It’s learning a new language, says the Doctor as he contemplates the science of the goblins, full of chance and ropes. So now Doctor Who learns a new leid too, with extra eyes upon its global audience as reactionary politics and economic woes have chilled its domestic market. Labelled for convenience as the fourth of the 2023 specials, The Church on Ruby Road knows that the old year is already over as far as Doctor Who is concerned and that the new is very much born.
This new Doctor embraces a new old-fashionedness, clubbing at the end of a year in which a middle-aged columnist could mourn the death of the club scene of his youth; or perhaps this is just consolation for someone who would have been mortified by the Doctor’s dancing thirty years ago in more alienated days. Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor has an early focus on the Doctor’s urbaneness, not seen perhaps since the 1970s, and transplanted into new settings. Like the Pertwee and Tom Baker Doctors, this Doctor has the potential to be at home anywhere.
Millie Gibson matches Ncuti Gatwa as an energising screen presence, with an added flourish of youthful enthusiasm. Still images of Mille recall Marilyn Monroe, or (within Doctor Who‘s precinct) Jenna Coleman; moving Millie is herself as Ruby in all her (so far revealed) facets, still in her teens and sometimes in facial expression seeming terribly young, but in control of her own life, asking questions, participating in a television programme, performing with a band, but still the big sister to a succession of foster children. Ruby’s involvement in (presumably) Long Lost Family marries Doctor Who to reality television much as Davina McCall’s last involvement in Doctor Who did, though in a manner which is more reflective. It’s not enough just to be seen and to be participating in something fashionable before a staggered if shared extinction; instead, one hopes through exposure to discover one’s substance in the hope others find it palatable, however much integrity it turns out to have.
For goblins, it seems babies are the most palatable form of human flesh; it’s not spelled out, but this might not just be the preference for tender and lightly flavoured meat of human lamb-eaters, but something to do with all the chains of coincidence and consequence which the cosumption of a human baby ties up and diverts into goblindom. It appears that only the Goblin King eats human flesh directly – how the other goblins benefit is best left to the imagination, or not even that. That the goblins can travel back in time to Ruby’s abandonment might suggest that there is already a wave which they can ride between ‘then’ and ‘now’ which might not have been created yet from our point of view; Russell T Davies has I think said that there are more characters in the scene at Ruby Road than we know. The Doctor might have released one master knot, but there is another still to be untangled and I suspect it’s wrapped around the building which provides the title of this episode.
Ruby Sunday invites paralells with Rose Tyler; both have blonde hair and names which suggest the colour red or adjacent shades. Ruby, though, has more going for her than Rose; she feels less trapped and has a mother and grandmother more attuned to her personality and needs. Russell has moved on from his obsession with harridan mothers, as could already be seen in the evolution of Sylvia Noble in The Star Beast and The Giggle into someone more willing to make positive and constructive judgements. Carla Sunday has chosen to be Ruby’s mother, and she is a generous and giving fosterer too. The change in her when Ruby is removed from the timeline, shifting the joyous Sunday household to a miserable one where Carla does not know herself, is given regretful force by Michelle Greenidge.
There’s an odd assemblage of Christian symbolism around the Sunday family; obviously Ruby is a Christmas baby, a Christ child surrogate, but her mother’s name recalls Carlin Sunday, the north-east English term for Passion Sunday, and the goblins do lead Carla into a betrayal of the person she has pledged most to protect. Ruby is launched not as an ordinary person like Rose, then, but as someone on the verge of learning that their foundlinghood might actually be supernatural; she is not a Steven Moffat Impossible Girl, imbued with the power of Doctor Who’s own mythology, but instead interpreted through wider religious traditions. Intriguingly, the goblins sing of baby Ruby as ‘the beast’, as if she is perceived by the goblins as a diabolical entity. ‘Beast’ conveniently rhymes with ‘feast’, of course, but it’s still a deliberate choice of language for a species addicted to coincidence. Cherry Sunday might be a tasty treat, but there’s a potential allusion to Mary the mother of Jesus there too if you want. This might not be too far a reach; Cherry laughs about the three Sunday women being the “three queens of the sky”, queens of heaven in their attic. It’s an entertaining juxtaposition of alllusions even if that’s all it remains.
The London of The Church on Ruby Road is oddly quiet and depopulated. This is on one level a budgetary consideration – supporting artists cost, even when your production’s had a cash injection from Disney – but it might mean something artistically too. The episode is haunted by strands of 1980s culture; the goblins owe something to the eponymous Gremlins of the feature film (1984) and others have argued the debts that The Church on Ruby Road owes to Labyrinth (1985). Is the second Russell T Davies era rejecting the stylized kitchen-sink reality of the first Davies showrunnership, for an equally stylized reality where the ostensibly contemporary is painted with the myths of lost certainties that today’s child audience might be told by parents and grandparents? It’s a little early to tell, and if so this world will only exist for the subversion of its nostrums, and those of overcaution and reaction in 2024. There might be something in homages to an era of mutally assured nuclear destruction, when global politics is far less predictable, but when Doctor Who has mortgaged its fortunes to an international streamer when some form of mutually assured destruction seems guaranteed in the age of digital broadcasting. Doctor Who, perhaps, is a licensed jester at the court of the Mouse King; but that can be a powerful position to be in.
There’s more to the turn to fantasy and fairytale than supposed Disneyfication. Doctor Who has to remain fleet of foot at a time when the BBC has been slowed down by underfunding and the domestic market fractured. Goblins are part of an international language, as are forthcoming attractions such as the Beatles and Regency England. There’s been widespread commentary on how the goblins stretch or break the conventions of Doctor Who, but I’ve been more struck by how a precedent is found for the goblins. The Doctor emphasises that their magic is actually a different science, placing them in the tradition of the Daemons from The Daemons (1971). The Doctor breaking into song is part of the language-learning, gaining power over the goblins by operating within their rules. Again, play is important. Perception seems to be, too; while the goblins’ interventions in the lives of Ruby and Davina McCall cause their accidents, the impressions which Ruby and Davina have is that they suffer from extraordinary bad luck, and perhaps it’s that off which the goblins feed as much as fate itself.
What, though, of Ncuti Gatwa in his first full adventure as the Doctor? He’s given several opportunities to show the Doctor’s glee at living, his physicality, his inventiveness. There’s an occasional manic edge to his performance which reminds me of Christopher Eccleston, but also a stillness of a kind I don’t think I’ve seen before. This was a tasting session of performance and we’ll see much more, in more depth and variety, in the series proper, but the episode has been carefully written and directed to show what this Doctor is like. He seems more open than Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor, and the burdens which weighed Russell T Davies’s earlier Doctors have been shed or are being therapized away in Donna Noble’s back garden. He has an emotional literacy which recalls Davies’s Casanova, charming all the Sundays, riding the party spirit of the Goblin ship, establishing quick rapports with anxious policeman Denzel and it seems at first with Mrs Flood, though she may be too knowing to be as taken by the Doctor as she appears. He leaves the woman who abandons Ruby at the church door to herself; while (responding to critics protesting that the Doctor should always seize opportunities to solve mysteries, which he doesn’t here) I first emphasized that the Doctor has travelled back in time to rescue baby Ruby from the goblins, and that confronting the hooded woman might imperil the restoration of the previous timeline, Scott Gray argued sensibly on BlueSky that the Doctor is clearly emotionally struck by the situation and thinks it judicious not to intervene in the hooded woman’s life at this point. The Doctor remains complicated and with inhuman depths. By the time Ruby pieces together who and what the Doctor might be, we have seen enough to think we know him, even though he is sparing with what he tells Ruby (the Doctor’s claim that he has nobody is not strictly true, but helps reel her in); his answer to Ruby’s “Who are you?” suggests that we don’t know him, yet.
Nevertheless, Gatwa’s Doctor has not only learned the ropes, but cut through them and used them the way he wants to. He’s not bound and will try to make his own luck, but is apparently unaware of two elements, one of whom has made themselves known to the audience in Anita Dobson’s Mrs Flood, the other (Susan Twist’s pub heckler, sometime housekeeper to Isaac Newton) hiding in plain sight. Yes, large sections of fandom are arguing about which of them is the Rani, or Susan. There is a lot for eight episodes to deal with and we might now be dealing with arcs across years, fitting for episodes to be discovered years hence in digital backlists. May, I tell myself, is not that far away.
Matthew Kilburn 