Culture | TV Wow. Just: wow. A Doctor Who episode that will win over even people who hate Doctor Who.
73 Yards is a stone-cold classic piece of British TV sci-fi that will be discussed long after this Saturday night. A kind of mash-up of The Wicker Man, The Dead Zone, The Ring, and It Follows, 73 Yards is genuinely disturbing in the way psychological horror can only be, touching upon primal fears of abandonment and death as it wraps you up in a looping fugue storyline that will leave viewers stunned. This series needed it.
The tone so far has been overly giddy and the new Doctor a little too trite. Not Ncuti Gatwa, but the character of his Doctor, who is more vulnerable, scared and fun-focused than we are used to, for all his obvious charm. But of course, this may all be part of Russell T Davies master plan for the development of him and his increasingly mysterious companion, Ruby Sunday.
And in fact, this episode pulls the old trick – as seen in David Tennant’s debut, The Christmas Invasion – of depriving us of the Doctor for most of the running time, thereby making us miss him as desperately as the bereft companion. For 73 Yards is one of those exciting stand-alone episodes that break with the usual weekly format and heads off on its own path, as with that modern classic Blink, with its weeping angels. But 73 Yards may actually surpass Blink’s high-water mark, due its formal excellence, wrapping itself up in a perfect one-off masterpiece.
It begins as a folk horror,.