S14/S1 73 Yards 24th/25th May Spoilers Aware

Quite Good

Very like a couple of similar Eps though

Hinges on the central performance which delivers

Could be contradicted and baffled by later EPs

Regards

mark687

Would this episode be ok for a nearly-8 year old?

I am checking out comments all over to try to gauge .

Thanks

Yes in content but they'll probably be bored. It's a much more cerebral episode than anything since at least the Capaldi era.

Ooooh I really liked this one! Exactly my favorite kind of RTD story, even if there are some similarities to his previous stories too. I finally felt like I clicked with Ruby this episode - Millie was brilliant! Very tempted to give this story a 5 as well!

A brilliant episode… or… absolutely wonderful… but what about… captivating throughout, wasn’t it, Millie was excellent… though why…. an instant classic… is there a perception filter around this episode because I could have sworn that… brilliant, just brilliant.

That was properly good. Great performances all round from everyone.

I’m not sure what to make of that. It’s a mix of past ideas from RTD’s desk (Midnight, Turn Left, Curse of Clyde Langar, Years & Years) but doesn’t seem to add up to anything. I get it being open to interpretation, but I’m just left bemused what point he was trying to make here. Maybe that’s just the supernatural now, it defies meaning.

This was entertaining but fell apart at the end, like RTD forgot or didn't know how to bring it to a conclusion once Ruby had done what she needed to do. I don't mind ambiguity but it was unsatisfying.

The main message seems to be don't trust the welsh.

Actually, the more I think about it the ending is problematic. If Ruby doesn't do what she does then we get a mad welsh PM & nuclear war!

Well, that was... deeply frustrating. I'll try and keep my thoughts brief here, as this is just my immediate reaction, having finished the episode only a few seconds ago. In short: it didn't stick the landing.

About halfway through the runtime (I actually paused the video to check): I thought to myself, "Wow, this is a fantastic episode. It's shaping up to be one of the best I've ever seen." Kind of like an inverted 'Midnight' -- not just a Doctor-Lite story, but a Doctor-Absent story altogether. And usually those are my least favorite kinds of stories! (I am here for the Doctor, true.)

Only the mystery of the '73 Yards' was incredibly compelling and deeply creepy, and Millie Gibson's performance was fantastic. And, good god, the sheer trauma of seeing her foster-mother physically flee from her, and then just... cut off all communication. Fantastic. In an ideal world, this would be a(nother) frustratingly disappointing two-parter, with the first episode ending here: a perfect 5/5 story, no notes.

Only instead Kate Stewart showed up, and we got a brief scene that didn't really go anywhere or accomplish anything to move the story forward. In this back-half, I thought the transition (is it fair to call it a montage?) of Ruby living out her life was pretty well-handled, but right in the middle of it we get a very abbreviated subplot about a very thinly-sketched fascist PM. A very abbreviated subplot that in an even better ideal world would be the focus of that second episode of a two-part story that wasn't frustratingly disappointing.

And then there's the end of the story. The landing.

Which is a weird thing to complain about in an RTD story, because as often as I've pointed out that he's kinda rubbish at plots, I've more often pointed out that he excels at emotional resonance. You know, like the scene where Ruby's mother abandons her -- neither overplayed nor underplayed. Perfectly affecting, perfectly effective storytelling. Nothing but praise for that scene; no notes.

But all of that's undermined with that most-reviled of story tropes, the "And It Was All A Dream," ending. Cool. So the 50-minutes of narrative we just saw were an aborted timeline that didn't affect anything beyond the Doctor's gait. We learned nothing new about any of the characters, and the characters themselves learned nothing new about, well, anything (save, perhaps, to watch where they put their feet... while walking along rocky terrain near the edges of very tall cliffs). And that fantastic mystery that propelled the first half of the story so amazingly well? Still a mystery. One they don't even try to explain. And, if anything, the revelation that the woman stalking Ruby through her life was just... Old Ruby... it doesn't make any sense, and makes the overall mystery make even less sense. Why would Ruby's mother run away from Old Ruby? And why would that cause her to break off her relationship with not-Old Ruby? And why would literally anyone else run away screaming from Old Ruby? Which, to be fair, could have worked. Could have worked brilliantly... if not for the episode pressing that giant red UNDO button.

It just... it doesn't hold up.

It's all just weak plotting that might've been saved by one of those "emotionally resonant" endings that RTD is so good at. Like imagine the story ending with a scene where the Doctor and Old Ruby meet, and speak to each other for a bit. This could give us that resonance -- a good opportunity for some narrative catharsis as Old Ruby tells her story to the Doctor. The Doctor could even explain away why things happened the way they did, or speculate, or just throw his hands up in the air and say, "who knows?" But it would give us that grounding. The timeline could still be undone the same way, with Ruby none the wiser, but the Doctor would've still walked back into the Tardis knowing what had happened. The events would have changed
 something, at least, no matter how small. And without that, '73 Yards' is, simply, utterly inconsequential.

A story that doesn't change anything -- quite literally -- is a story that doesn't matter. 

And you know what makes this whole thing doubly frustrating for me, personally? It's the first Doctor Who in a very, very, very long time not to have a monster. Or, rather, it almost is. The revelation that the old woman is Old Ruby would seem to indicate there is no monster; the way she's treated by literally every other character in the story prior to that revelation would seem to indicate that Ruby, herself, is a monster. But if it's the former, well, I've been harping on for years about how formulaic Doctor Who has gotten, with its constant re-use of the exact same sorts of stories despite operating with a premise that very effectively enables them to tell literally any kind of story imaginable. Monsters are a crutch! A monster-less episode is just as fundamentally appealing to me as that other White Whale of Doctor Who stories, the straight historical.

....    ....    ....    ....

And, yes: that was me being brief.

....

With the poll there, I kinda feel obligated to provide a rating, but maaaaaaaaan... I really don't feel up to it. That first half was so good; that back-half was so crushingly disappointing. Do I just rate both halves and split the average? That's be a 5 and a 2, so.... I guess that'd give this one a 3? But that doesn't quite feel right, either, given how powerful the performances are, how intriguing the mystery is, and how thought-provoking and memorable the story is. Say what you will about '73 Yards,' but odds are good you'll still remember how this episode went in five years... whereas there are plenty of Doctor Who stories I've largely forgotten after five days. Surely that has to count for something? 

1. It counts for 1. I'll round up to a 4, I guess.

Maybe for the next thread we can have an extra poll option for "too frustrated to assign an arbitrary numerical score," because, honestly, that's where I'm at right now.