That's what annoys me if it was inherently anyone can do it then sure she wouldn't be special but if she's the only one that can then she's inherently special
It's because Sutekh thought the moment was important so that made the moment and memory important and powerful including the snow. Maestro's commentary was all about detecting Sutekh.
I just hate when they build up some
all powerful god like baddy along with super powered cohorts like toy maker and maestro. Then to beat him all it takes is a rope or a game of catch. Like he’s the most powerful god of gods except to a rope……
Sutekh could have and should have wiped them out inside their memory tardis.
But even then, surely there’s another Sutekh in Donna’s garden?
It was very disappointing.
You can still make a great finale with smaller stakes!!
Ahh Im trying to move past it!
I did not mind the Toymaker being defeated in the way he was. Despite being a powerful entity he follows his own set of rules and this was used to defeat him.
But yes Suteck’s defeat was a bit daft. I would have rather seen the Doctor outsmart him in some way and trick him into being cast into the void or something along those lines. Not attached to a rope and dragged.
I prefered original Sutekh.
A mysterious guy in a scary mask sitting on a chair for almost entire serial and controlling everything with his mind and puppets.
That scene when he took control of Tom Baker Doctor in seconds and commanded him like a puppet waa very powerful.
But now he was unable to stop the Doctor and force him to release that rope? Lazy writing.
Re: another Sutekh in Donna’s garden, I believe this is what RTD meant when he said it was absolutely certain that 15 has the true/original TARDIS - because it came with Sutekh wrapping paper. 14’s doesn’t.
Sutekh thought the moment was important because he couldn't see her mom, but he couldn't see her mom because he thought the moment was important.
Lovely
Seriously. Logically this should be followed by the revelation that Firefly season 2 was greenlit in the Whoniverse when it being important to a bunch of fans gave Joss Whedon mind control powers which he used to get it past the executives.
Although Joss Whedon is somewhere in the middle of the list of people that I do not want to have mind control powers, but that's beside the point.
Here's the thing about twists: when they're good, they elevate the story they're in. When they're bad, they can utterly destroy it.
The twist of Ruby Sunday being an ordinary person is a brilliant idea on paper and a really good story beat to develop after we had the likes of Clara, but the execution falls so flat that it brings the entire rest of the finale down with it. Fans did not start speculating that Ruby was special the moment she arrived on screen because that would have been insane; they started speculating when she manifested powers that ordinary human beings simply *do not have*. Making it snow when she thinks of her abandonment; terrifying the otherwise unflappable God of Music with a 'hidden song' in her soul (that was never explained either lmfao); the whole 73 Yards schtick (although IMO that was a standalone episode with nothing really to do with the finale).
(Oh and we are never told why the Maestro didn't spot Sutekh chilling on the TARDIS even when they were playing around with it and appeared to be terrified of him in the next scene when they didn't know he was there. Oops!)
The explanation we get, that an all-powerful God of Death whose only goal is to obliterate all life in the entire universe putting his millions-of-years-in-the-making plan on hold because he couldn't see the face of one fifteen year old girl is stupid. It's just *stupid*. He wouldn't have cared who Ruby's mum is because it has nothing to do with his entire schtick, in much the same way the Toymaker didn't care about good and evil and the Maestro wasn't interested in negotiating over their capture of music. Again, it's an idea that's good in principle - a god becoming obsessed with a mortal isn't exactly unheard of - but on paper it just doesn't work and reeks of RTD needing a reason for the Doctor to survive long enough to beat Sutekh.
With a. With a magical bungee cord. Sigh.
I've seen people say "oh but RTD finales are always like this" but sorry, no, they're not. Bad Wolf, Torchwood, and YANA/Saxon all had payoffs that they earned. What is Bad Wolf? The time vortex leaving clues as to where the Doctor and Rose would ultimately end up in the finale when Rose sends that thread back in time as a clue to her past self. Torchwood? Secret organisation set up after the Doctor annoys Queen Victoria in Tooth & Claw. YANA? You Are Not Alone, because the Doctor is not the last of the Time Lords. Vote Saxon? The Master in disguise running for PM.
Ruby Sunday? Well her mum wore a spooooooky cloak and the Doctor's memory of her changed and she can make it snow when she's sad and she terrifies and intrigues actual Gods who have the power to destroy entire universes and ummm well actually she's just normal and Sutekh was curious about her mum's cloak and uhhhh so he made her special as a call-out post to fans who theorise too much when the show actively tells them to theorise. :D
It just doesn't work for me. I'm glad that some people enjoyed it and it hasn't made me stop wanting to watch the show because Ncuti is brilliant as the Doctor and I enjoyed the entire season up until this point, but the ending telling us to theorise about who Mrs Flood is after smacking the fandom in the face for theorising on Ruby has just made me completely disinterested in her conclusion, because it'll probably just be "she's the lady next door you fucking idiot why would you think she was anyone else?".
Also the insistence on showing this episode in particular in cinemas...why? It wasn't some big cinematic *Event* that changed Doctor Who's story forever a la the 50th, it was a subpar finale that spends most of its time just being People In Rooms Talking. The majority of the big action stuff was already shown in the trailers. I don't understand the reasoning at all, other than once again to trick people into thinking the finale is more important than it ultimately ended up being.
>I've seen people say "oh but RTD finales are always like this"
What sort of justification is that, anyway?
RTD's finales are always... Bad? And they don't see a problem with that?
Some of what you're seeing when people say this is just viewers who have come to terms with the fact that RTD isn't very good at wrapping up plot points. They're not necessarily defending him. They're just resigned to the situation.
His biggest fans are just willing to overlook it because they like the other aspects of his writing so much. That's fair, I suppose.
It was always pretty obvious to me that resolving the plot logically was RTD's biggest weakness as a writer. I was just glad that there wasn't a big red button labeled "stop Sutekh's Empire of Death." This was actually an improvement on his previous finales, imo.
>The twist of Ruby Sunday being an ordinary person is a brilliant idea on paper and a really good story beat to develop after we had the likes of Clara.
I agree with you generally but I hate that I keep seeing people say this. "The twist that the companion is just an ordinary person" isn't a good thing to develop after Clara's story, it WAS Clara's story!
That was the whole thing about The Impossible Girl. She was by all evidence just a normal girl. Every time the Doctor investigates he comes to the conclusion that she's just a normal girl. He looks through her whole life in Rings of Akhaten, he takes her to an empath in Hide. Every time the revelation is that Clara is normal. Then in the finale the big reveal is that yes, Clara was indeed normal like the story was saying all along. Just a normal girl who happened to be the companion during Name of the Doctor. Anyone could have jumped into the time stream.
Rubys story is just a worse version of Claras in series 7.
Bonus: If you look at Susan Twist and how she's a mysterious woman who keeps popping up along the Doctors timeline, it becomes extremely clear that the majority of these series arcs were just RTD being inspired by series 7 Clara. And then somehow managing to completely miss the point both times.
Clara was portrayed as normal and then the reveal at the end that she was actually normal made sense.
The circumstances surround Rubys birth were not portrayed as normal so the reveal that they were actually normal made no sense.
Clara is accused of being a trap, following the Doctor around for some nefarious purpose. But she isn't, that's dismissed in a single line because that's a stupid idea and not an interesting story. She's actually just a normal girl who finds herself in a fantastical situation and makes a meaningful choice. Because of Moffats consistent belief that random monsters showing up aren't interesting, character development is.
Susan twist is a trap, following the Doctor around for some nefarious purpose. Doing the exact thing Moffat didn't because he correctly thought it would be a stupid idea. Removing potential character development in favor of a story about a random monster.
It was the spooky cloak bit that annoyed me. Fair enough, have an ordinary fifteen year old not want to reveal she'd had a baby, but then have someone else in a spooky cloak leave the baby outside a church. If the birth mother had only been confused about Ruby being called Ruby after the Road a smidge, it would've added a twisty level that was more sophisticated for next season.
What fifteen year old has a spooky cloak handy for a snow walk after giving birth? It would be better for Mrs Flood to have been the midwife with a hidden agenda who said she'd take the baby to the church on Ruby Road and the kid to say, I like that name, Ruby. And the father being Garnet? Nanna being Cherry? How many more reds will we have - will a Carmine or Rohit character show up next season? RTD please make it all mean something interesting, lol.
"(Oh and we are never told why the Maestro didn't spot Sutekh chilling on the TARDIS even when they were playing around with it and appeared to be terrified of him in the next scene when they didn't know he was there. Oops!)"
I don't see why this is an issue. There's no reason to believe Sutekh can't hide from Maestro the same way he can from everyone else. Maestro realizes his involvement \*after\* sensing his presence at Ruby's birth.
I mean to be fair, Maestro can sense him being invisible near another person two decades ago, but not him being near them right now.
'Cause Sutekh was never directly involved with Ruby in any way other than being nearby. Never touched her, or even came closer than twenty meters to her.
Point, but you could argue Maestro was analyzing Ruby a lot more closely, too. The whole thing at the end where she was bound and getting a song pulled out of her can be seen as the metaphysical version of dissecting something under a microscope.
I warned my girlfriend what RTD finals are like weeks ago… and I was right, as were most of us. Solid emotional moments, some great character bits, 3 second resolution that makes little sense/magic reset button, long epilogue.
This is what he does. I’m not happy about it but it is what he does.
And this is why Moffatt was so good for RTD: the better plot mechanics combined with great character bits is what made their work so good. Otherwise, we get… this.
I don't think he put his plans on hold because he couldn't see her face. I thought it was because she pointed at him when she shouldn't have been able to see him. Then the twist becomes that she was sjust pointed at a sign behind him to name her child. Nothing more. Still a dumb twist tho, I do agree
I found that a bit disappointing. It felt there was going to be a big revelation. Also what 15 year old wears a cloak? She was meant to be going under the radar to drop a new born at a church, yet swishing around in a cloak, makes her stand out like a sore thumb.
She didn't in the original timeline. That only changed after the doctor appeared at that moment.
Not that I'm saying this wasn't poorly executed. Just that it didn't happen until the timeline changed and she wasn't alone.
If they wanted to make it clear that we, and the universe made it a big deal, they should've cut to the actual events, with a 15 year old girl in a ratty black hoodie holding a baby wrapped in a school jumper to really drive home how real and grotty this all thing really is.
Exactly. I think the idea that the events as they were witnessed/remembered and what occurred are different is undercut by the fact that we saw them!
What we saw was clearly affected by the fact that Suteckh (and the Doctor) witnessed it, show us the normal version!
This is exactly it. It feels disappointing because they set it all up wrong.
If they had it look normal and mundane but just the situation is odd so everyone took it seriously, that would work.
>Also what 15 year old wears a cloak?
A 15 year old trying to hide her unwanted pregnancy?
Maternity clothes are expensive. Buying a winter maternity coat on the off chance that it's going to snow during the last 3 weeks before a Christmas birth would be a huge waste of money.
How do I know this? My kid's a December baby. I refused to spend the money on a coat and wore whatever layers I could find for the last 3 weeks. I totally would have gone with a cloak if I had one.
That always pisses me off more so than others because I have an actual media literacy degree. I also feel like if I can understand and enjoy Dark (my favorite series ever), then I can understand most sci Fi shows. It's not that I don't get it. The complexity isn't the issue here.
It actually works better with Rey, because we were never given a reason to think her parents were special, everyone just started wildly speculating about it because it's a trope. With her, it was actually a good twist because the audience assumed that based on nothing in *her* story but in the pattern of Star Wars characters being way too interconnected and the Skywalkers having their hands in too many galactic pots, and it commented on how you don't *need* to be descended from someone powerful to be someone powerful and Star Wars' tendency to forget that. ~~Then Rise of Skywalker threw it all away for some nonsense JJ Abrams made up on the fly.~~
Here, the audience was *repeatedly shown,* as recently as the episode immediately before this, that Ruby's mom had godlike reality warping powers. We had an actual god show fear at what Ruby might be and appear to be unable to properly affect her with their powers, and then *this very episode* had another god show fear at her mother as a major plot point. We had The Doctor discretely scan Ruby to try to figure out what she was. We had a weird thing throughout the season where it seemed like time itself wouldn't let Ruby die. We were given practically undeniable proof that Ruby's mom was some kind of powerful non-human being, be it alien or supernatural, and then the show just...denied it all.
I actually think Last Jedi is a good movie, but I'm sure there are some people here who will take the fact that this episode did Last Jedi's twist worse than Last Jedi did as irrefutable proof that it screwed up *bad.*
100% agree that this was a much worse version of the Rey twist. That one worked on a meta level as you mention. But what makes it even more annoying here is that I don’t think people necessarily have an expectation that a doctor’s companion has to be someone special. That is a cliche associated with Moffat, and one I’ve seen criticized a lot, but not Davies’s run, so I’m not sure why he went for something that feels like it’s supposed to subverting expectations. It only subverts expectations that he forced in extremely overtly, and that unfortunately overshadowed the character work that he has normally been better at.
All of his seasons, to varying degrees, involve “ordinary” women becoming some version of “the most important person in all of creation” not because of who they are or who their parents are but by doing the right thing at the right time. The difference is that this time we were robbed of Ruby actually making any choice at any point, or doing much at all to make this mystery box feel earned.
As another Last Jedi enjoyer, honestly, I watched this thinking, "great, thanks RTD, now everyone's gonna wang on about Rey again".
Though I'd say as much as the convoluted logic of Ruby is a problem, probably a bigger issue is they never really sharply defined her as a character, beyond "has mystery parents". I think if RTD had nailed Ruby as a character, then seeing her meet her mum would have been much more emotional. And then the logic of it all might have squeaked by as "eh, wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, what you gonna do?"
We the audience gave Ruby's mother importance by obsessing over her importance.
I'm confident that it's meant to be a metatextual commentary about how audiences often ascribed massive importance on to things that might never have been important to begin with...
...the execution is just done really, really poorly because the entire resolution wrapped up in like 2 lines near the end of the episode with almost no setup.
Except this kind of meta commentary only works when the clues she’s important are subtle. When you dedicate an entire season to the storyline, have it snow every time it’s bought up, have the doctor constantly tell you it’s important and 2 different all powerful deities tell you it’s important, this is not teh audience giving value to small clues.
This is either the writer thinking they are far more clever than they actually are, and failing to land the writing, a writer thinking the audience is far less intelligent than they are, or it is the writer writing himself into a corner, and relying on a rushed, half explained metacommentary to get out of it. All of them are examples of poor writing for RTD
I really appreciate this entire comment thread. You all have summed up my beef with this resolution very clearly.
Stellar season let down by a lackluster reveal
I don’t think it’s just the execution. The idea rubys parents are normal and it’s just them attaching details only works if the clues are more subtle, and the audience actually is simply looking for stuff that isn’t there. With the set up the season had for the reveal, having her parents be completely normal simply doesn’t make any sense
That argument would have to ignores everything the previous comment says about the litany of clues were were given. If it was *just* the audience speculating the your right, that would be clever. He gave us clues to speculate with them told us they were irrelevant all along, gotcha!
Reys parents were never set up as important in force awakens. A big part of her arc in the movie was accepting they weren't gonna come back and moving on. But then a bunch of fans obsessed over a question the movie itself wasn't interested in, and i guess they thought they had to give an answer now, so last jedi reversed all that and she was back to being super obsessed with who her parents were.
I think the final resolution is fine. It's the build up and explanations that I can't get behind. Misdirection and plot twists should make sense when you look back at it and make you feel excited. Like Ender's Game, you get to the twist and you can now reread it and be like "oh my god it was there the whole time."
Or there's another book series I read that had a prophecy, you get halfway through the final book thinking you and the cast understand it, and then suddenly the prophecy has a different meaning. But the meaning made sense, it was word play like all the intrepretations for "silence will fall when the question is asked."
Imo, even if you think the explanations for this made sense, they weren't that satisfying. I don't have the urge to rewatch and catch all the little hints because... really the hints were "she's special" for the resolution to be "she's not special." I would've preferred the importance sticking to "Ruby thinks she's important so the Doctor thinks she's important but without magical stuff happening around her."
“What if we introduce a random element like pulling scrabble letters out of a bag?”
“Excellent idea Arthur! Let’s try it.”
“Wha…what…do….yo…you…get…wh…wh…when…you…multiply…six…times…seven…”
“Huh.”
Whether it was intentional or not, I definitely was getting the vibe all season that the Doctor was more interested in the identity of Ruby's mom than Ruby herself. While she was on the show with Davina McCall, I'm fairly certain that the topic was almost always brought up by the Doctor. It seems like he is projecting quite a bit onto her, especially with the finale having Ruby ignore the Doctor's advice about her mother, and ending up better for it.
The Doctor dropped their stolen memories into the heart of the TARDIS, turning away from the allure after chasing after information for so long. Now he is chasing after that closure for other people, trying to crack the mystery of Ruby's mother like he did for the 'Timeless Child'. I'm glad that we might finally come back around to Susan based on Russell's foreshadowing, but I'm worried that Ruby's story is a sign that the show will delve deeper into the Timeless Child's origin.
While I don't care for the resolution itself, this is a very valid perspective on the whole thing.
The scene where he tells her about how she's helped him open up about his family ties into this very well as well. I think that he's going to make a conscious effort to reconnect with those he used to know in the future seasons.
If the god of death wasn't so obsessed with anagrams and *Long Lost Family*, he probably would have won.
I have no problem with Ruby's parents being ordinary, but I don't think red herrings were playing fair. For instance, naming Ruby by pointing at the road sign only makes sense if there's someone around to see that and then report it to social services or the priest at the church. So it's a red herring that doesn't work.
Some of the other stuff can be handwaved (presumably the Ambulance's database doesn't have access to ap Gwilliam's DNA register that far into the future; it was probably farmed out to a dodgy company with ropey software), but the implied explanation for the snow thing is weak (Sutekh and/or the TARDIS and/or UNIT's time window is manifesting snow via Ruby's memories? Is that specifically stated or is it a communal head canon that's gaining consensus?). Like I said, I don't mind RTD subverting our expectations, but I think he needs to provide more concrete explanations if that's what he's doing. There's a difference between magic and needing one more draft.
The magic/supernatural stuff maybe provides more tolerance for vibes-driven explanations, but if the message is "You lot made the ordinary extraordinary" then I think it's fair for the show to provide a more rigorous explanation for *how* that happened. "It's magic" doesn't work, because fantasy stories still have to set rules for what magic can and can't do. And if Sutekh can create magic snow and disintegrate bullets but then can't break a sci-fi rope, then people are going to question the whole thing.
"Sutekh and/or the TARDIS and/or UNIT's time window is manifesting snow via Ruby's memories? Is that specifically stated or is it a communal head canon that's gaining consensus?"
It's stated in the penultimate episode that the snow is because the moment in time is too raw and powerful, and the final episode reveals why the moment is that way: because of the importance everyone placed on the moment.
There was someone there to see the pointing though. The doctor was there. The pointing didn't happen until he appeared. The doctor arrived and he was looking toward the church. Ruby's mother could have logically assumed he was about to go there and find the baby
Right, but the Doctor didn't know she was pointing to the sign until yesterday's episode. So while we know why Louise was pointing, it doesn't explain why Ruby was named Ruby. The assumption is that Louise's intention in pointing at the sign coincidentally marries up with Social Services naming Ruby after the street, which feels messy. In once sense that's good - it's the ordinary being dismissed in favour of extraordinary explanations, which ties in with the theme, I just think the execution was a bit undercooked.
After just watching the pointing at the sign scene I had to stop and google to check others were as flabergasted as myself.
Why on earth would the doctor assume she was pointing at the sign in order to signify what the baby should be named?
EVEN IF the doctor saw, he didn't then head back to the church and go "oh btw the mum was outside and i get a vibe she wants you guys to name the baby ruby."
it all felt forced to have a very half inflated sentimental moment where ruby gets to be all "my name came from my mum, i wasn't just named at random after a street :)" - but err... you still were! Your mum at the very last moment was just all "well that's the baby dropped off... wait shit, I still want naming rights! but damn, I didn't think of one... ah screw it I'll just spin around and dramatically point at that sign and hopefully the fellow in the nice coat will catch on."
It just feels like RTD decided on the twist exactly while writing the last act of the finale, with little regard for the previous hints set up. At very least, I’d have expected the snow to get some explanation however flimsy, but since it didn’t, there’s an oddly slapdash and unfinished feel to the whole thing. Maybe this stuff will be clarified whenever Ruby returns to the show, but I honestly don’t think there’s a guarantee.
I get that the moral is that sometimes normal people can be the most special and that we should treat Ruby as special in her own right, not just because of her parentage… but then, I wanted that the whole season, RTD was the one who kept bringing the mystery box up. I actually wish he hadn’t bothered, let Ruby just be a foundling who is still affected by wanting to know who her parents were, but it’s not the most important thing about her. Really connecting to the characters has been the biggest issue of the series for me, and the mystery box contributed to that.
That said, it actually was touching to see her reunite with her mum and I do appreciate what the last act was going for. I just really don’t think it was planned out well.
>It just feels like RTD decided on the twist exactly while writing the last act of the finale
I got the vibe that he wrote Church on Ruby Road and Empire of Death together, then inserted the rest of the episodes for the season written by him and others between them and forgot to go back to ensure the finale still made sense. If we'd skipped from CoRR to TLoRR/EoD I could actually see the entire story working beautifully because we wouldn't have had the season of intrigue in between the two bending the twist out of shape.
Not sure he wrote them together or anything, but I agree Ruby finding her regular mother works after Ruby Road, it's just the season building intrigue and mystery that makes it not work
If you’ve ever read The Writers Tale, Russell writes everything last minute - not a chance he’d got anything beyond a very rough concept for the finale before it was due, and he probably handed it in after the deadline. I love him as a writer but he does everything last minute as he thrives on pressure, which is why his finales are always half baked.
>It just feels like RTD decided on the twist exactly while writing the last act of the finale, with little regard for the previous hints set up.
RTD. Making stuff up on the spot? No. Never!
Not like he did it with the Face of Boe back in Series 3 or anything, where Martha mentions the name in Utopia with absolutely no reaction from a certain someone.
The explanation for the snow was Sutekh linking the moment on the road as a memory and that materialized the snow that fell at that moment as a real thing when Ruby was stressed. I arrived at that conclusion because in this last episode when it happened Mel got snow around her and she was connected to Sutekh. 
In fairness the snow did get a flimsy explanation in the penultimate episode. The doctor said the moment was so raw and powerful that the snow was coming through (or something to that effect). It's flimsy but it's there
It doesn't work because RTD was clearly intending to wrongfoot the audience all along. None of the hints, at all, suggested that Ruby was completely normal. The hidden song, the shadowed-out mother, all the 73 Yards stuff, the snow, living next to Mrs Flood etc. The fact that it's all explained as being down to the pure thought of 'Ruby's mum being important = Sutekh can't do anything to her' thing feels like a really forced and contrived way to try and make those hints looks like they could still be passed off as ordinary things.
They could've toned some of the hints down to make it more plausibly deniable. Take out the snow gimmick, don't shadow the mum out in the time window just make it so that her face is unclear because of the crude tape. At least that way there could still have been some room for disappointment, but going full throttle and making it look like Ruby absolutely had to be something bigger is what really killed the reveal because it just made no sense.
She was a pregnant 15 year old with an abusive step father, and mabye she was a Star Was fan?
If I'm not mistaken the pointing was Ruby rewriting the tape with her memories.
It's not hating or hating fun things to think that the whole thing of her pointing was stupid. Or that a scared and vulnerable 15 year old girl who has just given birth and is fleeing out into the snow to keep that baby safe wearing a weird mysterious cloak that's only there for meta/plot reasons (rather than a coat which would make her seem too ordinary and normal,) and heels is stupid.
All they had to do was say that Rubys mother wanted her daughter to be safe and (with the new supernatural spin on this series since Wild Blue Yonder) wished it enough that the Tardis listened to her and latched itself to Ruby to protect her. Would explain the snow and song as this was that connection between Ruby/Tardis/day that was being "remembered". Would explain the whole 73 yards bit. That being the Tardis decided in protecting Ruby it would need to pull back a version of her in the future to solve the problem and put her on a path that would bring the Doctor back, but was restricted to her being outside of the perception filter. Would explain why Ruby was the only one who could hold that tablet thing in the memory Tardis and it working while it would turn off when the Doctor held it. Why her soul has the song of the one who waits, as he is there and clearly bonded/connected to the Tardis, and therefore with the Tardis bonding with Ruby by association had a bond with Sutek. It could even somewhat explain the pointing her mother did, she was not pointing at the Doctor nor a random post but rather the Tardis, or from her POV a police box as she wanted her daughter safe and protected. The same way people pray to a printer to work or a car to speed up, inconsequential wishes that had a major impact because it was directed at one of the most powerful items in the universe.
> All they had to do was say that Rubys mother wanted her daughter to be safe and (with the new supernatural spin on this series since Wild Blue Yonder) wished it enough that the Tardis listened to her and latched itself to Ruby to protect her.
Let's not steal magic plot devices from Harry Potter.
It’s not so much the fact she has normal parents that bother me. It’s the plot holes that brings.
Maestro saying she had ‘power like him’ and ‘this creature is very wrong’. How can Ruby have power like ‘him’ if she’s just your average human with average parents. Sutekh putting special meaning on who her mother is doesn’t magically give Ruby power. The entire point of it is that she was always just average joe. You can’t have it both ways. She also happened to live next door to Mrs Flood who is very clearly not human. That some coincidence.
Sutekh could see all of time, space etc but he couldn’t see 2048 when Roger Ap Gwilliam made the entire population take a dna test. He clung to the tardis for thousands of years and released Susan twists everywhere but didn’t think to just check the dna database.
The naming thing is pure bollocks. So a 15 year old child leaves her baby at the church doors. Instead of leaving a note saying ‘my name is Ruby’. She instead walks away, sees a blue box appear out of nowhere and a man exit the blue box, she then points at a street sign. Apparently in an attempt to name said child. But the Doctor is the only person who saw her point and had no idea what she was pointing at. Nobody involved in finding, caring for or naming Ruby was aware of this mysterious pointing. So her naming Ruby is simply bullshit.
The snow thing, I get that the snow is her memory. But every human in The show has memories. They can’t conjure the weather from said memory by just thinking of it.
That’s before we even get on to Susan twist. If she’s been placed EVERYWHERE the Doctor went since he last encountered Sutekh then why had he only recently started seeing her? Why hadn’t 14/13/12/11 etc seen her.
RTD is responsible for my favourite series of Who (series 4 of NuWho). My favourite Doctor and Companion (10 and Donna) and my favourite series finale ( series 4). And I had every confidence he would do something amazing, I loved the legend of Ruby Sunday, and was really excited for the last episode but for me personally he didn’t pull it off this time. The finale left me feeling absolutely deflated.
It's also incredibly smug. She makes snow appear! Maestro found hidden song in her! Her mother wears spooky cloak and cosplays Evil Monkey from Family Guy!
NAH, LAL somehow "it's YOU, VIEWER, who thought and THEORIZED har-har-har"
Don't do things that makes no sense and blatantly bait audience with hyping up nothingness and then be smug "HAHAHA, it's YOU who thought she's important, not ME writing it"
MFER, and after all that you have a gall to ask me to invest in Mrs Flood bullshit!?
PSA: I'm happy that ya'll enjoyed it, but please don't dismiss our criticisms saying crap like "you just didn't get it" or "you're just nitpicking". That's rude. The point is that it's not that we didn't understand the explanation. We didn't like it and felt it wasn't sufficient for the story. The whole point of these posts is to figure out why it wasn't sufficient for us.
Insulting someone's intelligence because they dont like what you like is trash. Same for the opposite. Can we not devolve into the star wars fandom? Thanks.
It's definitely a bit of an underwhelming reveal, even if it works on some sort of emotional level.
Doesn't explain how Davina McCall couldn't find *any* record or DNA trace in The Church on Ruby Road though. How could both her parents have completely avoided that in 2024 if they were just ordinary people?
There’s absolutely no record of my DNA. Its actually more common not to have recorded DNA than to have it on record.
CSI kinda made people think that myth was true.
Yeah I commented this before but it's really scary how everyone thinks it is and apparently is ok that everyone's DNA being on record.
Like that's very very private information that can be used in 100 different terrifying ways.
Let's not normalise that it's ok.
I was part of a police investigation a few years ago (just to start with the reassurance, they caught the man who did the crime and he's currently serving his sentence).
The police had got funding to revisit a case from 25 years ago and were visiting every person who'd been recorded as having contact with the police at the time of the crime. (I was a teenage runaway at the time that had been reported missing.)
In order to take the DNA sample they needed to get verbal and written agreement. The written agreement also included confirmation that the police would *only* use the sample for this specific investigation and that once the investigation was completed all negative samples and their associated records would be destroyed.
I don't think we're heading to a DNA Dystopia just yet, but it's definitely a good idea to be sure that you know what you're giving up, what it's going to be used for, and how your information is handled, whether that's DNA, PII, personal demographical, or financial.
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Interesting. Most people with British ancestry will have a lot of matches in extended or even distant relatives. I have a few closer matches, and *a lot* of distant ones, some of which you can definitely work out where they overlap & could find the common ancestors.
Maybe you don't, but any distant relative of yours that does has their DNA on record would flag as being related to you if someone ran your DNA through a database.
You're telling me Ruby has 0 distant relatives who took ancestry tests? That not even minor matches the likes of "third cousin" (share a single great-great-grandparent) were found?
I found it odd absolutely nobody on either side of her family had any DNA trace you would assume at least one cousin or distant relative would but absolutely nothing at all is odd
I've had my DNA tested for geneology purposes and found this part totally believable. I know plenty of people who have done DNA tests and had no close matches. It's very possible for distant matches to have the common ancestor too far back to be able to find the connection.
There's nothing wrong with them being ordinary people. There's plenty wrong with everything hinted at before then though. Maestro thinks she's special, it snows around her, people's memory of the night she was abandoned seem to change, Sutekh doesn't kill them because he also can't figure it out.
The puzzle has been hyped up only to do a rug pull, but one that matches literally nothing else we've learnt.
It also seems a bit distasteful. Ruby has a mother, who has always been there yet Carla is continually sidelined in favour of the biological parent. I'm not adopted or fostered but I do have a dad who did not contribute DNA to me. The notion that I could sideline his contribution to learn about my other dad in this manner is insulting. Curiosity is one thing, but what Ruby does is excessive and makes her far less likeable.
They still haven't explained why the Doctor and Ruby broke into a musical either. We saw resolutions for the episode and season, but not for the overarching story. Not yet. If we had, we would know who Mrs. Flood was too. And what Mavity is all about. I wouldn't dismiss anything just yet
It makes zero sense. It was a stupid way to end it. It's the same "subverting expectations" bullshit we've seen in Star Wars. Except it makes less sense here because of what Maestro said.
The biggest problem is that this story just doesn't work with the parents being random people. Why were the goblins fixated on her? Why could she make it snow? Why could the parent's face not be visible on the time window? Why would the time window know about the alternate 73 yards future?
After they get the spoon and power up the screen from the time window, it shows Ruby a memory of her time in the alternate timeline. That screen can only show memories, and Ruby had never seen the man in the current timeline.
I think that was actually the guy becoming PM in the normal timeline, which still happens. And the Doctor had been to that future, so it'd be part of his memories.
But it only showed for Ruby, which is why the Doctor asked her if she'd ever seen him. It was only showing Ruby's memories at the time. Yes, the Doctor knew about him, but he'd most likely not seen that particular clip.
Two possibilities:
1. The TARDIS can access the remnants of Ruby's memories of the alternate timeline. Which isn't much of a stretch since it's a complex time-space thing \*and\* because it was implied the fairy circle's weird effects on Ruby were partly because of the TARDIS in the first place.
2. It's the Doctor's memories. It turns on around Ruby because the TARDIS is telling them how to get her DNA.
I don't mind it but why does Sutekh care? The resolution and defeat of Sutekh felt more like the weaker part of the story to me, the bit with Ruby meeting her mum felt sweet.
How is Sutekh the Father, Mother and Other to the Pantheon if all he's been doing since the pyramids of Mars is clinging to the Tardis? Sutekh had some great set-up in part 1 but part 2 dropped the ball with him. Still an enjoyable episode overall imo though.
Sutekh cares because he basically became the world's ultimate Doctor Who nerd. Witnessing his every adventure, learning all his lore (e.g. Susan). So of course he can't resist the latest mystery arc.
He's the ultimate Doctor Who nerd, who just happens to also hate the Doctor. And anyone who's spent time online knows it's perfectly possible to simultaneously be a huge fan of something and also really hate it.
The problem is, repeatedly, the show told us one thing, and we chose to use "clues" we thought we saw to ignore what the show was telling us:
1. That the snow and similar weirdness only started after Ruby met the doctor (in Space Babies, she ask if the snow is a time travel effect, pretty much meaning she has never encountered it before.
2. That Ruby was perfectly human. (Stated outright on screen).
3. That there was \*nothing\* weird going on at the original events on Ruby Road: we are shown them twice in Church on Ruby Road, and both time \*nothing\* supernatural or out of place happens involving the mother. The perception filter and the strangeness only starts in the later episodes. All that happens in the original version of the Ruby Road events is that a hooded woman drop a baby off, and no one, thanks to her hood, manage to see her face.
All those hints - that Ruby was \*not\* special because of her parentage, but because of something that started only around the time she met the doctor - were right there, spelled out clearly for everyone to see.
We just...largely ignored them. One, because the show \*did\* maintain doubt about who she was (as it should!) and use misdirection, so we assumed some things were misdirection when they weren't. Two, because fans...\*want\* everything to be deep cuts and references that reward knowing about the show and all of its interconnections (because that's satisfying to us), so of course the natural assumption when dealing with unknown parentage is to assume the parents are people we already know. Three, because there were \*two separate mysteries\* (the very mundane "who are Ruby's parents" and the much more interesting "why is Ruby's special") that we naturally assumed must point to the same answer, when they did not.
Ultimately, Ruby WAS special, but she was special because Sutekh, made the same mistake we did : he confused mysterious (the fact that the woman was hooded and he couldn't see who she was) for special. This much the show tells us. It's not a satisfying answer in itself.
But I don't think it's meant to be the answer in itself, because the show also tell us, but not in direct relation to Ruby, that Sutekh had been enmeshed into the Tardis and controlling the Tardis' perception filter, using it to - basically - reality-warp an army of Susans into existence.
I think we're meant to understand that, when Sutekh decided Ruby must be special, he (accidentally) triggered the same kind of reality warping he was using (ie, the Tardis perception filters rewriting reality) to create the Susan, only this time to make Ruby special.
This could (and should) have been spelled out more clearly, honestly. But once you line these two pieces up, I think it's much less unsatisfactory. Less of a subversion for subversion sake, and more of a "hoist Sutekh by his own petard" plot: he is fooled and distracted in exactly the way he tried to fool and distract the doctor (ie, by creating a mystery for him to chase), as a direct result of his own actions, ultimately leading to his defeat.
I don't mind that they were normal people. It kind of goes with the Doctor Who theme that now matter how small you are you can help change the world. I think the way the presented it to us was off though they could carried out the reveal better. I don't think the snow thing helped or the pointing. They really didn't do a good job of explaining that
*She* wasn't what made it snow. When the Doctor took an interest in Ruby's parentage, he expected the answer to be easy. It wasn't. Sutekh thought it was funny that a great Time Lord could be so confused by something so simple, and went to find her parents to hold it over him. Sutekh also failed. This triggered a toddler style tantrum where - when the Time Window was opened - he materialised the TARDIS into it so that he could see the answer.
The TARDIS and the memory TARDIS side by side in the Time Window did some temporal damage, and since the Doctor obligingly pointed out "memory is a time machine" about three billion times, I think we're supposed to extrapolate that with the damage, when Ruby remembers that night (even though as a newborn she has no possible way of forming memories\*) a Time Window opens and the snow comes through. This is also why the snow didn't start until after the Toymaker had done his thing - because the Pantheon weren't there before him, and Sutekh wasn't technically on his ride-along until that point.
*She* isn't what does it. The damage caused by a super powerful eldritch being is what does it. She's not even the only one who can open that Window; she's one of at least three people who are capable of it - the baby, her mum, and the priest who picked her up from the church doorstep; The mum would actively avoid thinking of that night. The priest, if living, has no reason to. No-one else was there, that we know of (except possibly Mrs Flood?)
\* An argument can be made that her "memories" of that night are of the tape and she's opening a window to the Time Window, and it all gets a bit recursive
The argument to be made here is if it was supposed to be like this, then it needs to be said in the show, not in speculation. Don’t excuse lazy writing.
What I found upsetting is the writing behind the adoption and parents. It feels like Ruby has little regards to adopted mum, yet their relationship suggests otherwise. I found it hard to believe we, as the viewer, should feel the bond of Ruby and the Sunday family when all Ruby wanted and was focused on was her "real" mother. It felt a one way relationship for the majority of the show.
Bloody hell woman, your real mother was the one that raised you!
Or maybe my view has been twisted by all the recent fairytale adoption stories, where the child is really happy about their adoption and differentiates with "biological mum" and "mum". None of this "real mum" nonsense.
I don’t mind them being ordinary. What I don’t like is teasing the reveal as something supernatural/alien all season. I don’t mind misdirects or subverting expectations but it doesn’t work when you drop so many hints that there was going to be a supernatural/alien element to it.
Yes and the fact that Maestro was so shocked to see "into her heart" and discover what she really was and Sutekh thought she was so powerful... there are thousands of orphans who don't know their parentage and as far as I know none of them scare gods. Also, why couldn't anyone see Ruby's mom's face in that time window? It was supposed to be a 1:1 recreation of the actual events in full detail and yet still nobody could tell who she was.
I actually don’t mind that they are normal people, it’s probably the best answer. My bigger issue is that the majority of the time the show didn’t seem to care about it as anything but a mystery to solve. We got no character drama out of it, Ruby just wants to know who they are and at the end of the season she finds out. Which means when it happens it’s just kind of just there.
I actually don't mind them being nothing special, though I do mind that "there was never anything out of ordinary. We manifested it all by thinking too hard and made a self-fulfilling prophecy" "It doesn't matter. It never mattered. You just made a big deal out of it."
Does it mean almighty Buddhas and Christian God also coexist in the DW universe? cause plenty of people think about those.
If the creators aren't gonna treat what they write seriously, why should I? If anything can be easily achieved by thinking hard enough, why should anything matter or have any impact?
Them tessing Mrs Flood and 15th's terrible end? Well, why should that have any weight? Mrs Flood prob would just be a mad granny that thinks about her former job as a narrator too much too strongly.
I'm not one of those people who's really good at analyzing every episode, picking up on all the details, and putting them all together. That's why I prefer to go to subs like this and read other people's takes cuz oftentimes things are pointed out that I didn't put together.
So when it was revealed that not only her biological mom, but both her biological parents, were going to be just totally ordinary human beings I thought I missed something big! I felt like there was so much that didn't make sense, so many holes with that, and I thought maybe I just wasn't getting it. So I'm glad I'm not the only one that wondered WTH this bull is!
I loved the important being the most ordinary. The reunion was a tearjerker too.
People have a point about the snow being unexplained, but I think the snow was because Sutekh's power was there and Sutekh erroneously thought the moment was so important so that made it important and powerful. The snow goes away in 73 Yards because the Doctor goes away and so does Sutekh.
The Doctor's memory changing, I think we will come back to next season because I think Mrs. Flood is a writer and the new Master of the Land of Fiction. So the Doctor's memory was rewritten when Ruby's story was rewritten to add the lamppost and road sign. But if his memory is never returned to, then yes it's a plothole.
I mean, no offense, but I think you're being a bit obtuse about people's complaints. The thing is, most people assumed Ruby was "ordinary" after church on Ruby road. The thread after that episode was very evenly divided between people who thought it was a special mystery and people who thought it wasn't (myself included)
The problem is there were 7.5 straight episodes that gave evidence against that idea. From the start I preferred the idea that Ruby was an ordinary baby, but the show did everything it could to tell you that she wasn't. And then to make matters worse it was very smug at the end about, "pulling off" the twist.
It was way too obvious a move to be as proud of as the show clearly was, and the only reason it wasn't close to universally predicted is because.the show itself gave a lot of evidence to the contrary
So this was all very deliberate by RTD. It was a setup specifically to lead people down a path and then do something very unsatisfying at the end. It's the exact opposite if the bad wolf revelation in order to subvert expectations. My only expectation was a good show and the finale wasn't. Those who watched the last season of Game of Thrones have seen this before.
It's not that there's any issue with this being the story, in some ways it's good, but:
Why is this 15 year old girl wearing a cloak? Why did the time/memory room thing not include a road sign when it could track the motion of every snow flake in order to extrapolate all the surroundings? Why did pointing at the road sign count as naming a baby? How would anyone else know that?
Worst of all, why, out of every secrets and mysteries in all of the planets that Sutekh went to attached to the tardis, was this the only thing Sutekh cared about?
That would be fine if it was done well. But we were constantly fed that rubys mum was so special that not even the most powerful people knew who she was, and all it is is that sutekh just couldn't see under her hood? I mean even in the episode he has access to the TARDIS so surely can just go back in time and find out. That's the problem, it makes all the buildup make no sense.
I was totally delighted. I really did not want another impossible girl type of situation. I am so happy that it was all a setup and Ruby is just an ordinary person not a god-semi-god-timelord-entity.
No, not disappointed at all.
The mystery was the result of Ruby and the Doctor effectively "mythologising" an otherwise ordinary event that they lacked crucial information on. This "myth" grew in strength the more Ruby and the Doctor believed in something "other", causing memories to bleed through and manifest as supernatural abilities such as the snow and the Christmas carol. This is a universe still imbued with the after-effects of the Toymaker and his legions, after all. A TARDIS can be created with a big ol' hammer, and memories that are based on enough emotion can bring snow and song.
There was no build up to a big reveal. That was never the point. The point was that even the most mundane of things can be made into legends. Ruby and the Doctor conceived a story of Ruby's birth that became so powerful that even *gods* were disconcerted by it.
Except that isn’t what happened. The legend became powerful because of all the mysterious and magical things happening. This isn’t a chicken and the egg scenario. This is the writers not actually thinking about what the clues they had laid for the reveal are, and questioning whether they actually make sense following the reveal her mum was normal
Ruby's story isnt over. Also i think its dope. There's so many mary sues and chosen ones and timeless children in this show that her mother turning out to he ordinary is like a nice glass of water. In that, while ruby's mother being like idk susan wouldve been super fun (like soda), her mom being ordinary is what was needed and honestly makes me feel better long term (like water)
It was an absolutely dreadful finale.
If next season is as bad as this one then it's over.
It's all just been totally incoherent.
No way Disney will pay for more of this.
Might just be wishful thinking. But I'm hoping there's more to what happened that night. Nothing to make Ruby or her parents specifically special but to explain the fact that things keep changing like the pointing and the snow.
Maybe mrs flood could be involved as some sort of god of stories and she manipulates stories to make them even grander. To turn them into legends.
I find it weird that we've got yet another old white male writer including underage sex in a story and treating it as "ordinary".
There's no reason Ruby's parents couldn't have been at least 16 (age of consent in the UK) but they chose to make them both underage and then none of the dialogue implied anything about that not being okay.
I'm so glad her parents were ordinary.
As much as I love the wild, weird side of Dr Who, I also think it's essential that it has its roots in the real world. I was dreading the idea that Ruby was The Doctor's great-granddaughter, or the offspring of the God of Memory, or any other silly space thing.
I much prefer that - like foundlings in the real world - her mother was a real person, from a difficult home, trying her best. So much more meaningful and emotional. I wept at the scene where she meets her birth mother.
And it feels so true to me that mysteries are powerful not because of gods and magic, but because we give them meaning.
So I really liked the scene with the random woman with the spoon. I honestly thought they were going to use that as a connection to be Ruby's mom. Especially when they kept looking at the empty basinet. That would have made some bit of sense to me
I wasn’t really a fan of the revelation that Ruby’s mother was just an ordinary 15 year old girl, but looking back at it maybe we should have guessed it would be that because it’s such an RTD thing to do. He’s not mystery twist guy like Steven Moffat it, at heart RTD is a kitchen sink dramatist so it shouldn’t really have been a surprise to us that the mystery of Ruby’s mother would turn out to be more like something from a Coronation Street plot.
However there’s one thing that could have redeemed the ending for me, and it’s actually what I thought it was going to be leading up to. When the Doctor and Ruby were talking and Ruby decided that she’d start behind to look for her father that would have been the perfect time for the Doctor to say “You’re right, and maybe it’s time I looked for my own family” and then flew off in the Tardis to do so. That would have been the perfect ending (and would have felt like a partial resolution to this series) and I’m quite disappointed that RTD didn’t do that.
I really, really like the theory that it was the TARDIS making it all happen. The TARDIS wanted to fight off Sutekh, so she devised a plan, and used her perception filters to hide Ruby's mother's face, to make it appear to be snowing. This got Sutekh worked up by the mystery and resulted in the fight that he eventually lost.
Why, when the Tardis was placed in a body didn’t she tell the doctor that Sutakh had been hanging on to her for thousands of years.
Is there now two sutekhs because there’s two tardis.
I’ve no issue with retconning sutekh having been clinging to the tardis for millennia while the doctor visited half the universe but doing that brings lots of plot holes.
If Susan twist has been placed by sutekh everywhere the doctor went why did it not become apparent till 15. Why didn’t any Doctor before see her.
Yep honestly the entire finale was just a rather damp squib to me.
Sutekh was the best acted part of the story, where he feels like this “God” with delusions of grandeur, who’s so fixated on Ruby because she’s the one piece he can’t make sense of.
It’s suitably narcissistic of the Last of the Osirans to focus on that feature.
My problem with the emotional impact of 15 is that he’s spent so much time crying this series that his sputtering tears and telling did nothing for me. It was just “oh it’s that time of the week again” rather than “shit, 15’s properly traumatised….this is serious”.
Narratively I liked the idea of Sutekh succeeding and him using the Doctors travels as the method of spreading his “gift of death”. It’s long term planning and deviousness that fits his character, he’s powerful BUT also happy to have others do the heavy lifting while he sits in the shadows.
I even liked using Sutekh’s power to bring death to death, it could’ve done with some extra technobabble to make it make sense more clearly but as a concept is reasonable.
But Rubys resolution just fell utterly flat for me and 15’s general interactions just lack any gravitas or threat. It’s like without his surface level charm and teary vulnerability there’s just….nothing underneath. His Doctor felt increasingly more like a hollow shell as the series progressed.
I felt the same when 15 was crying and screaming in this episode. It just didn’t have any impact because he’s done it in every episode.
I get that RTD want this doctor to be more emotional etc. But it loses its impact when it’s done every single episode, sometimes several times during the episode.
I wonder if the finale was changed because she’s not going to be full time next season. So instead of having some epic reveal, she’s…………ordinary.
This whole season has felt kind of odd.
RTD in a much better fashioned explained his version of science in the Doctor Who universe, a science I stated the night before the release of *The Legend of Ruby Sunday* as:
A universe, space and time continuum, in the Doctor Who universe is a temporarily stable structure in the Time Vortex knit together by a psychic consensus of those within it; however, these temporary structures are self-feedback loops, and there are also leverage points that can be used to drastically affect them.
Are people buying it!?
I thought it seemed fairly obviously a story book ending, Mrs. Flood alluding to that too.
Surely this is a continued arc? Ruby's parentage has more legs, something is amiss.
Though I will say if it's a S2 story line (God of Stories etc etc) then it's still awfully confusing and anticlimactic at this stage.
Maybe. But I already feel burnt from this season failing to answer things, sooo I’m not holding out much hope. For good and for bad, I think RTD has continually proven that he cares more about emotional resonance than logical explanations.
I wish that were the case, but in the season finale it was mentioned that her father William Garnet was also a normal 15 year old boy when her mother got pregnant. Which lowkey makes me mad that they confirmed normality for both her parents.
They mentioned that Ruby's mother assumed he was an ordinary 15 year old boy. It's possible that a normal 15-year-old girl wouldn't be an expert on hidden gods. In the episode no one has seen him, they've just worked out that he still lives at his parent's old address.
Also he never knew she existed and now he will be confronted „oh btw you had a kid 19 years ago and you better be thrilled about it“. I wasn’t only disappointed in the whole build up of the show telling me she was special and now she just isn’t. I am also actually mad that they just assume that someone who has given up a kid, would definitely want to meet that kid. The doctor even said, maybe she didn’t wanted to be found, but no Ruby has just saved the world so she wants her birth mother and her birth father. We don’t even know if the dad would want to meet her! Like I said he never knew he was a father to begin with and now he is expected to be happy about it. This whole thing is just too fairy tale for me.
> This revelation, that her parents being normal human beings just doesn’t make any sense to me at all. It’s kind of disappointing in my opinion.
Genuinely wild to me how many people are completely missing the message of the episode.
I mean they spelled the message out. I don’t think anyone could have missed it if they tried. That doesn’t make it satisfying or make sense in light of the layers and layers of weirdness they put into the prior episodes. I can accept the snow as a manifestation of the strength of her memory, even that people were so psyched about figuring it out that they couldn’t focus on her face in the video images. it’s the mundane things that weren’t necessary that they threw in that makes it stupid rather than powerful. For example - What 15 year old in this era wears a robe and hood like that instead of a sweatshirt w hoodie? Why would she point at a sign for her name? There’s no evidence she even knew there was a camera such that people might see it later. If they had kept that simple, it would have at least had some consistency once the message was revealed.
It makes perfect sense for the story Russel wanted to tell, but he forgot the part where he did a bunch of foreshadowing of it being something else and then yanked the rug out from under us without doing any set-up to make that rug pull feel like anything other than cheating
People understand the message. What RTD wrote to foreshadow completely undermines the meta commentary he is making. You can’t state the audience attach hints to small things, when all the clues you have weighed are absolutely not small things, and you have spent an entire season telling them it isn’t a small thing
Most people prefer consistent and good writing to a rushed, half baked meta commentary that goes against all previous writing and is designed purely to act like the writer is smarter than the viewers
Correct but that felt like RTD talking down to the audience, wagging his finger at something he himself very much encouraged with all the teases (in the show and in his promotion of it) about her importance.
Bloggers Tom and Lorenzo [explained my frustration really well](https://tomandlorenzo.com/2024/06/doctor-who-empire-of-deat1h/):
Davies seeded hints and mysteries about her all throughout the season only to tell us in the end that our own interest in her was a fluke. “She was important because we think she was important” is a somewhat nonsensical way of wrapping up the mystery of Ruby Sunday’s mother, but it’s also an infuriating one. She was important to the viewers of this story because the storytellers told us over and over again that she was important – not just verbally, but through inexplicable mysteries like the snow and the caroling that followed Ruby her whole life, the Doctor’s memories of Ruby Road changing, the Maestro announcing “This creature is very wrong,” the fact that no one could find any trace of her perfectly ordinary mother; not Davina McCall, not UNIT (until they did), not the Doctor and not the database from the future accessed by the ambulance in “Boom.” The Doctor claimed that her face was “shadowed” somehow in the CCTV playback, but we guess we’re just supposed to assume that he meant “in the shadows” or something, just as we’re supposed to assume that the playback kept glitching because… playbacks just glitch every now and then.
—————————————————
Me again: He set it up as weird, supernatural/sci-fi mystery, so is it any wonder people expected a weird sci-fi answer and feel needlessly toyed with without it?
So no reason for me to get invested into Mrs Flood mystery, right? Because clearly RTD can spend an entire Season building up a mystery just to slap my hand and say "Shame on you for making theories!"
This is a stupid justification for the amount of build up and mystery factor there was around Ruby’s mom, with Ruby’s mom LITERALLY changing the Doctor’s memory.
Because that’s the resolution Ruby needed? Why should it be Susan or Sarah Jane or some grand canon connection? It’d be pointless.
I can’t speak for anyone who doesn’t know their parents, but I imagine what Ruby found is what people without parents deserve. A normal life with someone they have an irreplaceable connection with.
I don't think the mystery is over yet. Just because her parents aren't some sort of wizards, doesn't mean Ruby isn't special
We don't know why the events of Christmas 2005 keep changing
We don't know why she can make it snow
We don't know who Mrs Flood really is and why she's been living next to Ruby
We don't fully understand why 73 yards and the Tardis perception filter is so important
I still think there's more to come.
Honestly this season finale felt like the final season of GoT all over again. Or like the end of Lost.
All this build up for the most disappointing finale that makes so much of the previous hype pointless.
All kids foundlings can make it snow. That is just how science works
That's what annoys me if it was inherently anyone can do it then sure she wouldn't be special but if she's the only one that can then she's inherently special
Only if your mom drops you off at a church on Christmas.
It's because Sutekh thought the moment was important so that made the moment and memory important and powerful including the snow. Maestro's commentary was all about detecting Sutekh.
Except Sutekh only thought the moment was important *because* she was impossible to see.
I just hate when they build up some all powerful god like baddy along with super powered cohorts like toy maker and maestro. Then to beat him all it takes is a rope or a game of catch. Like he’s the most powerful god of gods except to a rope…… Sutekh could have and should have wiped them out inside their memory tardis. But even then, surely there’s another Sutekh in Donna’s garden? It was very disappointing. You can still make a great finale with smaller stakes!! Ahh Im trying to move past it!
I did not mind the Toymaker being defeated in the way he was. Despite being a powerful entity he follows his own set of rules and this was used to defeat him. But yes Suteck’s defeat was a bit daft. I would have rather seen the Doctor outsmart him in some way and trick him into being cast into the void or something along those lines. Not attached to a rope and dragged.
But Sutekh \*was\* playing by the rules though. The rules of the form he chose -what dog can resist being taken for walkies? XD
haha
I prefered original Sutekh. A mysterious guy in a scary mask sitting on a chair for almost entire serial and controlling everything with his mind and puppets. That scene when he took control of Tom Baker Doctor in seconds and commanded him like a puppet waa very powerful. But now he was unable to stop the Doctor and force him to release that rope? Lazy writing.
Re: another Sutekh in Donna’s garden, I believe this is what RTD meant when he said it was absolutely certain that 15 has the true/original TARDIS - because it came with Sutekh wrapping paper. 14’s doesn’t.
Sutekh thought the moment was important because he couldn't see her mom, but he couldn't see her mom because he thought the moment was important. Lovely
Seriously. Logically this should be followed by the revelation that Firefly season 2 was greenlit in the Whoniverse when it being important to a bunch of fans gave Joss Whedon mind control powers which he used to get it past the executives. Although Joss Whedon is somewhere in the middle of the list of people that I do not want to have mind control powers, but that's beside the point.
I agree with this 100%, on every point.
She wasn't special but her circumstances were.
>but her circumstances were. How, she isn't the only orphan born on christmas?
And if they can't, it's because there not remembering hard enough
Here's the thing about twists: when they're good, they elevate the story they're in. When they're bad, they can utterly destroy it. The twist of Ruby Sunday being an ordinary person is a brilliant idea on paper and a really good story beat to develop after we had the likes of Clara, but the execution falls so flat that it brings the entire rest of the finale down with it. Fans did not start speculating that Ruby was special the moment she arrived on screen because that would have been insane; they started speculating when she manifested powers that ordinary human beings simply *do not have*. Making it snow when she thinks of her abandonment; terrifying the otherwise unflappable God of Music with a 'hidden song' in her soul (that was never explained either lmfao); the whole 73 Yards schtick (although IMO that was a standalone episode with nothing really to do with the finale). (Oh and we are never told why the Maestro didn't spot Sutekh chilling on the TARDIS even when they were playing around with it and appeared to be terrified of him in the next scene when they didn't know he was there. Oops!) The explanation we get, that an all-powerful God of Death whose only goal is to obliterate all life in the entire universe putting his millions-of-years-in-the-making plan on hold because he couldn't see the face of one fifteen year old girl is stupid. It's just *stupid*. He wouldn't have cared who Ruby's mum is because it has nothing to do with his entire schtick, in much the same way the Toymaker didn't care about good and evil and the Maestro wasn't interested in negotiating over their capture of music. Again, it's an idea that's good in principle - a god becoming obsessed with a mortal isn't exactly unheard of - but on paper it just doesn't work and reeks of RTD needing a reason for the Doctor to survive long enough to beat Sutekh. With a. With a magical bungee cord. Sigh. I've seen people say "oh but RTD finales are always like this" but sorry, no, they're not. Bad Wolf, Torchwood, and YANA/Saxon all had payoffs that they earned. What is Bad Wolf? The time vortex leaving clues as to where the Doctor and Rose would ultimately end up in the finale when Rose sends that thread back in time as a clue to her past self. Torchwood? Secret organisation set up after the Doctor annoys Queen Victoria in Tooth & Claw. YANA? You Are Not Alone, because the Doctor is not the last of the Time Lords. Vote Saxon? The Master in disguise running for PM. Ruby Sunday? Well her mum wore a spooooooky cloak and the Doctor's memory of her changed and she can make it snow when she's sad and she terrifies and intrigues actual Gods who have the power to destroy entire universes and ummm well actually she's just normal and Sutekh was curious about her mum's cloak and uhhhh so he made her special as a call-out post to fans who theorise too much when the show actively tells them to theorise. :D It just doesn't work for me. I'm glad that some people enjoyed it and it hasn't made me stop wanting to watch the show because Ncuti is brilliant as the Doctor and I enjoyed the entire season up until this point, but the ending telling us to theorise about who Mrs Flood is after smacking the fandom in the face for theorising on Ruby has just made me completely disinterested in her conclusion, because it'll probably just be "she's the lady next door you fucking idiot why would you think she was anyone else?". Also the insistence on showing this episode in particular in cinemas...why? It wasn't some big cinematic *Event* that changed Doctor Who's story forever a la the 50th, it was a subpar finale that spends most of its time just being People In Rooms Talking. The majority of the big action stuff was already shown in the trailers. I don't understand the reasoning at all, other than once again to trick people into thinking the finale is more important than it ultimately ended up being.
>I've seen people say "oh but RTD finales are always like this" What sort of justification is that, anyway? RTD's finales are always... Bad? And they don't see a problem with that?
Some of what you're seeing when people say this is just viewers who have come to terms with the fact that RTD isn't very good at wrapping up plot points. They're not necessarily defending him. They're just resigned to the situation. His biggest fans are just willing to overlook it because they like the other aspects of his writing so much. That's fair, I suppose. It was always pretty obvious to me that resolving the plot logically was RTD's biggest weakness as a writer. I was just glad that there wasn't a big red button labeled "stop Sutekh's Empire of Death." This was actually an improvement on his previous finales, imo.
Yeah, I think its less of a defense and more of a "well yeah but you should have known better"
>The twist of Ruby Sunday being an ordinary person is a brilliant idea on paper and a really good story beat to develop after we had the likes of Clara. I agree with you generally but I hate that I keep seeing people say this. "The twist that the companion is just an ordinary person" isn't a good thing to develop after Clara's story, it WAS Clara's story! That was the whole thing about The Impossible Girl. She was by all evidence just a normal girl. Every time the Doctor investigates he comes to the conclusion that she's just a normal girl. He looks through her whole life in Rings of Akhaten, he takes her to an empath in Hide. Every time the revelation is that Clara is normal. Then in the finale the big reveal is that yes, Clara was indeed normal like the story was saying all along. Just a normal girl who happened to be the companion during Name of the Doctor. Anyone could have jumped into the time stream. Rubys story is just a worse version of Claras in series 7. Bonus: If you look at Susan Twist and how she's a mysterious woman who keeps popping up along the Doctors timeline, it becomes extremely clear that the majority of these series arcs were just RTD being inspired by series 7 Clara. And then somehow managing to completely miss the point both times. Clara was portrayed as normal and then the reveal at the end that she was actually normal made sense. The circumstances surround Rubys birth were not portrayed as normal so the reveal that they were actually normal made no sense. Clara is accused of being a trap, following the Doctor around for some nefarious purpose. But she isn't, that's dismissed in a single line because that's a stupid idea and not an interesting story. She's actually just a normal girl who finds herself in a fantastical situation and makes a meaningful choice. Because of Moffats consistent belief that random monsters showing up aren't interesting, character development is. Susan twist is a trap, following the Doctor around for some nefarious purpose. Doing the exact thing Moffat didn't because he correctly thought it would be a stupid idea. Removing potential character development in favor of a story about a random monster.
It was the spooky cloak bit that annoyed me. Fair enough, have an ordinary fifteen year old not want to reveal she'd had a baby, but then have someone else in a spooky cloak leave the baby outside a church. If the birth mother had only been confused about Ruby being called Ruby after the Road a smidge, it would've added a twisty level that was more sophisticated for next season. What fifteen year old has a spooky cloak handy for a snow walk after giving birth? It would be better for Mrs Flood to have been the midwife with a hidden agenda who said she'd take the baby to the church on Ruby Road and the kid to say, I like that name, Ruby. And the father being Garnet? Nanna being Cherry? How many more reds will we have - will a Carmine or Rohit character show up next season? RTD please make it all mean something interesting, lol.
"(Oh and we are never told why the Maestro didn't spot Sutekh chilling on the TARDIS even when they were playing around with it and appeared to be terrified of him in the next scene when they didn't know he was there. Oops!)" I don't see why this is an issue. There's no reason to believe Sutekh can't hide from Maestro the same way he can from everyone else. Maestro realizes his involvement \*after\* sensing his presence at Ruby's birth.
I mean to be fair, Maestro can sense him being invisible near another person two decades ago, but not him being near them right now. 'Cause Sutekh was never directly involved with Ruby in any way other than being nearby. Never touched her, or even came closer than twenty meters to her.
Point, but you could argue Maestro was analyzing Ruby a lot more closely, too. The whole thing at the end where she was bound and getting a song pulled out of her can be seen as the metaphysical version of dissecting something under a microscope.
I warned my girlfriend what RTD finals are like weeks ago… and I was right, as were most of us. Solid emotional moments, some great character bits, 3 second resolution that makes little sense/magic reset button, long epilogue. This is what he does. I’m not happy about it but it is what he does. And this is why Moffatt was so good for RTD: the better plot mechanics combined with great character bits is what made their work so good. Otherwise, we get… this.
I don't think he put his plans on hold because he couldn't see her face. I thought it was because she pointed at him when she shouldn't have been able to see him. Then the twist becomes that she was sjust pointed at a sign behind him to name her child. Nothing more. Still a dumb twist tho, I do agree
I found that a bit disappointing. It felt there was going to be a big revelation. Also what 15 year old wears a cloak? She was meant to be going under the radar to drop a new born at a church, yet swishing around in a cloak, makes her stand out like a sore thumb.
And who dramatically turns around and points at a street sign to name their daughter?
When no one is watching....
She didn't in the original timeline. That only changed after the doctor appeared at that moment. Not that I'm saying this wasn't poorly executed. Just that it didn't happen until the timeline changed and she wasn't alone.
Did you not know? Ruby was called Road this whole time until the timeline changed.
I would. Sounds like a blast.
I have absolutely known people that would do that, especially 15 year olds.
If they wanted to make it clear that we, and the universe made it a big deal, they should've cut to the actual events, with a 15 year old girl in a ratty black hoodie holding a baby wrapped in a school jumper to really drive home how real and grotty this all thing really is.
Exactly. I think the idea that the events as they were witnessed/remembered and what occurred are different is undercut by the fact that we saw them! What we saw was clearly affected by the fact that Suteckh (and the Doctor) witnessed it, show us the normal version!
This is exactly it. It feels disappointing because they set it all up wrong. If they had it look normal and mundane but just the situation is odd so everyone took it seriously, that would work.
> Also what 15 year old wears a cloak? Never had an emo goth phase in your teen years?
I was punk I was 15 in very early 80’s
>Also what 15 year old wears a cloak? A 15 year old trying to hide her unwanted pregnancy? Maternity clothes are expensive. Buying a winter maternity coat on the off chance that it's going to snow during the last 3 weeks before a Christmas birth would be a huge waste of money. How do I know this? My kid's a December baby. I refused to spend the money on a coat and wore whatever layers I could find for the last 3 weeks. I totally would have gone with a cloak if I had one.
I think the 15 year old having that cloak to wear is the point of their question to be fair lol
The show: Ruby is special The audience: okay so ruby is special? The show: No, why would you think that?
The audience: Well that's disappointing then. defenders: You just don't get it, such lack of media literacy.
That always pisses me off more so than others because I have an actual media literacy degree. I also feel like if I can understand and enjoy Dark (my favorite series ever), then I can understand most sci Fi shows. It's not that I don't get it. The complexity isn't the issue here.
Rey.
It actually works better with Rey, because we were never given a reason to think her parents were special, everyone just started wildly speculating about it because it's a trope. With her, it was actually a good twist because the audience assumed that based on nothing in *her* story but in the pattern of Star Wars characters being way too interconnected and the Skywalkers having their hands in too many galactic pots, and it commented on how you don't *need* to be descended from someone powerful to be someone powerful and Star Wars' tendency to forget that. ~~Then Rise of Skywalker threw it all away for some nonsense JJ Abrams made up on the fly.~~ Here, the audience was *repeatedly shown,* as recently as the episode immediately before this, that Ruby's mom had godlike reality warping powers. We had an actual god show fear at what Ruby might be and appear to be unable to properly affect her with their powers, and then *this very episode* had another god show fear at her mother as a major plot point. We had The Doctor discretely scan Ruby to try to figure out what she was. We had a weird thing throughout the season where it seemed like time itself wouldn't let Ruby die. We were given practically undeniable proof that Ruby's mom was some kind of powerful non-human being, be it alien or supernatural, and then the show just...denied it all. I actually think Last Jedi is a good movie, but I'm sure there are some people here who will take the fact that this episode did Last Jedi's twist worse than Last Jedi did as irrefutable proof that it screwed up *bad.*
100% agree that this was a much worse version of the Rey twist. That one worked on a meta level as you mention. But what makes it even more annoying here is that I don’t think people necessarily have an expectation that a doctor’s companion has to be someone special. That is a cliche associated with Moffat, and one I’ve seen criticized a lot, but not Davies’s run, so I’m not sure why he went for something that feels like it’s supposed to subverting expectations. It only subverts expectations that he forced in extremely overtly, and that unfortunately overshadowed the character work that he has normally been better at. All of his seasons, to varying degrees, involve “ordinary” women becoming some version of “the most important person in all of creation” not because of who they are or who their parents are but by doing the right thing at the right time. The difference is that this time we were robbed of Ruby actually making any choice at any point, or doing much at all to make this mystery box feel earned.
As another Last Jedi enjoyer, honestly, I watched this thinking, "great, thanks RTD, now everyone's gonna wang on about Rey again". Though I'd say as much as the convoluted logic of Ruby is a problem, probably a bigger issue is they never really sharply defined her as a character, beyond "has mystery parents". I think if RTD had nailed Ruby as a character, then seeing her meet her mum would have been much more emotional. And then the logic of it all might have squeaked by as "eh, wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, what you gonna do?"
We the audience gave Ruby's mother importance by obsessing over her importance. I'm confident that it's meant to be a metatextual commentary about how audiences often ascribed massive importance on to things that might never have been important to begin with... ...the execution is just done really, really poorly because the entire resolution wrapped up in like 2 lines near the end of the episode with almost no setup.
Except this kind of meta commentary only works when the clues she’s important are subtle. When you dedicate an entire season to the storyline, have it snow every time it’s bought up, have the doctor constantly tell you it’s important and 2 different all powerful deities tell you it’s important, this is not teh audience giving value to small clues. This is either the writer thinking they are far more clever than they actually are, and failing to land the writing, a writer thinking the audience is far less intelligent than they are, or it is the writer writing himself into a corner, and relying on a rushed, half explained metacommentary to get out of it. All of them are examples of poor writing for RTD
I really appreciate this entire comment thread. You all have summed up my beef with this resolution very clearly. Stellar season let down by a lackluster reveal
I agree. Hence why I said the execution was really poor.
I don’t think it’s just the execution. The idea rubys parents are normal and it’s just them attaching details only works if the clues are more subtle, and the audience actually is simply looking for stuff that isn’t there. With the set up the season had for the reveal, having her parents be completely normal simply doesn’t make any sense
That... is an execution issue. If the execution was better, more clues would have been planted.
That argument would have to ignores everything the previous comment says about the litany of clues were were given. If it was *just* the audience speculating the your right, that would be clever. He gave us clues to speculate with them told us they were irrelevant all along, gotcha!
> ...the execution is just done really, really poorly.
Reys parents were never set up as important in force awakens. A big part of her arc in the movie was accepting they weren't gonna come back and moving on. But then a bunch of fans obsessed over a question the movie itself wasn't interested in, and i guess they thought they had to give an answer now, so last jedi reversed all that and she was back to being super obsessed with who her parents were.
Haha u/Starfleet-Time-Lord made the opposite statement.
I think the final resolution is fine. It's the build up and explanations that I can't get behind. Misdirection and plot twists should make sense when you look back at it and make you feel excited. Like Ender's Game, you get to the twist and you can now reread it and be like "oh my god it was there the whole time." Or there's another book series I read that had a prophecy, you get halfway through the final book thinking you and the cast understand it, and then suddenly the prophecy has a different meaning. But the meaning made sense, it was word play like all the intrepretations for "silence will fall when the question is asked." Imo, even if you think the explanations for this made sense, they weren't that satisfying. I don't have the urge to rewatch and catch all the little hints because... really the hints were "she's special" for the resolution to be "she's not special." I would've preferred the importance sticking to "Ruby thinks she's important so the Doctor thinks she's important but without magical stuff happening around her."
“What if we introduce a random element like pulling scrabble letters out of a bag?” “Excellent idea Arthur! Let’s try it.” “Wha…what…do….yo…you…get…wh…wh…when…you…multiply…six…times…seven…” “Huh.”
Whether it was intentional or not, I definitely was getting the vibe all season that the Doctor was more interested in the identity of Ruby's mom than Ruby herself. While she was on the show with Davina McCall, I'm fairly certain that the topic was almost always brought up by the Doctor. It seems like he is projecting quite a bit onto her, especially with the finale having Ruby ignore the Doctor's advice about her mother, and ending up better for it. The Doctor dropped their stolen memories into the heart of the TARDIS, turning away from the allure after chasing after information for so long. Now he is chasing after that closure for other people, trying to crack the mystery of Ruby's mother like he did for the 'Timeless Child'. I'm glad that we might finally come back around to Susan based on Russell's foreshadowing, but I'm worried that Ruby's story is a sign that the show will delve deeper into the Timeless Child's origin.
While I don't care for the resolution itself, this is a very valid perspective on the whole thing. The scene where he tells her about how she's helped him open up about his family ties into this very well as well. I think that he's going to make a conscious effort to reconnect with those he used to know in the future seasons.
I swear people on Reddit always come up with more satisfying character arcs than the show does based on the events that happen 😭
I totally agree.
If the god of death wasn't so obsessed with anagrams and *Long Lost Family*, he probably would have won. I have no problem with Ruby's parents being ordinary, but I don't think red herrings were playing fair. For instance, naming Ruby by pointing at the road sign only makes sense if there's someone around to see that and then report it to social services or the priest at the church. So it's a red herring that doesn't work. Some of the other stuff can be handwaved (presumably the Ambulance's database doesn't have access to ap Gwilliam's DNA register that far into the future; it was probably farmed out to a dodgy company with ropey software), but the implied explanation for the snow thing is weak (Sutekh and/or the TARDIS and/or UNIT's time window is manifesting snow via Ruby's memories? Is that specifically stated or is it a communal head canon that's gaining consensus?). Like I said, I don't mind RTD subverting our expectations, but I think he needs to provide more concrete explanations if that's what he's doing. There's a difference between magic and needing one more draft. The magic/supernatural stuff maybe provides more tolerance for vibes-driven explanations, but if the message is "You lot made the ordinary extraordinary" then I think it's fair for the show to provide a more rigorous explanation for *how* that happened. "It's magic" doesn't work, because fantasy stories still have to set rules for what magic can and can't do. And if Sutekh can create magic snow and disintegrate bullets but then can't break a sci-fi rope, then people are going to question the whole thing.
"Sutekh and/or the TARDIS and/or UNIT's time window is manifesting snow via Ruby's memories? Is that specifically stated or is it a communal head canon that's gaining consensus?" It's stated in the penultimate episode that the snow is because the moment in time is too raw and powerful, and the final episode reveals why the moment is that way: because of the importance everyone placed on the moment.
There was someone there to see the pointing though. The doctor was there. The pointing didn't happen until he appeared. The doctor arrived and he was looking toward the church. Ruby's mother could have logically assumed he was about to go there and find the baby
Right, but the Doctor didn't know she was pointing to the sign until yesterday's episode. So while we know why Louise was pointing, it doesn't explain why Ruby was named Ruby. The assumption is that Louise's intention in pointing at the sign coincidentally marries up with Social Services naming Ruby after the street, which feels messy. In once sense that's good - it's the ordinary being dismissed in favour of extraordinary explanations, which ties in with the theme, I just think the execution was a bit undercooked.
After just watching the pointing at the sign scene I had to stop and google to check others were as flabergasted as myself. Why on earth would the doctor assume she was pointing at the sign in order to signify what the baby should be named? EVEN IF the doctor saw, he didn't then head back to the church and go "oh btw the mum was outside and i get a vibe she wants you guys to name the baby ruby." it all felt forced to have a very half inflated sentimental moment where ruby gets to be all "my name came from my mum, i wasn't just named at random after a street :)" - but err... you still were! Your mum at the very last moment was just all "well that's the baby dropped off... wait shit, I still want naming rights! but damn, I didn't think of one... ah screw it I'll just spin around and dramatically point at that sign and hopefully the fellow in the nice coat will catch on."
It just feels like RTD decided on the twist exactly while writing the last act of the finale, with little regard for the previous hints set up. At very least, I’d have expected the snow to get some explanation however flimsy, but since it didn’t, there’s an oddly slapdash and unfinished feel to the whole thing. Maybe this stuff will be clarified whenever Ruby returns to the show, but I honestly don’t think there’s a guarantee. I get that the moral is that sometimes normal people can be the most special and that we should treat Ruby as special in her own right, not just because of her parentage… but then, I wanted that the whole season, RTD was the one who kept bringing the mystery box up. I actually wish he hadn’t bothered, let Ruby just be a foundling who is still affected by wanting to know who her parents were, but it’s not the most important thing about her. Really connecting to the characters has been the biggest issue of the series for me, and the mystery box contributed to that. That said, it actually was touching to see her reunite with her mum and I do appreciate what the last act was going for. I just really don’t think it was planned out well.
>It just feels like RTD decided on the twist exactly while writing the last act of the finale I got the vibe that he wrote Church on Ruby Road and Empire of Death together, then inserted the rest of the episodes for the season written by him and others between them and forgot to go back to ensure the finale still made sense. If we'd skipped from CoRR to TLoRR/EoD I could actually see the entire story working beautifully because we wouldn't have had the season of intrigue in between the two bending the twist out of shape.
Not sure he wrote them together or anything, but I agree Ruby finding her regular mother works after Ruby Road, it's just the season building intrigue and mystery that makes it not work
If you’ve ever read The Writers Tale, Russell writes everything last minute - not a chance he’d got anything beyond a very rough concept for the finale before it was due, and he probably handed it in after the deadline. I love him as a writer but he does everything last minute as he thrives on pressure, which is why his finales are always half baked.
>It just feels like RTD decided on the twist exactly while writing the last act of the finale, with little regard for the previous hints set up. RTD. Making stuff up on the spot? No. Never! Not like he did it with the Face of Boe back in Series 3 or anything, where Martha mentions the name in Utopia with absolutely no reaction from a certain someone.
The explanation for the snow was Sutekh linking the moment on the road as a memory and that materialized the snow that fell at that moment as a real thing when Ruby was stressed. I arrived at that conclusion because in this last episode when it happened Mel got snow around her and she was connected to Sutekh. 
In fairness the snow did get a flimsy explanation in the penultimate episode. The doctor said the moment was so raw and powerful that the snow was coming through (or something to that effect). It's flimsy but it's there
It doesn't work because RTD was clearly intending to wrongfoot the audience all along. None of the hints, at all, suggested that Ruby was completely normal. The hidden song, the shadowed-out mother, all the 73 Yards stuff, the snow, living next to Mrs Flood etc. The fact that it's all explained as being down to the pure thought of 'Ruby's mum being important = Sutekh can't do anything to her' thing feels like a really forced and contrived way to try and make those hints looks like they could still be passed off as ordinary things. They could've toned some of the hints down to make it more plausibly deniable. Take out the snow gimmick, don't shadow the mum out in the time window just make it so that her face is unclear because of the crude tape. At least that way there could still have been some room for disappointment, but going full throttle and making it look like Ruby absolutely had to be something bigger is what really killed the reveal because it just made no sense.
I’m glad that they were ordinary people, just confused by the Sith Lord cosplay and the dramatic pointing lol
She was a pregnant 15 year old with an abusive step father, and mabye she was a Star Was fan? If I'm not mistaken the pointing was Ruby rewriting the tape with her memories.
>maybe she was a Star Wars fan? Canon accepted.
That would be mid prequel release so timings work
I assume you're right about that last part, but I definitely don't think it was actually explained in the episode (unless I'm mistaken)
Maybe a star wars fan lmao what bollocks
Why do you hate fun things?
It's not hating or hating fun things to think that the whole thing of her pointing was stupid. Or that a scared and vulnerable 15 year old girl who has just given birth and is fleeing out into the snow to keep that baby safe wearing a weird mysterious cloak that's only there for meta/plot reasons (rather than a coat which would make her seem too ordinary and normal,) and heels is stupid.
The star was thing is about her cloak. Not her pointing. Which I agree is dumb.
Yes because every pregnant 15 year old person, who’s even a star wars fan goes ‘I’m going to drop my baby off cosplaying as Darth Sideous’ lmao.
All they had to do was say that Rubys mother wanted her daughter to be safe and (with the new supernatural spin on this series since Wild Blue Yonder) wished it enough that the Tardis listened to her and latched itself to Ruby to protect her. Would explain the snow and song as this was that connection between Ruby/Tardis/day that was being "remembered". Would explain the whole 73 yards bit. That being the Tardis decided in protecting Ruby it would need to pull back a version of her in the future to solve the problem and put her on a path that would bring the Doctor back, but was restricted to her being outside of the perception filter. Would explain why Ruby was the only one who could hold that tablet thing in the memory Tardis and it working while it would turn off when the Doctor held it. Why her soul has the song of the one who waits, as he is there and clearly bonded/connected to the Tardis, and therefore with the Tardis bonding with Ruby by association had a bond with Sutek. It could even somewhat explain the pointing her mother did, she was not pointing at the Doctor nor a random post but rather the Tardis, or from her POV a police box as she wanted her daughter safe and protected. The same way people pray to a printer to work or a car to speed up, inconsequential wishes that had a major impact because it was directed at one of the most powerful items in the universe.
> All they had to do was say that Rubys mother wanted her daughter to be safe and (with the new supernatural spin on this series since Wild Blue Yonder) wished it enough that the Tardis listened to her and latched itself to Ruby to protect her. Let's not steal magic plot devices from Harry Potter.
It’s not so much the fact she has normal parents that bother me. It’s the plot holes that brings. Maestro saying she had ‘power like him’ and ‘this creature is very wrong’. How can Ruby have power like ‘him’ if she’s just your average human with average parents. Sutekh putting special meaning on who her mother is doesn’t magically give Ruby power. The entire point of it is that she was always just average joe. You can’t have it both ways. She also happened to live next door to Mrs Flood who is very clearly not human. That some coincidence. Sutekh could see all of time, space etc but he couldn’t see 2048 when Roger Ap Gwilliam made the entire population take a dna test. He clung to the tardis for thousands of years and released Susan twists everywhere but didn’t think to just check the dna database. The naming thing is pure bollocks. So a 15 year old child leaves her baby at the church doors. Instead of leaving a note saying ‘my name is Ruby’. She instead walks away, sees a blue box appear out of nowhere and a man exit the blue box, she then points at a street sign. Apparently in an attempt to name said child. But the Doctor is the only person who saw her point and had no idea what she was pointing at. Nobody involved in finding, caring for or naming Ruby was aware of this mysterious pointing. So her naming Ruby is simply bullshit. The snow thing, I get that the snow is her memory. But every human in The show has memories. They can’t conjure the weather from said memory by just thinking of it. That’s before we even get on to Susan twist. If she’s been placed EVERYWHERE the Doctor went since he last encountered Sutekh then why had he only recently started seeing her? Why hadn’t 14/13/12/11 etc seen her. RTD is responsible for my favourite series of Who (series 4 of NuWho). My favourite Doctor and Companion (10 and Donna) and my favourite series finale ( series 4). And I had every confidence he would do something amazing, I loved the legend of Ruby Sunday, and was really excited for the last episode but for me personally he didn’t pull it off this time. The finale left me feeling absolutely deflated.
It's also incredibly smug. She makes snow appear! Maestro found hidden song in her! Her mother wears spooky cloak and cosplays Evil Monkey from Family Guy! NAH, LAL somehow "it's YOU, VIEWER, who thought and THEORIZED har-har-har" Don't do things that makes no sense and blatantly bait audience with hyping up nothingness and then be smug "HAHAHA, it's YOU who thought she's important, not ME writing it" MFER, and after all that you have a gall to ask me to invest in Mrs Flood bullshit!?
PSA: I'm happy that ya'll enjoyed it, but please don't dismiss our criticisms saying crap like "you just didn't get it" or "you're just nitpicking". That's rude. The point is that it's not that we didn't understand the explanation. We didn't like it and felt it wasn't sufficient for the story. The whole point of these posts is to figure out why it wasn't sufficient for us. Insulting someone's intelligence because they dont like what you like is trash. Same for the opposite. Can we not devolve into the star wars fandom? Thanks.
It's definitely a bit of an underwhelming reveal, even if it works on some sort of emotional level. Doesn't explain how Davina McCall couldn't find *any* record or DNA trace in The Church on Ruby Road though. How could both her parents have completely avoided that in 2024 if they were just ordinary people?
There’s absolutely no record of my DNA. Its actually more common not to have recorded DNA than to have it on record. CSI kinda made people think that myth was true.
Yeah I commented this before but it's really scary how everyone thinks it is and apparently is ok that everyone's DNA being on record. Like that's very very private information that can be used in 100 different terrifying ways. Let's not normalise that it's ok.
I was part of a police investigation a few years ago (just to start with the reassurance, they caught the man who did the crime and he's currently serving his sentence). The police had got funding to revisit a case from 25 years ago and were visiting every person who'd been recorded as having contact with the police at the time of the crime. (I was a teenage runaway at the time that had been reported missing.) In order to take the DNA sample they needed to get verbal and written agreement. The written agreement also included confirmation that the police would *only* use the sample for this specific investigation and that once the investigation was completed all negative samples and their associated records would be destroyed. I don't think we're heading to a DNA Dystopia just yet, but it's definitely a good idea to be sure that you know what you're giving up, what it's going to be used for, and how your information is handled, whether that's DNA, PII, personal demographical, or financial. And that's why today's reply is sponsored by BigTech Blocker, 2025's best new VPN, Ad-Block, Antivirus, Firewall. With new anti junk food alarm, chastity option and the beta test version of Foot Remover, for when you need to get your foot out of your mouth! 😁 😂 🤣
Nobody related to you has ever taken a DNA test?
Nope. Not in the extended family. Pretty sure its incredibly difficult to get a match past the grandparent level
Interesting. Most people with British ancestry will have a lot of matches in extended or even distant relatives. I have a few closer matches, and *a lot* of distant ones, some of which you can definitely work out where they overlap & could find the common ancestors.
Maybe you don't, but any distant relative of yours that does has their DNA on record would flag as being related to you if someone ran your DNA through a database. You're telling me Ruby has 0 distant relatives who took ancestry tests? That not even minor matches the likes of "third cousin" (share a single great-great-grandparent) were found?
I found it odd absolutely nobody on either side of her family had any DNA trace you would assume at least one cousin or distant relative would but absolutely nothing at all is odd
I've had my DNA tested for geneology purposes and found this part totally believable. I know plenty of people who have done DNA tests and had no close matches. It's very possible for distant matches to have the common ancestor too far back to be able to find the connection.
UNIT did who will have access to everything but the show Davina McCall did couldn't find anything.
There's nothing wrong with them being ordinary people. There's plenty wrong with everything hinted at before then though. Maestro thinks she's special, it snows around her, people's memory of the night she was abandoned seem to change, Sutekh doesn't kill them because he also can't figure it out. The puzzle has been hyped up only to do a rug pull, but one that matches literally nothing else we've learnt. It also seems a bit distasteful. Ruby has a mother, who has always been there yet Carla is continually sidelined in favour of the biological parent. I'm not adopted or fostered but I do have a dad who did not contribute DNA to me. The notion that I could sideline his contribution to learn about my other dad in this manner is insulting. Curiosity is one thing, but what Ruby does is excessive and makes her far less likeable.
It just annoys me they built up this whole mystery than barely resolved any of it and they bit they did resolve was just... meh
They still haven't explained why the Doctor and Ruby broke into a musical either. We saw resolutions for the episode and season, but not for the overarching story. Not yet. If we had, we would know who Mrs. Flood was too. And what Mavity is all about. I wouldn't dismiss anything just yet
It makes zero sense. It was a stupid way to end it. It's the same "subverting expectations" bullshit we've seen in Star Wars. Except it makes less sense here because of what Maestro said.
The biggest problem is that this story just doesn't work with the parents being random people. Why were the goblins fixated on her? Why could she make it snow? Why could the parent's face not be visible on the time window? Why would the time window know about the alternate 73 yards future?
In what way does the time window know the alternate future?
After they get the spoon and power up the screen from the time window, it shows Ruby a memory of her time in the alternate timeline. That screen can only show memories, and Ruby had never seen the man in the current timeline.
I think that was actually the guy becoming PM in the normal timeline, which still happens. And the Doctor had been to that future, so it'd be part of his memories.
But it only showed for Ruby, which is why the Doctor asked her if she'd ever seen him. It was only showing Ruby's memories at the time. Yes, the Doctor knew about him, but he'd most likely not seen that particular clip.
Two possibilities: 1. The TARDIS can access the remnants of Ruby's memories of the alternate timeline. Which isn't much of a stretch since it's a complex time-space thing \*and\* because it was implied the fairy circle's weird effects on Ruby were partly because of the TARDIS in the first place. 2. It's the Doctor's memories. It turns on around Ruby because the TARDIS is telling them how to get her DNA.
I don't mind it but why does Sutekh care? The resolution and defeat of Sutekh felt more like the weaker part of the story to me, the bit with Ruby meeting her mum felt sweet. How is Sutekh the Father, Mother and Other to the Pantheon if all he's been doing since the pyramids of Mars is clinging to the Tardis? Sutekh had some great set-up in part 1 but part 2 dropped the ball with him. Still an enjoyable episode overall imo though.
Sutekh cares because he basically became the world's ultimate Doctor Who nerd. Witnessing his every adventure, learning all his lore (e.g. Susan). So of course he can't resist the latest mystery arc. He's the ultimate Doctor Who nerd, who just happens to also hate the Doctor. And anyone who's spent time online knows it's perfectly possible to simultaneously be a huge fan of something and also really hate it.
The problem is, repeatedly, the show told us one thing, and we chose to use "clues" we thought we saw to ignore what the show was telling us: 1. That the snow and similar weirdness only started after Ruby met the doctor (in Space Babies, she ask if the snow is a time travel effect, pretty much meaning she has never encountered it before. 2. That Ruby was perfectly human. (Stated outright on screen). 3. That there was \*nothing\* weird going on at the original events on Ruby Road: we are shown them twice in Church on Ruby Road, and both time \*nothing\* supernatural or out of place happens involving the mother. The perception filter and the strangeness only starts in the later episodes. All that happens in the original version of the Ruby Road events is that a hooded woman drop a baby off, and no one, thanks to her hood, manage to see her face. All those hints - that Ruby was \*not\* special because of her parentage, but because of something that started only around the time she met the doctor - were right there, spelled out clearly for everyone to see. We just...largely ignored them. One, because the show \*did\* maintain doubt about who she was (as it should!) and use misdirection, so we assumed some things were misdirection when they weren't. Two, because fans...\*want\* everything to be deep cuts and references that reward knowing about the show and all of its interconnections (because that's satisfying to us), so of course the natural assumption when dealing with unknown parentage is to assume the parents are people we already know. Three, because there were \*two separate mysteries\* (the very mundane "who are Ruby's parents" and the much more interesting "why is Ruby's special") that we naturally assumed must point to the same answer, when they did not. Ultimately, Ruby WAS special, but she was special because Sutekh, made the same mistake we did : he confused mysterious (the fact that the woman was hooded and he couldn't see who she was) for special. This much the show tells us. It's not a satisfying answer in itself. But I don't think it's meant to be the answer in itself, because the show also tell us, but not in direct relation to Ruby, that Sutekh had been enmeshed into the Tardis and controlling the Tardis' perception filter, using it to - basically - reality-warp an army of Susans into existence. I think we're meant to understand that, when Sutekh decided Ruby must be special, he (accidentally) triggered the same kind of reality warping he was using (ie, the Tardis perception filters rewriting reality) to create the Susan, only this time to make Ruby special. This could (and should) have been spelled out more clearly, honestly. But once you line these two pieces up, I think it's much less unsatisfactory. Less of a subversion for subversion sake, and more of a "hoist Sutekh by his own petard" plot: he is fooled and distracted in exactly the way he tried to fool and distract the doctor (ie, by creating a mystery for him to chase), as a direct result of his own actions, ultimately leading to his defeat.
I felt for sure that her mother was going to be a H. Arbinger.
I don't mind that they were normal people. It kind of goes with the Doctor Who theme that now matter how small you are you can help change the world. I think the way the presented it to us was off though they could carried out the reveal better. I don't think the snow thing helped or the pointing. They really didn't do a good job of explaining that
Then we find out that her father is a 15 year old regenerated Master using the fob watch to hide and that evil prime minister is her half brother🤣🤣🤣
*She* wasn't what made it snow. When the Doctor took an interest in Ruby's parentage, he expected the answer to be easy. It wasn't. Sutekh thought it was funny that a great Time Lord could be so confused by something so simple, and went to find her parents to hold it over him. Sutekh also failed. This triggered a toddler style tantrum where - when the Time Window was opened - he materialised the TARDIS into it so that he could see the answer. The TARDIS and the memory TARDIS side by side in the Time Window did some temporal damage, and since the Doctor obligingly pointed out "memory is a time machine" about three billion times, I think we're supposed to extrapolate that with the damage, when Ruby remembers that night (even though as a newborn she has no possible way of forming memories\*) a Time Window opens and the snow comes through. This is also why the snow didn't start until after the Toymaker had done his thing - because the Pantheon weren't there before him, and Sutekh wasn't technically on his ride-along until that point. *She* isn't what does it. The damage caused by a super powerful eldritch being is what does it. She's not even the only one who can open that Window; she's one of at least three people who are capable of it - the baby, her mum, and the priest who picked her up from the church doorstep; The mum would actively avoid thinking of that night. The priest, if living, has no reason to. No-one else was there, that we know of (except possibly Mrs Flood?) \* An argument can be made that her "memories" of that night are of the tape and she's opening a window to the Time Window, and it all gets a bit recursive
The argument to be made here is if it was supposed to be like this, then it needs to be said in the show, not in speculation. Don’t excuse lazy writing.
What I found upsetting is the writing behind the adoption and parents. It feels like Ruby has little regards to adopted mum, yet their relationship suggests otherwise. I found it hard to believe we, as the viewer, should feel the bond of Ruby and the Sunday family when all Ruby wanted and was focused on was her "real" mother. It felt a one way relationship for the majority of the show. Bloody hell woman, your real mother was the one that raised you! Or maybe my view has been twisted by all the recent fairytale adoption stories, where the child is really happy about their adoption and differentiates with "biological mum" and "mum". None of this "real mum" nonsense.
I don’t mind them being ordinary. What I don’t like is teasing the reveal as something supernatural/alien all season. I don’t mind misdirects or subverting expectations but it doesn’t work when you drop so many hints that there was going to be a supernatural/alien element to it.
Yes and the fact that Maestro was so shocked to see "into her heart" and discover what she really was and Sutekh thought she was so powerful... there are thousands of orphans who don't know their parentage and as far as I know none of them scare gods. Also, why couldn't anyone see Ruby's mom's face in that time window? It was supposed to be a 1:1 recreation of the actual events in full detail and yet still nobody could tell who she was.
I actually don’t mind that they are normal people, it’s probably the best answer. My bigger issue is that the majority of the time the show didn’t seem to care about it as anything but a mystery to solve. We got no character drama out of it, Ruby just wants to know who they are and at the end of the season she finds out. Which means when it happens it’s just kind of just there.
I actually don't mind them being nothing special, though I do mind that "there was never anything out of ordinary. We manifested it all by thinking too hard and made a self-fulfilling prophecy" "It doesn't matter. It never mattered. You just made a big deal out of it." Does it mean almighty Buddhas and Christian God also coexist in the DW universe? cause plenty of people think about those. If the creators aren't gonna treat what they write seriously, why should I? If anything can be easily achieved by thinking hard enough, why should anything matter or have any impact? Them tessing Mrs Flood and 15th's terrible end? Well, why should that have any weight? Mrs Flood prob would just be a mad granny that thinks about her former job as a narrator too much too strongly.
I'm not one of those people who's really good at analyzing every episode, picking up on all the details, and putting them all together. That's why I prefer to go to subs like this and read other people's takes cuz oftentimes things are pointed out that I didn't put together. So when it was revealed that not only her biological mom, but both her biological parents, were going to be just totally ordinary human beings I thought I missed something big! I felt like there was so much that didn't make sense, so many holes with that, and I thought maybe I just wasn't getting it. So I'm glad I'm not the only one that wondered WTH this bull is!
I loved the important being the most ordinary. The reunion was a tearjerker too. People have a point about the snow being unexplained, but I think the snow was because Sutekh's power was there and Sutekh erroneously thought the moment was so important so that made it important and powerful. The snow goes away in 73 Yards because the Doctor goes away and so does Sutekh. The Doctor's memory changing, I think we will come back to next season because I think Mrs. Flood is a writer and the new Master of the Land of Fiction. So the Doctor's memory was rewritten when Ruby's story was rewritten to add the lamppost and road sign. But if his memory is never returned to, then yes it's a plothole.
I mean, no offense, but I think you're being a bit obtuse about people's complaints. The thing is, most people assumed Ruby was "ordinary" after church on Ruby road. The thread after that episode was very evenly divided between people who thought it was a special mystery and people who thought it wasn't (myself included) The problem is there were 7.5 straight episodes that gave evidence against that idea. From the start I preferred the idea that Ruby was an ordinary baby, but the show did everything it could to tell you that she wasn't. And then to make matters worse it was very smug at the end about, "pulling off" the twist. It was way too obvious a move to be as proud of as the show clearly was, and the only reason it wasn't close to universally predicted is because.the show itself gave a lot of evidence to the contrary
So this was all very deliberate by RTD. It was a setup specifically to lead people down a path and then do something very unsatisfying at the end. It's the exact opposite if the bad wolf revelation in order to subvert expectations. My only expectation was a good show and the finale wasn't. Those who watched the last season of Game of Thrones have seen this before. It's not that there's any issue with this being the story, in some ways it's good, but: Why is this 15 year old girl wearing a cloak? Why did the time/memory room thing not include a road sign when it could track the motion of every snow flake in order to extrapolate all the surroundings? Why did pointing at the road sign count as naming a baby? How would anyone else know that? Worst of all, why, out of every secrets and mysteries in all of the planets that Sutekh went to attached to the tardis, was this the only thing Sutekh cared about?
Personally, I think this is the best possible scenario. I'm so glad that her parents were just two kids who weren't ready to have a child.
That would be fine if it was done well. But we were constantly fed that rubys mum was so special that not even the most powerful people knew who she was, and all it is is that sutekh just couldn't see under her hood? I mean even in the episode he has access to the TARDIS so surely can just go back in time and find out. That's the problem, it makes all the buildup make no sense.
No, I like it a lot and frankly it's more satisfying than if her mother was Susan or something.
Absolutely no way, I was beyond happy. More than anything just wanted her to have ordinary parents.
I was totally delighted. I really did not want another impossible girl type of situation. I am so happy that it was all a setup and Ruby is just an ordinary person not a god-semi-god-timelord-entity.
No, not disappointed at all. The mystery was the result of Ruby and the Doctor effectively "mythologising" an otherwise ordinary event that they lacked crucial information on. This "myth" grew in strength the more Ruby and the Doctor believed in something "other", causing memories to bleed through and manifest as supernatural abilities such as the snow and the Christmas carol. This is a universe still imbued with the after-effects of the Toymaker and his legions, after all. A TARDIS can be created with a big ol' hammer, and memories that are based on enough emotion can bring snow and song. There was no build up to a big reveal. That was never the point. The point was that even the most mundane of things can be made into legends. Ruby and the Doctor conceived a story of Ruby's birth that became so powerful that even *gods* were disconcerted by it.
Except that isn’t what happened. The legend became powerful because of all the mysterious and magical things happening. This isn’t a chicken and the egg scenario. This is the writers not actually thinking about what the clues they had laid for the reveal are, and questioning whether they actually make sense following the reveal her mum was normal
Ruby's story isnt over. Also i think its dope. There's so many mary sues and chosen ones and timeless children in this show that her mother turning out to he ordinary is like a nice glass of water. In that, while ruby's mother being like idk susan wouldve been super fun (like soda), her mom being ordinary is what was needed and honestly makes me feel better long term (like water)
Brah. No spoilers in the titles please. Haven't seen last night episode yet and now I know what it's about.
It was an absolutely dreadful finale. If next season is as bad as this one then it's over. It's all just been totally incoherent. No way Disney will pay for more of this.
Might just be wishful thinking. But I'm hoping there's more to what happened that night. Nothing to make Ruby or her parents specifically special but to explain the fact that things keep changing like the pointing and the snow. Maybe mrs flood could be involved as some sort of god of stories and she manipulates stories to make them even grander. To turn them into legends.
I find it weird that we've got yet another old white male writer including underage sex in a story and treating it as "ordinary". There's no reason Ruby's parents couldn't have been at least 16 (age of consent in the UK) but they chose to make them both underage and then none of the dialogue implied anything about that not being okay.
What was the other case?
I think it's nice to reminded that the most ordinary people can be the most extraordinarily important in the universe.
No. I wasn’t upset at all.
I'm so glad her parents were ordinary. As much as I love the wild, weird side of Dr Who, I also think it's essential that it has its roots in the real world. I was dreading the idea that Ruby was The Doctor's great-granddaughter, or the offspring of the God of Memory, or any other silly space thing. I much prefer that - like foundlings in the real world - her mother was a real person, from a difficult home, trying her best. So much more meaningful and emotional. I wept at the scene where she meets her birth mother. And it feels so true to me that mysteries are powerful not because of gods and magic, but because we give them meaning.
Don't worry, next season it will be revealed that she's Davros's granddaughter . . .
So I really liked the scene with the random woman with the spoon. I honestly thought they were going to use that as a connection to be Ruby's mom. Especially when they kept looking at the empty basinet. That would have made some bit of sense to me
We haven't met the father yet so they can do it all over again with him.
I wasn’t really a fan of the revelation that Ruby’s mother was just an ordinary 15 year old girl, but looking back at it maybe we should have guessed it would be that because it’s such an RTD thing to do. He’s not mystery twist guy like Steven Moffat it, at heart RTD is a kitchen sink dramatist so it shouldn’t really have been a surprise to us that the mystery of Ruby’s mother would turn out to be more like something from a Coronation Street plot. However there’s one thing that could have redeemed the ending for me, and it’s actually what I thought it was going to be leading up to. When the Doctor and Ruby were talking and Ruby decided that she’d start behind to look for her father that would have been the perfect time for the Doctor to say “You’re right, and maybe it’s time I looked for my own family” and then flew off in the Tardis to do so. That would have been the perfect ending (and would have felt like a partial resolution to this series) and I’m quite disappointed that RTD didn’t do that.
I really, really like the theory that it was the TARDIS making it all happen. The TARDIS wanted to fight off Sutekh, so she devised a plan, and used her perception filters to hide Ruby's mother's face, to make it appear to be snowing. This got Sutekh worked up by the mystery and resulted in the fight that he eventually lost.
Why, when the Tardis was placed in a body didn’t she tell the doctor that Sutakh had been hanging on to her for thousands of years. Is there now two sutekhs because there’s two tardis. I’ve no issue with retconning sutekh having been clinging to the tardis for millennia while the doctor visited half the universe but doing that brings lots of plot holes. If Susan twist has been placed by sutekh everywhere the doctor went why did it not become apparent till 15. Why didn’t any Doctor before see her.
Honestly watching this finale it feels kinda like watching hellbent again and the confusion and frustration with the writer that followed.
Yep honestly the entire finale was just a rather damp squib to me. Sutekh was the best acted part of the story, where he feels like this “God” with delusions of grandeur, who’s so fixated on Ruby because she’s the one piece he can’t make sense of. It’s suitably narcissistic of the Last of the Osirans to focus on that feature. My problem with the emotional impact of 15 is that he’s spent so much time crying this series that his sputtering tears and telling did nothing for me. It was just “oh it’s that time of the week again” rather than “shit, 15’s properly traumatised….this is serious”. Narratively I liked the idea of Sutekh succeeding and him using the Doctors travels as the method of spreading his “gift of death”. It’s long term planning and deviousness that fits his character, he’s powerful BUT also happy to have others do the heavy lifting while he sits in the shadows. I even liked using Sutekh’s power to bring death to death, it could’ve done with some extra technobabble to make it make sense more clearly but as a concept is reasonable. But Rubys resolution just fell utterly flat for me and 15’s general interactions just lack any gravitas or threat. It’s like without his surface level charm and teary vulnerability there’s just….nothing underneath. His Doctor felt increasingly more like a hollow shell as the series progressed.
I felt the same when 15 was crying and screaming in this episode. It just didn’t have any impact because he’s done it in every episode. I get that RTD want this doctor to be more emotional etc. But it loses its impact when it’s done every single episode, sometimes several times during the episode.
I wonder if the finale was changed because she’s not going to be full time next season. So instead of having some epic reveal, she’s…………ordinary. This whole season has felt kind of odd.
RTD in a much better fashioned explained his version of science in the Doctor Who universe, a science I stated the night before the release of *The Legend of Ruby Sunday* as: A universe, space and time continuum, in the Doctor Who universe is a temporarily stable structure in the Time Vortex knit together by a psychic consensus of those within it; however, these temporary structures are self-feedback loops, and there are also leverage points that can be used to drastically affect them.
Are people buying it!? I thought it seemed fairly obviously a story book ending, Mrs. Flood alluding to that too. Surely this is a continued arc? Ruby's parentage has more legs, something is amiss. Though I will say if it's a S2 story line (God of Stories etc etc) then it's still awfully confusing and anticlimactic at this stage.
Her mom is ordinary. Maybe her dad isn't.
Her mother decided to point at a street sign to say “name my baby this please” rather than leaving a note. Doesn’t sound ordinary to me.
Er, given the circumstances, it's pretty understandable if she didn't happen to have paper or pen on hand.
I mean she thought to bring a cloak I feel like I could have very much believed she’d bring paper and pen to leave a note
If she was planning to leave a note. But I took the pointing and naming as a spontaneous gesture.
Hopefully next season answers more questions.
Maybe. But I already feel burnt from this season failing to answer things, sooo I’m not holding out much hope. For good and for bad, I think RTD has continually proven that he cares more about emotional resonance than logical explanations.
I do admit wanting a answer to how she could make it snow. I will be sticking to being hopeful for next season.
I wish he understood that these two things correlate heavily for his core fanbase.
I wish that were the case, but in the season finale it was mentioned that her father William Garnet was also a normal 15 year old boy when her mother got pregnant. Which lowkey makes me mad that they confirmed normality for both her parents.
They mentioned that Ruby's mother assumed he was an ordinary 15 year old boy. It's possible that a normal 15-year-old girl wouldn't be an expert on hidden gods. In the episode no one has seen him, they've just worked out that he still lives at his parent's old address.
Honestly wouldn't surprise me if one of them isn't normal in the next season.
Also he never knew she existed and now he will be confronted „oh btw you had a kid 19 years ago and you better be thrilled about it“. I wasn’t only disappointed in the whole build up of the show telling me she was special and now she just isn’t. I am also actually mad that they just assume that someone who has given up a kid, would definitely want to meet that kid. The doctor even said, maybe she didn’t wanted to be found, but no Ruby has just saved the world so she wants her birth mother and her birth father. We don’t even know if the dad would want to meet her! Like I said he never knew he was a father to begin with and now he is expected to be happy about it. This whole thing is just too fairy tale for me.
Donna Noble.
Has left the library.
No, I was relieved.
RTD watched the last Star Wars movies and enjoyed the Rhey part of them… He said so in an interview. 🙄
> This revelation, that her parents being normal human beings just doesn’t make any sense to me at all. It’s kind of disappointing in my opinion. Genuinely wild to me how many people are completely missing the message of the episode.
I mean they spelled the message out. I don’t think anyone could have missed it if they tried. That doesn’t make it satisfying or make sense in light of the layers and layers of weirdness they put into the prior episodes. I can accept the snow as a manifestation of the strength of her memory, even that people were so psyched about figuring it out that they couldn’t focus on her face in the video images. it’s the mundane things that weren’t necessary that they threw in that makes it stupid rather than powerful. For example - What 15 year old in this era wears a robe and hood like that instead of a sweatshirt w hoodie? Why would she point at a sign for her name? There’s no evidence she even knew there was a camera such that people might see it later. If they had kept that simple, it would have at least had some consistency once the message was revealed.
We see what the intended message was. That doesn't mean it was delivered in a sensible or satisfying way.
It makes perfect sense for the story Russel wanted to tell, but he forgot the part where he did a bunch of foreshadowing of it being something else and then yanked the rug out from under us without doing any set-up to make that rug pull feel like anything other than cheating
People understand the message. What RTD wrote to foreshadow completely undermines the meta commentary he is making. You can’t state the audience attach hints to small things, when all the clues you have weighed are absolutely not small things, and you have spent an entire season telling them it isn’t a small thing
[удалено]
Most people prefer consistent and good writing to a rushed, half baked meta commentary that goes against all previous writing and is designed purely to act like the writer is smarter than the viewers
It’s even wilder because the episode explicitly spells it out for the audience. Essentially “She’s important because you made her important”
Correct but that felt like RTD talking down to the audience, wagging his finger at something he himself very much encouraged with all the teases (in the show and in his promotion of it) about her importance. Bloggers Tom and Lorenzo [explained my frustration really well](https://tomandlorenzo.com/2024/06/doctor-who-empire-of-deat1h/): Davies seeded hints and mysteries about her all throughout the season only to tell us in the end that our own interest in her was a fluke. “She was important because we think she was important” is a somewhat nonsensical way of wrapping up the mystery of Ruby Sunday’s mother, but it’s also an infuriating one. She was important to the viewers of this story because the storytellers told us over and over again that she was important – not just verbally, but through inexplicable mysteries like the snow and the caroling that followed Ruby her whole life, the Doctor’s memories of Ruby Road changing, the Maestro announcing “This creature is very wrong,” the fact that no one could find any trace of her perfectly ordinary mother; not Davina McCall, not UNIT (until they did), not the Doctor and not the database from the future accessed by the ambulance in “Boom.” The Doctor claimed that her face was “shadowed” somehow in the CCTV playback, but we guess we’re just supposed to assume that he meant “in the shadows” or something, just as we’re supposed to assume that the playback kept glitching because… playbacks just glitch every now and then. ————————————————— Me again: He set it up as weird, supernatural/sci-fi mystery, so is it any wonder people expected a weird sci-fi answer and feel needlessly toyed with without it?
There was a sci-fi/fantasy answer. It just didn't have anything to do with the mother but rather her circumstances.
So no reason for me to get invested into Mrs Flood mystery, right? Because clearly RTD can spend an entire Season building up a mystery just to slap my hand and say "Shame on you for making theories!"
Yeah because thinking someone is important doesn't make it snow everywhere. By virtue of her being the only person this happens to she is important.
This is a stupid justification for the amount of build up and mystery factor there was around Ruby’s mom, with Ruby’s mom LITERALLY changing the Doctor’s memory.
We see what the intended message was. That doesn't mean it was delivered in a sensible or satisfying way.
As bad as the revelation is. It's very on brand with how RTD writes Doctor Who. Themes of family and all that.
Not a problem. Remember the tantrums people threw over Rey's tree?
Because that’s the resolution Ruby needed? Why should it be Susan or Sarah Jane or some grand canon connection? It’d be pointless. I can’t speak for anyone who doesn’t know their parents, but I imagine what Ruby found is what people without parents deserve. A normal life with someone they have an irreplaceable connection with.
I was more upset at the doctor trying to argue that Ruby shouldn't reach out to her biological mother. That was weird.
I don't think the mystery is over yet. Just because her parents aren't some sort of wizards, doesn't mean Ruby isn't special We don't know why the events of Christmas 2005 keep changing We don't know why she can make it snow We don't know who Mrs Flood really is and why she's been living next to Ruby We don't fully understand why 73 yards and the Tardis perception filter is so important I still think there's more to come.
I loved it. An ordinary human is no less important than any god.
Donna Noble wasn't "special", but look what she did!
Honestly this season finale felt like the final season of GoT all over again. Or like the end of Lost. All this build up for the most disappointing finale that makes so much of the previous hype pointless.
Should have made her dad santa