Doctor Who ?.04
May. 26th, 2024 10:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakIt’s horror time as Our Once and Future Welsh Overlord returns to Wales. Also, seems we’re back to the “one Companion and one Doctor lite episode each per season” format, with the focus on the respective other, to give the leads a break during shooting. This is the Companion heavy episode.
Moffat and Chibnall did their bit for Scotland and the English North in Dw respectively, but I figured the return of RTD would also the return to Cymru, and indeed it did. Not counting Torchwood, this was also the most overt horror episode he’s written in the Whoverse since Midnight, with the pub sequence being a tour de force whiplash of mood as the pub guests first take the mickey out of Ruby whom they see as a gullible English tourist by trying to creep her out, and then it inevitably becomes real. Since the great Sian Phillips has such an umistakable voice, I recognized her at once and hooted in delight at the thought that RTD managed to get her for a guest appearance, short as it was. (BTW, it’s also interesting to see her at this age and compare it with the old age make-up I, Claudius has given her as Livia. Her faces - as old Livia and now - don’t look quite the same, but more like sisters.) Recalling that Gareth “Blake” Thomas guest starred in very early Torchwood, I’m all for RTD giving legendary Welsh actors jobs on his show(s) again.
Anyway: Ruby being literally haunted by a figure she herself can’t appraoch but who manages to scare off anyone she asks for help and thus seemingly ruins her life is classic horror (see also: Poe, Edgar Allen, and Hoffmann, E.T.A.), deciptively simple and yet frightfully efficient, hitting on all her abandonment issues. I think the hardest hit isn’t her mother but Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, because Kate comes across as so much her confident and competent self that you hope along with Ruby that all her experience will have immunized her to the scaring off effect. (This was also when it dawned on me that the mysterious woman had to be a future/alternate self of Ruby’s, because short of Kate being told “this has to happen in order to save the world” by her, I couldn’t think of anything that made sense in-universe. (Also, it’s classic Romantic doppelganger horror.) So that part didn’t surprise me, but what did was when Ruby realized her purpose and it turned out the Doctor’s name dropping of the future Welsh PM who’d bring Britain to the brink of nuclear desaster by war was really plot important.
(BTW: This is RTD’s third evil PM, with the first being the Master as Harold Saxon, and the second Emma Thompson’s character in Years and Years. It says something about real life politics through the decades that Harold Saxon is still a slick Tony Blair type of PM in the way he markets himself, while Viv (Emma Thompson) is a Marine Le Pen/Boris Johnson/Donald Trump type of ultra right wing populist coasting on demagogic sound bites and jokes, and Roger ap Gwilliam is this and a groping boss evoking the Me Too era. That we don’t see the groping but just deduce along with Ruby what happened by the stricken demeanour of the victim in question is a very effective shorthand.)
Ruby’s idea of how to turn the blight on her life into the an efficient weapon to save Britain and the world from armageddon and the way she executed her plan was terrific. (I especially admire such details as her needing to be sure instead of relying on the Doctor’s casual classification of Roger ap Gwilliam as dangerous - so she’s not taking something major like that on blind faith, which says something about her -, and the fact she placed herself in the “Albion” campaign just enough without standing out and being remarked before she could execute her plan.
My one problem with the episode, which prevents it from being as rounded as Midnight is, is that the solution leaves open a great many question and only works if you assume it’s part of the long term seasonal arc about Ruby. I mean, given all the hints about Ruby being some type of powerful being by origin whose powers aren’t accessible to her except in the greatest distress and then only partly, I am willing to believe that this is how she when dying of old age was able to project herself by back to appear and haunt her younger self, twice, and the second time altering the timeline. But that leaves still open what happened to the Doctor the first time around (did he also hear from Older!Ruby that he needed to disappear in order for events to play out, but if so, why did the TARDIS stay?), and what will happen with Roger ap Gwilliam in this new timeline (i.e. who will stop him then). Now I do expect we’ll find out in the last episode(s) of the season, much as we did about Saxon, but it makes this episode less of a standalone than Midnight was, and I do regret that.
All in all: very good example of RTD bringing out the chills instead of the whimsy, and excellent showcase for Ruby.
Moffat and Chibnall did their bit for Scotland and the English North in Dw respectively, but I figured the return of RTD would also the return to Cymru, and indeed it did. Not counting Torchwood, this was also the most overt horror episode he’s written in the Whoverse since Midnight, with the pub sequence being a tour de force whiplash of mood as the pub guests first take the mickey out of Ruby whom they see as a gullible English tourist by trying to creep her out, and then it inevitably becomes real. Since the great Sian Phillips has such an umistakable voice, I recognized her at once and hooted in delight at the thought that RTD managed to get her for a guest appearance, short as it was. (BTW, it’s also interesting to see her at this age and compare it with the old age make-up I, Claudius has given her as Livia. Her faces - as old Livia and now - don’t look quite the same, but more like sisters.) Recalling that Gareth “Blake” Thomas guest starred in very early Torchwood, I’m all for RTD giving legendary Welsh actors jobs on his show(s) again.
Anyway: Ruby being literally haunted by a figure she herself can’t appraoch but who manages to scare off anyone she asks for help and thus seemingly ruins her life is classic horror (see also: Poe, Edgar Allen, and Hoffmann, E.T.A.), deciptively simple and yet frightfully efficient, hitting on all her abandonment issues. I think the hardest hit isn’t her mother but Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, because Kate comes across as so much her confident and competent self that you hope along with Ruby that all her experience will have immunized her to the scaring off effect. (This was also when it dawned on me that the mysterious woman had to be a future/alternate self of Ruby’s, because short of Kate being told “this has to happen in order to save the world” by her, I couldn’t think of anything that made sense in-universe. (Also, it’s classic Romantic doppelganger horror.) So that part didn’t surprise me, but what did was when Ruby realized her purpose and it turned out the Doctor’s name dropping of the future Welsh PM who’d bring Britain to the brink of nuclear desaster by war was really plot important.
(BTW: This is RTD’s third evil PM, with the first being the Master as Harold Saxon, and the second Emma Thompson’s character in Years and Years. It says something about real life politics through the decades that Harold Saxon is still a slick Tony Blair type of PM in the way he markets himself, while Viv (Emma Thompson) is a Marine Le Pen/Boris Johnson/Donald Trump type of ultra right wing populist coasting on demagogic sound bites and jokes, and Roger ap Gwilliam is this and a groping boss evoking the Me Too era. That we don’t see the groping but just deduce along with Ruby what happened by the stricken demeanour of the victim in question is a very effective shorthand.)
Ruby’s idea of how to turn the blight on her life into the an efficient weapon to save Britain and the world from armageddon and the way she executed her plan was terrific. (I especially admire such details as her needing to be sure instead of relying on the Doctor’s casual classification of Roger ap Gwilliam as dangerous - so she’s not taking something major like that on blind faith, which says something about her -, and the fact she placed herself in the “Albion” campaign just enough without standing out and being remarked before she could execute her plan.
My one problem with the episode, which prevents it from being as rounded as Midnight is, is that the solution leaves open a great many question and only works if you assume it’s part of the long term seasonal arc about Ruby. I mean, given all the hints about Ruby being some type of powerful being by origin whose powers aren’t accessible to her except in the greatest distress and then only partly, I am willing to believe that this is how she when dying of old age was able to project herself by back to appear and haunt her younger self, twice, and the second time altering the timeline. But that leaves still open what happened to the Doctor the first time around (did he also hear from Older!Ruby that he needed to disappear in order for events to play out, but if so, why did the TARDIS stay?), and what will happen with Roger ap Gwilliam in this new timeline (i.e. who will stop him then). Now I do expect we’ll find out in the last episode(s) of the season, much as we did about Saxon, but it makes this episode less of a standalone than Midnight was, and I do regret that.
All in all: very good example of RTD bringing out the chills instead of the whimsy, and excellent showcase for Ruby.
no subject
Date: 2024-05-26 11:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-26 02:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-26 03:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-26 10:00 pm (UTC)I also adored the episode for all the reasons stated above. I love RT Davies horror episodes. (I'm caught up now on Who and rather loving this season, having skipped over the last two...which didn't work for me, writing wise. If the writing isn't working for me there's little the actors can do to save it, unfortunately.)
no subject
Date: 2024-05-27 01:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-27 02:14 pm (UTC)But I think the character may be the Master or the Toymaker. I can't remember which. I'd have to rewatch the Toymaker episode.
no subject
Date: 2024-05-27 09:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-27 02:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-27 03:12 pm (UTC)