73 yards and 0 place for the Doctor

Both formally and thematically, there is something deeply self-reflexive about the series in this episode. So why am I talking about an alternative universe? Because that is very clearly what we are dealing with here. Ruby finds herself alone when the Doctor disappears, and she lives for a looong time before returning to the starting point and finding the Doctor again. She has therefore very clearly lived an entire life in a kind of parallel universe. The difference with an episode like The Girl Who Waited, for example, is that we never get the Doctor’s point of view even once in 73 Yards. And I have the feeling that this is more than just a deliberate stylistic choice.

In the previous episodes, you can already see that we have had three slightly artificial worlds:

- an episode in space where people have abandoned children who then create their own society.

- an episode set in an empty world where the antagonist has changed History, which the Doctor and Ruby then change back, so in concrete terms everything happens in a parallel world that is erased by the end.

- an episode where humans are fighting nothing at all, alone and lost in the fog, symbolically a world that exists only inside its own bubble.

And then comes this fourth episode, in which everything that happens will ultimately not happen at all, thus creating far more concretely, and in a totally overt way, a parallel world.

Could this season be completely calling the Doctor’s presence in his own universe into question? Is this not a way, both aesthetically and symbolically, of dismantling the Doctor’s all-powerful figure and saying that he exists only inside his own head? He solves only problems that, in the end, will not even really have existed. 73 Yards goes even further and seems to dethrone the Doctor entirely from his own series. Why? The feeling that comes through is that there is an amusing coincidence here that may not be a coincidence at all. This is the most overtly political episode the series has produced since 2005. It is an episode about the politics of the real world and real society, extra-diegetic politics, and therefore the Doctor is obsolete within it.

Is this a loss of hope on RTD’s part? Possibly. It feels as though the episode is telling us that no, there will be no all-powerful cosmic figure to save us from human cruelty. According to this episode, there is no magic formula to protect us from self-destructive fascism, only individual acts and a huge dose of self-sacrifice, which Ruby ends up bearing the cost of. That is also what gives full meaning to the Doctor’s line at the start of the episode: “The rocks and the water, it never ends. The war between the land and the sea.” Do these lines describe the Doctor himself, standard-bearer of all the world’s unchanging legends, as old and endless as the war between land and sea? Or is he saying instead that human beings fail to see that everything is just an infinite repetition of the same wars, and that nothing, not even him, will change that?

After RTD’s first, already highly political intervention in the world of Doctor Who in the 2000s, we find ourselves here with an even more radical version of that same idea. In 73 Yards, Doctor Who has no intention of making us forget the outside world; it shoves it right under our noses without compromise. This episode feels like an intense continuation of the work RTD had already begun, namely his deconstruction of the Doctor’s persona and his total obliteration of it. This is clearly something that has been preoccupying him since the beginning of his first era and now again in his second: what happens when the Doctor is not there? Back in the 2000s, he already asked that question with Torchwood, then with The Sarah Jane Adventures. Here, not only does he ask it again and offer answers, he does so in an episode that announces the next spin-off, which is itself deeply political in form.

That is why this episode raises so many questions about RTD’s desire to write Doctor Who at all. Consciously or not, he no longer seems to believe in the character, who now appears to him totally disconnected from reality. In the end, he has been striving from the start to offer everyone a far more realistic vision of the world, one that prevents the Doctor from existing. One might even wonder whether he finds the Doctor almost dangerous as a concept. Unlike Moffat, who later elevated him to the rank of a storybook figure as powerful as Santa Clause, RTD seems to want to tell us: no, the Doctor does not exist. It is a very singular, audacious, and profoundly dark position.

Everything in this episode points in that direction. Because all the codes of staging, editing and music are extremely dark, restrained, and violently intense. It is the violence of reality. The alternative world Ruby lives through is, ultimately, the real world. A world in which anyone who believes in the Doctor, and who is willing to believe Ruby even a little, gets cast out of that world, just as the Doctor is at the start. The folk-horror aspect is handled with extraordinary control, and one cannot deny the episode a kind of total commitment that it only perhaps loses slightly at the end when trying to tie the narrative threads back together. But it still earns a certain radicalism even in the storytelling itself: there is no logical, pseudo-scientific or magical explanation for what Ruby experiences in the episode. It is almost an X-Files-style formula that wants to tell us there is not always a valid explanation, but that it is there, that it happened, that it does not entirely make sense, and yet. Because the ending obviously does not make sense: Ruby must always have lived through that alternative world, because otherwise the rest of her life with the Doctor cannot happen, and that directly contradicts the fact that she is now going to live this new life. It is almost as if she lives two lives in parallel. Rather than returning to the starting point, one could almost imagine that Ruby splits in two at the beginning of the episode and we simply do not see it.

So this is a very powerful episode for many reasons, but one that can also be completely divisive if you consider that it implies the series is, in fact, just a smoke-screen to avoid facing real problems. RTD’s second era is a little “superior” in that sense, giving genuine little moral lessons to its viewers and showing them that their love for the Doctor as entertainment is futile, even childish. And perhaps it is important to make that point at a time like this. Is Doctor Who the right place to do it? I have the feeling that Doctor Who became, from its earliest incarnations, the place where people came to offer their own point of view and opinions, even if that meant completely reshaping the character and the concept.

Here follows the detailed account of the episode, with a closer analysis of certain sequences and even certain shots: COMPLETE ANALYSIS OF 73 YARDS