Doctor Who has always embraced the strange and the mysterious. Season 1, Episode 4, “73 Yards,” is perhaps the greatest expression of this that the sci-fi series has ever achieved. The episode takes Ruby Sunday, played by Millie Gibson, on a journey through an alternate timeline without the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa), as she is stalked by a strange and menacing stranger—a woman who is always exactly 73 yards away. The episode offers little explanation for its unusual events, leaving viewers with a conclusion that raises as many questions as it answers. Doctor WhoOf ‘s recent forays into the supernatural and the inexplicable, “73 Yards” may well be the most confounding.
Written by Doctor Who According to showrunner Russell T Davies, much of the time-based plot of “73 Yards” seems to be tied to the larger story built around Ruby Sunday. However, it’s unclear how much of this episode will be revisited in the future and how much will remain a mystery to fans. Recent episodes have jumped between all sorts of different worlds and tones, and “73 Yards” is its most shocking genre shift yet. The episode even avoids the Doctor Who opening titles, standing out from the rest of the series to tell a story of Ruby Sunday rooted in folklore.
Updated September 10, 2024 by Joshua M. Patton: Like the episodes of Doctor Who “73 Yards” is one of the most mysterious shows of the season. As Doctor Who delves deeper into fantasy, the narrative focuses on more mystical factors than the typical sci-fi problems the heroes face. However, “73 Yards” mixes magic and the supernatural with the time travel and alternate realities that are a staple of the show. This article has been updated to add analysis after the series finale and to conform to CBR’s current formatting standard.
Entering a fairy circle is the new superstition explored by Doctor Who
Ruby Sunday was caught in a magical time loop, and she saved the day and the Doctor
In the opening scene of “73 Yards”, the Doctor and Ruby exit the TARDIS and find themselves on top of a cliff in Wales. As they venture up the cliff, the Doctor steps on a strange circle made of cotton, trinkets, flowers, bird skulls and parchment, breaking it in the process. This makes “73 Yards” the second consecutive episode to show the Doctor stepping on something he shouldn’t, after “Boom” saw him stuck on a landmine. As the Doctor and Ruby inspect the strange circle, Ruby reads the messages on some of the parchment that has been left there and suddenly finds herself alone. The Doctor has disappeared and a mysterious woman is watching Ruby, standing 240 feet away.
Doctor Who Season 1/Season 14, Episode 4, “73 Yards” Preview
- Written by Russell T Davies
- Directed by Dylan Holes Williams
- Launched on May 25, 2024
- IMDB User Rating: 8.2/10
Trying to figure out what happened, Ruby ventures to a nearby pub, where the locals tell her that the circle she discovered is called a fairy circle. In real life, the term fairy circle or fairy ring usually refers to a naturally occurring circle of growing mushrooms. As in “73 Yards”, there are many superstitions surrounding real-life fairy circles, particularly in Wales. Folklore holds that anyone who enters such a circle will anger the fairies who created it and receive a curse as punishment. Superstitions vary, with some stating that the intruder will be trapped in the fairy circle forever, and others suggesting that they will be transported to the fairy realm or become invisible to the mortal world. Others suggest that entering a fairy circle brings bad luck or early death.
“73 Yards” is not the first time Doctor Who touched on folklore or superstition. Classic stories such as “The Demons” and “The Battlefield” explored demons, witchcraft, folklore and myths. More recently, superstition has played a significant role in Doctor WhoThe series’ 60th anniversary specials. In “Wild Blue Yonder”, David Tennant’s Fourteenth Doctor invoked a superstition at the edge of reality, using a line of salt to hold back the Not-Things. This appears to be the cause of the Toymaker’s entry into the material universe in “The Giggle”. The clifftop where the Doctor and Ruby find the fairy circle in “73 Yards” is also depicted as a vulnerable point on a boundary between worlds – land and sea – similar to the edge of the universe, as depicted in “Wild Blue Yonder”.
The Doctor and Ruby accidentally created a doomed alternate timeline
Ruby used her ‘curse’ to end Roger ap Gwilliam’s tyrannical reign as Prime Minister
After the Doctor enters the fairy circle and Ruby reads the scrolls that are part of its strange network of threads and charms, inexplicable things begin to happen. It all begins with the sudden disappearance of the Doctor and continues with the appearance of the Woman, who remains 240 feet away from Ruby at all times for the remainder of the episode. It is quickly established that anyone who speaks to the Woman is overcome with fear and runs away from Ruby. This is first seen when a hiker – the last of Susan Twist’s mysterious characters Doctor Who roles – talk to the woman for Ruby on the cliffs.
As the episode continues, Ruby’s life goes on without the Doctor. In fact, Ruby’s life goes on for much longer than viewers could have imagined. After the Doctor’s disappearance, Ruby returns home, as days turn into years and years into decades. Ruby eventually manages to use the 240-foot-apart Woman’s effect on the others to stop the rise of Roger ap Gwilliam, a dangerous politician the Doctor had mentioned when he first arrived in Wales, but even that doesn’t solve the problems. Eventually, Ruby dies of old age and it is revealed that she was the Woman all along. As she dies, she returns to the beginning of the story in the Woman’s place and prevents the Doctor from entering the fairy circle.
Time is eventually returned to normal, with the Doctor and Ruby together. However, it may be that Ruby is not just changing an unfortunate past: she seems to have been transported to an alternate timeline at the time when the fairy circle was broken.
A year into the “73 Yards” timeline, Ruby meets UNIT’s Kate Stewart, who tells her that this timeline “might be suspended along [Ruby’s] event.” The line is never fully explained, but seems to suggest that Ruby’s actions created an alternate timeline. One of the scrolls Ruby read in the fairy circle read “Rest in peace, Mad Jack”—a childhood nickname for Roger ap Gwilliam, leading Ruby to believe that her purpose in this alternate timeline is to stop Gwilliam, thus fulfilling the fairy circle’s goal.
The depiction of an alternate timeline without the Doctor in the episode is reminiscent of 2008’s “Turn Left,” which saw Donna Noble, played by Catherine Tate, fall victim to a time beetle. This propelled her into an alternate life in which she never met the Doctor, leading to her death during the events of “The Runaway Bride.” Working with Rose Tyler, Donna was ultimately able to prevent this dark alternate timeline from being created, much like Ruby at the end of “73 Yards.” Interestingly, the time beetle was part of the Trickster’s brigade, and the Trickster himself is a godlike being, cast in the same mold as the supernatural villains who now face the Doctor in the new series of Doctor Who. All this could indicate that the Trickster’s hand is at work again..
Ruby’s alternate future existed to help her past self repair the timeline
The alternate timeline Ruby experiences in “73 Yards” culminates in her discovering that she was the woman she had been seeing all along. As old Ruby Sunday dies, she sees the Woman, finally within 240 feet. Ruby then travels back along her own timeline, to the moment when the TARDIS arrived in Wales. She tries to call the Doctor to warn him not to enter the fairy circle. Despite her fragile voice, too weak for her younger self or the Doctor to hear, Ruby manages to connect with herself and stops the Doctor from breaking the circle. This immediately erases the timeline the Doctor disappeared into.
Ruby’s interference in her own past makes her a paradox, preventing the very event that brought her into existence in the first place. However, there is also evidence that the timeline was changing even before Ruby stopped the Doctor from entering the fairy circle. When the older Ruby travels back in time, becoming the woman who had been haunting her, before she can begin to interfere, the younger Ruby tells the Doctor that she has been to Wales three times. This differs from the first time this moment played out, at the beginning of the episode, when Ruby told the Doctor that she had only been to Wales twice. It is implied that, when the timeline changes to include the Doctor again, a part of Ruby is able to remember her alternate life. It is possible that by stopping Roger ap Gwilliam, thus keeping “Mad Jack” at bay, Ruby earned her release from the cursed alternate reality of the fairy circle.
Although Ruby, in an alternate future, appears to have been created and moved through time to help her past self, her methods seem unusual at first glance. She distances everyone she speaks to from her own younger self. She also, of course, always maintains a distance of 240 feet. This distance seems reminiscent of how Doctor Who represented paradoxes and crossed timelines into the past. Episodes such as “Father’s Day” have established that it is dangerous for a time traveler to come into contact or interact directly with his or her own past.. The fact that older Ruby hunts people seemed like a necessary evil that drove her to use this power against Roger ap Gwilliam. It’s also possible that it was the cursed timeline playing on Ruby’s fear of abandonment, stemming from being abandoned by her birth mother as a baby.
Ruby, alternate past and future, breaking time loop suggests divine origin
The ending of “73 Yards” doesn’t offer a clear explanation for how Ruby began traveling through time to become the Woman, or how she was then able to change her past to prevent the creation of this alternate timeline. While this could simply be due to the powers of the Fairy Circle, a superstitious artifact built on a barrier between worlds, it’s also possible that it has more to do with Ruby herself. Throughout season 1 of Doctor Who So far, there have been several clues that Ruby Sunday is more than she seems. — she is able to make it snow when her thoughts return to the night her mother left her in the snow, and she has often been at the heart of timeline shifts.
Doctor Who
The new era also introduced a pantheon of gods.
It’s possible that Ruby herself is a member—or descendant—of this pantheon of gods, unknowingly. If so, it could explain how the old Ruby traveled back in time and altered her personal history. Perhaps if anyone else had been affected by the fairy circle, they would have been trapped forever in a cursed alternate realm. However, as a creature with powers beyond the material universe, Ruby Sunday may have been able to defy the curse’s powers in order to restore her life with the Doctor. Doctor Who Season 1 came close to a finale where the mysteries surrounding Ruby Sunday were somewhat resolved. However, definitive answers about what happened in “73 Yards” may never be revealed.
How ’73 Yards’ Resonated Through Doctor Who Until Its Season Finale
Other Alternate Timelines in Modern Doctor Who
The most significant detail in “73 Yards” is that Ruby Sunday was able to use her haunting to end the reign of Prime Minister Roger ap Gwilliam early.changing the timeline of Earth as the Doctor knew it. However, when the older Ruby became the Woman and saw herself and the Doctor, she changed that past. As Ruby and the Doctor approach the fairy circle, viewers can hear “Don’t walk…” being said, presumably by the older Ruby. Although her younger self did not hear it, Ruby seems to have understood the message or, perhaps, “remembered” that breaking the fairy circle would cause the Doctor to disappear.
Later, in the Memory TARDIS, Ruby Sunday again shows that she has some sort of memory of this lost timeline. When told that the TARDIS has a perception filter that extends 220 feet around it, Ruby immediately knows that it is 240 feet. Additionally, when the Doctor, Ruby, and Mel travel to the future, the reign of Roger ap Gwilliam seems to have gone unchecked. This world is empty, thanks to Sutekh, his DNA database of all British citizens exists. This is what allowed Ruby to find her birth mother in the finale. However, what allowed her to change her own past or even become the Woman in the first place is left to the viewers’ imagination, for now..
The final season of Doctor Who is streaming on Disney+ and BBC iPlayer, along with previous seasons of .
Doctor Who
The new adventures in time and space of the alien adventurer known as the Doctor and his companions from planet Earth.
- Created by
- Sydney Newman
- Latest TV Show
- Doctor Who: The Complete Works by David Tennant
- First episode air date
- November 23, 1963
- Last episode
- Yonder’s Wild Blue (2023)
- TV show(s)
- Doctor Who, Doctor Who: Life in the Ponds, Doctor Who: The Scream of the Shalka, Doctor Who: The Matt Smith Collection, Doctor Who: The Complete David Tennant Collection, Doctor Who: The Peter Capaldi Collection, Doctor Who: The Jodie Whitaker Collection, Doctor Who: The Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant Collection
Summary
Doctor Who, the world’s longest-running science fiction series, takes viewers on a whirlwind journey through time and space with the enigmatic Doctor, a centuries-old Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey. In his iconic blue box, the TARDIS, which can disguise itself as an ordinary police box, the Doctor travels with ever-evolving companions to confront alien threats, solve cosmic mysteries and rewrite the laws of physics across the universe.