“ap gwilliam was the worst prime minister” doctor. babe. i know why you don’t tell your companions everything at once, but you’re really gonna tell them a bald-faced lie like that. your ex murdered a tenth of earth’s population and immediately turned the entire planet into a hellscape, there is some steep competition here

Last of the Time Lords // 73 Yards

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already seen people calling the marti subplot “unnecessary”. because ruby didn’t turn to the camera and proclaim Abuse And Harassment Are Bad apparently that makes her a moral failure. also seeing the argument “this is a childrens show so it’s inappropriate” okay miss Hays Code, you think a 12 year old will be corrupted or something if they notice a realistic scene of a politician exercising his absolute power to control and manipulate women in his entourage? even when it’s subtext, not stated outright? tfw got so woke you accidentally looped right back to being a conservative pearl-clutcher.

needless to say that even from a story perspective marti’s presence fleshes out what would have been quite a cartoonish villain (teehee wouldn’t it be cool to nuke the world!) into a genuine 3-dimensional representation of evil. the media literacy crisis is getting dire

73 Yards has devastated me and i have some theories

we all agree that 73 Yards was a genre-defying, harrowing episode...and i think there's some really interesting themes and ideas going on here. tw for discussion of trauma, abuse, neglect and abandonment:

i hope we're all on the same page that the Woman seems to represent Ruby's fear of abandonment, brought to life. always present, always out of the corner of her eye, and whose primary mechanic is to drive people to scorn and leave Ruby without explanation. even people who do not know her, or people she's just met, or who are incredibly warm towards her...they speak to the Woman, and they look back as if to confirm their suspicions, and then run away, maddened and horrified. it is an unbelievable stroke of genius to make the Toymaker's breaking down of the boundaries between science and fantasy bring Ruby's abandonment into being...and for Ruby to weaponise her. but that's it - as soon as Roger ap Gwilliam was taken care of, we expected the Woman to disappear, right? but that could never happen, because Ruby's fear of abandonment will never disappear...no matter how purposeful her life is, or how much she distances herself from others. the use of the cruel, distant individuals in the Welsh pub to set up Ruby sympathetically is excellent...and then, we see people approach Ruby at all levels of emotional connection, when time and again she is considered untouchable, as if her very being is contagious. and all this time, we have the fairy circle being broken and hope vanishing...with hope being the Doctor. the one man who potentially holds the key to uncovering Ruby's deepest desires - to find out why she was abandoned, and by who. and at the end of it all...even in death, Ruby doesn't find peace. she is transported into a neverending hell-loop where she is her own abandonment. the two are inseparable, inexplicably the same, because Ruby's very existence as herself is built on the bedrock of abandonment. and i think this resonates heavily with any trauma survivor...the way that our trauma and our very real anxieties brought on by that trauma are inextricable from ourselves. i think the plot with Roger ap Gwilliam shows off a very real symptom in trauma survivors: we often daydream that our hurt and pain will be useful one day - functional. and not only does Ruby get to do that...she gets to be the quiet, unsung saviour of the whole world, protecting us from a world-ending terror in spite of the abuse and neglect she's faced. she endures menial work and constant fear, while only confiding quietly in one other person...Marti, who i believe is coded as another trauma survivor due to her response to Roger (who she describes as a monster). if Ruby can't receive love and affection from anyone else, at least she can feel satisfied that she served her purpose. on a practical level, the presence of Mrs Flood and Susan Twist in this episode AGAIN gives me pause. my theory that someone here is another of the Toymaker's Legions, and is the embodiment of Story, has only deepened. the fact that we had a cold open without the title sequence, we met Susan Twist very quickly, we seem to have flipped genres for the show and Ruby was able to embark on a self-destructive wish-fulfilment saviour fantasy in real life...it all indicates to me that the boundaries between reality and fiction are fully collapsing. when Kate says things are trending towards the supernatural lately, i think we've only hit the tip of the iceberg. on a broader level: my God Russell T Davies, what a brilliant script!!! this is one of my favourite ever episodes of Doctor Who, and is absolutely my highlight for the season. huge kudos to Millie Gibson for giving such a killer performance...i am now terribly endeared to, and protective, of Ruby, and hope against hope she gets the happy ending she so deserves 💖

Couple of thoughts on 73 Yards

A) I don't think it was Ruby all along. I think the Woman is indeed the herald of Mad Jack in a way or the personification of the curse. She’s the watcher who makes sure whoever breaks the circle and realeses Mad Jack finally gets rid of him again. At the end Ruby is simply given a reward for completing this task - she gets to save herself and the Doctor from breaking the curse again. The original timeline stops being "suspended around Ruby's event" of releasing Mad Jack. Which leads us to:

B) Roger Ap Gwilliam is indeed Mad Jack in the sense that he's a really scary murderous Welshman. Anyone could be Mad Jack, he's like an archetype. We're getting a nuke-happy nationalistic politician because hey Doctor Who does social/political commentary and for breaking the circle in our times it makes sense.

C) It's the fairy tale logic all over again. In "normal" circumstances Mad Jack and the curse would just be a scary story, like the people in the pub believe. But because we're dealing with fantasy logic and superstitions this season it becomes real.

Me for like 20 minutes of the new episode: IS RUBY GOING TO ASSASSINATE THE PRIME MINISTER???

everyone’s like “roger ap gwilliam is the most evil prime minister? what happened to mr. saxon???” and like, y’all, his term got deleted. the doc basically hit ctrl-z on his whole administration. he was never the pm.

thought that entered my head and will not leave

The implication by the interview scene that Roger Ap Gwilliam prepared a whole political campaign and public persona and got himself elected by stoking nationalist sentiment with vague jingoistic rhetoric just because he rlly rlly wants to launch a nuke for funsies…

AND IT WORKED?!!

*mwah* comedy gold. Funny cuz it’s true oh Jesus Christ oh fuck oh man oh-

I think if Harold Saxon was pointing out post-politics, Roger ap Gwilliam is pointing out a desire for simple solution. The interview kinda nails it: there's inflation and inflation is a messy, complicated and above all boring issue that isn't caused either by rich people being greedy or poor people wanting handouts alone, but you know what - NUKES. Nukes are simple, nukes you understand!

And people gobble it up, without hypnosis.

What does she look like? She looks like what she looks like. What does that mean? She looks like what she is.

DOCTOR WHO 73 Yards

Okay, I'm seeing a few people making theories for 73 Yards taking the Mad Jack stuff really seriously, and while there's no wrong way to theorize, I do think it's mostly a red herring. The only people who insinuate that the name written in the fairy circle is that of an Evil Fae Entity are the people at the motel, and they were just having Ruby on for a laugh. (The Doctor corroborates them saying it's a fairy circle, but he says it's done for wishes, hopes, dreams, etc. which is supported by the TARDIS being used for the same thing in the Loop Timeline. It's more of a prayer than a binding seal.) But, one thing we do know for certain is that Ruby attracts concidences. This is an established thing! And her stopping Roger ap Gwilliam doesn't fix her situation, or change her situation at all, which you'd think it would if it was related to the semperdistans. And, as cool as it was, the Doctor said that Roger brought the world to the "brink" of nuclear war, but he didn't succeed, he just came really close. So Ruby wasn't needed to stop him. (And in the Loop Timeline, Roger didn't get the chance to bring the world to the "brink", he was just kind of nearing the end of the road to nuclear war, not the brink. So I don't think it makes sense to say that Ruby undoing herself stepping in the circle means that the world now ends in 2046, it just means that Roger goes all the way to the brink before being stopped, as it would've happened before- in fact, I bet Marti being at the party on Saturday probably would've led to those events, maybe she's the one who stops him in the real timeline.) So that whole thing was just Ruby ascribing a random coincidence that she magically attracted (for reasons as of yet unknown to us) to the probably-unrelated fucked up fairy circle curse she was dealing with.

So yes, an evil fae spirit getting elected prime minister is very fun to theorize about, and nothing I said deconfirmed it, but I personally firmly believe that no, he was just a random guy who really wanted to fire some nukes.

@shivorceeratom pointed something out in my tags which i just had to bring to light. “jack of all trades i was, mad jack they called me” — the full expression is ‘jack of all trades, master of none’. say the line folks: which could mean nothing!!

the master’s #1 narrative haunter agenda

Love the dual imagery of the old woman. How she represents both the previous generations that dealt with Mad Jack the first time, and the current generation worrying what their future will be. Will the older version of me look on me kindly? Is that even the older version of me, does that person even survive? Or is it only the past, silently watching us walk into destruction?

The old woman appeared after the the circle was broken, yes, but also after Ruby became aware of her own mortality due to the Doctor’s slip of the tongue.

As a representation of the previous generations, the woman is distant and offputting. Not even the oldest folks in the pub are worried about Mad Jack anymore, and when Ruby tries to bring other people in, tries to let those now-dead generations speak, Ruby becomes the problem.

She’s left to embark on this (in retrospect) decades-long mission virtually alone, getting involved in politics, taking calls, holding coats, pulling every strategic lever available to her even if it means working for this terrible man. She has to, because she’s one of the few people who fully recognize the danger he poses.

And both the past and herself-from-the-future are watching.