“Are you my Mummy?” Penultimate Who asks familial questions…

After noting that he and Ruby keep seeing the same woman’s face scattered through time and space, the Doctor decides they should go to UNIT to see if he can use their resources to actively track her down in the contemporary world – with the added attraction of catching up with some old friends along the way.

It also becomes apparent that some UNIT experimental technology could help Ruby explore the mysteries of her birth and why she was left, as a baby, at the church on Ruby Road. The Doctor can’t cross his own timeline and was already there, but  UNIT’s ‘time windows’, views into the past, recreations of key moments generated by incredible amounts of data, also generate more questions than answers. The Doctor realises that there was something else there that night, something that could possibly be reaching back and forward across time with fatal consequences.

The Doctor is about to find out that he and the Tardis itself may have unwillingly played a far greater role than he’d ever realised, but first he’s going to have to face a very old enemy, one who has been waiting for a very long time – and possibly in plain sight…

*big spoilers*

To echo an infamous Star Wars line: “It’s a trap…”

The online Who community, as all fandoms, likes to guess, second-guess and work out some of the ‘bigger picture’ elements. It tends to be hit-and-miss in result, with some ‘leaks’ and ‘rumours’ turning out to be nothing…but to be fair, some of the initially-outlandish ideas have turned out to be on the nose, so you take your chances. And to be even more fair, it wasn’t so much a case of which of the main rumours were right this time as the somewhat unlikely situation of them all having some accurate pay-off. However, somewhere Russell T Davies is cackling into an equal disinformation campaign.

Those of us who thought the mentions of Susan, the Doctor’s grand-daughter played by Carole Ann Ford and not seen in the show since the days of William Hartnell had been name-checked multiple times and the ‘coincidence’ of having a mysteriously-recurring character played by an actor named Susan Twist and a song called ‘There’s always a twist at the end…‘ seemed to deliberately encourage the idea that after half a century we might be picking up one of the show’s longest-dangling threads. In The Legend of the Ruby Sunday the show has already guessed (either through knowing fans like patterns or by deliberately seeding the speculation) that ‘Susan Foreman’ might be expected in some form or another.  The Doctor wonders if the 2024 version of Susan can be found in the reason that Susan Triad keeps showing up and that her company’s name is an anagram of Tardis. (The episode has dialogue scoffing at how easy that anagram is).

But no – or, at least if my suspicions are correct, not until next week when I’d bet on some kind of real-Susan pay-off – it turns out that the alphabetical clue factor at work is one of the other rumours.  Susan Triad’s name can be shortened to Sue and her company is technology. Sue. Tech. Or, Sutekh, the ancient evil only just defeated by the Doctor in The Pyramids of Mars back in the 1970s. And here the paper-mache jackal mask of the 1970s FX-era is replaced by full-on CGI-rendering of the Egyptian ‘god’ to full effect.

The problem with the episode is that in its attempt to start tying everything together, it shifts from one mystery to another as if they all have equal weight. It’s awkward when the mission of the moment is to identify Susan Twist’s identity and mission-statement and then everything on that front stops so Ruby can try to have closure with identifying the person who left her at the church door all those years ago. Of course, we know it’ll all be connected in some way, but the characters don’t and it feels like their attention is divided in a convenient manner rather than a logical one. And yes, things happen in a certain order here because they have to for the story and any deep analysis would likely show how easy things and should have gone differently.

All due credit to Russell T Davies in the way he dropped certain other easter-eggs into the mix both to tantilise and distract. The trip to a causality-altered present/future in The Devil’s Chord now cleverly echoes a similar trip the Doctor and Sarah-Jane undertook all those years for similar reasons in The Pyramids of Mars and there’s certainly a feeling of an OMG classic-villain return a la the climactic Utopia in Tennant’s second season, especially with the villain’s name appearing repeatedly typed out – this time not ‘YANA- You are not Alone’ but Suthek’s moniker instead.

On the supporting cast front, it’s great to see Jemma Redgrave having more to do as Kate Stewart and some nice dialogue underlying her familial connection to the Brigadier. Yasmin Finney returns as Donna Noble’s daughter Rose and we get a formal introduction to 13 year old prodigy and scientific advisor Maurice Gibbons played by Lenny Rush (though, to be blunt, the squeaky-voice sometimes made dialogue difficult to catch). Genesis Lynea plays UNIT tech Harriet (proving surnames can end up being important!), Alexander Devrient reprises UNIT tough guy Colonel Christopher Ibrahim and Tachia Newall is requisite red-shirt Colonel Winston Chidozie (which leads to Kate Stewart’s withering recognition that the Doctor’s orders essentially get him killed).

There’s still some of Davies’ famous hand-wavery doesn’t-make-sense-if-you-think-about-it elements and an argument to be made that the episode’s real power is in its last ten minutes rather than the meandering, confusing run-up. Equally, there’s some lines that overtly don’t make sense, even in the moment. The Doctor thinks that Susan Triad could be Susan but when a computer registers her DNA as fully human, he notes “We already knew that” which you could explain with a chameleon circuit reference, but is left hanging in a contradictory way. By the end of the episode, The Legend of Ruby Sunday feels like a classic Doctor Who climax with shiny, generally impressive VFX. Sutekh’s reveal (and, nicely, voiced again by Gabriel Woolf) may mean the most to old-time, die-hard Whovians while modern casual viewers will have to make do with a more ‘looks big and dangerous!‘ reaction.  It’s not perfect, the pace being uneven and too many story elements fighting for prominence, but it should please a vast majority of fans, except the ones who take pleasure in actively finding nothing to like or finding something distasteful to mutter.  Will we get that Susan pay-off next week and how much airtime will the Mrs. Flood (Anita Dobson) mystery get – and will they be tied together? It’s been a short season, but there’s much to bring together and resolve (or to try to) in next week’s finale… and there’s still images from the original trailer – of city-wide mass destruction and a desolate Doctor – to pay-off…