“It isn’t magic – it’s a different kind of physics.”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
Nice to see the Doctor back on Christmas Day again! For all that Russell T Davies is keeping to the continuity established by his predecessor, it seems one thing he was set on was abandoning Chris Chibnall’s setting of the “Christmas” special on New Year’s Day, and returning the show to the Day itself.
Your mileage may vary as to whether that’s a good thing – I’ve heard some grumble that it gives undue preference to a Christian tradition ahead of those of other religions, but I think that’s down to a misunderstanding of how exactly Christmas is viewed in British culture. It’s long since ceased to be a religious tradition; now, in a largely secular culture, it’s a kind of midwinter festival primarily built around nostalgia, consumerism, and faintly misremembered Victoriana. Charles Dickens has a lot to answer for 😊
Doctor Who Christmas episodes are a relatively recent thing in the show’s 60-year history. Yes, I know William Hartnell broke the fourth wall to wish viewers a happy Christmas back in 1965, but actually The Feast of Steven was the only classic episode broadcast on 25 December. It’s only since the show’s big budget return in 2005 that Christmas episodes became a thing, and they’ve always had to be a little different to the rest of the show to accommodate a wider audience of casual (and often seasonally exhausted) viewers looking for a light and fluffy adventure with a feelgood factor.
The Church on Ruby Road, though, has a new, unprecedented brief. It has to introduce not only a new Doctor, but a new style for the show itself, in a ‘soft reboot’ for its expanded viewership, thanks to new production partner Disney+. There’s been reboots before of course, not just the obvious 2005 one. Effectively, every change of showrunner has brought in a new style, and Steven Moffat actually ‘rebooted’ the show twice when he was in charge, once at the end of the Matt Smith run, and two-thirds of the way through Capaldi’s, with an episode actually (and cleverly) entitled The Pilot.
This is a taller order though – a reboot not just for the existing audience, but to introduce the show to an entirely new one. It’s the same challenge that RTD faced in 2005 with Rose, and it’s no coincidence that it was this episode The Church on Ruby Road was most reminiscent of, introducing the Doctor as a mysterious, unknown stranger, through the eyes of a new, everywoman companion from contemporary Earth.
In that sense, incoming Doctor Ncuti Gatwa had almost as much of a challenge as Christopher Eccleston did in 2005 – to not only reinvent the character for an audience unfamiliar with it, but to make them love it too. And, like Eccleston, he succeeded superbly. Gatwa has charisma to burn, and he absolutely owned the screen every time he was on it.
He’s a Doctor unburdened by all the angst and trauma that’s haunted the character since its 2005 return, which was overtly the point of the ‘bigeneration’ – to let the older version of the Doctor work through all of that while giving us a new one who’s made his peace with it. This new Doctor has an honest-to-goodness joie de vivre we haven’t seen since the show’s return, exuberantly dancing in a nightclub with both men and women, sprinting and jumping along rooftops, and revelling in mystery and puzzles.
Gatwa has the character nailed from the off. The Doctor is fun, compassionate, mysterious and emotional, with time for everybody – the seemingly inconsequential scene with the young, soon-to-be-married policeman was a vital little gem in showing how this magical character cares deeply about everyone, even people he’s only going to know for a few minutes.
He’s also shown to have less of a fixed sense of sartorial style than his predecessors, which I definitely like. In this one episode, he sports three distinctly different looks, appearing first in a tweed overcoat with, unexpectedly, a rather magnificent hat; then in a very sexy vest/kilt combo (presumably paying tribute to his Scottish background), then finally in the leather trenchcoat/high-waisted trousers/sneakers combo he keeps for the rest of the episode. It really is Christmas for cosplayers – we’re only one episode in, and already there’s three different ‘Doctor looks’ to recreate!
New companion Ruby Sunday, though, made rather less of an impression. Now, that’s nothing to do with Millie Gibson, who gave a great performance and will presumably fill the role with aplomb. Rather, it’s that, if you are a longtime viewer, she’s nothing especially new. She doesn’t have much of an actual character yet, the script seemingly more concerned with the mystery of why she was abandoned at birth, and by whom. Like the early version of Clara Oswald, she comes across as a puzzle piece first, and a character second.
This might have worked better if the script had presented the whole plot from her point of view, as it does with Rose, but the plot, by necessity, had to exclude her from events she could have had no knowledge of. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to see Ncuti Gatwa dominating the screen as the Doctor in scenes that don’t involve Ruby, but it feels like she doesn’t get anything like as much character establishment as Rose Tyler did.
Said plot was itself fairly lightweight. That’s not unexpected for a light, fluffy Christmas episode, and probably inevitable when you’re trying to introduce the show to a whole new audience. After all, Rose too had a pretty slim plot. No returning classic monsters here though – though those of a similar age to Russell T Davies would have immediately recognised the baby-eating Goblins as a combo of the Gremlins from Gremlins and the, er, Goblins from Labyrinth.
And, like the ones from Labyrinth, these had a fondness for songs, with baby-eating paean ‘The Goblin Song’ already a significant online hit for Murray Gold and singer Christina Rotondo. It was a lot of fun (for me anyway) to see the Doctor effortlessly joining in, and despite Ncuti Gatwa’s nervous assertion that he’s an actor not a singer, his voice was excellent. I know Russell T Davies reveres the classic musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and has often stated he’d like to do a musical episode of Who – I don’t know if this counts as it, but the interlude was so much fun I wouldn’t mind seeing a bit more of it!
The Goblins themselves were fun and rather cute – with the obvious, and actually rather dark, exception that they like to eat human babies. I found myself rather wondering about that – are babies all they eat? I mean, there’s not a lot of food on something that small, certainly not enough to feed that whole crew and their rather gargantuan King. The King was an impressively realised creature, but despite being presumably in charge, didn’t get a single line, which seemed rather wasteful of a chief antagonist. He also seemed quite reminiscent of the similarly ranked Nekross King from that other RTD show Wizards vs Aliens – though that King got the voice of Brian Blessed to say some actual lines.
Nice to see the ever-game Davina McCall joining in the festivities as herself, and for a plot-germane reason too – McCall fronts ITV’s relative-reuniting series Long Lost Family, which is presumably what Ruby was appearing in here. Longtime viewers might recall that this isn’t the first time Davina’s been in the show – back in 2005, she voiced the robot version of herself presenting the far future Big Brother in Bad Wolf. What with exploding there, being transformed into a zombie in 2008’s Dead Set, and now having her skull smashed in by a falling Christmas star, she’s shown an impressive willingness to be repeatedly killed onscreen, rivalling only Sean Bean.
The ep’s other big guest star was the legendary Anita Dobson as mysterious neighbour Mrs Flood. At first seemingly just a bit of local colour, with a penchant for arguing with the neighbours, a mid-credits scene (just like in Marvel movies, oddly enough) showed her to be rather more – breaking the fourth wall to wink directly at the audience, she mischievously asked, “Never seen a TARDIS before?”
Obviously this is going to be an ongoing plot point, and equally obviously fandom is in an uproar trying to work out who she is. The most popular theory currently seems to be the Rani, which rather misses the point that Time Lords no longer need to be fixed in gender; though I’ve seen both the Master and Romana mooted as possibilities. But why should an important character be one from the past at all? Why not somebody entirely new? It would certainly be in keeping with the show’s apparent desire not to lean so heavily on its past. My theory? Maybe it’s Paul Magrs’ much-loved spinoff creation Iris Wildthyme, making her screen debut after decades of book and audio appearances.
Despite being an effective introduction for an exciting new Doctor, I have to say I found The Church on Ruby Road a rather forgettable episode in most other ways. It’s definitely aimed at younger children, with its cute singing Goblins (not that that’s a problem), but it felt, tonally, like we’d been here before. Of course that will make little difference for the new viewers RTD and Disney+ are trying to attract, and perhaps it’s never been truer to say that the show isn’t being made for obsessive fans like me.
On those terms, it succeeds, and sets an agenda for where the show’s going next. Aside from the ongoing mysteries of Ruby’s parentage and Mrs Flood’s identity, it’s clear that this new era is going to lean more heavily into the “fantasy” side of science-fantasy than it has for a while, with a throwaway (but very significant) line explaining that magic is just “a different kind of physics”. That’s fine by me – after all, if you found the idea of a flying wooden sailing ship unpalatable, however did you cope with the ones racing through space in 1983’s Enlightenment?
Outright fantasy is nothing new for the show, and if that’s the direction Russell wants to take it in, I’m ok with that; providing, of course, that he writes coherent, entertaining stories. This did meet those criteria, but I have to say I’d like to see something a bit more ambitious for the new season. I’m optimistic that, despite making some decisions I’m not keen on, RTD will do that. Roll on Season 1/14/40, or whatever it is 😊
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