DOCTOR WHO-73 YARDS (spoilers)

 

DOCTOR WHO-73 YARDS 

Wtf? I mean really WTF?

 

Okay, this starts out weird but at least it seems like it will be a good Hammer Horror or at least Horror Hotel great. Good scares, good situation. Very creepy.

 

The Doctor vanishes, no explanation. He’s wearing Sarah Jane’s outfit from THE SONTARAN EXPERIMENT. No, really. And Ruby is wearing something Jamie might have worn. Yes, really. I’m not sure but later on Ruby’s mum might be wearing a Tom Baker 18^th season jacket. Who cares?

 

The start is great, the set up is great but I had this wary feeling that I’ve seen this before or heard it before maybe in the movie FOLLOW or maybe in a Paul McGann audio.

 

Everything is going to be explained right? Well, this is RTD so it will be and it might not make sense but at least he’ll try, right?

 

The Doctor, before he mysteriously vanished, told Ruby the name of a future politician in Wales who was bad news. Later on, this just happens to be the same man she’s supposed to stop.

 

Oh, yeah, the Doctor steps on (you’d think he would have learned from last week’s stepping on a mine) a sort of lined up Wiccan memory to a dead person? Is it witchcraft (oooooooh, that’s a bad word now, innit)? 

After this an old woman that for some reason Ruby can never approach stays 72 feet or so away from her and yet follows her. When someone talks to the woman, they flee in terror from either her or Ruby. The woman follows Ruby even in the country side as Ruby rides on a train. The woman stays with Ruby for over IDK, 40 or more years. Ruby ages, grows old and becomes the woman. What the serious fuck?

 

The old woman is even approached by UNIT led by Kate (she’s still a bore) who assured Ruby that help is here. It’s not and UNIT turns and leaves. Kate somehow found Ruby. How?

 

Ruby’s mom turns on her because of the old woman. Her gran turns on her, too, though there is no sign that gran ever met the old woman. WTF?

 

Ruby gets the old woman near…the politician? If someone is smarter than me and I know there are people smarter than me who were paying more attention at that point----I knew this was going where LOST went---to no explanation that makes any sense or any satisfying sense----please explain this shit to me.

 

I can hear the fans now: they like making excuses for Moffat and his entire fucking stupid era: “Maybe we’ll get an explanation later in the season for how Ruby traveled in time to become the old woman and warn Ruby as the old woman in the past, her own past, and have all those powers and how the magic circle was involved and and and…maybe it's the Rani or the Monk or a future Doctor or...” Oh, fuck off.  

As I’ve always explained if it’s not up there on the screen, most of the time, and it still doesn’t make sense at the time, it’s lazy writing and lazy plotting.

 

I knew once Ruby was left outside by her mum that this is where we were going and then in the fiction, years passed by and I knew it was going to be a shitstorm of stupid, which it was. Again, if someone knows what this was about or what was going on, let me know.

 

Also: Ruby’s dumb. I mean completely stupidly dumb. Or immoral. Having seen the first hiker scream and run away from the old woman, Ruby lets Josh get near her and the same thing happens. She never warns him about the old woman. Then, it happens to her mum as if Ruby just set her mum up to let it happen. That’s three times. She buys into UNIT and their whole baloney---really can we just retire UNIT already? Kate’s part in this was so unbelievable and stupid. 

 

This is a very stupid, unexplained story. Doctor vanishes. No explanation.

 

Ruby, old woman, goes back in time to haunt herself but can’t approach and has to stay a certain amount of feet away. HOW does young Ruby measure the distance if she can’t get near her? More than that, how does old Ruby do all the things she did?

 

And…if she’s in her old age home or whatever that place was…how does a version of Ruby get there and make her go back in time to when Ruby and the Doctor arrived? Maybe it’s me but does this make ANY sense? Is there something involved we did not see?

 

Or …is it that it just doesn’t matter to RTD. WHY is he writing this episode, too? WHY is he writing?

 

Ruby going on dates was looking for…a reason why the old woman was there?

 

What’s more worrying is what this says about the Doctor and exploring. DON’T. He stops Ruby from reading the scrolls, saying something about giving them their dignity or their privacy. As an explorer in time and space who always has to know everything, why would he do that? He’s always curious and would love to know what that is. Here, he’s not.

 

 

He doesn’t believe in faith and god and the afterlife (as poor the BOOM shit or does he? Go watch that stupid dumb cowardly episode which can’t take a stand but wants to, to tell us or some of us, off).

 

What was that whole thing about the young girl that Ruby just about sets Mad Jack onto? Was this another Trump is bad story?

 

And I thought the two part John Sim Master story was bad. This is far, far worse.

 

With a good reason why the woman was following Ruby and a good idea of a background and who or what she was, this might have been a good story but as it stands, it’s another poor story, a lazy script, an unreal situation and lacking. It’s the fourth low scored, low quality story in a row. I’d give this 1/10 again and the 1 is only for the creep of the pub scenes but even those in hindsight, don’t make much sense.

 

You can retroactively ruin stories and scenes and seasons as we’ve seen before in DW but never so blatantly as this. This story retroactively ruins its wonderful start by not explaining a thing. Do we have to make it all up as we go along? I mean DW fans are good at that.

 

How did Ruby get locked out of the TARDIS?

 

How did the Doctor get back?

 

Was time changed? Did Ruby change it back?

 

When you can’t trust the narrative for reasons, explanations, or even some sense of meaning, why bother watching? In a way this is worse than the other three POS because it promises so much by being so very well directed at the first 15 minutes or so, weird pub characters and all, and btw none of them go anywhere or do anything of any value other than prank Ruby.

 

And so we get another world shaping, time shaping, epic that might stop the world but it makes NO sense at all. If you think it does, I would love to hear your explanation of it. Please.

 

When does Ruby become the old woman? The old Ruby was in a wheelchair with the helper in her car at the TARDIS. What happened to the helper? Was she the Doctor, too?

 

Who cares? Seriously, this is shit and next week looks even worse.

 

I can’t believe that continue to let RTD write for DW after this season, though they already have season two filmed. I can’t. I just can’t.

 

When LOST started, after an episode or three, I bailed. I totally knew they were going nowhere with this show and having gone down with several shows in the past (hey, at least the X FILES gave an explanation, okay), I refused to go down with this claptrap. I mean the main character was seeing his dead father. There was a smoke monster. Then, someone I liked died (the guy who later played Damon in VAMPIRE DIARIES). There was some kind of polar bear. 

Seeing enough TWILIGHT ZONES, OUTER LIMITS, and Irwin Allen episodes, I knew that there were only a few handful of explanations to all that shit: they were dead (yes) or in purgatory (yes) and/or it was all a hallucination (probably). Added to the mess, instead of adventure we kept seeing full hour episodes about the characters’ pasts, making them even more unlikable than they were in the present on the island, where at least the promise of adventure existed. But never came fully. Some of them, like the black boy, went home. A lot of good people died. 

Then, it was revealed they all died. It all meant nothing. When I heard about that ending some six agonizing seasons later, I was so happy I didn’t waste my time with that shitty fucking show.

 

This is much the same but coming late in the Doctor’s show span.

 

 

It time to give up on this show. I just have trouble saying goodbye to a character and premise I’ve loved, dreamed about, read about, listened to and enjoyed for FIVE decades. The fandom is toxic, the writers are toxic, and the show runner is toxic. There’s signs the main actor is toxic. Maybe, it’s making me that way, too.

 

DOCTOR WHO has finally jumped ship from a low quality show under Moffat and Chibs (mostly, though seasons 10 and 11 and the last half of 12 were good) that occasionally had some good stories to a show that HAS NO good stories. This show is no good. It has no more good stories to tell under RTD, Moffat, and the fan boys. It’s time to complain about it, it’s time to direct the blame where it belongs: NOT on woke-ness but the scripts themselves and the terrible show runner who does not know what he is doing. As far as DW, he’s turned into a hack writer who needs to go back to writing what he writes best: real life gay dramas about AIDS, death, and sluts. Moffat, too, needs to stay away. All fan boys need warding off, maybe with that magic circle.

It's almost as if RTD said, "A figure follows Ruby, wouldn't that be a great scare and idea." Then followed it up with nothing of any measure (ironically). 

 

 

 addition: it was crap clap trap garbage, through and through. Someone, on FB, thinks that the pantheon of gods did this. If that's the case, and it makes some sense, maybe there were another set of gods that gave Ruby her powers. If so, why not just do it themselves? Either way, even if fan theories make sense of this or we get explanations later, it was boring after the pub and went nowhere but back to a time loop thing that made no sense. Not only was the thing able to make Mad Jack run away, it also made Ruby go back and stop the Doctor from breaking the circle. I think. THe Doc needs to look where he's putting his foot.