby wherever she is... frightens anyone else away from Ruby with whatever she says to them. This includes her own foster mother, who locks her out and never speaks to her again and, even Kate Lethbridge-Stuart and UNIT, who goes to help Ruby, abandon her as soon as they hear what the woman says.

Then, because of something she heard The Doctor say about a prime minister bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war in 2046 (yeah, thanks for dating the show for future viewers, guys!), she manages to fix things so the woman who is always there talks to the guy before he starts a nuclear war and terrifies him away from his position of power. Another 40 years later and she dies in hospital, realises the woman is herself at her old age and then she goes back to where it all started in her past somehow, to warn her younger self, successfully this time, to not let The Doctor break the circle. The end.

And it’s great... the sense of suspense coupled with a relatively new companion both abandoned and with no way of helping herself pushes lots of the right buttons. It’s entertaining, starts off with a relatively early, extended Susan Twist sighting (oh yeah, that twist is coming at some point alright) and even has Anita Dobson’s Mrs. Flood from the Christmas special make an appearance too.

But it’s also very infuriating because, as the thing the woman, aka future Ruby, is saying is that The Doctor shouldn’t step on the circle... why the hell was everybody in the episode running away in fear? It made absolutely no sense whatsoever. Now... I’d like to hope that Russell T Davies has some kind of trick up his sleeve and that he’s going to revisit this story in some way before the series is done... to somehow make sense of that but, I dunno... I don’t trust that to happen. Rendering the whole story actually quite ineffective and, I dunno, a bit of a damp squib. It’s the kind of great build up and then complete anticlimax I would have expected from Steven Moffat as a show runner, to be honest and, yeah, I’m still not feeling that confident about this iteration of the series now, once again.

Still, with 73 Yards, getting there seems to be half the fun and, yeah, it’s entertaining and intriguing enough, for sure. I just wish it had actually gone somewhere, though, rather than just give us mind candy with no real substance, as seems to be the case here.