I'm going to make an unfavorable comparison between this and a Chibnall-era episode. It must be a day that ends in Y on the blog, but I have not felt this specific flavor of way about a part 1 since Chibnall's 2020 episode, Ascension Of The Cybermen. In a fundamental fashion, the two are very similar. Right to the heart of the matter, they each feel like several minutes of wheel spinning and red herrings meant to delay, ruminate on the mysterious mystery of the season arc, and then drop a big anticipatory cliffhanger to get us super excited for the next part. They don't feel like compact episodes in their own right to me. They feel like feature-length teasers for the next part to get me on board with watching it, and I really don't like that! Ascension spent a good chunk of its runtime showing us images without context, repeated inexplicable flashes to an Irish cop. It was a bold choice, to be sure, but not one which cohered in the moment. 73 Yards also did the inexplicable, sure, but that was a coherent and self-contained thing. You know there's no part 2 coming to make sense of it, so you grapple with it on its own merits.
In retrospect, it wasn't worth it. The Timeless Children shit the bed, and not just in its macrocosmic focus on deep Whoniverse lore to explain away the fucking Brain Of Morbius. Really think about this. We spend half of Ascension seeing the story of Brendan in Ireland with no explanation. We then spend half of The Timeless Children having the Master lore dump the story of the Timeless Child, and then get an "oh by the way all the Irish stuff was the story I just told you, but like censored or something". The anticipatory tease was all just to hear the same story twice, just because we had a week to burn and needed to keep you all glued to the TV screen so you'd come back next week. Nonsense. Utter nonsense, and one of the many nadirs of the show.
The Legend Of Ruby Sunday shares some unfortunate similarities with this, from the vantage point of June 16th. There is a conspiratorial tone of "Right, we're going to address and theorize all about the mysterious mysteries from this season! We're gonna talk about seeing Susan Twist all over time and space! We're gonna go back to trying to figure out the identity of Ruby's birth mother! We're gonna make implications about the grand return of Susan Foreman after 60 years! Then we'll end it all on a big shocking twist to get the viewer hooked!". As I said, wheel spinning and red herrings that feel like they're there to just keep us here until 43 minutes have passed and it is officially time to reveal the big twist at the end, and not a Susan Twist. It's dire and I don't like it, but that is not to say that this episode is completely without merit.
For one, the Time Window scene. Ostensibly the section of the episode where we deal with the legend of Ruby Sunday for a while, and introduce the malevolent force which has possessed the TARDIS, there's something about this that still catches my attention. Using an old fuzzy VHS from 2004, the dying embers of VHS as a format, and creating this projection in analog lo-fi to peek around in is certainly visually stunning. There are emotional beats in this scene, and in others, which speak to the heart and soul of the show and the real human drama behind it which I'm here for. Scenes like Ruby trying to move in desperation to peek behind the hood of her mysterious birth mother, or the Doctor talking about Susan Foreman with Kate, or the Doctor having a little emotional moment with Mel at Susan Triad's speak to me. These are the kind of fresh things I've been loving in that brilliant run of episodes. I genuinely love these touches, and they accentuate and lift up this episode for me, but they're fleeting. There's a point to this, and it's more macrocosmic with its heft then Doctor Who on the floor having a cry.
Sutekh is back after 50 years, canonized as the literal God of Death in RTD's new Pantheon. Susan Twist was a red herring, a troll of a mysterious mystery arc meant to make Doctor Who feel bad or something, and now there's a big scary dog thing what you know from an old Tom Baker story back and being menacing. That's what we were building up to. I'm not writing off the show and I will be back next week, but for all the dramatic heft I am sufficiently whelmed. It's just another known guy from the Whoniverse. I have no doubt that this came about in similar fashion to the Toymaker, where RTD wanted a big spooky death god as the season's Big Bad, realized that Doctor Who canon has one of those in its back pocket, and decided to just go for it. It's not some unknowable thing. It's some familiar asshole from canon. It flies directly in the face of the new freshness this era has been playing with so far. I really wish RTD could nail this Pantheon thing. They're either old fuckers from Doctor Who canon, or new fuckers playing story beats similar to the encounters with the old fuckers. I was hoping for something new. I was hoping for a story that had more to say beyond building up to this. I was hoping for a story that could stand on its own.
I didn't get that. Maybe you at home did, and you love this story, but I didn't get that. Instead I have this, and I have to sit with it for five days and hope that Empire Of Death is good. I think back to the Moffat era and its two-part finales, and something about them felt like concrete stories in their own right that swerved into something else for part 2. Dark Water had all that Danny/Clara stuff which is tragic on its own, for instance. This? Nope. I don't like this. Maybe I will after the 22nd when I have the other half, but right now? Nuh uh. While I have you in the grasp of this temporal pocket of time, let me tell you about yesterday. On June 15th I opened the day by watching this. Later in the evening, I watched Final Fantasy The Spirits Within for the first time in years. After that I finished watching a Japanese cartoon called Lycoris Recoil. The Doctor Who was the least resonant thing I watched that day. What a sad state of affairs.
Continued in Part 2.
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