That’s a nice idea, and it’s fun to see Sutekh become obsessed with discovering her identity, the one mystery left in the universe after he’s destroyed it. There’s something poetic in the concept of an alien god being flummoxed by what turns out to be a normal human woman (though you almost start to feel sorry for poor Louise, with everyone constantly harping on about how “ordinary” she is). The episode ultimately becomes more about Ruby’s reunion with her mother, with the defeat of Sutekh and restoring life to the universe handwaved away with some intelligent rope, a whistle, and a trip through the vortex. And while it’s a shame that there’s no real payoff to this season’s engagement with superstition and folklore, beyond the concept of Louise becoming impossible because Ruby believes she is, their reunion is pleasantly low key, and both Millie Gibson and Faye McKeever fully sell the complicated emotions at play.
It all hangs together, though whether you find the various resolutions satisfying is another matter. It’s still not entirely clear why basing Susan Triad on the Doctor’s granddaughter made her “the perfect trap”, when the Doctor himself didn’t even clock the possible connection until the last minute. And while the explanation for Louise’s pointing makes emotional sense for Ruby, it makes absolutely bugger-all sense as something a scared 15-year-old would actually do in that situation, with nobody around to see it. Ditto her choice of outfit. We do get a bit of welcome closure for some leftover threads from “73 Yards” (which turns out to be the exact range of the TARDIS’ perception field), though more questions are raised in the process. Roger Ap Gwilliam, it seems, is still destined to rise, and the Doctor will have some involvement in his downfall.
At the end of the episode, the Doctor basically tells Ruby that her character arc is complete, and that she can’t travel with him anymore because her “adventure is just beginning.”
Does this work? Yes and no.
To look at Series 14 as a whole, it’s been a pretty damn good series of Doctor Who. High energy, confident, mostly stellar production values, a charming Doctor-companion pairing with real emotional range, lots of fun and interesting ideas. Even with the episodes that haven’t quite come together, there has been plenty to talk about. Overall, the show is in a good place, and the foundations for the era to come are more-than solid.
Looking back, though, the standalone stories are what have really resonated, and the arc plot elements feel like more of an afterthought. Unfortunately, this blunts the impact of the finale. The Susan Triad stuff is basically fine, it’s a sci-fi mystery with a sci-fi explanation that makes sense in terms of the villain and his machinations. But with Ruby’s arc, the breadcrumb approach is less successful. After the Christmas special and “Space Babies”, there just hasn’t been enough focus on her mysterious parentage as an animating force. The mysterious snow is a great recurring visual, and there have been effective individual moments like her desperate appeal to the ambulance in “Boom”. But Ruby has generally seemed happy, her relationship with the Doctor has been solid, and they’ve been having fun together.
