Well… 73 Yards was a waste of an hour of my life!
The episode started off so well! Although I have to say the conversational “banter” we get between Ruby and the Doctor every time the exit the TARDIS in the episode opening is always really stilted and makes me cringe, it has not been improving with the episodes! But anyway, this episode started off really creepy, and I loved the Welsh pub. For the first 15 minutes I thought we were in for a good one…
But then it just started to get really, really repetitive… I actually paused after 20 minutes to check how long we had been watching for! I felt the episode was seriously dragging and losing my interest. This was after Ruby’s Mum had kicked her out, making third person who’d run away after talking to the old lady .. and then we got the same, now completely predictable, beat a fourth time with UNIT.
Any why was Kate acting so suspiciously towards Ruby? She’s always got slight suss vibes, but it felt a lot thicker this episode. I don’t think it was only about laying groundwork for a potential UNIT spin off!
Her Mum dramatically driving off in the back of the taxi was a laugh out loud moment though! That slow motion death stare!
Then we get Ruby through the decades at 25, 30 and then 40 where they just stuck a pair of lensless glasses on her… I’m sure her hair poked through at some point! I didn’t feel Millie Gibson made any attempt to make Ruby feel any older in her performance, she felt like exactly the same person as she does at 19… Not someone who’d had 20 years of this trauma!
As soon as we saw the old lady I strongly suspected it was going to be Ruby from her future.. because isn’t it always that? The biggest problem with the episode though is that the reasons behind any of it were either not explained or very poorly explained…
What was old Ruby saying to people? Even if it was just some kind of spell/psychic projection… If this was Ruby how the fuck was she doing that?! And also why… Surely there are a hundred better ways to communicate… And why did she have to be 73 Yards away doing sign language? (Which obviously her younger self did not understand or even try to apparently…)
And where did the Doctor go… And why did he have to disappear in the first place?!
It sounds like the evil PM guy still exists in the timeline, so what was the point of any of it?
And who even was he – just a human? Some kind of evil faerie spirit?! Alien? – and why did he want to nuke the world so badly?!
It just felt like such a waste of time.
And if they are planning to fill in all these blanks in the rest of the season that still feels like bad storytelling because this was a wholly unsatisfying and poorly paced episode that to me felt like it was pretending to be smart when really it was a load of half-finished bollocks…
Clearly though I’m in another universe to reviews I keep seeing praising this mess as a top episode… They (and 2/3 of our friends) must have watched something else!
On the bright side if we got a Ruby only episode, hopefully that means we can have a Doctor only episode this series! I don’t feel like we’ve got to know him well enough yet, it feels to me like the focus has been all on Ruby so far.
Series 8
We’ve watched three more episodes in our rewatch!
6. Caretaker
The Doctor goes undercover as the caretaker at Coal Hill, where Clara and Danny Pink work. The Doctor meets student Courtney Woods. There is a killer robot on the loose, but mostly it’s about the Doctor and Danny not liking each other and harping on the recurring theme of soldiers. It was alright, I found the Doctor a lot of fun again… I still find Danny an unconvincing character, especially regarding his relationship with Clara… we’ve never seen what it is she likes about him.
7. Kill The Moon
They take Courtney Woods to the moon because she’s got hurt feelings that the Doctor said she’s not special (honestly, why do people have to be told they’re “special”). There are horrible spider creatures with teeth and then the moon is an egg. Clara and the other human have to decide whether to blow it up or not for fear the debris of the shell may hit Earth. Clara ends the episode super mad at the Doctor for making her make that decision. I didn’t love this episode, I don’t ever love it when we’re left with Clara as the focus … But it was still better than 73 Yards which we’d watched earlier the same evening!
8. Mummy On The Orient Express
Frank Skinner is some kind of space train engineer, there is a Mummy (yet another soldier) killing people, and Clara after being super dramatic for two episodes about how the Doctor is terrible and she’s leaving then suddenly decides to lie to Danny, and changes her mind.. which I find very annoying and disrespectful! !But otherwise, this was a cool episode – I liked the themed train setting – and I really enjoyed it… As distracting as I found Frank Skinner being in Doctor Who, I did like his character.
We’re getting closer to Missy now!! I am excited for Michelle Gomez! And at this point in wondering if Twelve is going to overtake Eleven and become my favourite Doctor…
