A legendary serial featuring a poacher sandwiched twixt buxom mummies.
Sutekh’s back and Kate just had a flapjack, as RTD lines up a plethora of mysteries that surely all will be explained in the next and final episode of the series, surely
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It’s mid-June and that can only mean one thing: it’s time for a Doctor Who Christmas Special! Thus, the Fifteenth Doctor brings legendarily mysterious companion Ruby Sunday to UNIT HQ and there poses three challenges to his uniformed chums: Can they identify the mysterious woman they have encountered across a series of Doctor Who and apparently a couple of adventures we really wish they could have aired; can they reach soaring new heights of flimsiness in the forming of anagrams; and do they have an overly complicated scifi wibbly wobbly, or maybe a phonebook, to identify Ruby’s mum?
Don’t be daft. It’s Junemas 2024! No one has a phone book anymore, and so UNIT has no choice but to sacrifice a floor of their skyscraper to a VHS digitisation device. Plugging a grainy video tape and the power of memory into the so-called Time Window, and pulling in a series’ worth of ancillary characters for a day’s work, however, they make a tragic discovery: they’ve been giving an old foe a free ride to every Doctor Who adventure since the middle of Series 13. Stick around for one more paragraph to learn which foe it is.
Following the big reveal, Doc and companion-turned-undercover-agent Mel B head to a grand presentation by billionaire and Elon-Musk-but-kind, Sue Triad (S triad, get it?) who’s unveiling some new tech (Sue tech, get it?) and who happens to look like that intertemporal lady. She’s also the only person named Susan on the planet, so it stands to reason she might be Doc’s granddaughter. Alas, she is not. And the internet already predicted that the foe is Sutekh. Hilarity ensues.
In this penultimate episode, RTD pulls at the spastic, incongruous threads strewn across his literary loom, and dives twist-first into a legend so elusive, that it wasn’t mentioned until an episode bearing the same name.
Alongside the wistful nod to the “Fast and Furious” franchise (IT’S ABOUT FAMBLY), the breakthrough technology of…(checks notes) vhs tapes, and Ruby showing off her Tameside 11 Herbs and Spices to Colonel Chidozie/Chi-doesn’t-he, are all your favourite hits of yesterday, today and tomorrow:
Give Me The Lovin’
Don’t Stand (So Close To Me)
Walking in a Winter Wonderland
Who Let The Dog Out
And featuring performances by:
Harriet the Spy
Ibrahim Electric
Mel B
Morris G and The Time Window
And now for the minor details. Nice Segway.
The Doctor should always be the smartest being in the room. Every room.
The Doctor would have known there was a camera 73 yards away. He’d have the 4k 360° feed in 7.1 surround sound and fucking THX on his Time Lord Tamagotchi. He’d have Susan Triad sussed, sorted and squared away. Gods of Death can Suketh.
And he’d have known his fucking granddaughter on sight.
PS: Carla is the only mum Ruby needs.
Open the Time Window, Morris. It smells like wet dog in here.
2.7 out of 5. A Rose by any other name would be as pointless. Sorry. Should have gone with the anagram.
Hi Gang,
Wow what an episode!
I’ve often found with NuWho it hasn’t been able to keep me on the edge of my seat, but the era definitely has. This episode absolutely rattles along, showing us all the threads we want answers to and it kept me engaged throughout.
I absolutely love the scene when the Doc & Ruby arrive at UNIT and decipher the ‘anagram’ of S TRIAD and everyone is like yeah we worked that out already.
I really can’t wait to find out who Mrs Flood is.
Bonnie is back! It’s so great to have her back and being integral to the story.
The Doctor taking the piss out of the Time Window is great.
The fan theories were out there for the return of Sutekh but I gotta say I didn’t think RTD would do it, but boy he did it – it was another punch the air moment. And the Gabriel Woolf’s voice boomed out, and I was a kid all over again – what a legend!
Without doubt this is one of the best cliffhanger endings there’s ever been. This season has just gotten better and better, and with all the different plot threads I just hope next week RTD can pull them all together in a satisfying way, surely, he won’t disappoint us, right?
I award this 4.8 even Col. Ibrahim working out the anagrams out of 5
Andy Parkinson
@caffreys71
P.S, I watched this at the cinema along with the finale and it’s even more epic on the big screen – I hope they do more!
I’m sure you guys discussed this, but this episode is ALL setup – none of the plotlines are resolved, and most of them honestly barely move forward. however, i’m trying to judge this episode not by the payoff it will eventually receive, but how i felt when i first watched this.
likes:
– mel! what a delight, and they gave her backstory that was severely deficient during season 23/24- wish they dove into the timey-wimeyness of how she met the doc though! (they never got their official first meeting in classic)
– first time we see ruby’s mum and she’s nice all the way through, every other episode has been an alternate timeline where she was the worst person in the world
– quickfire rest of the supporting cast: kate, great as always. lenny rush, national treasure. rose, good to see though nothing to do (why is unit hiring so many children???) col. ibrahim was cool as hell. chidozie played one of my favourite characters on waterloo road so it was great to see him! susan was good at being nice AND menacing, harriet had a great evil voice and ruby’s gran was fun!
– who is mrs flood? so creepy (my opinion changes next episode)
– time window is different from every other appearance but incredible graphics nonetheless
– SUTEKH IS BACK
not-so-likes:
– didn’t move the story along at all
– the mystery and anagram sucked, and why bring up susan at all??? big part of episode’s mystery and it’s SO inaccessible to new fans (in fact, the whole episode is)
– please explain the vlinx. also why do the children have powerful laser guns?
– my biggest gripe – i HATE HATE HATE this. why say the doctor doesn’t have children??? a HUGE part of the doctor’s mysterious backstory and emotional core was his kids – mentioned in classic, really poignant scene in good man goes to war (whose cot is it?), tennant talks about them to both rose and donna AND if you say the toymaker changed his history, he mentioned his children (“dad to dad”) FOUR EPISODES AGO!!!! why get rid of this just for rtd to make his own mark on canon? it doesn’t add anything at all!
overall okay story, definitely not as good a penultimate episode as sound of drums, stolen earth or bad wolf but better than closing time. 3.2/5
Vamshi
The Legend of Ruby Sunday: 40 minutes of oddly-paced setup, all to reveal that the universe’s all-powerful uberdemon spends eternity in the howling void thinking how he can troll people with word games. Oddly ho-hum, for all the uproar. 2.1 actually-not-anagrams out of 5.
Hi folks
Well..well. Let’s discuss the main episode rather than the ending. And I didn’t overly like it…Good elements but it just doesn’t do it for me. Very similar to Army of Ghosts from series 2, so I’ve seen it before. Partly this is due to me not buying the idea that Susan Triad is Susan which the episode plays with for a good while. With that, a good part of the episode feels a bit flat for me. The Time Window sequence looks good, but be more style over substance for me.
Right, the ending? So I’d thought Russell would resist bringing back a classic villain for the big bad. So him apparently picking a one-off villain from 1975 seems odd. I say apparently as it is entirely possible that Sutekh isn’t the big boss that the Meep and ‘The one that waits’ that Toymaker and Maestro mention. It would be a twist after all.
But Russell does have some balls to bring Sutekh baack and it will be very interesting to see how the show uses him next time. The Doctor needs a better ‘dispel Sutekh’ button this time round.
Based on my ratings this series, it gets a 3/5 gifts of dusty death to you
Cheers
Kieren
Hi everybody!
This is going to be tricky to review the first part of a 2-parter before I’ve seen Part 2 and most of this part is build-up but here goes nothing.
UPS:
• My immediate thoughts on finishing the episode: SUTEKH!!!!!!!!!! And he’s still voiced by Gabriel Woolf!!!!!!!!!!
• Incredibly tense and atmospheric throughout and very scary at the end (yet exciting because I was trying to figure who the villain was at the same time).
• I enjoyed Morris Gibbons (Lenny Rush’s character).
• Bonnie Langford was great as Mel. Mel’s not one of my favourite Classic companions (though I seem to like her more than most) but she’s been a really strong character in her recent appearances.
• The Time Window scene, while slow to get going, was eerie and visually striking.
• A personal piece of trivia: one of my all-time favourite Who cliff-hangers is Pyramids of Mars Part 1 (“I bring Sutekh’s gift of death to all humanity” coupled with killing someone by touch) so I was overjoyed to see that scene being replicated here!
DOWNS:
• The pace of the first half (up to the Time Window scene really) was very leisurely and consisted of characters reiterating the Ruby’s mum and Susan Twist story arcs to each other before the story eventually got underway. For such an important episode, the story had a very slow sense of momentum and plot progression until the second half.
Overall, this was an overly slow yet effective scene-setting start to the finale. Let’s see how Part 2 goes.
RATING:
The episode as a whole:
• 3.5 Reminders of my age from Doctor Who Unleashed since they included a short explanation of the functions of VHS tapes. Hmph. Thanks Unleashed.
The cliff-hanger:
• 5.0 Tom Bakers kneeling before the might of Sutekh!
One of the first serials I watched on video was Pyramids of Mars. I’ve wanted to see Sutekh in new who forever – I know I’ve mentioned it in one of my earlier mini-reviews, though I can’t remember which one – and as soon as I heard the “Sue-tech! Sue-tech!” Chanting at the beginning of the story, I was buzzing. I was nine years old again, holding my breath with the anticipation of that terrifying, blank faced servant of Sutekh emerge down the disco tunnel and burn poor Nahim to death to the chaotic carnage of a loud organ.
The last five minutes or so of this episode fucking RULE. RTD is the best at hype, and Harriet Arbinger’s melodic monologue about the pantheon of gods – the Mara gets mentioned!! – while Murray Gold’s score goes nuts was way too much for my little brain to handle at almost one in the morning. I will be honest, I have nothing much to say about the rest of the episode, other than I really like that kid with the segway and he’s as cool as Benton – as Benton! – and I hope he sticks around for a while. Anyway, yeah. Am I allowed to score an episode based on just one ninth of it’s runtime? Probably not. So, overall, maybe a 3.2. Sutekh as a dog though is an insane downgrade. I miss his sick hat!