One of the great thrills of Russell T Davies’s 2005 era of Doctor Who was seeing how a series-long mystery, threaded throughout each episode, would pay off in the end. Successor Steven Moffat ’s arcs proved convoluted, while recent showrunner Chris Chibnall’s plotting was unsatisfying. Today’s “The Legend of Ruby Sunday”, the penultimate episode of this series and the first of a two-part finale, doesn’t quite recapture the magic of Davies’s previous twists.
It opens with Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor dramatically landing the TARDIS at UNIT HQ, the home of Earth’s alien-fighting taskforce. He has seemingly taken a break from travelling to do some much-needed admin, including asking UNIT (which now include Yasmin Finney’s Rose and a new child genius character, Morris, played by Bafta winner Lenny Rush) for their help in answering two of the series’ biggest questions. The first is about the identity of a mysterious woman (Susan Twist) who has curiously appeared in every episode of the series.
Have you spotted her? She was a tea lady in “The Devil’s Chord”, a hitchhiker in “73 Yards”, a robot ambulance in “Boom” – the list goes on. In “The Legend of Ruby Sunday”, she is Susan Triad, a tech billionaire on the verge of putting her enigmatic Triad technology into every home on the planet. Despite the undercover work of Bonnie Langford’s Mel – returning to her iconic former companion character for the umpteenth time – it is not entirely clear .