(Putting a spoiler warning at the top because please go see this episode before you read this, it does spoiler things and you should react to them in the episode instead of hearing me summarize them for you.)
Oh great. Now I have to go and summarize that in a cohesive set of paragraphs? Can I go back to bed instead?
I suspect tackling this one is going to end up like my Spyfall 2 writeup, wherein I tried really hard to summarize stuff before I had to throw up my hands and talk about the thing I actually wanted to bitch about. Fugitive Of The Judoon... well, it's equal parts bitching and equal parts speculation. The ball has not been thrown in the air so much as it has been punted into the upper stratosphere. Chris Chibnall, that magnificently odd son of a bitch, has tossed shit into the mix that actually does feel new and exciting and grandiose in its implications and theories. It's a lot like Spyfall 1 in that regard, but note how let down I was by Spyfall 2's big reveal being "what if... a plot point from 2008... ... ...again?". There are definitely parts of Fugitive that feel like that, but other parts of it feel fresh. The danger one falls into, and I'm doing it here, is treating this as a solely Chris Chibnall script. There are two major additions to this episode that feel like his reach, given that they're arc shit, but the rest of this thing is ostensibly written by Vinay Patel. Holy shit, the same genius who wrote Demons Of The Punjab! Quite possibly the best episode of Series 11! Before we deal with Chibnall's grand reach, let's see what Patel has for us.
Cutting out all the bullshit around it that feels Chibnall-esque, what we have is a unique and human story from Patel, all centered around Ruth Clayton. We get to know her in the cold open! She's nice! She's got a nice hubby, she lives in a picturesque place in England, she does tours but nobody really wants to take the tours, and today's her birthday! She's friendly with a lot of people in the community too, like the nice old lady who lives outdoors or the kind of weird barista at the cafe. Ruth Clayton has a nice life, and then it all goes to absolute shit when alien rhinos come down and quarantine the whole place. Again, we have to do our best to ignore the Chibnall power for at least a bit, and focus on the very human story of the Claytons. Lee Clayton clearly is acting suspicious, and he seems to know more than he lets on. Then he's killed by what appears to be the mysterious benefactor of the Judoon, and it's tragic. Ruth herself has some bullshit embedded in her head, and she despairs at the thought that her life as she knows it could be one giant fabrication. She's Ruth Clayton! She knows who she is, she's human, and why is all this space bullshit happening to her? It's only in forcing myself to write about this episode without screaming about all the whizz-bang-boom bullshit Chibnall's co-write hurls into the thing that I'm really getting a sense for the human melodrama of it all. In a way, it does echo Demons in that we witness Ruth Clayton, see her struggle and grief, and eventually watch her destruction. Something big and exciting and shocking gets put there in her place, but we can't forget Ruth Clayton. Ruth Clayton is gone. Huh. I actually like the episode a little more now that I can properly articulate that part of it. Writing does some fun things, y'all. Good on you, Patel. You did your best again, despite Chibnall's best efforts to overshadow what you were up to. We must now deal with the Big Chibnall Kabooms.
Alright, so we got some dark depressed Doctor here. Still deeply moved and shaken by the destruction of Gallifrey, snapping at her companions that they don't know a thing about her and her inner turmoil. I'd groan, but they'll do something with this at the end and beyond that could make this... not bad. We're mid-season, I don't know where any of this shit is going to go, so this is full-on speculation mode. That speculation mode is facilitated by the episode's weakest segment, in hindsight. Hey motherfuckers, Captain Jack Harkness is back after a decade. Now, this move made a lot of people very happy because they love Captain Jack. It also made a lot of people very mad because they don't like John Barrowman. Forgive me for fence-sitting on that issue, but I have my own unique gripe about this whole thing. Captain Jack's role in this episode is twofold: A) warp the companions out of the Judoon situation and onto his ship so the Doctor and Ruth have their own adventure with revelations, and B) deliver a whole bunch of arc word bullshit involving a lone Cyberman. This... this could be done by anyone. It could have been Maisie Williams as Me, it could be Clara, it could be Martha Jones. Once they decided it would be Captain Jack they bother to write him in character, sure, but his main function is a season arc delivery machine happening off in space and distracting us from the actual plot down on Earth with the Doctor and Ruth. This gets at something I prodded at in the Spyfall 2 writeup; a bunch of little things that are fine on their own, but put together create a pattern that I don't like. Spyfall 2's major beats and selective blind spots felt like a retro throwback to the RTD era. I get that vibe even more now. We have Judoon doing the same shit they were up to in the Series 3 opener. We have Captain Jack. We have one more major thing I'll get to involving Ruth Clayton. It's the blatant nature of the Captain Jack stuff where I find the breaking point. For the first time in my memory, I feel actively pandered to by Doctor Who, in the same way I would by watching a Doug Walker Nostalgia Critic video in the past, or by playing Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures. Captain Jack's inclusion feels like it is there to light up the part of my brain that recognizes John Barrowman and yell and scream in hype. I did. Then I thought about it and went "wait a minute he didn't do anything.". Alright. He delivered his arc word stuff. We'll worry about what that means in a few weeks. I am not that impressed in hindsight by his showing up.
Lucky for Chibnall, that's not the only trick he pulls this episode. Thank god for that, too. The Jack thing was something I got spoiled on via Twitter, the one alt account I didn't mute as the episode aired got through and had to made an untagged Captain Jack joke. Well, there's the big hype surprise given away early for me, I thought. Oh. Oh you sweet summer child. This shit managed to remain unspoiled for me, and I had an honest to god natural blindsided reaction to it, staring at the TV mouth agape. Was I really seeing this shit? Ruth Clayton, destroyed... but by smashing a thing and having light fill her. The Doctor digging up a grave to find a police box. Yes. Yes. Ruth Clayton was the Doctor all along, the true fugitive of the Judoon, and she had hidden by using the Chameleon Arch from Series 3. More 2007 wank, I know, but HOLY FUCK! I legitimately have no goddamned idea what Chibnall is playing at here. "Our" Doctor doesn't recognize the Ruth Doctor, but the Ruth Doctor doesn't remember ever being Jodie Whittaker. More to the point, the Time Lords called in the Judoon to catch the Ruth Doctor. Now this shakeup has some potential. Fuck Gallifrey being destroyed again, fuck Captain Jack's Cyberman nonsense, this has the potential to be some wild shit. It all depends on how much of the lore Chibnall is willing to shake up. I'm again put in the unenviable position of trusting Chris Chibnall to plot out a satisfying arc, but there are possibilities for the Ruth Doctor. A pre-Hartnell incarnation? Slotted between Troughton and Pertwee to make the Season 6B theory canon? A Doctor from an alternate universe? (This one's where I'm putting my chips.) I don't know. We're in a fun state of temporal grace, and I look forward to re-reading this post in the future and going "ha ha ha you dumbass you don't know what the deal is.". Time will tell... but what I can say involves what I said earlier about the companion snapping. An anxious and moody Doctor at the end of this story re-iterates that the fam doesn't know a goddamned thing about her, and they retort that. Of course they know who she is. She's the Doctor. She brought them together, saved them, saved countless other lives across time and space. This, in so much as it is a bit of a rehash of the "I am an idiot" speech from Death In Heaven, is still a lesson that our Doctor needs to take to heart. As we've learned in so many other episodes, you don't have to be the Doctor to be the Doctor. All you need is that energy, that burning desire. Jackson Lake could do it. Clara Oswald could do it. A Monk simulation could do it. Jodie Whittaker can do it. So yeah. In writing this one, I liked it more than I thought I did on initial watch. Neat. Now let's see where this shit goes.
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