“He waits no more.”
The Doctor and Ruby return to London to recruit UNIT to help them work out who the mystery woman who keeps appearing in their lives is, only to discover that she is already on UNIT’s radar: Susan Triad (Susan Twist, Brookside), CEO of S Triad Technologies, a woman preparing to give billions of dollars worth of software away to the world, for free. While Mel Bush (Bonnie Langford, Bugsy Malone) investigates Susan, Kate Stewart (Jemma Redgrave, Mansfield Park) and her team – including Rose Temple-Noble (Yasmin Finney, Heartstopper) and new new scientific adviser Morris Gibbons (Lenny Rush, The Haunting of the Queen Mary) – speculate that the mystery of the woman the Doctor can’t stop seeing might be related to the mystery of the woman he can’t see: the woman who left a baby on the steps of a church on Ruby Road, on Christmas Eve 2004.
Oh, and more than usually spoilers, sweetie!
Using UNIT’s time window to clean up a security video – or possibly vice versa – the team are unable to resolve the face of Ruby’s mother, but do reveal a… let’s call it a whirling vortex of hate surrounding the TARDIS, which eats one of UNIT’s men.
Quick aside: I don’t know if it’s relevant, but before the whole guy being eaten by a vortex thing derails the process, people are dong a fair bit of projecting onto the enigmatic figure of the mother, especially Carla Sunday (Michelle Greenidge, Code 404). On a possibly related note, it must be hard for Carla to see her daughter’s absolute investment in the woman who abandoned her.
The Doctor goes to meet Susan Twist, thinking she might be related to his granddaughter, but although she seems to have dreams of her meetings with him, she is no Time Lord. Then she makes her speech and starts suffering from serious disassociation, while her teleprompter goes all apocalyptic and UNIT archivist Harriet Arbinger (Genesis Lynea, A Discovery of Witches) begins proclaiming. The darkness resolves around the TARDIS into a form and the S(usan) Triad Technologies logo abandons the obvious TARDIS anagram, leaving only Sue and Tech.
“I bring Sutekh’s gift of death to all humanity.”
So… How to feel about this.
On the one hand, great to have Gabriel Woolf (Knights of the Round Table) back as Sutekh. On the other…
…this CGI rat thing squatting on the TARDIS actually lacks the gravitas of Gabriel Woolf in a silly head piece. I thought at first it was the CG, but with reflection I think the problem is the motion. Sutekh shouldn’t snarl at people. He’s the embodiment of destruction, capable of destroying with a touch or a glance; he doesn’t need slavering jaws and six eyes for some reason. Now, maybe we’re going to see a Sutekh driven to bestial madness after being trapped in an endless corridor, only able to focus his intellect through a mortal harbinger. I could get behind that, but for now I have reservations.
I was also surprised to see Sutekh upgraded from very definitely a sufficiently advanced alien (going by his single series appearance only, none of your Faction Paradox here, thank you) to a being that the Toymaker, an actual for-some-values-of-the-word god, is afraid of. I mean, I love Sutekh. ‘Pyramids of Mars’? 10/10, no notes (this is a lie, I absolutely have notes, which I will publish once I finish season 15.) But Sutekh classic is not, even within the woolly confusion that is Doctor Who canon, operating on the scale of the Toymaker or Fenric. He was the Last of the Osirans, not a being that Time Lord was not meant to wot of.
I also think I was hoping for Fenric, although I would have expected a lot more chess metaphors if that were to be the case.
Story: 4/5
Characters: 4/5
Locals: 4/5
Design: 3/5
TOTAL: 15/20
The Bad Movie Marathon 