Doctor Who (2023) 1-04: 73 Yards (Quick Review)

Episode:

879

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Serial:

308

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Writer:

Russell T Davies

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Director:

Dylan Holmes Williams

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Air Date:

25-May-2024

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's one of the few episodes of Doctor Who to feature a number in the title. I've no idea what it means though, something to do with sports maybe? It's yards, not metres, so I'm thinking that this is going to be set in the US or the past, but that's all I've got.

I usually try to write all of this intro bit before watching the episode so I can be properly clueless, but I have to jump in from the future to talk about how this is one of the few stories to be missing the opening titles entirely. I can only remember two other regular episodes that do this: Sleep No More and The Woman Who Fell to Earth. So it's a sign that an episode is doing something different... though not a sign that it'll be any good.

Incidentally The Woman Who Fell to Earth was the first episode filmed for the Jodie Whittaker era and this was the first filmed for the Ncuti Gatwa era. It even predates last year's Christmas Special. Gatwa had already made a brief appearance in The Giggle, but this was Millie Gibson's first ever work for Doctor Who.

There will be SPOILERS here for this and earlier episodes. And I mean way earlier, like 1981.

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RECAP

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The TARDIS arrives in a remote part of Wales and the Doctor immediately goes and steps on something again. This time it's a little more dangerous than a land mine though, as he just vanishes. There is someone else there with Ruby however: a woman who stands and watches her from a very exact distance.

Ruby goes to the local pub and gets trolled by the locals, but when one of them goes to talk to the woman he runs off. With no sign of the Doctor, Ruby eventually takes a train home and sees the woman following her out the window. People try to help Ruby, first her mother and then Kate Stewart, but every time they talk to the woman they run off as well. They just don't want anything to do with Ruby anymore.

Years later Ruby realises that she has a chance to stop the worst prime minister's reign of terror before it starts thanks to her future knowledge and her mysterious woman. She manages to stand in the right place to put the two of them together and he runs away, resigning his job before a single nuke goes flying.

40 years later Ruby is still alone, still tormented by the mysterious woman. Until the night she dies and finds herself in the woman's place, on a hill in Wales. This time she's able to signal Ruby to stop the Doctor stepping on the fairy circle and the episode never happened.


REVIEW

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The lack of title sequence is a bit of a hint that this is a special episode, but man, the younger newbies who jumped on board with Ncuti Gatwa aren't going to know what hit them with this one.

This isn't my first Doctor-light story, so I'm already aware that things get a bit bleaker when there isn't a fun genius Time Lord around to explain what's going on and save the day. But RTD's 2005 run took years to build up to darker, creepier episodes like Blink and Turn Left. Series 1 had the emotional Father's Day, but it wasn't that much of a departure from the established tone. Sure Rose had a wheelie bin eating Micky and replacing him with a plastic copy, but it also had Clive getting gunned down in front of his family.

The 2023 run, on the other hand, began with a fart-propelled space station run by babies and now three episodes later we've got a straight up horror story! The season's grown up quick.

This time the story begins with the Doctor stepping on a fairy circle and Ruby making things worse by reading the messages left there, so it's apparently a completely supernatural situation. A supernatural situation that anyone could've ended up in, because this was just left here on the grass in the present day, a couple of hours drive from Ruby's house.

Step in the wrong place on the alien war planet and you might end up on a landmine. Step in the wrong place in Wales and you'll straight up disappear.

I have to be honest, I didn't need to see a whole episode of Doctor Who about fairy magic making the Doctor vanish or give up, or whatever happened here. I've had three seasons of Chris Chibnall's Doctor Who already, I want to see the Doctor impress me for a change. Dude needs to show up and earn his theme music.

73 Yards is almost a horror anthology, with each chapter featuring the same protagonist and creature, but a completely different cast. I haven't seen either version of The Wicker Man, but the first part had a bit of that vibe to it perhaps. The creepy remote village that knows something.

The twist is that these guys don't believe the local legends for a moment, they just like to torment tourists for a laugh. Even when their visitor is clearly going through something and could do with a bit of kindness. For a moment there I was worried Ruby had ended up way out of her own time, though I suppose the TV is a hint that she's close enough. Plus it's also foreshadowing!

Unusually for Doctor Who, the episode itself isn't in the mood for joking around either. The comedy here doesn't ease the tension, it just makes the place more unnerving and unfriendly. Russell T Davies is good at writing natural dialogue and he grounds these scenes in enough reality that you can buy what Ruby's going through even if the fantasy elements are weird and arbitrary.

Incidentally, I checked these two shots to see if the woman stays in exactly the same place after the time jump and she does. But they decided to film from a slightly different position, so everything else in the shot is slightly different. It makes sense, Ruby's not a weird supernatural event who acts with inhuman precision, so she's not going to look out of the same bit of window both times.

Except, maybe Ruby is a weird supernatural event.

It didn't take me long to think back to that other time Doctor Who had a mysterious figure staring at the characters from afar, back in the classic series.

The Watcher in the season 18 episode Logopolis wasn't particularly well explained either and honestly I wasn't keen on him, but we did at least find out who he was. He was an aspect of the Doctor who came back in time from his impending regeneration to... help out I guess. I don't know, it was weird.

What's happening with Ruby and the stranger is somehow even more vague, but it's strongly implied to have been her all along. She came back in time to ruin her own life, for some reason. Maybe the fairy magic made her do it.

Anyway, the episode leaves all the characters from the pub behind and goes to London for the next horror story.

I haven't seen It Follows, but that's what jumped to mind when the woman followed Ruby into her regular life.

The really scary part is that getting other people involved just makes it worse. Everyone believes Ruby, they're only too happy to help, and when they do she loses them forever. They're not dead, they just run away and abandon her. In fact they seem disgusted by her, by whatever secret they learned. It's so bad that it even turns her own mother against her, which is pretty horrific considering how Ruby's story is all about her desperate need for family and her issues over being abandoned.

It reminded me of Extremis, another episode about a terrible secret that drives people to act wildly out of character when they learn the truth, and both episodes make good use of how scary that is. Though Extremis has its cake and eats it by leading to a really good explanation. We learn the secret ourselves and understand. 73 Yards, on the other hand, is a strong believer that things are scarier if we never get answers.

Kate Stewart makes a surprise appearance during this segment of the episode to try to drag the story back into the comfortable Doctor Who realm of weirdness we can deal with. I didn't see this coming and I was happy to see her... but I knew where it was going.

Still, before she inevitably ran off, we did get an interesting conversation about how people make up rules to try to understand things. Ruby has tried approaching the problem logically, taking photos and working out the distance, but there are things she's reluctant to try, like going on a flight or a boat. At times the episode gives a very realistic and rational look at how we deal with the unrealistic and irrational, and I appreciated that.

But even with all of UNIT's defences against psychic powers and the supernatural, they're turned against Ruby instantly and then they're just gone from the story as well. They don't care about the mystery anymore, they're not even curious about the rules.

I suppose the truth is that the woman isn't a threat that UNIT needs to deal with. It's just making Ruby too distracted to have successful relationships and driving away anyone she confides in. It's a very personal problem, not something that has any effect on national security.

Well, except for when the story makes a huge time jump and starts to involve politician Roger ap Gwilliam. This is where the Black Mirror vibes really started to get strong for me, even though I haven't really seen the series. But if this part of the story is a homage to anything, it's The Dead Zone... which I haven't seen either. I haven't even read the book.

Anyway, Ruby decides that her mission is to stop a future prime minister before he causes a nuclear crisis. He has the nickname Mad Jack, the same as in the legend she heard at the pub, so there has to be a connection, right? This has to be a monster she accidentally released 20 years ago, possibly?

All we know is that this guy will be the worst prime minister ever, and considering that list includes the Master, he must be pretty damn bad. In fact, he's probably as bad as that other Welsh politician that tried to nuke the world in series 1's Boom Town.

I didn't notice while watching the episode, but Ruby's got a fancy translucent phone in the future. Technology moving on is a theme introduced early in the episode when the pub landlord acts confused about paying with a phone, but it doesn't really tie into the plot. I guess it may just be there to show the passage of the time.

Ruby has learned enough of the rules by this point to use the mysterious woman to her advantage, weaponising her horror, so this time the scary part is that she might get shot for stepping on the grass. It feels like a real possibility as well, as the time jump means it won't be this Ruby who continues travelling with the Doctor.

But nope, Ruby's plan works, the monster Roger ap Gwilliam is driven out of Downing Street, and the world is saved. It's like the Doctor deposing Harriet Jones in The Christmas Invasion, except she got someone else to say the six words.

I loved this whole section of the story as the threat is clear, the protagonist has a goal, and all the relevant rules are known. Ruby being proactive and using her curse as a tool for good was fantastic, and the scene where Mad Jack goes running is very cathartic. Especially with the appropriately heroic music we get.

The way the throwaway line we got about ap Gwilliam at the start turned out to actually matter to the plot was kind of genius. Usually when the Doctor mentions something like The Woolly Rebellion of 2211 it's just played off like a joke and forgotten. Here though the story continues to the point where Ruby actually has to deal with the issue and she chooses to change history.

But I suppose it wasn't really relevant after all. Nothing is relevant. The twist at the end of this chapter is that Ruby can't just complete a mission to satisfy the fairies and end the curse. This is a part of her life, forever.

The last horror story in the episode is that of a woman growing to old age after a life spent alone. I couldn't even tell you what films this reminds me of as those kinds of movies don't even make it onto my radar.

The story could've ended already but instead it keeps going and there has to be a point to that. The episode's lack of answers only makes the viewer more keen to analyse it, decode it, and figure out what it's actually about. What's the message? What is Russell T Davies saying? All I know is that Ruby was haunted her whole life by something that occupied her thoughts and whenever she came clean about it people didn't want to be around her anymore. Their perception changed.

This could be a metaphor for a whole bunch of things, illness, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, political beliefs, criminal acts, and so on. But her mother points out that 'even your real mother didn't want you', like the reason she was abandoned at a church is the same reason she's abandoning her now. And Ruby can only guess at why that was.

Then at the end, the mysterious woman finally breaks 73 yard rule and gets closer, as Ruby gets closer to death. There's no point in her trying to run, you can't escape old age on foot. As the Doctor said last episode, the human lifespan sucks.

Though she keeps her back turned, so we still don't get to see her face.

And then it ends with Ruby taking the role of the mystery figure, except this time she arrives early enough to avert her biggest regret and change her life. This doesn't explain anything about why she drove away everyone she cared about in the previous timeline.

This time Ruby says that she's been to Wales three times instead of two. Old Ruby had been to Wales lots of times, the football field was in Cardiff, so it's not that she's remembering bits of a past life. Something else that's interesting: Mad Jack was apparently never freed in this timeline, but the Doctor still mentions ap Gwilliam being a terrible prime minister. So was that future averted or not? This episode just raises further questions!

Though the way the episode draws attention to Susan Twist and Mrs Flood makes me think that we've only got half a story here and some answers might be coming eventually. Ruby even recognised Twist's character this time!

Then again, we eventually got answers for what happened in Fugitive of the Judoon and every fan who learned that secret ran away from the show, so learning more about what's happening here might just make it worse.


RATING

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I usually compare episodes to another story so I can decide how to rate them, but 73 Yards has a vibe unlike anything else in Doctor Who history. Anything I can remember at least. Pulling that off after 878 episodes is bloody impressive, though it managed this trick by straying outside of what I like the series to be.

I've been mentioning the movies that this reminded of and they all have one thing in common: I haven't seen them. They didn't appeal to me, they're not my kind of thing. Really, this episode lost me at its premise.

Also, it's about fairy curses and unexplained supernatural weirdness, and I've never been keen on that in my sci-fi shows. At least not in a series that's avoided it for 60 years! The day we get an episode like this in Star Trek I'm throwing all my toys out of the pram. (Unless they say that subspace did it. Subspace can make anything happen.)

Though even I can tell that this is a really well made horror story. It absolutely nails the mood it's going for, all the production departments rose to the challenge, and I can't honestly find any flaws with it. The cinematography in particular is great. But also the music in particular, and the performances in particular, and the makeup. They did an amazing job of making 40 year old Ruby look like a 20 year old with glasses on.

I could never rate this as low as Space Babies or The Devil's Chord as it didn't have a farting space station and the soundtrack wasn't so unbearable that I had to leave the room. Ruby's theme was basically made for this episode and it was the first filmed so that might be literally true. But when a story ends with 'and Ruby dies and somehow goes back in time to become the woman who stays 73 yards away and drives people away with her super powers, except this time she warns her past self not to break a fairy circle on a cliff in Wales,' that pretty much disqualifies it from getting a high score from me.

So after subtracting a whole bunch of points, 73 Yards is left at...

7/10

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NEXT TIME

Doctor Who will return with the cheerfully-titled Dot and Bubble, and judging by the trajectory this season's on it's going to be the bleakest, most mature episode of the series ever. But I don't really know, I haven't even seen the trailer.

Hopefully I'll have the final part of my The Last Jedi review ready for you soon, so you may want to come back for that. But before you disappear, I'm curious about whether you liked 73 Yards yourself. Was it proper horror or just horrible?