The Cutprice Guignol

The more I think about this episode, the more I really, really hate it. And that’s because of how much, at first, I really, really loved it.

The follow-up to the respectably-decent Boom last week, 73 Yards looked to be exactly the kind of Doctor Who episode that I gobble up with a spoon: a spooky, eerie slice of British folk horror, a character-driven ghost story that took Doctor Who’s generous background in genre fiction and put it to good use. And, for the first twenty minutes or so, that’s exactly what we got.

And, God, it was brilliant. Ruby is left to navigate a small town on the Welsh coast alone after the Doctor accidentally breaks a fairy circle and vanishes, leaving Ruby stalked at a distance by a mysterious woman in black who sends people who talk to her fleeing for their lives. I can’t even tell you how much I loved this aspect of the story – Doctor Who, as I’ve discussed before, was my introduction to horror, and I have such love in my heart for when the show takes us down the eerier, more unsettling routes this universe has to offer. Visually, it’s simple and striking, that lone figure following Ruby, a stripped-back but instantly-memorable image that harkens back to MR James and O Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad (PS: read that story, if you haven’t already!), or last year’s brilliant Cornish horror Enys Men.

It’s a strong episode for a mostly-solo Millie Gibson, who finally gets to flesh Ruby out with a little more character beyond being, you know, just passed out for the final third of the episode as she was last week. As Ruby goes back to her life before the Doctor and contends with the mysterious woman’s words driving away the people closest to her, including her own mother, I was totally absorbed – the idea of this creature following you, leaving you in constant terror that the people you love will abandon you for reasons you don’t and can’t fully understand was discomfortingly familiar to me, as I’m sure it was to many people who deal with mental illness.

Kate Lethbridge-Stewart is brought in as a ringer here in a really smart way, as even she and her UNIT crew can’t resist the woman’s influence – it drives home just how powerful and all-consuming this thing is, and it’s always fun to see Kate turn up in a new Doctor’s era. Aside from a truly comical lack of effort in the age make-up department to make Millie Gibson look like anything other than a teenager in a bad wig and a pair of Maggie Costello glasses, it was working for me.

And then the episode takes…a turn. Ruby, after an offhand comment from the Doctor, realizes that she’s witnessing the rise of a British politician, ap Gwilliam, who’ll bring the UK to the brink of nuclear war, and takes it upon herself – with the help of the mysterious figure – to stop him. Long story short, after his rise to power on the back of the Albion party and British nationalism, Ruby uses the figure stalking her to spook him into fleeing his newfound position as prime minister, thus saving the country. Well done, I guess.

But the way this section is handled is such a mess to me, not to mention such a jarring left turn from the first chunk of the story as to leave me, tonally, struggling to catch up. Ap Gwilliam is an utterly unconvincing character to me as this imposing figure of dread that he’s meant to represent – the writing isn’t sharp enough nor is the performance impressive enough to really make him land the way he needs to.

And I get the feeling that Russel T Davies knew this, because he throws in an abuse subplot that I truly think might be one of the worst things I’ve ever seen in the show’s run. Ruby, who takes a job working for Gwilliam to keep on top of his rise to power, realizes that another woman on his campaign, Marty, is involved in an abusive relationship with him. The nature of that abuse isn’t exactly clear, but Ruby is aware of it, and does nothing to intervene or offer help to the victim until she figures out how to use the figure to her advantage. At which point she offers Marty a brief apology for letting it go on so long, and then bolts off.

You will never catch me saying that Doctor Who can’t take on adult or mature topics – hell, domestic abuse has even been a feature in the show before, with episodes like Fear Her and The Idiot Lantern. But if you’re going to do it – and if you’re going to do it in this era of the show, which seems to pride itself on progressive explorations of difficult topics – you better not throw it in as a sidenote for an already-villainous character, show virtually nothing of the impact it has on the victim beyond her cheering cheesily when he runs off into the ether, and reveal that the assistant (ie, audience surrogate) has known about it all along and not been shown to do anything about it. It’s such a cheap, nasty, ugly bum note for the episode.

It’s as though Russel T Davies didn’t have the time or energy to flesh out Gwilliams as a full villain so just went to the most undeniably villainous thing he could think of to tag on to his character without meaningfully exploring the victim’s perspective or discussing how people in positions of power can use them to get away with abuse. It’s, truly, insulting, and I’m surprised to see Davies include something so tone-deaf and cheap. The episode loses nothing without this plot included, and, for something as serious and painful and real as domestic abuse, it shouldn’t feel like such a footnote.

After Ruby gets all that done, she continues to age and dies, with the big reveal at the end being that she was the figure all along. And, uh, oh, just like that, we’ve reset! That’s handy. What was the figure saying to those people to make them abandon Ruby completely? Why did an older version of Ruby start stalking her from 73 yards away? What does the fairy circle the Doctor stepped on have to do with it? Well, good news – you get to fill in all those answers yourself, because this episode ends on a deliberately ambiguous note.

And there’s nothing wrong with not answering every question that your script lays out. In fact, I think some of the most profound and impactful genre fiction leaves some questions unanswered. But to pull off this trick, you really need to have a total command of every other aspect of the story you’re telling – leaving questions unanswered should feel like an active choice made by the storyteller, rather than an excuse. And an excuse is what it reads as here. There are so many threads left dangling that it’s hard to believe Davies seriously chose, as a writer, to just keep them hanging rather than at least offer a few more hints in the way of a satisfying conclusion. I don’t believe he had total command of this story, and this ending only further convinces me.

73 Yards might be the death knell for this season for me – a horror episode is already stacked in my favour, and I could barely get through the second half of this dragging, insultingly clumsy, tonally messy disaster. After the exceptionally wobbly start to this season, consider my confidence in the new version of the show officially shot.

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(header image via Radio Times)