Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) loses the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) in a fairy circle on a clifftop in rural Wales. She is stuck with a stalker — one who stays exactly 73 yards (aka 219 feet) away, just far enough that Ruby can’t quite see or hear her — for the rest of her life.
Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson choose their ultimate ‘Doctor Who’ squad
That’s the premise of “73 Yards,” the mind-bending fourth episode of Doctor Who Season 14, and arguably one of its creepiest horrors since “Blink” introduced the Weeping Angels in 2007. But just as this simple horror story turns out to be a timey-wimey fight against a future fascist Prime Minister, there are plenty of references hovering just under the surface. It’s a cornucopia of references for fans of writer/showrunner Russell T Davies — and we’re not just talking Doctor Who Easter eggs.
Let’s start with an unusual but not entirely unprecedented opening:
There are no Doctor Who titles or theme music.
Right from the beginning, Davies signals “73 Yards” is going to be something different. This is only the second time in Doctor Who history that an episode has omitted the theme music and title sequence. The first was another horror episode, the Peter Capaldi-era found-footage tale in 2015 called “Sleep No More” — a story that has already been referenced once this season, in “Space Babies.”
However, even “Sleep No More” briefly highlighted the words “Doctor Who” within one of its found-footage screens. “73 Yards” is the first Doctor Who episode in its 60-year history to omit the title altogether, with Davies audaciously assuming that the TARDIS materializing in the opening seconds is now enough to tell anyone in the world what show this is.
Part of this plot happened to Donna in “Turn Left.”
Of course, it wouldn’t be Doctor Who if it didn’t also reference itself like crazy.
In 2008’s “Turn Left” — which, like “73 Yards” and “Blink,” is what’s known as a “Doctor-lite” episode, allowing the lead actor some well-deserved time off — Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) enters an alternate reality where she never meets the Doctor (David Tennant) and thus wasn’t able to save his life at their first encounter in “The Runaway Bride.”
The following Doctor-less disasters include Starship Titanic from “Voyage of the Damned” actually crashing into London and igniting a nuclear fireball. They leave Donna and her grandad Wilf (Bernard Cribbins) in a Britain under military rule, straining with refugees. A new “England for the English” law means a family living with the Nobles get loaded onto trucks bound for work camps.
“They called them labor camps the first time too,” laments Wilf, a World War II veteran who sees the fascist future all too clearly. “It’s happening again.”
“Turn Left” also gives Donna a mysterious stalker — not herself from the future, but former companion Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) from a different dimension. Rose is actually able to talk to Donna, but the end result is the same. The alternate Donna and the alternate Ruby must die, or rather they must never have lived in the first place.
“Years and Years” also had a future fascist Prime Minister.
Credit: Disney+
Nuclear madman Roger ap Gwilliam (Aneurin Barnard) may be the first Welsh leader of a future fascist party that Russell T Davies has written, but not the first British one in his screenwriting arsenal. That would be Vivienne Rook (Emma Thompson) in Davies’ award-winning 2019 HBO miniseriesYears and Years.
Like “73 Yards,” Years and Years fast-forwards in time at a vertiginous pace. It also features the shadow of nuclear war; in this case, a missile is fired at a Chinese island by Donald Trump, after Davies has him (wrongly as it turns out, but in this fictional case, legitimately) winning the 2020 U.S. presidential election. In “73 years,” Davies wisely avoids mentioning all elections until the 2040s, meaning it’ll be a while longer until his prediction is out of date.
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Gwilliam leads the Albion party to victory in 2046. (Albion is an ancient Celtic name for Britain; it’s also a mythical giant in William Blake’s writing that has become a sort of cultural handshake among neo-fascists longing for a return Ye Olde Tymes.) In Years and Years, Rook leads the Four Star party to victory in 2028. (Its name references the BBC censoring her use of “fuck,” but also evokes the Italian far-right “Five Star movement.”) Both move immediately to jail their opponents, and both are ousted with the help of our heroes — though in Rook’s case, it takes far more than a single day.
And just to complete the timey-wimey loop back to Doctor Who, Vivienne Rook was also the name of a journalist in the 2007 episode “The Sound of Drums,” in which the Master (John Simm) becomes Harold Saxon, an evil dictatorial Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
The TARDIS has a perception filter.
![Ruby Sunday knocks at the door of the TARDIS](https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/articles/03u4Kk9gO1xCoWVJAgjDrS2/images-3.fill.size_2000x1333.v1716495400.jpg)
Credit: Disney+
Speaking of “The Sound of Drums,” that’s also the episode in which the Doctor (Tennant again) first explains the perception filter mentioned by UNIT head Kate Lethbridge-Stewart in “73 Yards.”
“The TARDIS is designed to blend in,” the Doctor tells Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) and Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman) as he gives them TARDIS keys with perception filter attached and puts one on himself. “It’s like you’re there, but I don’t want to know,” Martha says.
The concept was introduced earlier that season in “Human Nature,” where Tennant’s Doctor hides from enemies by locking his Time Lord personality in a pocket watch with a perception filter. The Master is later revealed to have done the same thing. Although other enemies of the Doctor have used perception filters, and Captain Jack uses one to disguise his Cardiff HQ in the Torchwood spin-off series, “73 Yards” is the first Doctor Who episode since “Sound of Drums” to discuss this crucial TARDIS tech in any detail.
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