the touches of 1960s modernism in the set design and decor seem tonally correct
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“… and my wonderful [pause] character’s father…”
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RTD accidentally created a perfect metaphor for his writing in the new series: the doctor frantically trying to keep the memory tardis from falling apart or exploding by tying together every loose thread he sees amongst the pile of nostalgia detritus.
Yet another dramatically inert doctor who series finale. Who else yawned when every being that has ever existed in the universe died? I don’t know how RTD hasn’t yet learned that relentlessly raising the stakes actually kills tension.
He should try to do much, much less. Maybe he can retire again after this one season and we can get some wholly new blood running the show instead of a doddering sixty year old who hasn’t had a fresh idea in twenty years
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well. don’t know how to process that final episode yet.
but this is kind of hypnotic:
slightly spoilers
I would be more okay with the mundaneity of Ruby’s mystery parentage if it didn’t also require that I actively ignore all of the clues to something supernatural going on, like the spontaneous snow and music. Instead, those clues are swept aside as red herrings unworthy of even the most perfunctory explanation.
And even all of that wouldn’t bother me if there was more to Ruby’s character than her mystery, but there isn’t. She was an underwritten companion gamely performed by an actor who deserved better
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it sure was a Classic Rusty Finale and thus my least fav episode of the season so far. but im just… frustrated (in the sense that it frustrates my efforts to reply, not makes me frustrated at you) by your take that he’s uhh, an incompetent boob who cant write his way out of a paper bag lol. like ive been struggling to articulate this without sounding like a defensive fangirl, and i still am, but. i think youre just flat out wrong lol
if anything it just tells me he knows exactly what he wants out of his Doctor Who finales: big FX spectacle, hella melodrama, impossible stakes that only a deus ex machina can resolve, a climax/denoumount that spotlights character beats and dismisses crunchy plot mechanics with a big roll eyes jerk off motion. Like this was kind of a 2024 remaster of Last of the Time Lords (with notes where you can tell RTD watched the Moffat years and nodded thoughtfully) and i just dont think its cuz he a crusty old fuck got nothing new to say. Idk, i thought this season (inc. the 2023 specials) was rife with him finding new things to say with his approach, and gleefully fucking with the flimsy canon of this old ass show whether fans liked jt or noy. Maybe i just felt that way cuz i like TV for dummo babies!! Idk kinda feels that way sometimes here!!
I do sincerely hope he hired BIPOC writers for next year, but like, also im already pretty confident he did? cuz this season has been consistently dedicated to giving the show a more diverse canvas, and it would just be idiotic to make a statement like Dot & Bubble then not follow up with an effort from someone with skin in that game. and again, dont think the man’s an idiot
i mean even Chibnall commissioned Demons of the Punjab
edit: i swear im trying to disagree politely on a conversational point and am being bad at words rn in trying 
so i also wanna say, i feel awkward re: Ruby’s story because i agree it “wrapped up” unsatisfyingly and in a way that annoyed me… but… i know shes back next year, cuz of the bloids. So to be totally fair, that’s a plot point i let slide for meta reasons more than its own merits.
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he’s not an incompetent boob, he just has awful instincts when it comes to doctor who. I know he knows how to write a coherent story with actual characters when he’s not writing for this show. It’s just something about working on this big nostalgia lodestar in his life that wrecks his ability to tell a story with earned emotional beats, to tell a story that isn’t a series of unrelated events.
He is paradoxically trapped between wanting to never disappoint his audience and treating them with total disdain. All of his new new who scripts are just a series of ‘wouldn’t it be cool if…’ moments that don’t connect together and undermine whatever themes he has the characters spout because he’s convinced himself that that’s all that who fans want. The doctor portentously intoning “Now I must become a monster” is a perfect example. It’s a setup without a payoff. What does he do after saying this line that’s perfect for an episode trailer? He yells at a cgi bad dog and brings life back to the entire universe. How very monstrous. It’s bad writing to make promises you don’t intend to keep, rusty.
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but… moments like what? i really dont know what you specifically mean by that?
The 2023 specials alone are rife with choices that seem designed to piss off diehard Who Fans lol and there’s def a thematic thruline
-starting and ending with regenerations that go “pbbblltttt fuck the ‘rules’” (bigeneration was a fucking flex idgaf)
-Star Beast not only dares to foreground a trans woman in an important role but also does a solid job of giving the (largely cissy) audience some 101 insights, clumsy lines about male-presenting Time Lords nonwithstanding. its climax is about how different people process their grief, how Donna and Rose are able to win by sharing theirs together while Tennant2 Doctor remains in isolation (his arc until Ncuti bursts out of his crotch in a fabulous gay mpreg birth scene)
-Wild Blue Yonder is completely a character piece about two people who haven’t seen each other in a long time struggling to reconnect and process their shared grief, with a creepy scifi wrapping. also it officially handwaves away the handwaves “aliens did it” in favor of a cosmically weirder universe, which really the best classic Who was doing anyway
-The Giggle has the bigeneration and is also just so gonzo and fun, and thematically it is an almost too clean bow on 14’s lil arc (and 10’s greater arc): he learns that he needs to stop bottling his pain from the only person who can only really get him to listen, himself. (in a pair of tightie whities while he’s going commando.)
-The Church on Ruby Road has the novelty of a Doctor who shakes his ass off on the dancefloor fighting goblins on an airship with the power of musical numbers, but even under the froth you can pick out a theme, the potential warmth of accepting difficult experiences and trauma vs the understandable desire to analyze and wallow
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I literally gave an example right after the bit you quoted
Okay well give me another one i guess because a stupid portentous line in the finale is not “all his new new who scripts”
or you know what fuck it nevermind.
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Every time it snowed around ruby, which is roughly 75% of ruby-centric scenes throughout the season. Every time a background character commented on how impossible it was to trace ruby’s parentage. The doctor shouting ‘push the button’. 73 yards. The 13 year old boy genius has a machine gun built into his segway. ruby has a song hidden inside her. mrs flood says something cryptic.
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Totally not reading any of this thread til I’m caught up even though the bbc’s Facebook already blew the season’s surprise villain for me (and god damn it, I would have flipped out), but I enjoyed Rogue. I’ve always been a fan of RTD using his pulpit, and the fandom drama junkie meta commentary was fun. Writing the Doctor as more impulsive is a new twist and it seems like a novel thread. Let’s see where it goes. I always loved that bit at the end of Family of Blood where he got creatively vindictive as a bit of run up to that season’s wrap.
I am shocked they didn’t go the extra mile and have this guy be from Jack and Spike’s future time cop organization.
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Rogue wasn’t written by RTD! One of two episodes this season
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Ohhh! I didn’t catch that!!
(cracks knuckles) (cracks neck) (cracks back) (cracks in the whole of Time and Space) ow
k for the record im using the transcript(s) at The Doctor Who Transcripts - Empire of Death to review this stuff, which is also just a kickass resource if you care about Doctor Who
(and i acknowledge it’s telling that reviewing it helped clarify parts of the last episode… it suuuuure was a Rusty finale)
-Ruby’s snow/song (“Carol of the Bells”): so ok the moral of Ruby’s story is pretty cute, that her mom was never really a huge mystery, it just seemed that way to her. And the Doctor and the TARDIS and a goth doggy god who was clinging under the TARDIS’ chassis like Sideshow Bob all empathized with/obsessed over her story in different ways, and it did Weird Shit™ to Time & Space (R). (Apparently it was inspired by Rise of Skywalker doing that bullshit reversal of Rey’s parentage being pointedly unimportant → oops we meant to say Palpatine is her grandpa). That’s the signature “fuck your facts, I have feelings” RTD finale and whether you buy in at all or not is up to you, ofc.
In any case tho the manifestations of snow and song are from Sutekh glommed onto the TARDIS, obsessing over his fan theories real hard. When it snows in “Empire” it’s while he’s trying to possess Mel, and the Maestro hints that the “song in her heart” has Sutekh’s stink all over it. Also when the Doctor wrests the TARDIS away from the Maestro, it makes the Sutekh ouchie noise (which it also first made back in “Wild Blue Yonder”, hinting that Sutekh was starting to manifest at the edge of reality)
-mom being super hard to find: i dont know enough about family tree shit to know how likely it is that someone who never got blood tested basically can’t be found but that seems to be the mundane explanation, given that they find her that way in the future when blood testing is compulsory. Which does fit the “we made Ruby’s mom a mystery but she was just a normal person” bit – like Davina McCall said, if shes not in a database we dunno, happens sometimes, sorry. Ruby and the Doctor and Sutekh just assumed it had to be something bigger than that. They also make a big deal about the TARDIS perception filter and state it extends about 66.something meters (which = 73 yards), while at another point explicitly saying the CCTV camera that recorded Ruby’s mom making the baby drop was exactly 66 meters away, and thus just inside the filter. so it’s not explicitly connected but strongly implied the perception filter (which Sutekh was screwing with at that moment) had something to do with her mysteriousness & inability to be caught on camera.
Also, grain of salt this is 100% pat fan theory on my part but: Ruby does receive the bad news about not being able to find her parents while in the middle of a goblin-induced bad luck streak, which has bled over to Long Lost Family judging by Davina breaking multiple limbs and nearly getting 360 noscoped by a Christmas star
-73 yards: i take it you mean the fact that this episode doesnt really explain its mechanics. i actually think that rocks lol, and is the best example yet of RTD2 Doctor Who explicitly crashing scifi into fantasy. The TARDIS parks in a fairy circle, Ruby disturbs it, and some unknowable dark fey force punishes her meaningless transgression by wielding the TARDIS against her for an entire lifetime, forcing her into a purgatory made of her worst fears came true. i took The Doctor being removed from the action as a signal that we weren’t going to get our usual exposition about this monster of the week. it’s a cosmic horror. BUT!! this is undoubtedly a Marmite episode, and if it didn’t do it for you i think that’s fair
-push the button/machinegun superkidgenius: ngl i barely remember these and im not really following you re: them. i mean they are kinda some twee bullshit if thats what you mean
-Mrs Flood says something cryptic: the last scene of the season is her looking at the camera and saying “I’m gonna be the arc villain next year, buckle up bitch” so im gonna let this one slide for now. get back to me in 2025
-and to dip back to the Doctor’s “now i am become death, destroyer of worlds” (drags a dog behind his car lashed to a chain) moment – the finale pulls audio right from Pyramids of Mars where Doc4 explains that he Sutekh is the last of the Osirans, and he put Sutekh in time jail rather than kill him. Same Doctor has a very famous scene where he witters about whether its OK to wipe out a race of genetically engineered nazi squids. Every other Doctor has a moment like this where they guilt trip themself about killing the insanely evil bad guy, because it is core to the character that theyre an all-loving cosmic weenie. In this case it’s him conceding to Sutekh “in a way you won, cuz I didnt wanna kill you, but, welp” and then he kills him. There’s your setup and there’s your payoff: the Doctor feels bad about killing, he gives the villain a little Doctor Who speech about that, and then he does the deed anyway because its gotta be done
(its also probably meant to be a perma-sendoff to Sutekh. we brought this guy back but no seriously he’s dead fr this time. or at least he is until the 100th anniversary specials)
fake edit i forgot this stupid overlong post was in drafts whatever im just airing it out. i tried to steelman your points and get you to chuckle tulpa, whether you agree or disagree, if i failed oh well
Will also reaffirm that if Davies writes all of next year i will be very annoyed
real edit cuz this post was too short i forgot to mention though that i… think he wont? RTD1 S1 was also written 90% by him with assists from Moffat, Paul Cornell and Mark Gatiss. So it would track that he once again wanted to outline a first season mostly by himself before easing off of the reins a bit
It would also just be fucking tacky and embarrassing if Chibnall had a more diverse writer stable lol
that said, even though Stephen Moffat emphatically doesn’t count as diverse its nice that he’s doing the Christmas special, because most of his are pretty dope as actual stories while Rusty’s are zesty fluff at best
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“There’s Always a Twist At the End” is not a good song (besides Ncuti’s vocal 
) but its fucking infuriatingly catchy and i laugh like an idiot whenever i get served a meme video using it
its extremely cringe how many times i yelled out “THERES ALWAYS A TWIST AT THE EEEEND” to no one at my job the past couple days
also this video makes me wish i could find the one of 9th Doctor going “KILL YOURSELF!! WHY DONT YA JUST DIE (lightning bolt eyes meme)” but i think that was just on twitterx
i love that this is low tier gods legacy
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im 99% not ok with yelling at people to kill themselves online but im 100% the 1% thats that meme
You can’t see me, can you? You look at me, and you can’t see me. Have you any idea what that’s like? I’m not on the phone, I’m right here, standing in front of you. Please, just… just see me
don’t mind me just pondering and totally not crying how this is somehow the most insanely trans-coded Doctor Who bit ever*
do not fuckin skip 12
*besides the entire Sacha Dhawan Master story which i can not possibly read in the context of Missy other than “the Master is forcibly detransitioned by her closeted past self and consequently fucking loses it”
it’s as ineptly handled as any Chibnall era stuff ive watched but having now actually seen Power of the Doctor, holy shit lol she literally twins with the Doctor and begs not to be changed back, who the fuck put that subtext there do we need to talk?? im like wow oh wow holy shit Master girlie im so so sorry
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Still bummed I didn’t get to bug out in real time with that reveal as someone who grew up on the Tom Baker era, but yeah the rest of the two parter was a stock undo destroying the universe thing. Which is playing the hits, can’t really fault the show for that.
I thought the Doctor making a point of killing Sutekh was Davies getting a quasi punch Nazis statement in there in the light of the legacy of that old exchange with Davros mentioned above.
I do think if the over arching theme of this go around, in the same way that the fall out of the time war was back in 2005, is that the universe is broken and we’re dealing with fucked up gods, I’m on board. They can’t all be musical though, right?
Did Mara get a little shoutout there too? Something about the three part being in that big preamble Sue was giving?