Doctor Who Waits for Death, and Not Much Else

Doctor Who, of course, is king of the cliffhanger. For a show that thrived on needing to get people to tune back in next week as storylines stretched across multiple episodes, few ongoing series have mastered the art of a last minute hook screaming into the closing titles that will have you seated this time in seven days. “The Legend of Ruby Sunday”, the penultimate episode of the current season, has that. And it’s really good. It’s just got a pretty muddled episode before all that.

Much of “Legend” is largely about biding its time for that final reveal—the dark entity who’s behind every little crumb of teasing across Doctor Who’s latest season, everything from weird groans the TARDIS has been making, to just why Ruby’s birth mother is such a mystery, and to, of course, why Susan Twist has been showing up as the most persistent guest star of a Doctor Who season in years. Very suddenly, the Doctor has decided this is a thing he now has to immediately care about, but he’s also decided it has to be the time he has to immediately care about Ruby’s parentage, even if she’s been randomly making it snow all season long. And so, our heroes are off to UNIT to say hi to their old friends, and ask the big question they should’ve been asking all season long: has anyone seen Susan Twist lately?

Conveniently, they have—Susan is now playing another Susan, Susan Triad, a global tech head preparing to introduce some incredibly vague software to the world that promises to change everything. We never know what, how, or why, “Legend of Ruby Sunday” is not actually interested in this. It just needs you to know that Susan Twist is Also Here. And so, within a few scenes, the episode is already getting away from itself, pulling in a bunch of sparsely interconnected directions: the Doctor and Ruby are at UNIT because they hope UNIT can use billions of pounds worth of government equipment to look at some CCTV footage from the night Ruby was left at the Church that would give her her name. They also need to help the Doctor figure out why his own TV show keeps casting the same woman, but then not only is that woman already here, she… might be the Susan, as in, the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan, a theory floated almost entirely on the basis that “S. Triad” is an awkward anagram of “TARDIS.”

What this means is that suddenly the Doctor and Ruby are suddenly pulled between three potential huge storylines—the (potential) return of Susan, whoever Susan Triad really is if she isn’t a Time Lord, and attempting to use UNIT’s dubious “Time Window”, which essentially looks like a Volume set but is a window in time and space, to figure out the identity of Ruby’s mother. There’s also a huge cast to deal with all of a sudden with the return of UNIT—familiar faces like Kate and Mel, and Rose Noble (who now has a job there, watching for potential shoplifters which… seems like a wild misuse of UNIT resources!?), and newcomers like scientific advisor Morris (Lenny Rush), archivist Harriet (Genesis Lynea), and soldiers like Colonels Ibrahim (Alexander Devrient) and Chidoze (Tachia Newall). So in the end, no matter how fast the TARDIS comes crashing in in the opening, what “Legend” is almost entirely about is having this huge cast shuffle about as we wait for that climactic reveal to click into place.

In some ways this works—there is so much up in the air throughout the episode that there is a lingering sense of dread that is effective, as you and the Doctor and Ruby alike try to race through all the possibilities of what’s really going on. But in plenty others, it’s largely frustrating. There’s a lack of flow to “Legend” that pulls the Doctor and Ruby between all these warring plot threads—one minute they’re having this emotional frustration that no matter what they try with the Time Window, they can’t see Ruby’s mother in its gateway to Christmas Eve. The next, the Doctor and Mel are racing over to Triad Technologies to try and sus out Susan before her big, incredibly vague keynote speech to the world, and they’re also trying to navigate the Doctor’s discomfort at the possibility that his own granddaughter is not just still alive, but a potential threat.

Each one of these threads on their own could’ve made a compelling episode, but together they jumble into something that feels incoherent, and where none of the emotional beats you’re meant to feel for the Doctor and Ruby—who themselves have struggled to feel like a really tight friendship this season in a lot of ways already—get the time to breathe or really land. And because all these threads can’t actually lead somewhere other than the reveal at the end of the episode, along the way there’s just little narrative momentum other than poor Morris annoyingly having to yell “probability of a trap!” with increasingly higher percentages to remind you this is all building to something.

Thankfully, that something is pretty killer. Push and pulled between UNIT HQ and Triad Technologies, the Doctor realises all too late that he and UNIT alike were looking at the wrong anagram: Susan Triad was a red herring, and Susan Technology was there in it all along. This great evil, this groaning force that has been hiding around the TARDIS in plain sight, this mystical force that has both transformed Sue and even Harriet—full name Harriet Arbinger, a herald of the pantheon—into skull-faced heralds of its arrival: Sutekh (once again voiced by Gabriel Woolf!), now a god of death made flesh, the legendary villain of “The Pyramid of Mars”, back to menace the Doctor once more. And it’s legitimately a fantastic reveal—that lingering dread that’s bubbled up throughout “Legends” and its myriad plot threads pays off in classic style, a glorious cathartic release that is everything you want out of a Doctor Who villain reveal: the little puzzle, the body horror of Sue and Harriet’s transformations, an absolutely horrifying death when the former touches someone and they turn into skeletonized dust.

It’s good enough, even, that you kind of forget in the moment that it’s essentially Russell T Davies riffing on past work—Sutekh’s reveal here is a fascinating mirror to the Professor Yana/Master twist in 2007’s “Utopia”, which aired on this exact weekend 17 years ago, right down to the fact that Murray Gold re-leverages some of the rising and falling strings from that reveal’s soundtrack. That you even forget, perhaps more importantly, that nothing that happened in the 40 minutes beforehand really mattered all that much in comparison. Was the legend of Ruby Sunday solved? TBD. Did it matter the Doctor thought his granddaugter had returned? Not really. Did UNIT actually help at any point other than the fact Mel got to bike the Doctor to Triad Technologies and Morris could keep yelling about trap likeliness? Well… they did provide a few mooks to die and ramp up the tension, I suppose. That was somewhat useful in an episode that, by and large, felt like it struggled to find an existence beyond setting up Sutekh’s reveal.

Which mostly means that, as great as that five minutes is, we’ll have to wait until next week to see if it was worth it—or rather, that Doctor Who can justify a bit of aimless set up here with a deliciously villainous performance. If there’s any classic villain the revived version of the show hasn’t played with yet to do it, Sutekh is up there: “Pyramids of Mars” is a classic for a reason, and the reason is Sutekh’s horrifying, emptied feeling of just how far beyond he was when it came to the Doctor and humanity. A cold and calculating villain, the giant monstrous form we see in “Legend” enveloping the TARDIS in roars and cackles, hidden beneath mysterious puzzles and anagrams, already feels like a mix of the familiar and the new.

If next week’s finale can pull off Sutekh as an all-time villain for the modern era of the show, then maybe we can forgive “The Legend of Ruby Sunday” for being little more than a stepping stone. If it can’t? Well, at least we got a pretty fantastic cliffhanger here—and sometimes with Doctor Who, that’s the best you can hope for.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.