New Doctor Who Season 1 First Impressions: Episode 4 (73 Yards)

I want to apologize to Steven Moffat right now for thinking that the reaction to Boom was divisive, because Jesus.

If ever there was an episode of this show that split opinion between realists and formalists, this is the one. From a realist sense, 73 Yards is an absolute dealbreaker of a nonsense episode. A bunch of mysterious and horrible shit happens to Ruby over these 45 minutes, and none of it is given any explicit explanation. You do not get a succinct piece of technobabble where Ncuti Gatwa says OH RUBY A QUANTUM LIMITATION BUBBLE WAS AROUND YOU breathlessly with great charm to soothe your queries. You do not even get any sort of handwave that says "Oh wow, it was magic, really shouldn't have done that salt thing huh?". Shit happens, it all gets cancelled out at the end due to some sort of loop, and we move on without ever knowing the specifics of what or why. From a realist stance, it's an absolute dealbreaker. Things must happen in the television program for good and clearly defined reasons, the logistics of which all make enough sense in the end to cohere. There can be a wiggle room of ambiguity, but there must be at least an attempt at definition. As an example, think of the episode Midnight. The antagonistic force in that story is never truly defined or explained, but there are enough rules and logic in play for us to understand how this creature possesses and takes over, and how its mirroring works when it latches on to a new target.

The mystery woman in 73 Yards does not have that. She always lurks exactly 73 yards away from Ruby, is always out of focus in photographs, and any attempt by anyone to talk to her sends them screaming away in existential horror from her. That's all we ever learn, aside from the twist at the end (no not that one, she runs away screaming in the first five minutes), and so that is all we have to work with. What are we left to do with this 45 minutes of television, in the absence of definition and explanation? One can be cynical and write it off as nonsense, but we're not going to do that here. I want to take you along my thought process on this show and thinking on it. I fall more into the formalist camp, where I'm less concerned with what happens in the show and more how it makes me feel. Instead of writing it off, I choose to take a different approach. In the absence of an explanation, of knowing what happens, I focus on how it made me feel.

I learned this trick by watching the majority of the filmography of David Lynch, and though you can get it from other fine cinema that is the lens I will approach this from. It would be reductive and incorrect to call 73 Yards "Lynchian", as being Lynchian implies a specific vibe and theme at play. Stylistically speaking, though, there's a resemblance. A truly good Lynch film will, like 73 Yards, have a bunch of absolutely strange shit happen with no defined and canonized explanation at the end. It's up to you to decide what it all means and symbolizes. Famously, when the actors on set of a Lynch project will ask for clarification on what a scene means so they have a better understanding of how to play it out, he will respond with "What do you think?". That is the lens through which I view Lynch films, and also how I viewed 73 Yards. Some might call that a copout, that it's the creative's job to formalize and define shit instead of pawning off the legwork to the viewer. I disagree. I like the challenge, and how it mirrors one's own resonances when watching media. This is the viewpoint of vibes-based storytelling. What are the vibes at play in 73 Yards for me?

73 Yards is, to me, a story about anxiety and apprehension over abandonment. Over the terrible alternate timeline at play here, Ruby Sunday is cursed with her deepest fears over who she is and why she was abandoned becoming manifest. Her becoming the mystery woman 73 yards away at the end is signposted in the way that her life becomes one lived at semper distans after all of this. Anyone who encounters the mystery woman runs screaming, but not just from the mystery woman: from Ruby herself. Even her own adoptive mother, on one encounter with this figure, completely cuts Ruby out of her life for good on a dime. Kate Stewart and UNIT do the same, and the look of sheer disgust on Jemma Redgrave's face as she says "Disengage" says it all. Ruby is a thing to be discarded, abandoned, something to distance yourself from at all costs. It is a lonely life of solitude, one where she truly cannot connect with anyone as her multiple failed relationships over the years show. It's just her and the woman, and the woman is her so in the end she truly is abandoned and alone. Her older self seems to have made peace with it, but the truth is there.

There's that whole digression with Roger ap Gwilliam, the nuke-happy PM who gets ousted by Ruby using the mystery woman against him to save the world, but in the end this is not the solution to the episode that Ruby thinks it is. She's been abandoned. Not just by every figure of positivity in her life, but by Doctor Who plotting itself. Doing a Doctor Who plot and stopping this power-mad abusive fuckhead isn't the solution to the mystery of the episode that breaks her out of the curse. It's a good thing, considering that 2040s Britain doesn't start a thermonuclear war, but it doesn't solve the episode because this is not a traditional Doctor Who episode to be solved. Things do get resolved in the end, due to acceptance or being given a second chance or just the whims of the fae or something. I don't know. I'm not here to give you all the answers of what happened, just to tell you how I felt. Let's do that and close out.

I love the hell out of 73 Yards. This is the fresh direction Doctor Who has needed, something I have never seen from it before. It boldly steps forward, breaking the circle of realist sci-fi storytelling and bringing not just magic into the show, but an entirely new for Doctor Who way of telling a story. Things happen, we don't know what, but how did it make you feel? What do you think? I think it's spectacular, depressingly poignant, and heartbreaking. It harrows and haunts me in all the right ways, its themes resonating with me to form this story about abandonment and adoption anxieties that once again deliver the promise of what the Timeless Child arc could have been were it not so concerned with lore. Throwing all that out creates a masterpiece of an episode, and that's not even the only way to read it. My podcast pal Kuchiri thinks the mystery woman represents Death, and I am eager to hear why he thinks so tomorrow when we record our show. Until then, I will leave you with 73 Yards. Make of it what you will, but I make of it that it is a damn fine episode of this show.