Season 1, Episode 7: ‘The Legend of Ruby Sunday’
Over six many years, “Physician Who” has launched many villains — together with huge hitters just like the Cybermen (first launched in 1966) and memorable one-off monsters just like the gas-mask sporting Empty Baby (2005) — because the Physician’s most fearsome enemy.
However in “The Legend of Ruby Sunday,” the primary episode within the season’s two-part finale, it appears his final nemesis would possibly lastly have been recognized — or slightly, rediscovered. It seems the mysterious villain who’s been pulling the strings this season (“the one who waits”) was first fought by Tom Baker’s Fourth Physician again in 1975.
This reveal is genuinely fear-inducing. But it surely’s the mixture of Russell T Davies’s pacey, tricksy script and the present’s newly lavish manufacturing values that makes Episode 7 such a bone-chilling journey — one far scarier, much more formidable, than I anticipated from the present’s Disney period.
Because the finale opens, two mysteries, which Davies has threaded all through the season, dangle within the air. There’s the query of Ruby’s (Millie Gibson) again story, together with the identification of her start mom. And what in regards to the mysterious girl (Susan Twist) who retains popping up wherever the Physician (Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby journey?
These questions are on the Physician’s thoughts because the TARDIS crashes into the headquarters of the United Intelligence Taskforce, or UNIT, Britain’s supersecret extraterrestrial process power. He’s greeted by the group’s head, Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave), and her staff, together with the 13-year-old scientific prodigy Morris (Lenny Rush).
Proper on cue, the mysterious girl’s face flashes onto the display as soon as extra, this time recognized because the entrepreneur Susan Triad of Susan Triad Know-how. Her identify units off alarm bells for the Physician. Not solely is “S Triad” an anagram of TARDIS (“Clearly, thanks,” Kate says sarcastically,) however Susan can also be the identify of the First Physician’s companion and granddaughter.
First, although, the thriller of Ruby’s origins. The Physician has at all times mentioned that they’ll’t return to Christmas Eve 2004, when Ruby was deserted, lest the Physician mess with the timelines. However utilizing surveillance digicam footage from that evening and a strong piece of know-how known as a Time Window, they may recreate that day.
The Physician and Ruby, accompanied by the UNIT soldier Colonel Chidozie (Tachia Newall), journey again into the shimmering, glitchy previous. A hooded girl, presumably Ruby’s mom, seems, however she is much more shadowy than the remainder of the image and Ruby sobs within the Physician’s arms, unable to see the determine’s face.
Amid the uncooked human emotion, an existential risk arrives. “What’s that?” the younger Morris stammers on the Physician, pointing at a cloud of mud billowing menacingly across the TARDIS.
The readings on Morris’s charts skyrocket. “That factor is sizzling. It’s chilly. It’s radioactive. It’s useless. It’s every little thing. I don’t know,” he panics. Ruby’s adoptive mother Carla (Michelle Greenidge), instinctively is aware of its identify. “It’s the Beast,” she says, an alien incarnation of Devil himself.
Realizing that Chidozie has gone lacking, the Physician and Ruby name out his identify and his distorted voice responds in a low, inhuman growl: “I’m in hell.” Within the Time Window, the system overloads and the Physician and Ruby are ripped out of the reminiscence. Chidozie’s corpse returns with them, turned to mud.
Unnerved, the Physician calls for that his former companion Mel (Bonnie Langford) take him to Susan, who’s about to offer an necessary speech on the United Nations in her position as chief government of a large tech agency. If the Physician is her grandfather, she doesn’t acknowledge him, greeting him pleasantly: “Good to fulfill you, pet. Physician, who?” offering a short second of levity.
Susan tells the Physician she’s been having “lot of desires” and the Physician asks what she desires about. Is it Lindy, the spoiled influencer from the episode “Dot and Bubble”; or the abandoned planet from “Growth”? Her look of shocked recognition confirms that in some way, Susan is a part of this.
On the UNIT headquarters, the TARDIS lets out a baleful groan. UNIT’s members look terrified as soon as extra; no person does wide-eyed terror fairly like Redgrave. Morris confirms that this isn’t simply occurring prior to now, and the enemy has woven itself into the Physician’s ship.
A sense of dread pervades Susan begins her speech. She awkwardly dances onto display with a stiffness immediately harking back to the awkward boogie by Theresa Could when she was Britain’s prime minister. . However as Susan prepares to learn the phrases “I feel we will succeed” on the teleprompter, that very same sinister, echoing, demonic voice says them first.
At UNIT, the beforehand perky staffer Harriet (Genesis Lynea) begins talking like a lady possessed about “the king himself.”
“He has hidden within the howling void,” she chants. “The Lord of Time was blind and useless and knew nothing.” Her identify, it’s revealed, is Harriet Arbinger, one other wordplay on “harbinger,” similar to Henry Arbinger in “The Satan’s Chord.”
“The gods carry harbingers to warn us of their coming,” the Physician whispers. However which god, he ponders, and Harriet lists gods of chaos from previous “Physician Who” escapades: Neil Patrick Harris and Jinkx Monsoon’s father-child duo of Toymaker and Maestro; the Mara, a snakelike creature confronted by Peter Davison’s Fifth Physician; and the Trickster from the kids’s spinoff present “The Sarah Jane Adventures.”
With each god, and the phobia they introduced, pressure builds. By the point Harriet warns that “standing on excessive is the mom and father and different of all of them,” the anticipation feels nearly as insufferable for the viewer because it appears for the characters. “No matter it’s, right here it comes,” Kate says.
The “god of all gods” on the coronary heart of this story, Harriet explains, has “one true identify” and it’s revealed as Sutekh.
For the primary time this episode, all sound recedes, save for the Physician’s sharp, shallow panting. To newer “Who” followers, the identify won’t imply a lot, however erstwhile viewers could keep in mind Sutekh from the 1975 episode “Pyramids of Mars.” Impressed by the Egyptian god of violence and storms, he’s the “god of demise,” hell bent on destroying all life within the universe.
Earlier than the TARDIS, the mud cloud coalesces right into a monstrous, dog-like beast with a number of pink eyes and sharp fangs. Susan’s head cracks again and her face turns into a skeletal horror, with pink glowing eyes peering from sunken sockets.
“Did you suppose I used to be household?” this new, horrifying Susan asks the Physician. Her hand reaches out to pulverize the Physician, who’s terrified.
“I carry Sutekh’s present of demise for you, and for all of your tiny, vile, incessant universe,” she says, the episode ending on this cliffhanger. Has the Whoniverse ever been this scary?
