The Cutprice Guignol

If you don’t think about this episode at all, it’s actually a really great finale! If you do think about it…well, not so much.

Empire of Death, the follow-up to last week’s The Legend of Ruby Sunday, is a huge, gurgling, grunting, unwieldy beast of an episode, and I mean that in…mostly a bad way, I think. But, after the way this season has gone, it’s not really that much of a surprise that this finale has left me pretty cold. I truly think this season might be my least favourite of the entirety of the show’s reboot – it never truly recovered from the baffling awfulness of Space Babies, and I have found myself trudging towards BBC iPlayer every week with the feeling of a woman headed to the – well, maybe not the gallows, but a few toe-stubbings. The writing hasn’t been there, the characterization hasn’t been strong enough, and most of all, Russel T Davies has felt like the biggest problem, with the only really good episodes coming from other writers. It’s just not, in a practical, nuts-and-bolts sense, good TV, and I hate to say that about this show, because I love it. Well, loved it.

But we’re not quite done with this season yet – we still have to contend with Empire of Death, which follows Sutekh, god of death and weird ugly CGI dog thing, as he reveals that he’s been hanging on the back of the TARDIS since his first encounter with Tom Baker’s Doctor, and thusly, can destroy everything in the whole universe. Now, this right here is where we start with the “good, as long as you don’t think about it” thing, because this means that Sutekh has been lurking about in the background of Doctor Who stories for literal centuries in-show without it ever coming up. It’s a cool idea, this god of death serving as the Doctor’s longest companion without him even knowing it, a metaphor for the loss that plagues them, but also…eh? This never came up before? Nobody ever noticed? Not even the TARDIS, when she became a human woman, thought she would mention it?

In a similar vein, Sutekh has been creating versions of Susan Triad wherever the Doctor lands, using the TARDIS perception filter to cast a version of her into the world – but the Doctor only noticed this the lifetime equivalent of twenty minutes ago? Did Susan run into the various versions of Clara (who was, in a chilling moment, referenced by Mrs Flood this episode – an open threat if I ever heard one) as she was scattered through time and space? Give it no thought and it’s a cool idea, but the moment you start to pull at the thread, it all unravels.

Sutekh leaves the Doctor, Ruby, and Mel (who genuinely has a great episode this week – I loved the moment Bonnie Langford discovered her Doctor’s outfit, the mixture of grief and gratitude as she held his sleeve again) alive because he doesn’t know who Ruby’s mother is, and thus, can’t wipe everyone off the face of the universe. The best moment of the episode comes for me in this section, as the Doctor visits a woman who has been left alive after the not Thanos snap, no, it has nothing to do with that and the CGI effects of people turning to dust were not reused, thank you for asking, played by Sian Collins. Left without reference point for where she came from or who she was before, Collins, brings something really strong to this small, vital role, and what she shares with Gatwa feels richer and more fleshed-out than the whole of his relationship with Ruby Sunday this season (a problem in and of itself, but we’ll get there).

Anyway, these leads them to try to dig up Ruby’s mother’s name, which they do by…using the DNA database created by the prime minister Ruby worked for in 73 Yards? Okay, sure, whatever. I hated that episode, why not bring it up again? But, upon denying Sutekh the knowledge of her mother’s name, the Doctor manages to hook Sutekh up to the back of the TARDIS, pull him through the time vortex again, and that undoes all the death that he’s brought on to the universe. While shouting a shit monologue and dressed as a PE teacher. For some reason.

It’s not Ncuti Gatwa’s fault that the writing has been such a let-down this season, but God, this climactic moment – as the Doctor declares that he must become a monster – was so utterly, painfully cringe to me that I almost didn’t notice how weak and hand-wavey the solution to Sutekh’s plan actually was. I get it, it’s a finale, go big or go home, but that hugeness has to have something to build off of – it can’t just be the Doctor bellowing platitudes into the time vortex while a creature marginally less frightening than my cat towering over me in the morning before she’s been fed happens to be. This season has been such a mess in terms of tone and consistency that it strips this moment of all the weight it should have had, and that’s a real damn shame.

But, of course, that’s not the only climax we get this episode – no, we finally find out who Ruby’s mother is. And, it turns out, she’s just some girl – a young teenager who gave up her daughter to get her out of an abusive situation at home, who’s gone on to train as a nurse and live an otherwise very normal life.

And I know this is going to be a really shit reveal for a lot of people, but for me, on the surface, it actually works. I love when this show acknowledges the power and importance of seemingly-ordinary people (something one of my all-time favourite episodes, Father’s Day, does beautifully), and I preferred this ending to the story to anything more dramatic or tied back to previous characters in the show’s run. Ruby’s mother was imbued power by the very nature of Ruby’s fascination with her, an interesting kind of meta-narrative (my God, I cannot stop banging on about them this week) about the fandom’s interest and speculation about this character too. Ruby tracks her down and meets her, and, while it’s a bit cheesy, it’s generally pretty nicely-handled, if a little too perfect for my liking.

But then, as soon as I started thinking about it, it began to unpeel pretty easily. Why does Ruby have all these strange powers, such as being able to make it snow? Did that just happen because she was really, really curious about who her mother was? Why could Sutekh not figure out who her mother was, if she was Just Some Person? What was a fifteen-year-old doing sweeping about London in a great big cloak? Who was she hoping would see her when she pointed to the road sign in an apparent attempt to name Ruby? Eh? Eh?

Ruby and the Doctor part ways at the end of the episode, which leaves me curious for the next season – I was under the impression that Ruby would return alongside the new assistant, but I assume we’ll get more of that in the Christmas special. Their parting moment should hit hard, but, after how much of their relationship has been tell, not show, it feels more like they’re hitting their marks than bringing to life a profound new beginning for their Doctor-companion dynamic. Mrs Flood remains unexplained (though consistently turning up in ex-assistants outfits, which is fun), a slightly frustrating carrot-dangle to keep us coming back for more. Kate, apparently, isn’t a lesbian, which I had, through the sheer force of my crush on Jemma Redgrave, managed to convince myself of. Episode ends. And scene on this season.

This is the finale I think season this season deserved: hitting the mark with some stuff, but fumbling the mechanics in such a way as to render it ineffectual in the long run. I’m really curious to hear what you thought of this episode in the comments, and of this season as a whole – thank you for joining me on this trudge through time and space once more! If you’d like to keep up with my other recapping projects, you can check out my deep-dive into Christine, or my reviews of the recently-finished Inside No. 9.

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(header image via The Doctor Who Site)