Doctor Who Season-Finale Recap: Old Dog, New Tricks

Can Russell T. Davies do what the TARDIS has been struggling to do all season and stick the landing? Regardless of how you feel about it, I think most Doctor Who fans would agree that RTD tends to prioritize the big emotional beats he wants to hit in a finale over the logic of the plot resolution. And hey, when you’re trying to make the big bad of every season the Doctor’s toughest challenge yet, it gets harder to find a believable way to save the day. Even the Flux ultimately only destroyed half the universe; Sutekh is gunning for 100 percent of it and has control of the TARDIS. There’s a lot of pressure to provide a satisfying payoff after all the setup last week. No wonder this episode hits the ground running.

Roughly 15 minutes in, nearly everyone in the universe has gotten an STD (a Sutekh-ually transmitted death). In the Classic-era serial Pyramids of Mars, Sutekh was an alien whom the Doctor aged to death in a time corridor, though comic readers were later told he sidestepped into the Void. Now, thanks to some retconning, Sutekh was actually sent into the Time Vortex where he latched onto the TARDIS and evolved into his “true godhood.” Any time and place the TARDIS landed, its hidden stowaway birthed a Susan — a name Sutekh learned while learning the ship’s secrets. The TARDIS’s perception filter gave the Susans a real past each time. But now they’ve been converted into Sutekh’s “angels of death,” who are turning everyone to dust on all planets the Doctor has ever touched, from the Ood Sphere to Skaro.

Earth is dying multiple simultaneous deaths. UNIT and all of the child labor on its staff are gone. Kate Lethbridge-Stewart uses her last breaths to implore the Doctor to “send this monster back into hell.” Meanwhile, Mrs. Flood asks Cherry to tell her maker she will “come to storm down his gates of gold and seize his kingdom in my true name.” Her cryptic final words are, “I’m so sorry it ends like this. I had such plans.”

Though Sutekh’s stated objective is for every living being to die, he hesitates to kill the Doctor, Mel, and Ruby when they meet at the Time Window. The Doctor and his companions take the opportunity to escape into the remembered TARDIS, which Tales of the TARDIS viewers won’t be surprised to learn is a Memory TARDIS containing a mashup of past consoles.

We get a moment of nostalgia when Mel sees the Sixth Doctor’s coat and polka-dot cravat again, and then it’s time for takeoff. Loose objects fall onto the floor, and a fire breaks out. The Doctor eventually calms the ship down by connecting parts of it with an intelligent rope, a kind of cousin to the intelligent glove he used when he met Ruby in the Christmas special. In this case, the rope’s hook functions as a molecular bond. (Would’ve been nice if he could’ve thrown Rose a rope and a glove like that in “Doomsday,” eh?) After the Doctor has a chance to stop and reflect on what’s happened, he ends up screaming with guilt and pain. He inadvertently became a harbinger of the god of death just because he thought it was fun to travel.

An unspecified amount of time passes, and the Doctor lands on a planet where a kind woman (played by Fleabag’s sister, Sian Clifford) gives him a spoon when he asks for metal. Their encounter reveals that even among the few survivors left in the universe, memory and facts are dying. The woman can’t even recall what city she’s in. Worse, she realizes that her daughter died in a cradle just a few feet away from her — and she forgot it happened. She says she’s heard that Sutekh’s death wave can kill backward down a family line, then crumble into dust. “I swear to you with a spoon,” the Doctor says, instantly joining the earnestly delivered “Do you dream about being an ambulance?” as one of the season’s funniest out-of-context quotes.

Once the spoon is placed in the Time Window screen, which is still connected to Ruby’s memories, it begins answering Ruby’s questions with images. The Doctor theorizes that Sutekh revealed himself because the god hates that he also can’t figure out who Ruby’s mother is. (He’s right; Sutekh says earlier in the episode that he considers the secret of Ruby’s birth to be “greater” than the Doctor.) The screen points Ruby to Roger ap Gwilliam. She doesn’t remember him from “73 Yards,” but the Doctor knows that Roger became prime minister and enforced compulsory DNA testing on the U.K. population in 2046. If Ruby’s mom was alive, there’d be a record. The Memory TARDIS presents him with a whistle, and they arrive at the Department of Health in 2046.

Melanie, who has been fighting Sutekh’s voice in her head for a while now, whimpers in the hallway after the Doctor asks her to stand on the lookout. The Doctor bypasses the security on the DNA database, puts a prick of Ruby’s blood into his sonic screwdriver, and tells her to press search. I guess I was being too jaded when I wondered if her mom might’ve moved out of the U.K. because the snow starts falling as the computer finds a match. “I don’t understand,” Ruby says. But her train of thought is interrupted by Melanie, who has transformed into one of Sutekh’s red-eyed servants.

As the last two living beings left, the Doctor and Ruby are brought to Sutekh, who demands to see her mother’s name. Thankfully, before Melanie transformed, the Doctor realized that her hand was too cold, giving him time to put a plan in place. Ruby fakes Sutekh out by pretending she’s going to reveal the name, but instead calls him a “great big god of nothing” and hooks the intelligent rope onto his collar. She throws the end to the Doctor, and they pull with the power of one intelligent glove each.

The Doctor blows the Memory TARDIS’s conveniently-gifted whistle, which opens a compartment in the original TARDIS and shoots a beam that forcefully expels Harriet and Sutekh. After hooking the other end of the rope to the TARDIS console, it’s time for the Doctor to take this leashed doggy for a walk to the Time Vortex. Apparently, bringing death to a dead universe means bringing it back to life — PEMDAS, I guess? Everyone who died in this episode wakes up. (“That clever boy!” Mrs. Flood says.) Even last week’s victims, like Colonel Chidozie, return. Elsewhere in the universe, the kind woman is reunited with her baby.

It almost feels like this could be the end of the episode until the Doctor tells Ruby that it’s time for him to become a monster and goes to have a conversation with Sutekh. If Sutekh represents death, the Doctor reasons that he surely represents life. Yet that’s where Sutekh has won. “You turned me into this,” the Doctor says. “I am the one that brings death.” And he’s not just referring to the fact that his travels spawned deadly Susans. Earlier in the episode, we saw a clip of Sarah Jane Smith asking why Sutekh’s fellow Osirans didn’t just destroy him since he was so evil. “It’s against their code,” Four replied. “To have killed him would have meant that they were no better than him, so they simply imprisoned him.”

Sound familiar? That’s been the Doctor’s strategy with other villains like the Chuldurs. He couldn’t bring himself to kill; he wanted to be better than his foes. But now, he’s able to release Sutekh from the rope and watch him burn up. His moral code seems to have changed. Meanwhile, Sutekh’s role as death personified arguably also evolved. UNIT’s newest recruit, Susan Triad, is proof that he created life that could outlast his dusty murders. Maybe Sutekh was having an existential crisis of his own, and that’s why he didn’t answer earlier when the Doctor asked him if he had ever felt so alive.

Back in UNIT HQ, we’ve got one final mystery to solve. UNIT has done a DNA retrieval and found Ruby’s mother, who turns out to be a regular human named Louise Alison Miller, who got pregnant at 15. A Time Lord and a god thought she was an important mystery so that apparently made Louise’s sheer existence more powerful than both of them. I still have some questions about the mechanics of that and how Ruby could make it snow, but the Doctor isn’t overthinking it. He just loves that the most important person in the universe was ordinary.

The VHS tape reveals that Ruby’s mother was pointing at a lamppost, a signpost for Ruby Road. Unclear why that was hidden before, but Ruby is just happy to learn that her birth mother named her. The Doctor thinks it’d be best to leave Louise alone since she’s never tried to find her daughter, which is definitely his bias speaking as someone who’s never looked for his granddaughter. However, Ruby ignores him and introduces herself to her mother in a coffee shop. They have a tearful, touching reunion, and Louise later tells Ruby’s adoptive family that she’s thought about getting in touch every Christmas.

The Doctor realizes before Ruby does that she’s not going to keep traveling with him. She’s got to stay and build a relationship with the family she’s been longing to find, including her newly-discovered birth dad. But he promises he’ll see her again because she’s changed him. He’s able to admit that it was a mistake that he never tried to find Susan. “I talk about family in a way that I never did before. It’s because of you,” he says. “You have made my life bigger and better.” He doesn’t let himself cry until Ruby is out of the TARDIS. Ruby’s moms hug her as they watch the TARDIS disappear.

Mrs. Flood tells us that little Ruby Sunday got a happy ending. She’s standing on the roof holding an umbrella and briefcase, once again looking directly into the camera. Are her white outfit and ring clues about her identity, or is she just stylish? Mrs. Flood knows we might be wondering what happens to the Doctor next. “I’m sorry to say, his story ends in absolute terror,” she says before grinning and wishing us a good night. Uh, what could be more absolutely terrifying than the god of death? Guess we’ll have to wait until next season to find out.

Cut for Time (Lord)

• When Ruby and the Doctor see old clips from Pyramids of Mars, Ruby asks what all that Egyptian stuff was. “Cultural appropriation,” the Doctor quips. It’s a nice way to acknowledge some critiques that might come from modern viewers of the 1975 serial.

• For a god who brags to Melanie about being able to speak to any dead cell in the universe and find people through their family, it’s kind of funny that Sutekh couldn’t manage a little DNA test of his own to find Ruby’s mom.

• I hope there’s a support group for the hundreds of Susans on Earth. Imagine thinking you just look like a famous tech CEO when, in actuality, your face helped enable the temporary destruction of the entire universe.

• Kate and Ibrahim hold hands after coming back to life. Does that mean they’re a couple now? Didn’t expect that the future UNIT spinoff I’ve been manifesting might have a workplace romance!

• At this point, I have no idea who Mrs. Flood is. Could she be the meta-fictional character Iris Wildthyme? Or perhaps the Monk, Hecuba, the Rani, someone related to the Doctor or River Song, or a completely new character? As far as I know, she might as well be Mary Poppins. Maybe that’s why she had the umbrella!