Good episode, maybe a little obvious where it was going. Way too much unexplained.
Tap for spoiler
That moment when Kate turned her back on her, it hit so hard…
Your spoiler didn’t work just FYI, but yes, my heart sunk.
Oh, crap. It works for me on the Voyager app though.
It works fine in Lemmy ui too. Just kbin doesn’t support Lemmy spoilers.
Anyone able to logic this one up a bit?
I’m thinking at the moment Ruby does this a lot but never realises because she resets her time line each time.
She is able to live out a timeline change the outcome then slingshot back to the moment it started.
Which would make her the person that dropped herself off at the church
The doctor not being there and the tardis rejecting her would be because she is a walking paradox generator
Oh I love that idea!
It fits as well because in Boom the doctor told Ruby about the church and he said the memory changed
Liked this ep a lot, my favourite of this run so far including the specials.
Apparently it ties into Ruby’s past and the season finale which will be interesting to see but honestly just enjoyed it as a standalone creepy mystery story.
This was AMAZING, absolutely loved it. I normally don’t like leaving things unexplained, but it worked for me here.
RTD is such a weird writer, he talks a bunch about how dr who is such a whimsical show and writes these fun campy episodes, but then occasionally just writes some of the most existentially horrifying episodes of television, and in the bts for it he’s just like “oh I love wales, i’m so glad to film an episode set in wales!”
I honestly did not peg the reveal on this one, only because it felt too obvious at the top of the episode, and made less sense as the story went on. Why was the old woman causing people to abandon Ruby? There was no hint I could figure as to why that might be happening. The ending felt almost like an “it was all a dream” twist, and didn’t feel satisfying.
I will think about this episode a lot, it had a lot of interesting ideas, and I always love a doctor-lite episode, but it did not stick the landing.
Why was the old woman causing people to abandon Ruby? There was no hint I could figure as to why that might be happening.
On the BTS ep Russell said that he didn’t want to reveal it because the audience thinking “What could someone say to make a mother reject her daughter” is so much creepier than any reveal could be. It’s got me thinking.
But by the conclusion we know who the woman is. We never learnt anything that she might know that would make people hate Ruby.
The more I think about it, the more annoyed I am. The very specific 73 yards. The ability to teleport. The repeated gestures. The inability to see her face. Her power of suggestion. Even the clothes she was wearing. It was all set up to create a creepy and mysterious stalker. But in the end none of it was paid off.
The way I see it, it doesn’t matter what she said, it was only happening to make her creepy. If Ruby’s guess near the end is right, the whole point of her being there, haunting her, making people run away, was to make specifically this one man run away in terror, and there’s no way whatever that was had anything to do with anyone else abandoning Ruby. She simply says something so terrifying that people run away, that’s it, it doesn’t matter what exactly, and it doesn’t even have to be the same thing for everyone. Same with the teleport: she did it the same way she time travelled back into her past. How? We don’t know either, and it doesn’t matter, it’s just here to make her creepy.
The Doctor told her about this terrible Welsh minister, and she made it her life’s mission to get rid of him, and then went back to her young self. Why did the Doctor vanish? Why 73 yards? Why did her mom and Kate turn on her? We don’t know, it’s magic. Or it’ll be revealed later, maybe, or maybe it won’t. The creepiness, the distance, is to make her afraid, to make others afraid, and to make her realize she has an easy way to make the guy run away. It doesn’t make sense, it just has to work for her to think “I can weaponize that” and connect the dots. I’m fine with the details not making sense personally, it’s not that kind of episode, I thought it was well executed.
Only thing I would have hoped to see at the end is the Doctor again realizing that his memory changed between telling Ruby about Robert and then Robert disappearing from History in the future. Just to tie with the previous one.
If Ruby’s guess near the end is right, the whole point of her being there, haunting her, making people run away, was to make specifically this one man run away in terror, and there’s no way whatever that was had anything to do with anyone else abandoning Ruby. She simply says something so terrifying that people run away, that’s it, it doesn’t matter what exactly, and it doesn’t even have to be the same thing for everyone.
Which makes me think that perhaps it’s like psychic paper: she could say anything (or even nothing), and the experience would be the most horrifying, disgusting, or terrifying thing to the listener, enough to drive them away from Ruby forever.
Yeah, and if it was Ruby the whole time, how did she maintain the 73 yard thing? Especially on the train?
I saw a comment about how it was a character piece, not a plot piece and i think that nailed why i find it so dissatisfying- Ruby really doesn’t inveigle me as a character.
Well that and Turn Left did it so much better
Weirdly, I like episodes where the doctor is absent, it gives the other characters opportunities to build relationships and lets us know them better.
Some of the best episodes are like that, Blink for example.
Turn left is probably my favourite, it turned me on Donna completely, but yes, Blink is a strong one too.
Sorry what the fuck was this episode? Why did the Doctor disappear and the tardis lock? What was the resolution? Why 73 yards? What was she telling them? How did she go back? Why did the Doctor know not to read the notes in the second timeline but not the first?
The moments of tension were really good, and as a short story even independant of Doctor Who it was very compelling, but the end was so fast and made no sense to me.
The Doctor didn’t read the notes the first time, she did.
Yes. She didn’t read it because he stopped her, why did that change?
She read them while the Doctor was busy trying to fix the circle.
Second try : he doesn’t step on it and can prevent her from reading the notes as he knows what he’s looking at
