Doctor Who: “73 Yards” Spoilery Thoughts

*Spoilers for “73 Yards,” obviously but I reference other things from across the season as well.*

Now that the Fifteenth Doctor has his whole first season under his belt, it’s time to revisit some of the plot points that I avoided diving too deeply into earlier. Today, we’re circling back to “73 Yards”!

I love the creepiness of this episode, and it ends up going to some really interesting places. I gasped at the reveal that, by the time Kate meets her, it’s been a year since Carla turned Ruby out, but when we arrive in 2046, I loved the realization that Ruby’s story is going to tie into the Roger Ap Gwilliam stuff. I have some issues about how all this stuff goes down, but I love the resolution of Ruby weaponizing “the Woman” against Gwilliam, positioning herself 73 yards away from him so that she’ll work her creepy magic and make him run away in terror, thus saving Britain (and the world!) from a nuclear-missile-happy prime minister.

I also love some of the specific details about the Woman, like how she doesn’t just stay exactly 73 yards from Ruby, but she always appears 73 yards away as well—even with UNIT’s best long-range cameras, the view of her face still looks like she’s being seen from 73 yards away.

This ties in nicely with one of my favorite aspects of the episode: Ruby’s cleverness in trying to learn more about the Woman. She’s out of her depth quite a bit, because she’s a 19-year-old woman with a fairly modest level of experience with alien/supernatural stuff. Not to mention, everyone who attempts to help her literally turns against her the second they get close to the Woman. So she’s very much on her own, but she manages to figure out quite a lot. She measures the 73-yard distance and realizes how she can’t photograph the Woman any closer than that. She doesn’t know at first what a perception filter is, but she notices how most people just ignore the Woman unless she’s specifically pointed out to them—she experiments with this, noting that her coworkers never mention the strange woman standing outside the shop, or that cars will simply drive around her if she’s positioned in the street.

And along with that, I like that she’s considered and rejected certain other experiments, like seeing what would happen if she gets on a plane or a boat. Ruby worries about the potential outcome of this, not just for herself, but for the Woman as well. She tells Kate, “I keep thinking, if I cut her off, I might die. Or…she might die.” Ruby wants to get rid of the Woman, but she doesn’t want to hurt her. I really like that.

But of course, there are still so many unanswered questions from this episode. Part of me wonders if it’s just meant to be like that, if we’re not supposed to know because it’s kind of a fairy story. It wouldn’t be the first time Who has left us without all the answers. There’s a lot we don’t know about the Beast in “The Satan Pit” or the creature in “Midnight.”

To me, though, I came away from this episode with a more distinct “not done yet” feeling. And we do get slight references to “73 Yards” through the second half of the season. When Ruby closes the time loop, she goes forward without a clear memory of that timeline, but we see little hints that she remembers something, even if she doesn’t understand what. In “Dot and Bubble,” the Doctor and Ruby both get a glimmer of recognition of that world’s Susan Triad, but Ruby isn’t sure where she remembers her from. When she hears the words “66.7 meters” in “Empire of Death,” she instantly snaps off, “73 yards,” but she doesn’t know how she knows that.

The fact that the CCTV camera on Ruby Road was 66 meters away from the church where Ruby’s mother left her feels enormous. It definitely seems to lend credence to the theory that, much like Ruby’s questions about her mother can manifest snow, the Woman is somehow a personification of her fear of abandonment and rejection. And then we learn that the TARDIS’s perception filter extends for 66.7 meters around it. Roger Ap Gwilliam even gets an important reference in the finale!

I don’t know too much of what’s going on next season and I’m trying to avoid reading anything about it, but I really hope we come back to this at some point in season 2. Even if there are certain things that are never revealed, it definitely feels to me like we have some unfinished business here.