It’s taken me a while to get around to this, long enough that I’ve forgotten most of the details! Plus it’s been a busy and very hot week in the UK (and I have PMS brain fog!) so I don’t know how well I’m going to string together thoughts here…
Especially because it was a pretty crap episode.. that didn’t make much sense… Even for Doctor Who.
I knew it was going to be crap and unsatisfying based on the previous episode! But this might be some kind of ‘NuWho’ record for a finale with the ratio of level of dramatic build up to the laziness of the resolution!
If you want to read a more in-depth review and discussion on this episode you should definitely go to Michael’s blog in! But for the record here are a smattering of my thoughts –
As soon as we saw Kate and the UNIT Gang turned to dust it was obvious everything was going to get reset in some way. She’s too big a character to go out in such a lame fashion and we’re not killing this many people in a single episode! This immediately removed all drama and suspense from the episode.
The woman with the spoon scene felt really out of place and like it was a completely different episode. We never actually examined the effect of the Sutekh dust or whatever elsewhere in the universe (we didn’t even see a Dalek turn to dust), plus as above it was clearly going to be undone, so while I think they were trying to build some emotional weight but it didn’t work for me.
Some people on Reddit were getting excited that this lady, and her dead baby, was something significant but after the ending with Ruby’s Mum I don’t think so .. people have some wild theories though (the baby is the Doctor but also Doctor 14 is the father, and the mother, of course, The Rani!) and I’m pretty sure at this point she was meant to be another “ordinary person.’
The Sutekh resolution was so ridiculous there are countless hilarious memes out there. It doesn’t make sense within the history of the show that he was supposedly hanging on the outside of the TARDIS the entire time.. why was it only now he decided to actually do something? How did the other people who have also cling to the outside of The TARDIS mention him? Why didn’t the TARDIS mention him?!
Stupid.
And then the Doctor defeated him by what seems to be luck rather than anything very smart or Doctory… They were lucky the machine created the “memory TARDIS” and that he happened to have the exact right stuff in it. There was no sense he had a clever plan. And also how did dragging Sutekh through the vortex again a) undo all those deaths and b) apparently kill him given he survived in there before? Was it because he was outside of some kind of protective shield on the outside the TARDIS? Explain it!
There was also a really half hearted attempt to tie in the also terrible episode 73 Yards but that was immediately dropped and I guess meant nothing, except it got them to the future to search a DNA database.
Stupid.
I’m used to series final episodes having ridiculous last minute resolutions. I love Star Trek, I don’t mind some last minute sci-fi bollocks to save the day, as long as it made some kind of sense within the episode and there were some kind of stakes so I cared about it being resolved.
Russel T Davis is also responsible for the bloody awful Dobby/Tinkerbell/Jesus 11th Doctor in series 3’s Last of the Timelords. That was really stupid but those episodes have a lot of emotional stakes for the Doctor and Marta’s while family, and The Master was an entertaining villain who had been effectively teased all series. And the clapping for Doctor like he’s Tinkerbell made some narrative sense (however cringe inducing and stupid it was).
Empire of Death didn’t work on any level. It was so clear that it was going to all get undone and Ruby was safe with the Doctor the whole time, so there were no emotional stakes.
And then, we also resolve the mystery of who is Ruby’s mother in an even more unsatisfactory way! I don’t mind the idea that her Mum is just ordinary if they’d executed this properly. They should not have explicitly shown her warping reality (exactly how did she change on the VHS?!), they could have shown weird shit happening but in such a way that it could plausibly have not been her. Oh and what 15 year old in the 2000s is wearing a black skirt that length and fucking cape?! Come on.
Also the pointing to name the baby she was abandoning was ridiculous, but again.. enjoying it now being a running joke on the subreddit.
Why was Maestro so afraid of Ruby? What’s with the snow and the carol?!
In fact why was Sutekh so obsessed with her? She’s special because he’s obsessed with the mystery but why? Because the Doctor didn’t know how she was… But why didn’t the Doctor know?! It honestly seems like he really didn’t try very hard to work out it… To me it feels a bit like another example of how this Doctor being weaker somehow.
And then the scene at the end with the Ruby and the Doctor was so bizarrely over the top emotional?! I get why she’d be a bit worried he’d not come back (she knows about Susan) but why was he so emotional?! He has a literal time machine, he could step inside and then come back out a month or two later when Ruby’s dealt with her family stuff! He could have popped back the next day to prove it to her!
Why were we acting like there was some deep emotional drama there?
And then Mrs Flood looks dressed for a Christmas special, and my God I hope that turns out to be something decent after this pile of shit.
So turns out the best episode of the series was the one with Jinkx Monsoon in it! They should have made Maestro the series big bad!
Series 9 Rewatch
We are definitely in the era where I got so sick of Clara I stopped watching entirely, and once again I’m feeling very reluctant to watch, which is why we’ve only got through two episodes this week!
5. The Girl Who Died
I got a bit bored in this one, the viking thing was quite silly (and vikings wouldn’t have called themselves vikings!). I felt like the whole thing was Clara’s fault for being arrogant as usual, ignoring what the Doctor said and getting herself and Maisie Williams captured… Which set the whole chain of events in motion.
6. The Woman Who Lived
This was the fallout of the Doctor making Maisie Williams immortal in the previous episode. The good point was no Clara!! Hurrah! But.. “Me” was actually even more irritating, even if she had some fair points about the way the Doctor treated her.
She was so annoying she made the Doctor glad to see Clara again…
Also Rufus Hound was in this episode, and was surprisingly good.
My partner will force me to keep watching, but it’s a struggle. A shame because I actually love Twelve.. the problem is he feels completely smothered by Clara and I find her sucking the fun out of every episode…
I’m not sure how I’ll keep tracking my thoughts on series 9 now I don’t have a weekly check-in around the new series. Maybe I’ll wait until the end and round up… I don’t think I’ll have much good to say anyway while it’s still Clara Who so I don’t think it’ll be fun to write or read! 😅
