Well, it's been a hot minute, hasn't it?
What on earth has inspired Muddles to sit down on a Sunday night and write a blog post?
Well, it's simple. Doctor Who.
To be honest, the last few years of Who have lost me a little. At times they've been great, at others the storylines have been unecessarily complicated, the messages preachy and the companions bland. I've still enjoyed watching, but until this last season I haven't found it occupying much brain-space outside of the 45 minutes that it's on.
But this season... wow!
There's so much going on. New Doctor. New Ruby. A new mystery.
Most importantly, new rules. In UNIT commander Kate's cameo, she points out that UNIT are dealing more and more with the supernatural. She says, with a straight face, that her soldiers are using salt to defend themselves.
Earlier in the season, Ruby asks the Doctor whether stepping on a butterfly will cause the world to change. The Doctor laughs the idea off.
Then Ruby steps on a butterfly, and a moment later has become a lizard-person. Very odd indeed. In Doctor Who, time is a fairly fixed thing. There is a history of the universe, one the Doctor knows well. Normally it is only changed by fairly massive powers, either the Time Lords themselves, or the things the Time Lords (or the Doctor, anyway) fight.
Now, though, a single butterfly and all of modern Earth doesn't exist.
What happens next is almost as interesting. The Doctor does a little butterfly mouth to mouth, it flutters back to life and Ruby is Ruby again.
This actually calls back to an Early conversation the 10th Doctor had with Martha. His answe to her when asked the same question "what if I step on a butterfly?" is the same as the one given to Ruby- Don't!
But the reality is, and always has been, that the time stream is more robust than it seems. Martha, and many others before and since, do much, much worse. It took Rose saving her own father's life to cause serious damage!
The Butterfly effect is called that for a reason. It isn't that it doesn't exist within the Dr Who universe, but previously, the time stream has been able to cope.
Now, seemingly, it can't.
When the Doctor blows that butterfly back into existence, he isn't saving the life of an insect. He's restoring a timeline to the way it should be. He's doing his job as a timelord. But he's surprised he needs to.
It's a joke. A single silly joke to introduce a companion. A call-back to Martha's first trip, for those of us who have been around that long.
Or is it?
No.
Something is happening in the world of The Doctor. The timestream is working differently.
In fact, time itself is broken.
This is the plot of this series. The big bads from outside the universe are coming in to play. The rules are going out of the window. The supernatural is becoming natural. Music is now a weapon. Games are dangerous.
Time is broken. And it's trying to fix itself.
This is what this episode is about.
Spoiler alert, by the way.
We begin at the beginning. Ruby and the Doctor get out of the TARDIS in the Welsh countryside. The Doctor starts to tell a story about a politician, Jack.
Then one of two things happen. First time around, he finishes. He tells Ruby that this man launches a nuclear weapon, then steps on a circle of thread.
Or he is interrupted by Ruby, who sees an older version of herself stood under a bent tree. He doesn't tell us why Jack was a bad man, and he doesn't break the circle.
One of these two things happens.
If you have watched the episode, you know that we get to see both version. First, he completes his story, he breaks the circle. Then Ruby bends down, and reads a scroll of paper. "Rest in Peace Mad Jack".
When she looks around, the Doctor is gone. And the woman, the older version of herself, is here.
She then begins an almost hellish journey, discovering that she is haunted by this figure. If she sends someone to talk to her, that person speaks to her for a moment, then turns and looks back at Ruby with an expression of true horror, then runs.
The woman is always 73 yards away. No closer. No further away.
Ruby has no choice other than to continue with her normal life. The watching woman, the constant vigilance and Ruby's distraction make every relationship in her life fall apart.
Eventually, the time comes for Mad Jack to enter her awareness. She sees Jack given the name on TV, and she realises what she must do. She has to stop him starting a nuclear war. She endeavours to get close to him, emptying her savings account to get to his... well, not his inner circle, but close enough.
Then, just before he gets control of the nuclear warheads, she makes her move. She positions the watching woman right next to him. Mad Jack speaks to her, then runs away. He loses his chance to press the big red button.
Ruby lives out the rest of her life, still haunted. Finally, she lies dying. As her breaths fade away, the watching women appears closer to her, but with her back to her.
Finally, as she dies, she finds herself back in the Welsh countryside, looking down at her younger self and the Doctor. They've just arrived in the TARDIS.
Now, the second happening plays out. Young Ruby sees old Ruby, she interrupts the Doctor's story and the circle isn't broken.
Old Ruby vanishes.
So, what happens?
I think there are two things at play. The first is the sickness of the timeline. I believe that a divergence exists on that clifftop. Two possible futures, all revolving around whether the nuclear weapons are fired by Mad Jack or not.
This isn't a sign of a healthy timeline. In Doctor Who, the rules are established to be complicated, but absolute. Significant events, such as firing a warhead, are fixed points. Since the Doctor knows about it, we know that is has already happened and is unchangeable, just as the explosion of Vesuvius, or the destruction of Gallifrey.
Yet though this story, what we see is that the timeline, what is real and fixed, changes. I believe that the second time around, the Doctor doesn't remember Mad Jack starting a nuclear war, because by the time we reach the end of the episode, he never did. Ruby stopped him.
The disturbing thing here is that this suggests that the unhealthy, incorrect timeline isn't the one Ruby lives out through the episode. It's the one that exists when they arrive together.
This isn't the first time we've seen this. A running joke this series is that, after a TARDIS fly-by, Newton names Gravity Mavity.This is obviously the wrong word, but in the timeline the Doctor is living in so far this series, Gravity no longer exists. The timeline he is in is wrong.
Interestingly, the way in which this happens is that The Doctor pops by to visit Sir Isaac, and makes a joke about "The Gravity of the situation". Isaac then mis-remembers the word as "mavity" and so everything changes. The strangest thing is that the Doctor, who made the joke, now also thinks that gravity is mavity.
This brings me onto paradoxes. This whole episode is a beautiful example of a bootstrap paradox. When old Ruby warns young Ruby not to let the Doctor break the circle, she prevents the set of circumstances that lead to her own existence from occurring. If she didn't exist, then young Ruby wouldn't have stopped the Doctor from breaking the circle, and so Old Ruby would then end up existing to warn young Ruby, and... yeah. Headaches abound.
Something that we are told time and time again in Who is that paradoxes are bad. Paradoxes, specifically, break timelines.
And here we have an episode with two timelines, one with Ruby living a life alone and risking everything to prevent nuclear war, and one with her happily going off to explore Wales with the Doctor. I believe that the set-up of the paradox means that one of these two timelines is doomed to collapse in on itself and be destroyed. The only question is, which one?
The fact is that it can only be one. The timeline in which Old Ruby exists to haunt young Ruby ultimately leads to Old Ruby preventing the existence of the timeline. It is a loop that is destined to close.
Does that then mean that none of it matters? Did Ruby even need to prevent nuclear war, if the timeline in which she did is erased?
You might think so, but there'stwo details that make me believe that this is not so. First, the fact the Ruby interrupts the Doctor before he can tell her about Mad Jack firing off the nuclear weapons. Hiding this information is only narratively satisfying if the reality we live in now has seen this hange.
Secondly, there's Ruby's three trips to Wales. In both timelines, Ruby says she has been to Wales three times. Second time round, the Doctor asks her to name them, and she can only recall two. The third visit happened, but in another timeline. The only plausible alternative timeline we know of is the one in which Ruby defeated Mad Jack, and the fact that she remembers, even just as an echo, implies that things that Ruby changed in the First timeline might impact things in the second.
Instead, then, of thinking of the timelines collapsing in on each other, perhaps it is more a case of them colliding. Of things from one leaking over to another.
How can that be possible? Nothing like that has ever happened on Who before?
Well, this is where magic comes into play.
This is a universe where the supernatural is starting to play a part. A place where, if you wonder into a pub in Wales, the people will begin to share a collective story of horror and death without any pre-planning. A place where people are afraid of the dark.
This is a place where breaking a fairy circle can have dire consequences. The Doctor, the breaker of the circle, is banished from the first timeline completely. Ruby commits a further desecration by reading the scrolls. She's warned against this twice in the episode, first by the Welsh pub-goers, and secondly by the Doctor in the second timeline. It's an act of disrespect, she is warned. When she innocently commits this act, she is given an instruction. "Rest in Peace Mad Jack". It's a pennace she has to pay for her share of the crime.
And if she had failed? If she had misunderstood the message, or not managed to get to Mad Jack in time?
I think she would have gone back to the beginning all over again, but this time in a different role. This time she would have been forced to stand and watch as she aged, drifting through life, getting progressively lonely. Unable to offer more than a few words of regret, forced to be the agent who chased away anyone who might have given her younger self support.
Think of it as a video game with multiple endings. The Watching Woman, Old Ruby, is a result of a "bad ending". You got to the end, but you didn't complete all the goals. You didn't atone.
What we see at the end of the episode is the result of the Good Ending. Ruby atoned. She paid her pennance. She was given a chance to prevent the Doctor and her younger self from commiting the crime in the first place, and she managed to communicate it. I believe that, as part of this, she also managed to put right a wrong, correcting the story of Mad Jack in the timeline.
There is also a wrong she doesn't put right. One she can't. Marti Bridges is a young woman who volunteers for Mad Jack's campaign. It seems that she is awed by him, but when we meet her again later in the episode, she is jaded. The implication is that, in some way, she has been a victim of abuse by Jack. Ruby apologises to her directly for not being able to put things right for her. I think Ruby might understand more of what is going on than we see.
Perhaps there is another being somewhere in this story. The "fairy" who made the circle. Perhaps not. Perhaps the universe is simply trying to heal itself from the many, many wounds that have been torn through it of late. Maybe even using paradoxes and magic, things normally so dangerous to it, to reel in the more dangerous rogue timelines and bring them in line with the true path of the universe.
Final points. This has been a long one.
Firstly, I hope we find out what version of the story the Doctor and Ruby are living in now. I wouldn't be surprised if we do, but I would expect it to be something subtle. Maybe Marti will re-appear at some point, and if we have any other episodes this series in the right time period, I would keep a careful look-out for background mentions of Mad Jack.
Secondly, I don't know what Old Ruby was saying to people to make them look at young Ruby with such revulsion. I think this might be hinting at the truth about Ruby, and what or who she is. I don't think this is something I can answer from this episode alone, but I will think about how it links in with everything else. It's worse mentioning that it's mentioned that, after the day Ruby loses the Doctor, there is no more snow. Snow is something closely related to Ruby, and it's fascinating that it vanishes from the world once her torment begins. Maybe this is a sign that Ruby was out of place, or more likely, out of the correct timeline.
Finally, the Doctor. He was hardly in this episode, but there's still something important to mention. I'm beginning to think of him more and more as unreliable, at least as far as his knowledge of the universe goes. We spoke about it earlier with regards to the butterfly effect, and his use of the word "mavity". Something else adding to this is him bringing up Mad Jack at all, albeit by another name, just before Ruby is launched into a time loop she can only escape by preventing him from taking power. It's a massive coincidence... unless it isn't. Unless the Doctor, by talking about Jack, inspired the punishment that Ruby had to endure. Even if that's not the case, the fact is that the Doctor no longer seems to know as much about the universe as he used to. Whereas previously, he could spot things that were out of time, or out of order, and work to correct them, now he seems not to notice little paradoxes like "mavity", and seems relatively unconcerned by the effect of Ruby stepping on a butterfly.
Whether he's knowingly ignoring the problems with time, or simply unaware of them, we will have to wait and see. Honestly, it's been years since I was so excited for the next episode. I can't help but praise the brilliant cast and crew who have, so far, created a stand-out series.
Long may it continue!
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