Doctor Who: The Legend of Ruby Sunday

The beginning of the end to Doctor Who season one airs, as UNIT and the Doctor begins unravelling The Legend of Ruby Sunday.

Doctor Who: The Legend of Ruby Sunday is the first of two episodes concluding season one. It was directed by Jamie Donoughue and written by Russell T Davies. The episode addresses the mystery of Ruby Sunday’s identity and the constant appearances of actress Susan Twist throughout the season.

As the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby (Millie Gibson) arrive at the headquarters of the Unified Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT), Kate Stewart (Jemma Redgrave), Melanie Bush (Bonnie Langford), and Colonel Christopher Ibrahim (Alexander Devrient), along with recently joined recruits Morris Gibbons (Lenny Rush) and Rose Noble (Yasmin Finney) solve the threat tied into Triad Technology and Ruby’s birth.

Triad Technology and its system were first mentioned in The Giggle (2023), and at its heart is Susan Triad (Twist), whose face has appeared in almost every episode since Wild Blue Yonder (2023).

Eagle-eyed viewers spotted that Susan Triad was initially teased in a poster seen behind Russell T Davies when interviewed for Blue Peter (2023). However, Twist’s true identity remained a mystery for general audiences throughout the season.

Audiences were slowly drip-fed her appearances episodically, beginning with Mrs Merridew in Wild Blue Yonder, then an unnamed partygoer who requests Gaudete in the Christmas special, The Church of Ruby Road (2023). Then, as the season began fully, Twist appeared credited as Comms Officer Gina Scalzi in Space Babies (2024); Tea Lady in The Devil’s Chord (2024); Ambulance in Boom (2024); a Hiker in 73 Yards (2024); Penny Pepper-Bean in Dot and Bubble (2024), and finally as a portrait in Rogue (2024).

Though Susan Triad’s motives were unknown, or even why her face had appeared in so many stories, fans had instead noticed a similarity between the shorthand for the character’s name, S. Triad, as being an anagram of TARDIS. Fans began theorising that the time-travel machine may have an involvement in placing her throughout the Doctor’s timeline given that Davies used a shorthand reveal in series three’s Utopia (2007) with the return of the Master. Plus, sharing the name with the Doctor’s granddaughter, Susan — played by Carole Ann Ford on the show from 1963-64 — the plain-sighted anagram was a red herring for Sue Triad’s real identity.

Meanwhile, Rose Noble and Morris Gibbons are new additions to the UNIT team. Rose, daughter of former companion Donna Noble, joined the Fourteenth Doctor in solving the invasion of the Meep in The Star Beast (2023).

Morris, a newcomer to the show, is a child genius, covering for the absence of Ruth Madeley’s Shirley Bingham. Lenny Rush, the Am I Being Unreasonable? (2022) star, was initially intended to voice act in Space Babies but became a mainstay for the show, with his character created explicitly for the two-part finale.

Asking for the help of UNIT, the Doctor seeks answers from the multiple story threads woven throughout the short season: why has Susan Triad appeared through time, who is Ruby Sunday’s birth-mother, who is ‘The One Who Waits’, and why does the TARDIS keep making that noise?

By bringing back time windows, a portal allowing characters to look back into a different time, Russell T Davies revisits the device to explore Ruby Sunday’s history. The showrunner first introduced time windows in The Girl in the Fireplace (2006), which Davies later repurposed in the spin-off show The Sarah Jane Adventures in the double-part episode Lost in Time (2010).

As an aside, fans began speculating that The Sarah Jane Adventures may have been the initial basis for the season’s arc, borrowing stories and themes such as a curse inflicting a character by alienating those around them as featured in both The Curse of Clyde Langer (2011) and 73 Yards.

Rumours spread to comparing the identity of Ruby Sunday to the character of Sky, a foundling left at Sarah Jane’s door. In the spin-off, Sky was to become The Trickster’s daughter, a Pantheon member alongside The Toymaker and Maestro. However, before the production team could complete the series, Elisabeth Sladen passed away, leaving the story arc unfulfilled. Therefore, fans speculated that with this opportunity to write a new arc, Davies was borrowing and leaning on his incomplete project idea. Though just a theory circulating amongst fans ahead of the episode airing, there were clear links to the manipulation of timelines and the chaos it brings to the Sarah Jane Adventures villain.

In reality, the first two-part series finale written by Russell T Davies since The Stolen Earth and Journey’s End (2009) unleashes a different god-level threat with ties to Sarah Jane.

Sutekh the Destroyer, last seen in the serials The Pyramids of Mars (1975), under the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker), returns. Voiced by Gabriel Woolf, the actor is the second to reprise a role in all three eras of Doctor Who, starring as Sutekh and Satan in the two-part episode The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit (2006).

Despite being incredibly clunky in its execution, the episode fixates on Sutekh’s reveal at the expense of fluid storytelling. Focusing solely on exposition and context, new audiences are given the breadcrumbs of Sutekh’s origins nearly fifty years ago, ahead of the resolution in Empire of Death.

Once Sutekh is revealed, however, the transformation of Susan Triad and Harriet Arbinger (Genesis Lynea)—shorthanded once more to harbinger—is ghoulishly magnificent. The withered appearance of Sutekh’s minions perfectly explains their character and the unrelenting power achieved by the make-up and prosthetics department. It is a shame that the same level of magnificence isn’t visible in the depiction of Sutekh through his Set representation from Ancient Egyptian mythology, as the extreme close-ups of the computer-generated beast invoke a connection instead to Moon Knight (2022).

The Legend of Ruby Sunday is a substantial part of the season finale, but it is only one part of a larger whole and will fit better when watched back-to-back with Empire of Death. As a standalone episode, it is clunky and a whirlwind of exposition, with too many moving parts. Still, its reveal parallels Derek Jacobi’s Professor Yana seventeen years ago.

Doctor Who: The Legend of Ruby Sunday is available for UK audiences on BBC iPlayer. New episodes are released weekly on Saturday at midnight on the streaming platform or broadcast later in the day on BBC One. For viewers outside the UK, the show can be watched exclusively on Disney+.