Doctor Who: Empire of Death

The highly anticipated final episode of Doctor Who season one sees the Doctor, UNIT, and Ruby Sunday in a fierce battle against the return of the formidable Sutekh the Destroyer as he unleashes an Empire of Death.

Ending the previous episode with a cliffhanger, Doctor Who: The Legend of Ruby Sunday reintroduced Sutekh the Destroyer via Susan Triad Technology whilst planting seeds for revealing the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan and Ruby’s mum’s real identity.

The cliffhanger left Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) and Corporal Sullivan (Jasmine Bayes) in a precarious situation, trapped inside a time window within the headquarters of the Unified Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT). Meanwhile, Commander-in-Chief Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) must take charge of her staff’s safety, including Rose Noble (Yasmin Finney), Morris Gibbons (Lenny Rush), and Colonel Christopher Ibrahim (Alexander Devrient), after the shocking revelation that Harriet Arbinger (Genesis Lynea) and Sutekh have infiltrated their base, and worse, may now have control over the TARDIS.

Simultaneously, at Triad Technology HQ, Mel Bush (Bonnie Langford) and the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) find themselves in a tense face-off with a possessed Susan Triad (Susan Twist) after her broadcast to the United Nations goes haywire. At the same time, Mrs Flood (Anita Dobson) is entrusted with the care of Cherry Sunday (Angela Wynter), but as revealed in The Legend of Ruby Sunday, audiences learn a darker side to Mrs Flood’s character after initially dismissing Cherry’s request for a cup of tea and alluding to the impending arrival of Sutekh.

Leading into Empire of Death with so many moving parts, it becomes the job of director Jamie Donoughue and writer Russell T Davies to resolve the many threads and beats. Unfortunately, even with an extended episode runtime of 55 minutes, ten minutes extra compared to the other episodes in the series, Empire of Death fumbles the bag at tying together all the threads of the series into a satisfying conclusion.

There are areas of brilliance within Empire of Death that rise to the top against the murkiness of mediocrity, such as the production design for a sand-swept universe after Sutekh releases death across all of time and all of space. Equally, the Remembered TARDIS, a set used to bookend the Tales of the TARDIS omnibus series, is finally brought into the main show, with odes and references littering the screen — a personal highlight being how Langford’s Mel noticeably recollects her adventures with Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor.

Equally, the costume department’s creativity with Anita Dobson’s enigmatic character is exceptional. Her final flourish on-screen, dressed in a fluffy white coat, is an ode to former companion Romana (Mary Tamm) from Classic Who’s series 16 beginning with The Ribos Operation (1978).

Coincidentally, this is the second instance where Anita Dobson’s Mrs Flood is seen wearing an outfit based on a companion’s wardrobe, with the first, seen earlier in the episode, drawing inspiration from Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman). The attention to detail from the costume and props departments is an evident labour of love from the crew as they scour through years of iconography to plant the subtlest of nods and acknowledgements of the show’s history.

Conversely, Sutekh the Destroyer, returning for the first time in fifty years and voiced by original performer Gabriel Woolf, clearly intends to continue the character’s history; however, in execution, it does a disservice to the all-powerful creature.

For audiences unfamiliar, Sutekh was trapped eternally in a time corridor after encountering the Fourth Doctor in The Pyramids of Mars (1975), but somehow he survived. By attaching himself to the TARDIS, Sutekh grew in strength and patience, learning how the TARDIS operates until, as we learn, he eventually concocts a plan using the Doctor’s timeline as bait throughout time and space, each one a stronger Susan Triad version than the last.

The first act with Sutekh, where his killer dust spreads across time and space, appearing in every instance the TARDIS has ever landed, is incredible. Jaw-droppingly so. With an all-power devastation, similar to how the Flux tore its way through creation, beloved characters turn to dust and fade, reminding audiences of Avengers: Infinity War (2018) while reiterating Sutekh’s destruction is endless. Admittedly, this may have worked better as the cliffhanger to The Legend of Ruby Sunday, but the desecration of life certainly establishes Sutekh’s omnipotence.

The episode continues impressively as the Doctor, Mel, and Ruby retreat into the Remembered TARDIS, powerless to Sutekh’s might, with one niggling question planted in minds: if Sutekh can kill everyone, why are these three still alive.

Then we cut to black, and as we do, the episode’s quality begins to degrade.

Arriving now at a death-ridden planet, the Doctor interacts with a Kind Woman (Sian Clifford), and the pair share a tender exchange about memory. However, as in this moment, Clifford delivers a powerful sucker punch of a line about her child and the empty baby basket beside her, it raises doubts that the priorities of the episode are misaligned. For it should be the companion that audiences want to get invested in, but within a few short minutes, audiences care more about this Kind Woman than the travelling companion from the last seven episodes. Until the pacing of the script undermines all of this with a spoon.

What was once a story with structure and a concise understanding of what it was trying to tell and how instead, becomes a fumbling mess of story hooks and ideas. By returning Roger ap Gwilliam (Aneurin Barnard) in conversation with Amol Rajan, as seen initially in 73 Yards (2024), the story suggests landing in 2046 to access Ruby’s DNA records and, thus, solve the answer to her mystery mother. During this time, Bonnie Langford’s performance cannot be ignored. Though Mel Bush was given a hard time during her tenure in the show, Langford finally has an opportunity to show off her acting accolades. As Mel gets possessed by Sutekh, Langford carries the duality of companion and puppet with exceptional balance.

Rushing into the final act, Ruby is presented with her mother’s name and destroys the information to stunt Sutekh’s master plan. As a character decision, this makes total sense and indicates how she’s grown as a character—the unknowing not only being the reason she’s alive but also the reason, she realises, to keep fighting.

But, by utilising bungee cord, dubbed intelligent rope, harking back to The Church on Ruby Road (2023), the Doctor takes the hound of Sutekh for walkies through the time corridor again. Despite the obvious flaw in this plan in how Sutekh survived by latching himself to the TARDIS within the time corridor, something he can still do, the episode’s deus ex machina is ridiculously unforgivable. By dragging Sutekh along space and time, his deathly presence undoes his destruction because death plus death equates to life. If two wrongs don’t make a right, I don’t think two deaths bring life.

Worse still, all this takes place within the episode’s half-hour mark, so with twenty minutes left in the runtime, there is a knowing rush to the conclusion for the series threat, as if to breeze through the inconsideration and storytelling inconsistencies.

As for the final twenty minutes, the unravelling nonsensical grasp of storytelling proceeds to undo the established character beat for Ruby Sunday. It turns out UNIT could’ve done a DNA test this whole time. Her mother? A then 15-year-old from a family of domestic abuse, who decided to leave Ruby at the church in order to give her a safer life.

The woman, Louise (Faye McKeever), is remarkably ordinary, but the mystery and story surrounding her was enough to ravage the Universe. For so much normality, the justification as to her identity fails to answer why Ruby possesses the ability to make it snow, nor what the hidden song was within her as alluded to in The Devil’s Chord (2023), and even the mysterious timeline altering pointing she does, was recontextualised to be her pointing at the road sign – Ruby Road – as a way of naming her child.

Except we know her name is Ruby because of the road she was found on. That reveal does nothing for Ruby’s character, as there’s no change in belief or understanding. What this does then for audiences is create a feeling of being cheated as even with a regular character reveal, we would expect some change to the character to compensate, which never arrives.

With a rushed ending and an unsatisfying conclusion, Empire of Death fumbles the bag for what was, for the most part, a decent return to form for the show. Perhaps it bit off more than it could chew, but the inexcusable poor storytelling drags it down despite all the best efforts from the crew.

Doctor Who: Empire of Death is available for UK audiences on BBC iPlayer. For viewers outside the UK, the show can be watched exclusively on Disney+.