Doctor Who #1053: Empire of Death

"Time is a memory and memory is a time machine."

TECHNICAL SPECS: First aired Jun.21 2024.

IN THIS ONE... Sutekh returns.

REVIEW: Doctor Who Endgame turns almost everyone to dust and the universe dies retro-casually... Wait, didn't we just go through this in Flux? Yes, but Sutekh's return! Finding out who Ruby's mom is! Right?! RIGHT!???!! Those should have been strong elements to pin a season finale on, Davies unfortunately drowns it in complete nonsense that, unlike his 2005-2009 nonsense, doesn't even benefit from internal logic. While the Sutekh stuff felt fairly exciting on the first go, rewatching Empire of Death only yields more frustrations than those first experienced. It's a little like on first viewing, you're one of the UNIT people shooting at the monster ("one day!"), then being Rose Noble playing on her iPad in the background on repeat viewing. But let's take a big breath and dissect it, shall we?

As everyone gets dusted, the Doctor, Ruby and Mel escape through the image/echo of the TARDIS in UNIT's time window and, lo and behold, it's the "memory TARDIS" from all those Tales of the TARDIS framing pieces to introduce new viewers to old serials. Dozens of Easter Eggs jostle for attention in there (nice to see Mel stroke the Technicolor coat) and it's pretty clever to use that set in an actual story. This may all be part of the Broken Universe Theory, but memories HAVE been manifesting (Ruby's snow) so why not this amalgam of every TARDIS, somehow existing even though it's essentially been painted as a dream space where Companions and Doctors can meet while they're sleeping. A neat surprise, even though it's part of the episode's weak pattern. HOW it can be there, is vaguely explained by the idea of plugging one of the vacuum tube screens from the time window lab into it, and later putting a piece of real (non-remembered) metal (a spoon, is this a Matrix riff?) into its USB port, and it starts giving Ruby clues as to how to defeat Sutekh/find out who her bio-mom is... OKAY HOLD ON HERE!

The more you try to synopsize the episode, the more you hit scrape against faulty logic, continuity snag-ups and outrageous conveniences. Equating the mystery of Ruby's origins with Sutekh's defeat is the principal one. Somehow, the God of Death, who exists in all times and spaces, and inside every dead cell (including the hair and nails of the living) is obsessed ("for soooo lonnng!" - oh, you mean 8 episodes?!) with the identity of Ruby's mother and just can't figure it out. This is what keeps the TARDIS team alive, and seeing as there's nothing special about the woman in the end (we'll get back to that), it's one of the worst villain weaknesses on the books (and this is a show that has Cybermen die from window washer and gold dust!). Davies wraps this up with the perception filter, saying it extends 73 yards, which is where the mom was on that Christmas Eve, and therefore, it's disguised her? Russell, just because you say a thing using words we recognize doesn't mean it makes sense. The mother's identity can be found thanks to evil Prime Minister Roger ap Gwilliam's future policy of getting everyone's DNA in a database... So did Ruby stop his reign or didn't she? I guess no longer possessed by Mad Jack, he doesn't cause a nuclear war, but he's still a fascist who polices people's DNA. (A lot of this could have been explained with better dialog, but the episode forces me to constantly No-Prize what's happening.) We're told the Sutekh brings death to every place and time the Doctor's been since the Osiran grafted himself onto the TARDIS, but the episode keeps referencing destinations from BEFORE Pyramids of Mars. So his existence goes back through the TARDIS's past too? (See? No-Prizing.) When the Doctor returns to confront him, he uses a whistle to control his proper TARDIS (huh?!) and drags the god (who has mostly been relegated to growling like a simple monster in most scenes - some evolution!) through the time vortex where it will be destroyed. The insane bit is that this will undo all the Thanosian finger snapping he's done because "bringing death to death brings life". It's bonkers when you say it like that. Maybe (here I go again) if it was explicitly said that burning up in the vortex unravelled Sutekh's existence as if he never existed, but if that were true, people wouldn't be waking up from their dusting with complete memories of the event. But reasonable dialog escapes RTD in this one as he throws a lot of cool or pregnant lines at us that just end up being head scratchers. What's Kate's sudden interest in birds (or sudden hand-holding with one of her men)? Who is the man the lady from the destroyed timeline (again, very Flux) talking about? Why doesn't the Doctor admit to being Tom Baker when looking at the older episode? Sutekh making the "perfect trap" by pointing to Susan (which was a leap, to be honest). Susan Triad joining UNIT like she's somehow just lost her techbro empire. Mrs. Flood, in particular, says a bunch of contradictory things. There's too much to process.

Which brings us to the bio-mom and how Davies cheated the reveal. So she's just an ordinary person, which explains absolutely nothing. If she's just this normal nurse, who gave her child up when she was 15, then how do those events keep changing between The Church on Ruby Road and the time window? Among these changes is the fact that the sign for Ruby Road isn't there in that first episode, and even if it were, pointing creepily at it is just ridiculous. Imagine you drop a baby at a church's door and walk away. At some point (and again, that's not in the first version of events), you turn around and point at the sign because you want the baby to be killed Ruby. You do this for a random man who just walked out of a police box, unless the priest who finds Ruby can see her all the way over there, essentially pointing THROUGH the Doctor. And somehow, the priest comes to the conclusion that that's what you meant. Ooof. The convenience means that Ruby can tearfully claim that her name is a legacy from her bio-mom, and then use that information to convince the woman that she is indeed her daughter. This is all apparently a rebuke to J.J. Abrams making Rey part of an important bloodline in Rise of Skywalker (as a response to the previous film's attempt to "democratize" Jedi powers. I don't disagree with the notion, and RTD has elevated the "ordinary person" many times before in his writing, but dude, it's not like you're retconning someone else's work here. YOU set the board up. You are retconning the big "impossible girl" mystery you YOURSELF have set up. In other words, you were lying to the audience this whole time, and the mystery absolutely doesn't play fair. In fact, the solution contradicts the clues.

Let's put allllll of these frustrations aside and try to end on a positive note. The visuals are cool. Mel is usually very strong. The Doctor detecting that she is already dead is chilling. His final speech to Sutekh, telling him he's won by making this "man who never would" (truer of this Doctor than any previous) kill him. The touching reunion between Ruby and her bio-mom, though by the epilogue, it tends to become a little corny. And the best scene, bar none, is the goodbye between the Doctor and Ruby. We knew that Millie Gibson had complained that the schedule was grueling, so I wasn't too surprised to see the character leave. Then I remembered that they filmed the second season concurrently and that this was probably just a temporary goodbye. Which is a shame, quite frankly, because it's done in a way that seems VERY final. The Doctor playing coy and not wanting to show any emotion is Gatwa at his very best. Why does he cry if it's not a goodbye? This scene can only be tarnished by Ruby's return, honestly. As is, it's one of the best companion farewells ever.

THEORIES: I've already No-Prized much of the plot here, but the cloaking of the mystery woman remains an outstanding problem. If you give the TARDIS agency, consciously throwing up a perception filter to confound Sutekh, that could explain things. But we also have to contend with the TARDIS making grumbly noises as if only becoming aware of Sutekh's presence very recently. Perhaps the god couldn't really manifest until the 14th Doctor broke that line of salt at the end of the universe. Which recalls the TARDIS leaving for the length of an adventure there... Being in that time frame, did it sense Sutekh would escape as a result, and did it go to Ruby Road to shroud Ruby's mother (causality being timey-wimey)?

And then there's Mrs. Flood and HER identity. In trying to make his own River Song (note the watery name), Davies has bred a lot of red herrings here. He's connected her to Sutekh ("Flood" as in the Nile, as in Osirans), to Clara ("you clever boy"), to Romana (the white fur coat), to the Beast ("I will storm down [God's] gates of gold and seize His kingdom in my true name"), and to the Master/Missy (the Mary Poppins trappings and general menace). In some of these cases (including the less likely Susan Foreman), it would require a villainous turn. My favorite theory, however, is that she's one of the Toymaker's children. If Maestro was music incarnate, then Mrs. Flood is Storytelling, which is how she was so often breaking the fourth wall and telling the Doctor's story. She also says her mother died while she wasn't looking, as if people only exist while they are characters in a story. The most likely identity is nevertheless the Master. Whoever she is, she's playing the long game, living a normal life for years as Ruby's neighbor (a very Master thing to do), and says she's "always hiding herself away".

VERSIONS: When this episode first aired, a combination of this episode and the previous one was shown in cinemas in the UK. For the cinema viewers, a special message from Millie Gibson was played during the intermission thanking people for coming out so late to watch the episode in theaters. We should also note that a new episode of Tales of the TARDIS came out between this episode as a frame tale for the relevant Pyramids of Mars. It shows the Doctor tell Ruby all about Sutekh during the events of Empire of Death (Mel must be in a corner, unseen).

REWATCHABILITY: Medium - The frustration felt by most of the audience about the bait and switch on Ruby's mom is compounded on repeat viewings and the sense that the rest of it doesn't make much sense either. Uptick for the acting, especially in the conclusion.