Doctor Who (2023) 1-08: Empire of Death (Quick Review)

Episode:

883

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Serial:

311

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Writer:

Russell T Davies

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Director:

Jamie Donoughue

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Air Date:

22-Jun-2024

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm watching Doctor Who's latest season one finale, Empire of Death.

It's weird to have reached the end of a season so soon, I'm supposed to get another five episodes! It's been two episodes longer than the Flux season though, I'll give them that. Also, the classic show's first season only had 8 serials, so that's basically the same length... if you don't count the fact that each of those serials had about 6 parts.

There will be SPOILERS below, for a bunch of things. I can't tell you what things exactly as that would be a spoiler, but it'll help if you're up to date with the series.

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RECAP

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Sutekh latched onto the TARDIS after his defeat in Pyramids of Mars and has been planting women identical to Susan Triad on every world the Doctor has visited since. Now the One Who Waits has stopped waiting and has started wiping out all life with these angels of death. But he lets the Doctor, Ruby and Mel survive to escape in the Memory TARDIS parked in the time window as he can't finish killing everyone until he knows who Ruby's mother was. The heroes grab a spoon from a woman in a tent and head to an impossible 2046 to check the DNA records, then the TARDIS teleports them back to give the information to Sutekh. Ruby and the Doctor have a plan though and tie Sutekh to the TARDIS with the memory of an intelligent dog lead, dragging him around the universe so that he involuntarily kills all the death his angels have caused.

With Sutekh sorted out, the heroes have 12 minutes of episode left to find Ruby's mother. It turns out she is just an ordinary person and Ruby is finally able to meet her birth parents, so the Doctor continues his travels without her. Meanwhile, Mrs Flood poses on a rooftop, promising a terrifying future for the Doctor.


REVIEW

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And The Legend of Ruby Sunday's cliffhanger is resolved by... Mel pulling the Doctor back a bit. It's fine though, as it wasn't really a "How does the Doctor get out of this?" kind of situation, more of a "Oh damn, the villain's here and he's crazy powerful!" reveal, and that takes a little longer to resolve.

Meanwhile, over at UNIT HQ, they're doing what they can to gun down Sutekh and his harbinger. Which means Kate employed a 13 year old and then gave him guns... even Batman would be disappointed with her at this point. Unfortunately, it works about as well as it always does. Even the Vlinx's eye beams don't work! Also, it turns out that the Vlinx can kill people just by looking at them, so that's scary.

The entire UNIT team turns to dust without showing a hint of fear, which is the kind of thing you'd expect from Kate and the heroic teenagers under her command. I feel like maybe a little bit of fear could have helped though. I mean, they didn't even try to escape.

Mel had the right idea: turn around, go the other way. Or go the same way as it turns out, as she takes the Doctor to the building where the rest of UNIT just died.

There's a bit of an action scene here, as Mel rides through the city as people around her crumble to dust, and I thought it was pretty well done. It's very reminiscent of a particular movie, but being able to see the death wave coming and outrun it makes things different enough. The trouble is that once the episode killed off Cherry and Carla it was blatantly obvious that it was all going to be undone.

Of course, I thought the same thing about the Flux, but I'm not entirely sure Chris Chibnall realised he didn't undo it.

Soon Doctor, Ruby and Mel are the last three people alive on Earth, and even the Doctor thinks that's a bit convenient. Turns out that Sutekh is keeping them alive because... he wants to know who Ruby's mother is as much as the rest of the audience! He's already wiped out all of humanity, but it's going to bother him if he doesn't find this out. Just like how he knew it'd bother the Doctor if he put Susan Triads everywhere.

Okay, as villain motivations go, that's surprisingly relatable. Especially considering he's a giant godlike jackal. Incidentally I love how he keeps wrapping his arms around the TARDIS and spinning the box around. He's been perched there for thousands of years and he still hasn't gotten bored of it yet.

Sutekh latched onto it during Pyramids of Mars, episode 413, so he's been there for more than half of Doctor Who's televised episodes. Man, this is going to make the episode Listen play differently. Sutekh was there when the TARDIS was torn apart in Frontios, when it was dunked in Z-neutrino energy at the core of the Dalek Crucible in Journey's End, when it was blown up in The Pandorica Opens and when it was dispersed in The Magician's Apprentice. That poor Dog of Death been through a lot over the years.

He was also there when the TARDIS was duplicated in The Giggle, so either it's like how only one Doctor was left wearing underwear after bi-generation, or there are two Sutekhs now. Or maybe the magic mallet just pulled the same TARDIS from the future and this Sutekh is also waiting on the TARDIS in Donna's garden.

At least we got an explanation for all the Susan Twists.

Sutekh focused his mind and created a new person everywhere the TARDIS landed, then used its perception filter so that everyone would believe that they had a history in that world. In Space Babies they believed that there was a recording of her on the computer. In Dot and Bubble, Lindy Pepper-Bean believed that she had a mother and wasn't just a sentient pile of trash.

Man, I don't actually have a clue how this works, and tying it in with the 73 yards thing just makes it more confusing. Was the TARDIS the one that manifested the mysterious woman in 73 Yards? Was the TARDIS obscuring Ruby's mother's face from the CCTV camera? What percentage of Susan Twists made friends with a Clara Oswald?

Here's something I do understand: UNIT's time window is run off three things: the entire nuclear power plant output of Europe, a VHS tape from a security camera, and memory. Time is memory so the memory of a time machine makes it exist in a tangible form held together by hopes and wishes. They basically wanted the TARDIS in the VHS tape to be real so bad that they were able to climb into their memories.

Okay, I was lying, I don't understand this at all. Is it like how the image of a Weeping Angel becomes a Weeping Angel? Man, this whole episode is held together by hopes and wishes.

But hey, it's the Memory TARDIS from Tales of the TARDIS! They actually tied it into the plot of the main show... or vice versa, if the set was built for this episode. We also got an extra Tale of the TARDIS featuring a new edition of Pyramids of Mars with new effects and a framing story with Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson.

Tales of the TARDIS - Pyramids of Mars

See, there they are. Same place, same clothes, same creepy miniature of Jodie Whittaker's console room standing in for a fire (you can't see Mel, as she's lying against the door).

There are a few minor differences in the background however, along with a pretty major one. The resolution of Empire of Death absolutely depends on a few crucial pieces of imaginary gear pulled from this imaginary TARDIS: the remote control whistle, the intelligent gloves, and the intelligent rope. But the Tales of the TARDIS version of the scene is missing the rope the Doctor needs to save the universe! All life is permanently doomed.

Oh, here's something that amused me. Ruby asks why Sutekh's all Egyptian-themed and the Doctor says it's cultural appropriation. This version of Pyramid of Mars edits out the line "The whole of Egyptian culture is founded upon the Osiran pattern," but keeps the part about the Osiran war against Sutekh entering into mythology (plus it keeps the pyramids on Mars, obviously). So the Doctor still kind of accused Egyptians of appropriating Osiran culture.

Also, I have to point out that the Sixth Doctor's coat is in this episode, visible on screen. Some things should be left forgotten.

But okay, they've set up that anything from the history of Doctor Who can be in this room, it's a treasure trove of memories. Well except for that gun that erases its reason to exist from time, no one's going to remember that. The important thing is that they could've pulled some real crowd-pleasing gear out of this thing, the Key to Time, the big friendly reset time button, maybe even a K-9... and what they went with is the gloves from The Church on Ruby Road, a rope and a whistle. They're in a TARDIS literally made from nostalgia and this is the best RTD could come up with. Well at least one of them is from a previous story!

Anyway, the Doctor yells a bit due to the absolute devastation he's inadvertently helped to cause in a scene a lot like the ones we got in Wild Blue Yonder and Dot and Bubble. In fact it's too much like them, which is unfortunate as by this point the returns have greatly diminished.

I'm going to completely change the subject and make up some numbers now. Let's say the Doctor's been actively time travelling for about 2000 years since the events of Pyramids of Mars, and he averages one new planet every two days. That's 365,000 planets. Scientists estimate there are maybe 60 billion planets in our galaxy capable of supporting life, and there are maybe 2 trillion galaxies in the universe. So that's 120,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 habitable planets alone.

Turns out that you really don't have to visit a huge percentage of the universe before it's all caught in the pattern of a death wave. Roughly 0% is enough.

Anyway the Doctor goes looking for a spoon in a world of dust and I had three problems with this scene.

The first is that the episode just jumps right into it without telling us why the Doctor's there, so the whole time I was thinking 'why does this scene exist?'

The second is, the scene has no reason to exist. They didn't need to put a human face onto the horror of a universe turning to dust, we just saw Carla, Cherry and all of UNIT die. Oh no, her baby's dead... who cares, everyone's dead. Oh no, facts are dying somehow. Everyone's dead, I don't care. Oh no, she can't remember things anymore. That's incredibly uninteresting! Thanks for wasting my time with that. Oh no, the death wave is travelling from her child to her because of I don't even know. BIG DEAL, EVERYONE IS DEAD.

Five minutes this scene takes, about 10% of the entire episode, and it could've been cut entirely. Granted it probably contains a lot of things that RTD felt were important for the themes of the episode, maybe even the whole season. But I wasn't paying enough attention at this point for anything to jump out at me.

Oh and the third problem is, they could've gotten a spoon from anywhere, as it turns out that anywhere the Doctor has ever travelled to is a fixed point now. Humanity was destroyed in 2024, then Roger ap Gwilliam took power and forced Ruby's mother to take a DNA test, and then humanity was destroyed in 2046.

But make Isaac Newton say 'mavity' and the entire timeline is changed.

Look at all the metal!

Also, here's a question, why did the Doctor have to replace the monitor screen with the one from the time window? Also why does the screen in the time window look like the front of a CRT screen? Also why did it try to help Ruby and point her toward the specific memory of Roger ap Gwilliam she needed? Was it just her subconscious figuring it out?

Turns out that ap Gwilliam gets taken down in any timeline, whether Ruby does it or not, but if she'd waited a bit he would've taken her mother's DNA. Man, nukes and mandatory DNA tests, this bloke really is the worst prime minister. Fortunately, like the surveillance camera at Ruby Road, this pays off for the good guys in a big way!

Davina McCall couldn't find anyone even slightly related to Ruby but it turns out her team was just inept as Ruby's mother is perfectly normal and would have had relatives all over the place.

They find the information, but oh no Mel got turned into an angel of death with a robe and everything and then H Arbinger teleported them back to 2024 UNIT by pulling a lever in the TARDIS. Yeah the TARDIS can teleport people through time now, but only when the villain uses it. The Doctor didn't see what lever it was so it's fine.

So if Sutekh can turn anyone into an angel of death, why did he need to the trouble of creating his own angels of death and giving them their own lives? Also, why does the God of Death have so many damn children?

Anyway, Ruby gets close to Sutekh by acting confused about what the screen reveals about her mother, and then puts a lead on his collar! He's too surprised by her audacity to remember that he can dominate people's minds and turn them into his slaves. Also, he apparently had no idea that if you blow a whistle, the TARDIS can shoot an energy beam that flings it across the room.

There are so many gods and machines in this story I don't even know what counts as a deus ex machina anymore. Sutekh was woven into the fabric of the TARDIS itself, but all they needed was a rope and a whistle and they got him detached just fine.

This means that the threat of Sutekh, a god allegedly more powerful than the reality warping Toymaker and Maestro, is ultimately resolved by dragging him through the time vortex by his neck! You know that a dog has been really bad when the audience wants to see the hero kicking him. This time the Doctor failed to save the monster.

It's cool finally seeing the time vortex again during an episode, as the last time it happened Jodie Whittaker was still flying the TARDIS. It also looks fantastic, like an upgraded version of its season 5 appearance. I definitely prefer this to the murky Chris Chibnall-era effect.

Oh, good news, it turns out that bringing everyone back to life from piles of dust is far easier than killing them. Sutekh needed to spend hundreds of years planting Susan Triads on hundreds of worlds in order to spread the death wave, but the Doctor just drags him around the time vortex for a bit and he accidentally kills all the death in the universe.

I didn't find it to be a very satisfying win, but the episode did surprise me by bringing back more people than I expected. Even Susan Triad's assistant came back, along with the redshirt in the time window... which means Kate has all that resurrected soldier paperwork to fill out now. In fact, it seems plausible that RTD could use this as an excuse to bring back the Time Lords or undo the Flux, or whatever he wants to change. Not that he needs much of an excuse these days.

It was a bit of a strange choice to reveal that Mrs Flood is a villain and then immediately have a more powerful villain kill her off before she's even done anything, but I suppose being killed by Sutekh doesn't really diminish her threat. Everyone got killed by Sutekh, all the villains. And seeing the fourth-wall breaking bad guy hugging Cherry in relief is definitely something unusual for the series. I bet she still didn't get her cup of tea though.

I don't feel cheated by the reveal that Ruby's mother was just a regular normal 15 year old, Though I am 100% sure a lot of viewers did, after the reaction to a certain movie that did the same thing. If you give people a mystery box they're going to want a prize in there worth the wait.

Personally, I liked the idea that Ruby's mother became important simply because people believed she was important. She was the key to saving the universe, she was the spoon, because they had imbued her with significance. Like how the series Doctor Who means something to its audience because they're emotionally invested in it.

My only problem with the reveal is that it doesn't explain the snow, or the music, or 73 Yards, or why Sutekh couldn't find her with his death powers, or anything really. Okay I'm sure the Doctor once mentioned something about memory that I disregarded as being an obvious wrong answer and forgot, but a satisfying answer would've definitely been more satisfying.

So now we know that a perfectly ordinary 15 year old put a cloak on to hide her identity, dropped her baby off in the snow in front of a church, then waited outside as a TARDIS materialised and a man rushed out to drag a wooden goblin ship down from the sky with his bare hands.

The Church on Ruby Road

The man impaled the goblin ship onto the church spire then caught her falling child as the vessel disintegrated around her.

Time changed and she pointed right at the Doctor and his TARDIS, except she was really pointing just a little bit across to the "Ruby Road" street sign. This was to show the Doctor, or the CCTV camera, or anyone peering out the church window that she had named her daughter "Ruby".

The Doctor chose not to walk over and solve the biggest mystery in his companion's life and instead returned to the present. I guess because of his own issues with family.

I have to admit, of all the crazy things in this episode, it's the reveal of the Ruby Road sign that was the worst for me. She looked at a stranger and pointed at a road sign and therefore Ruby is name she wanted to give her baby? That's not just a stretch of the imagination, that's a snap. Imagination broke. She could've just left a note. You can buy baby clothes which say "Ruby".

Oh, and the episode just keeps going and going. I know this because I wrote that exact line in my notes... twice.

I mean, it's nice that Ruby gets a proper ending after being so torn apart all season trying to find out where she's from, but it feels a bit much. It's like a quarter of the episode! It didn't help that I kept waiting for the Doctor to go look for Susan already.

Maybe it would've felt more satisfying if there was an actual reason for Ruby to give up travelling with the Doctor. Sure she's excited about reconnecting with her birth parents and that's going to take up a lot of her time. But this isn't like Martha, who had to stay and help her parents after they were kidnapped by the Master. She'll be eager to travel again before too long, and not too long isn't any time at all to a man with a time machine.

The episode ends with a interesting shot. It's technically possible to see all of these landmarks at once, but they'd be way further apart. Also St Paul's Cathedral would be behind the London Eye, not over on the left. Also we should be able to see UNIT HQ between Big Ben and the Shard.

I don't know if the landmarks shown were picked for their importance to Doctor Who history, or it's just that Doctor Who has used all the iconic landmarks in London, but I spotted a few familiar structures. The War Machines featured the BT Tower, St Paul's Cathedral was visited by Cybermen in The Invasion and Dark Water, the London Eye was featured in Rose, Big Ben's gotten into the action a whole bunch of times, and the Shard was the villains' lair in Bells of St John.

Anyway, I guess Mrs Flood is the villain for the Christmas special then? Does she have snow powers? Was it her that did all the snow? Hang on, Susan left the show in The Dalek Invasion of Earth's final episode which aired on 26th December 1964, and The Christmas episode will air 60 years later, almost to the day. That's too perfect for them to not bring Susan back.

And Mark of the Rani was 1985, so 40th anniversary appearance by the Rani next year?


RATING

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The Legend of Ruby Sunday was all tension and setup for the big season finale, so I figured Empire of Death was going to have to be a dramatic improvement just as a result of it having a story. But when a review is filled with questions that either means the story was really thought provoking or it had real problems, and I wouldn't recommend turning your brain on for this episode.

Maybe things like the snow and 73 Yards got an explanation and I just didn't realise it. I don't know if anyone really knows for sure at this point. The whole Sutekh plot seemed like nonsense start to finish... especially finish. But it's not the unsatisfying payoff that bothered me most, or even the departure from any semblance of reality, it's that it dragged. I watched the finale of Star Trek: Discovery a few days back and even though it wasn't a great story and the action was lacklustre I didn't even realise it was a double-length episode until afterwards. Empire of Death, on the other hand, left me shocked that it was only 55 minutes. It seemed to never end.

But the soundtrack was pretty great and not unbearable at all, so I have to rate it higher than The Devil's Chord. Plus there were no space babies, so it should probably get more than Space Babies as well. In fact, I'm going to give it the same score as the episode that kicked this story arc off, The Church on Ruby Road, and considering how attached I am to things making any kind of sense I think I'm being extremely kind.

5/10

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COMING SOON

I guess I need to do a season review now. Doesn't seem worth it for only eight episodes, but okay! Though next time on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm finally getting back to Star Trek: Picard, with episode 3-05, Imposters. I'm almost halfway through!

If you want to share your opinions on Empire of Death, I think that's a great idea. Go wild!