73 Yards

Chapter the 305th, where the Doctor puts his foot in it again.

Plot:

[A recent story of the streaming era, so be warned there are spoilers ahead.] The Doctor and Ruby park the TARDIS on some clifftops in Wales. The Doctor is too busy crowbarring in references to a dangerous Welsh politician Roger ap Gwilliam from Ruby's future to look where he's going. He breaks a faerie circle, a small pagan structure of thread and scrolls. Ruby reads some of the scrolls, then looks around to find the Doctor has disappeared; she can't get into the TARDIS, and is all alone... except for a mysterious old woman, a distance away from Ruby, gesturing at her. She goes off looking for help, and the woman always seems to be there, the same distance (which Ruby will later calculate to be 73 yards) away from her. She asks a hiker to speak to the woman on her way past, and she sees from far off that when the hiker hears the old woman speak she becomes terrified and runs away. At the nearest town, she stays in a pub. The regulars wind her up about her worries about druids and folklore and whatnot, but when one of them goes outside and talks to the woman, it terrifies him such that he won't come back to the pub while Ruby is there. Reluctantly leaving the TARDIS, Ruby goes home to London. On the journey home, she sees the woman in the fields and streets rushing past the train window. Her Mum speaks to the woman, and leaves home; only coming back when Ruby is out to change the locks of their flat. Rejected, Ruby turns to Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and UNIT, but their technology and knowledge of supernatural phenomena do not help; once they approach the woman, they too abandon Ruby.

Years go by, Ruby learns to live with her distant but ever present companion. Aged 40, she sees Roger ap Gwilliam, remembers the Doctor's warning about him bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war, and realises that maybe she has to save the world to return her timeline back to normal. She infiltrates ap Gwilliam's Albion party as a volunteer, and bides her time. The party wins a general election and a victory speech is planned at a Cardiff stadium where ap Gwilliam will announce that he's taken control of a nuclear arsenal (and may just launch). Ruby, with security officers yelling at her to stand down, positions herself exactly 73 yards away from ap Gwilliam. The old woman speaks to him, and he runs off terrified, and resigns as prime minister with immediate effect. Saving the world doesn't change anything for Ruby, though, and 40 years later she is still accompanied by the strange old woman 73 yards away. She visits the TARDIS once last time - it has become something of a shrine, overgrown and abandoned on the clifftop. On her deathbed, she is visited by the strange woman, suddenly much closer but facing away from her. Ruby reaches out to her happily... ...and finds herself observing her younger self and the Doctor as they approach the faerie circle. She wills them not to break the circle, and this time they do not. Young Ruby still seems to have vestigial memories of the aborted timeline.

Context:

As reported in the last blog post's First Time Round section, the Better Half is not getting on with Fifteen's vocal mannerisms because they remind her of an annoying colleague she once had; I thought therefore that when 73 Yards came up in the random selection to be blogged next, given Ncuti Gatwa only appears briefly at the beginning and end, it might be good for her to sample. She's only seen the Goblins and Space Babies episodes thus far, and its fair to say that the series does some different and interesting things in the episodes after those ones. She was not to be persuaded, though, so I watched it on my own one evening in late July 2024 from the BBC iplayer.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. The new Ncuti Gatwa series broadcast in May and June 2024 delivered seven new stories (six single-parters and one two-part finale) that would postpone the point of catching up a little. This is the third one of the series to be covered for the blog in random order, following The Devil's Chord and Space Babies.

First Time Round:

Watched from midnight on the 25th May 2024, seconds after it landed on BBC iplayer. I was accompanied as I was for most of the series by the middle child, a boy aged 14. My initial impression as the end credits rolled was that I'd watched the best Doctor Who episode I'd seen for some considerable time (I mean years); my son thought it was "weird and a bit crap".

Reaction:

There are clearly loads of influences on 73 Yards including folk horror, M.R. James ghost stories, horror comedy (the sequence in a rural pub has echoes of American Werewolf In London), It Follows, The Dead Zone, Turn Left and The Curse of Clyde Langer. There's also more than a pinch of David Lynch. Lynch's films and the TV series he co-created Twin Peaks often involve a dream or nightmare-like atmosphere and corresponding logic. His individual offerings tend to fall on a spectrum based on how much one is expected to understand what is going on. On the left-hand side is something like Mulholland Drive, which even had a set of clues that Lynch wrote and published accompanying its home media release, and has a single reasonably plausible reading that fans have worked up over the years; in the middle is something like Lost Highway where there are some tantalisingly plausible interpretations but not everything fits; at the right-hand side would be something like Inland Empire, where you haven't got a hope of getting a grip on it (unless you're David Lynch himself, perhaps). To me, 73 Yards is on the left-hand side of my imaginary Lynch-o-meter. There are mysteries, but enough clues to solve them (in this and in subsequent episodes). The old woman has a perception filter like the TARDIS, it later transpires that the range of the TARDIS perception filter is exactly 73 yards, Kate establishes (as seeded in previous episodes) that apparently supernatural phenomena are becoming increasingly common. Kate also speculates that landing a perception filter on top of the faerie circle may have caused some kind of reaction, and says that "this timeline might be suspended along your event". Put that together and its not hard to see at least one reasonably coherent reading.

Usually in Doctor Who's stories that sample ghost stories (and there have been quite a few over the years) the explanations for any supernatural shenanigans are much more prosaic - it's aliens, or it's time disturbance. As fans, we are perhaps hard-wired to expect this; if one can't switch off those expectations, then 73 Yards might be a frustrating experience: is the mysterious woman Ruby herself when old? If so, why is she played by a different person? And what exactly does she say to people to terrify them, and turn them against Ruby? Not only do we not need to be told these things, the drama would be significantly lesser if we were. The story is a space for our imaginations to work, and a beautifully made one at that. Director Dylan Holmes Williams and his crew achieve so many great shots, not just of the dramatic landscapes of Welsh cliffs, hills and shores, but urban scenarios too, each with this one constant presence - a woman just close enough to be emphatically there, but too far away to be seen in any detail. Some set-ups counterpoint the many long shots that the script requires with some expertly framed close work. There's the simple but effective pan left onto Ruby as she does the clearly foolish inciting act in a horror story, opening and reading the scrolls and thereby breaching the sanctity of the faerie circle, then a pan back to the right again in a continuous shot to where the Doctor was, to show that he's disappeared from the frame. Then, a cut back to the lonely wide shot of Ruby, abandoned. I also love the moment when Jemma Redgrave walks into a big close-up representing Ruby's POV and gets straight down to UNIT business. It raises hopes for Ruby and the audience that are then quickly dashed when even the professionals are shown not to be immune to the mysterious woman's powers.

That is just one moment indicative of what happens throughout where the narrative of 73 Yards stubbornly refuses to settle down to be an ordinary Doctor Who episode, or indeed any one particular thing. It restlessly moves from the folk horror of the scenes of Ruby in the isolated Welsh inn with creepy regulars (there's some genuinely funny material in there - "Of course you can pay with your phone" - but it does come at the expense of presenting the rural Welsh as very rude and hostile, which is an unfair generalisation) to the domestic anguish of her mother turning on her. Then there's the aforementioned tease that UNIT might arrive and things might settle down, but no. Suddenly we're jumping forward in time (with impeccably well chosen musical accompaniment in Labi Siffre's Watch Me). This montage is just one of three electrifying sequences that push this story high above any other broadcast this year or in the last few years of Doctor Who (I think it's probably the best single story since at least Heaven Sent, and there's some stiff competition in that time). The next moment of the three is the climax of the following section, where the narrative morphs into a political horror/thriller. Aneurin Barnard as Roger ap Gwilliam does a lot without seeming to do much in creating a chilling character. It's a great performance, and the scene where Ruby positions herself such that the mysterious woman brings all his destructive plans to an end is a tour de force. It's uplifting not just because of the defeat of evil, but because of what it represents for Ruby's character. She's not just learned to live with the limitations imposed on her life, she has turned them to her advantage. Her - our - challenges are also her - our - superpowers.

The story refuses to conform, though, and this act to save the world does not close the loop and bring things back to normal. We cut to 40 years on, and Ruby has lived a tough life of abandonments, but is unbowed ("At the end, I have hope... I dare to hope"), The final one of the three electrifying sequences is the pure horror of the mysterious woman, her back turned so she remains unknown and unknowable to the last, appearing by Ruby's futuristic hospital bed. The reaction of Ruby sidesteps our expectations yet again: there's no fear, just smiling and the outreached arms of acceptance. The ending going back to the beginning ties things up nicely. Long term readers of the blog will probably be thinking I'm a hypocrite. I've criticised other stories that have come up for the blog that take place in aborted timelines because nothing ultimately has any true meaning (a notable example of such criticism can be read in the post for The Wedding of River Song). It's a bit tricky to delineate why 73 Yards is different, but I think it is mainly because of the emotion involved. An alternate timeline which is just the setting for another action story is a wasted opportunity, but here we are able to see a companion's entire alt-life lived out. It's not a reset ending either; the entire aborted timeline powers a subliminal impression that averts the Doctor and Ruby breaking the faerie circle and sends time off in the right direction again, but Ruby is left with traces of memory of what happened that will be referred back to in future episodes.

Millie Gibson is phenomenal in this story, thrust early on into a full starring role (necessitated by Gatwa still filming Sex Education series 4 when production began). Her performance ties all the different phases of this story together, and makes every emotional beat count. I'm thinking that the Venn diagram of Doctor Who fans and David Lynch fans might show only a slender overlap. So, I'm not expecting this story to top any polls, even though I think it should. Intellectual meanings may remain tauntingly semper distans throughout, but the emotional meaning is right there, front and centre.

Connectivity:

Both 73 Yards and The Giggle are Russell T Davies penned episodes of 2020s Doctor Who featuring Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and UNIT, and a brief appearance from Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor; they both also feature a politician making a speech on TV, and someone with (seemingly) supernatural powers.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Continuing Story of Narcissus. Inevitably over nearly ten years of Deeper Thoughts sections on the blog, I have given away some of my preoccupations beyond Doctor Who. Amongst other things, I've regularly discussed my affinity with left-leaning progressive politics and my love for UK pop duo Pet Shop Boys. July 2024 and the months leading up to it were good times for someone with these particular persuasions. The UK voted in the Labour party at a general election in a landslide, removing a Conservative party that in its 14 years in power showed more and more extreme populist tendencies, and did much damage with its policies. Overnight, the heightened drama of UK politics disappeared. Adults appeared to now be in charge. To give him some credit, this also included the former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who seemed much more calm and sensible as Leader of the Opposition when he didn't have such urgent need to try to please the wildly different factions of his party to get any work done. Shortly after the UK election, the second round of the French National Assembly elections decisively rejected extreme right-wing populists, leaving left-leaning and centrist politicians in power. This rejection of a couple of examples of similar political groups, those that angrily express supposedly easy answers to difficult questions (as fictionally personified in 73 Yards by Roger ap Gwilliam) - was a positive for Europe, and for the world. It was also positive, though I don't agree with them, that the UK's Reform party (the epitome of this kind of populist politics) got some representation in the UK parliament. Clearly there are people out there that want to vote for them, and some of those people will have their own local representative, as well as having the leader and mouthpiece of the party as part of national opposition; they can judge them on how they perform: democracy in action.

The build up to the UK election was accompanied by a great new series of Doctor Who, and the release of a new Pet Shop Boys album Nonetheless, plus a few singles from said album (the latest of which had a physical release the day after the election on the 5th July). All told, it felt like everything was aligning specifically for me, which is always a nice feeling. The album is - and I know every aged superfan says this about the latest album by their enduring faves that everyone else thinks peaked decades before - simply one of the best things they've ever made. In the mold of their most classic releases (1990's Behaviour, or 1987's Actually as just two examples) it is ten tracks, all perfect songs and perfect productions, almost all of which could be singles. There's another thing in common with the album Actually from their "Imperial Phase" in the 1980s too. One of the songs has become inadvertently and eerily prescient of a shocking contemporary event. In 1987, the song was King's Cross, the final number on the second side (this was a time when albums had sides) of Actually. It is a song that uses the at-the-time run down area of London as an example of Thatcherite urban deprivation. Metaphorically, it talks about the song's narrator finding themselves "lost by the station called King's Cross" with "dead and wounded on either side", adding that it's "only a matter of time". Lyricist of the band Neil Tennant was, just for that moment and probably to his immense sadness, exactly right. A couple of months after the album's release, there was a fire in the King's Cross St. Pancras underground station that caused 31 fatalities. It took until 2024 for him to repeat this freak occurrence of second sight. If I had a nickel for every time Pet Shop Boys lyrics were inadvertently and eerily prescient, I'd have two nickels, which admittedly isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.

The track in question on Nonetheless is the penultimate one, Bullet for Narcissus. It tells the tale of an agent on a security detail who despises the politician he's protecting, but nonetheless (see what I did there?) might have to take a bullet for him in the line of duty. The song is completely from the point of view of the agent, and is not inciting anything so let's not even think of going down that line of enquiry. The lyrics tease the possible identity of the politician (to the agent, he's self-serving and his politics are "mean", he wears make-up that runs, he faces accusations that he denies, and gives speeches to large, devoted crowds). It's generic enough to be any populist politician, to be honest; ignoring the make-up reference, it would describe Roger ap Gwilliam, a fictional composite of many real life figures, and for all we know Roger might put on a bit of slap to look his best for the cameras). Anyone listening to the song probably would guess the same frontrunner candidate, though, and it wouldn't be Roger. So, that second nickel was earned when on the 13th July, some idiot managed to get on a roof with an assault rifle and take shots at the Republican candidate for US President in the November 2024 election. Did his security detail let him down? Do they secretly despise him? At the time of writing, investigations are still ongoing, but it does seem unfathomable that anyone could be allowed to get that close. Given it's such early days, I'm trying not to worry about the subsequent commentary that seems almost unanimous in the opinion that surviving this attempt means he is certain to win. In my opinion, that would be bad for the world; maybe not quite as bad as Gwilliam trying to nuke everyone, but bad. It shouldn't need saying, but I will: this doesn't mean I want this person to be shot.

Murdering anyone is morally wrong, of course; more dispassionately, though, it is also bad politically. Creating a martyr creates too many unknowns, and probably would have the opposite effect than that which the assassin intended (if they were thinking coherently at all). Besides, any individual populist is just one person representing a larger movement. If, like I do, you believe that movement is in the wrong direction, then the way to stop or change it is by voting not shooting. 73 Yards is a story about one person making a difference to the actions of a populist who threatens the world. It's done non-violently, though the sequence where Ruby paces back with her phone trained on Roger ap Gwilliam uses the visual syntax of movie scenes of political assassination to such an extent that the episode might even have got pulled had the shooting happened around when it was planned for broadcast. Will it also prove that one person can make a difference to the fortunes of a populist in the real world, but this time ultimately being responsible for putting him into power? As I say, I'm trying not to worry about it. My period of undiluted good feeling, though, didn't even last two weeks. The new dawn lasted from the early hours of the 5th to the 13th July, and the extreme right-wing populists might already be on their way back. There's a glimmer of hope in that a new opponent on the Democrat side might make a difference, and I dare to hope. I also have a Labour UK government (and MP, the first ever in my constituency to wear a red rosette), and I can still console myself by watching Doctor Who and listening to the music of the Pet Shop Boys...

In Summary:

By some distance (ho ho) the best recent Doctor Who story.