How Do You Solve A Problem Like Ruby Sunday, Doctor Who?
I finally write about the Doctor Who Christmas 2023 finale, The Church On Ruby Road and make sense of it all.
Firstly I like Doctor Who. The Ood, the Bad Wolf and the Ogrons. I have been watching Doctor Who since I was four years old; my Dad has watched Doctor Who since he was sixteen, and my kids have watched Doctor Who since they were born. One of my eldest daughter's first phrases was, when watching the titles, saying "TARDIS running". So I have blinkers on when it comes to Doctor Who, I am going to like it. Writing an official Doctor Who comic published by IDW is definitely a life highlight. As was when I found myself having lunch at London Film And Comic Con at a table in the green room with five Doctor Whos. If you count Richard E Grant and I do, twice. There's still a TARDIS at my house on Google Streetview. I went to Time Fracture six times before it closed down, in the height of the pandemic. So don't expect some wild criticism of structure, woke culture, or storytelling tropes as internecine BBC/Disney politics from me; you are not going to get it. But some people seem to like me writing about Doctor Who and I am always happy to do so. And no one else seems to have seen what I saw in the Doctor Who finale, The Church on Ruby Road, from Christmas last year, so here we go.
Russell T Davies said that 99% of our Doctor Who season questions would be answered by the season finale, apart from one. He lied. The “one” was presumably the identity of Mrs Flood, and we have a few thoughts about that, but there were other big ones. And I'm going to do my best to answer them in a No-Prize head canon way.
Why Did It Always Snow On Ruby Sunday And What Is The Song Inside Her?
This was not answered but I am going to give it a go. Ruby Sunday may be an ordinary girl. But I think she is also a living time window. She is a time window to the moment when she was placed on the church door steps as a baby. Which is why UNIT’s own artificial time window worked so well when targeting her, why the sounds and images were so strong, when all they had was the twenty-year-old VHS footage.
And why is she a living time window you ask? Because when she was left at the church door twenty years ago, the UNIT time window with a Time Lord, and her adult self, looked at her, when a TARDIS, a Time Lord, a second Sutek TARDIS and a Memory TARDIS all turned up. Which was enough to imprint on her, and turn her into a time window, to that moment in space and time for the rest of her life.
So, yes, she is a living time window because all these events occurred, crossing time streams all at one point, and turning her into one. And the reason they were able to do that, was because she was a time window. Or at least would be very shortly. Timey wimey. To recall an earlier Doctor, “you named your daughter… after your daughter.”
And that is why her personal time window is locked to that moment and we get the same snow flowing through her from that moment at the church to wherever and whenever she is stressed.
Also for song. The sound of carols being sung in the Church rings out through her timeline, and as the Maestro noted, there was something different about her, there was a song in her.
Because she is a Living Time Window, she was also able to trigger the events of 67 Yards when she fell into a fairy circle. And also able to close that circle, as one might a window.
So she is an ordinary person. But she is also a Time Window, which attracted the Doctor to her but was also caused by the Doctor. Russell T Davies has gone for the Steve Ditko idea that the Big Bad should just be a normal person that you didn't know, using in Amazing Spider-Man for the villain Crime Master - later erroneously attributed by Stan Lee to the Green Goblin.
And I don’t think my reading destroys that. Ruby Sunday is important because everyone thinks she is, and as a result, she is actually important.
If Titan Comics ever give me a chance to write another Doctor Who comic, I bet I can turn that into a fun Playschool-style romp. What's In The Ruby Window?
A Russell T Davies Finale
As for the rest of that episode… just to recap a couple of decades of Doctor Who...
First Russell T Davies finale, Rose uses impossible power to delete all the Daleks, brings Captain Jack back to life, loses the Doctor.
Second Russell T Davies finale presses a button and sucks all the Daleks and Cybermen back where they came from, losing Rose.
Third Russell T Davies finale presses a button and gets the world chanting his name, fills the Doctor with impossible power, de ages him, reverses time, brings everyone back to life, losing Martha.
Fourth Russell T Davies finale, Donna full of impossible power presses a button and reverses all the travelled planets back to where they came from, losing Donna.
Fifth Russell T Davies finale, the Doctor presses a button and reverses the Master killing everyone on Earth and turning into him, losing the Doctor.
And now? The Sixth Russell T Davies finale, the Doctor presses a button and sucks Sutekh back where he came from and reverses the polarity of the death flow, bringing everyone back to life, but losing Ruby. For those complained about this one, but were fine with the first five, to paraphrase Mrs Flood...
Oh go on then, while we are at it, if Sutekh is the God Of Death, then the Doctor is now the God Of Life. We saw that when he breathed life into a butterfly in his first episode. For a professed atheist, Russell T Davies does like to fill his finales with Christian imagery, angels, resurrection, forgiveness, and the like. And now we have Mrs Flood, promising an angelic assault on God. Hang on, Mrs Flood... she couldn't be Noah's wife, could she?
But by dropping in additional Susan Triads, Russell has given Big Finish, Titan and the like the opportunity to tell more stories about the Doctor encountering her in different times and spaces. Looks like Susan Twist have plenty of work for decades...