Stories have always had a touch of the dream about them.

Like a deep dream, a good narrative conveys a sense of truth without a sense of reality.

“73 Yards” is the latest episode of the brand-new series of Doctor Who. 

The first episode of the series to be filmed, it is the boldest invasion yet of the show’s ostensibly scientific worldview into the realm of the psychological; here, companion Ruby Sunday is stranded Doctor-less and left to face a sinister woman who always appears seventy-three yards (6.66 metres) away from her.

The pitch of this is obvious; strip away the materialist bombast of the Doctor, and we can dive into the psyche of the companion more than ever. It even seems to answer prayers I sent out in my last blog about the show; give genuine interior to the characters, and re-imagine the fundamental tone of Doctor Who.

For the most part, “73 Yards” succeeds. It’s a gripping, inventive piece of television.

But in the end, waking from this particular dream brings a strange note of disappointment:

Doctor Who almost made a masterpiece, so what stopped it finishing the job?

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Doctor Who and Doctor Jung: 

Here’s a question you’ve never heard before.

How would Carl Jung write an episode of Doctor Who?

The famous Swiss psychotherapist was renowned for his insight into the symbolic importance of dreams. For Jung, our psychological depths spoke to us at night, and his theory of individuation stated that the goal of life was full integration of your own psychic contents; not just your conscious emotions, but also your hidden darknesses which each person hides, a psychological space he named “The Shadow”. Be careful when you throw away your dark side that you do not also throw the best part of yourself away, he said.

“73 Yards” is more than a little Jungian.

Our patient for the episode is Ruby Sunday; when the Doctor steps on a magic circle and disappears to film Sex Education for a while, it’s her that is left to face the Woman, alone. 

Our patient notes for Ruby so far show her as a strong, adaptable, active teenager. Disappointingly, though, her key feature has not been a unique perspective to bring to the show, but Circumstances: Ruby was a foundling left on the steps of a church and is now driven by a desire to find her birth mother. Her character is thus a “mystery box”, with the hook of a mysterious origin stamped onto her from the outside without any need for inner qualities to make her interesting from within. 

So, Doctor Jung is just what we need: “73 Yards” gives us a first-person narrative of Ruby Sunday, here to show us the hidden drives which animate the interior of her character. The question is: does it work?

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Well, in the general sense - yes. 

The symbolism might not be subtle, but it is effective.

What the script is planting into Ruby is a subconscious fear of abandonment: as soon as any other person approaches the Woman, they flee from Ruby and never return. Her “shadow” is thus represented by an older woman who she is always aware of but never close to, who’s dark power drives people from her - an elegant representation of her birth mother. And, with further neat harmony, almost every person who is torn from her life up until the climax is also an older-woman figure - the difference being they are the inversion of the shadow; where the Woman is distant and dark, they are close and caring.

It’s a holistic metaphor; simple and powerfully realised.

Doctor Jung would also applaud the dream-logic with which this is shown: we have no explanation for why those who approach the Woman become terrified, because we don’t need one. Newcomer Dylan Holmes Williams directs us into this surreal tone, confining us in pubs before bewildering us with wide, open football stadiums - with his flair behind the camera, everything from a lone tree to a glass of wine shimmers with symbolic possibility. Like in a dream, the half-linked rush of images generates logic in itself: the worst thing Ruby can imagine is abandonment, so that’s just what the Woman brings.

On the surface, this is a harrowing depiction of a life haunted by trauma, and in the general sense, “73 Yards” is just that. This is the first episode of the series which Millie Gibson shot, aged just eighteen, and her performance is rich enough to skip across the time-jumps without issue; she embodies the chaotic charge of a teenager as easily as she does the tired acceptance of a middle-aged woman who has grown to accept being always distant. When Ruby finally integrates her Shadow in the resolution, using the Woman to turn a dangerous politician insane and save the world, it’s her performance which makes the beat cathartic. 

The truth is, though, that the episode works best in that general, superficial sense

On rewatch, the Jungian symbolism is revealed as a pleasing layer covering a deeper sin:

Despite the elegance of the metaphors around, “73 Yards” adds no real depth to Ruby’s interior - in fact, by failing to recognise the key issue with her character, she becomes blander than ever before.

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Doctor Who and the Hollow Ruby:

Ruby Sunday is characterised consistently in “73 Yards”.

The trouble is that she’s characterised as a bland and passive idiot who is either sociopathic or a coward.

For the first two-thirds of a story designed as her showcase, she does almost nothing proactive at all; her boldest action is to timidly ask some questions to Welsh people, who promptly take the piss.

She discovers a mind-demon following her: she shows little curiosity and walks away. 

A room full of strangers mocks her multiple times: she has no reaction and later eats toast.

She realises that the Doctor is presumably dead and gone forever: she goes home.

At home, it is her mother who comes up with a plan to test the demon: Ruby does nothing.

Instead, she stands there passively and lets her own mother take on the Woman.

Her mother goes mad and abandons her: Ruby gets a job.

Another woman arrives and comes up with another plan to test the demon: Ruby sits there.

That other person goes insane and the Woman wins again: Ruby drinks some wine. 

Even when she finds her big mission of the episode - taking down the insane politician known to her as Mad Jack - she does nothing to figure out that information for herself. It arrives via Contrived Coincidental Television Broadcast, while Ruby sits there and passively receives it. At this point, we are past the equator of the run-time and our big companion showcase has given her the same amount of inner drive as a satsuma. In every situation she is put into in the first two acts, Ruby does nothing but passively fade away.

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So…

What’s going on here?

What happened to the Ruby of “Space Babies”, the pipe-wielding lunatic of justice?

Yes, this is a teenager abandoned in a story designed to play on her fears - but a good character is meant to react with more interesting choices when put in more intense situations.

For some reason, Ruby becomes a wallflower.

The trouble is that - like the intrigue of her origin - the character traits of Ruby have been impressed upon her. It’s logical that a foundling child would have abandonment issues; the trouble is that there has been no hint of such issues in any of her behaviour up until now. In order for “73 Yards” to explore her abandonment issues, it first has to give her some: and it doesn’t. We are expected to infer it simply from her lore. 

For instance, how might a woman with abandonment issues react to her foster mother wanting to take on the demon who that woman knows causes people to flee from her?

With screeching paranoia, you might imagine. 

Anything but risk her only loving mother figure disappearing in the face of such a monster! 

Ruby lets it happen without much input. 

How might a woman with abandonment issues react to the Doctor disappearing on her?

With gut-wrenching panic, you might imagine. 

Anything but being abandoned again, stranded without a reason!

Ruby sighs before walking off to the local pub. 

The reason for this is that the theme of abandonment issues in “73 Yards” doesn’t come from Ruby’s character; there isn’t anything like that inside her yet, so it can’t. The theme is coming directly from the concept of the episode itself, which speaks over the top of her actual behaviour and links itself to her only via backstory  - which is also external to her character. The story can only be a superficial one, because it has nothing else to pull from.

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Doctor Who and the Jack in the Box:

Listen, it isn’t all so bad.

The resolution of “73 Yards” finally gives Ruby something to do.

Linking the magic circle with the Welsh folklore from the first act, Russell suddenly swerves into the dystopian political drama which fans have been salivating for with his return: “Mad Jack”, foretold to Ruby by the Welsh pub-goers, turns out to be Roger Ap Gwilliam, foretold to Ruby as the most dangerous prime-minister in history at the start. Roger wants to start a nuclear war, because he’s fucking mental.

And I love this. 

The uncanny equivalence of this connection, where pub drama lands on the same dramatic plane as the threat of nuclear war, adds to the off-kilter effect; Roger is not a material reality who says something about British nuclear policy. He’s the psychic representation of what Jung warned about if we did not achieve individuation: without accepting our darker psychic currents, they would override us and explode into the stuff of nightmares. If we cannot accept our Shadow, our Shadow will become Mad Jack.

There is, then, a genuine sense of triumph when Ruby realises what she must do: with her first sign of inner motion thus far, she calls out to the Woman and tells her that they have work to do: after ingratiating herself into Mad Jack’s political campaign, she stands seventy-three yards away from him and lets the Woman drive him insane: he flees right out of the narrative, and nuclear war has been averted. It’s delicious. 

This our Jungian climax: our patient has integrated her psychic contents, and won. 

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But even here, the issues remains.

The emotional tissue of Mad Jack - the insane part of the human mind which could annihilate us through politics - does not represent anything within the emotional tissue of Ruby Sunday; it’s a third-person commentary, superimposed into what is supposed to be a first-person narrative. 

What makes it especially jarring are the scenes in which Roger/Jack is implied to be a rapist.

In that moment, for the sake of fast characterisation, Jack becomes something alien to the psychology of Ruby herself; she is not vanquishing any part of her mind when she vanquishes Roger, and so the inner victory which the episode implies is only half-complete. This becomes even uglier when you realise Ruby had the chance to stop him before he abused the woman in question: again, for the sake of this gratuitous sexual-assault suggestion, Ruby had to “make sure” that this was really Mad Jack before she acted.

But I’m not going to lie and pretend that the moment of triumph doesn’t work.

It does, and the episode does: it is emotional. It is gripping. It is unique. It works. 

Just.

What this almost-masterpiece shows us, though, is that no matter how excellent a Doctor Who episode is, the show will always be stymied if the core characters are superficial. This was a chance to dive into the psychology of Ruby Sunday and feel it through her actions: we might have seen her driven to panic by abandonment issues, pushing her family away out of fear that they would be taken by the Woman. We might have seen her testing the demon she’s confronted with, figuring out the rules, realising who Mad Jack is, and saving the day from an insane politician who reflected her own mad panic back at her. 

But we didn’t.

We got a strong, stylish, emotive episode of Doctor Who. A fantastic episode, in fact. The reason this blog is so intent on criticising it is because this episode deserved to be a masterpiece. It deserved to be one of the best of all time. And because of character issues which emanate beyond its borders, it couldn’t be. 

And that’s sad, because for as long as Ruby Sunday remains a hologram of what a Doctor Who companion will be, there will always be something stopping us from getting that 10/10. We just can’t live the dream.

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Conclusion:

Most of the discourse about “73 Yards” has debated whether it made sense.

At the end of the episode, Ruby dies as an old woman having prevented nuclear war: the Woman takes her back to the start of the episode, when the Doctor first broke the magic circle and let Mad Jack loose; Old-Ruby’s dying spirit calls out through the Woman and stops the Doctor from breaking the circle at all.

Therefore, the events of the episode never quite take place.

No answers are given as to what the Woman said to people to make them flee. No answers are given as to whether Roger Ap Gwilliam still presents a danger in this timeline. No answers are given as to where the Doctor disappeared or why. No answers are given as to whether the Woman was Ruby all along. 

And quite honestly, I do not care.

After all, stories have always had a touch of the dream about them.

The sense that “73 Yards” makes is an emotional one - it lands in the experience of watching the episode, and not with trying to fix it all up afterwards. Of course, I could write out any number of answers for all those questions right here, but none of them would matter; they would be small candles placed around the actual logic of the story, which can only be illuminated through direct experience of the emotions.

Even a bland protagonist is not enough to stop it being one of the most unique and memorable Doctor Who episodes of the last decade. There has never been such a psychological take on the show before, and this episode makes the case for the show doing it many times more.

In the end, “73 Yards” is definitely not a masterpiece. But it’s definitely close.

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Series One Ranking:

1. 73 Yards

2. The Devil’s Chord

3. Boom

4. Space Babies

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