“73 Yards” isn’t a bad episode of Doctor Who, but it’s not a good one either, and I just watched it and I have no idea what it was about.

The acting is brilliant. I need to tell you that right now. But I don’t look at these things just for acting. I look at it all the way across the road.

A lot of people have been saying this season is very reminiscent of Russell T Davies’ first season of Doctor Who back in 2005. If you remember the Eccleston season, it was sort of spotty, hit or miss. There were some brilliant moments and there were some boring moments, and it was really rocky. I felt like the RTD era got into its stride after David Tennant came in, and then onward through Moffat and all the others.

It was Mrs. Know-It-All’s birthday yesterday and we had friends and family over, so I didn’t get to see the episode last night. I watched it this morning, first thing, waking up. I’m going to watch it again later with my wife when she wakes up, because I want her opinion.

Halfway Through, and I Still Don’t Know These Two

Technically this is the midway point, and I still don’t feel like we’ve gotten much.

By this point in most other seasons, I knew who Rose was and what that relationship was. Heck, even with Martha, by this point I knew who she was and I understood the dynamic they were dealing with. Then you get to Donna, and I knew exactly who she was. Same thing with Amelia Pond. Same thing with Clara. It was hit or miss for me during the Jodie Whittaker era. With Peter Capaldi’s Doctor and his companion, I understood who she was and I understood what was going on.

This season is leaps and bounds, head and shoulders better than anything we got from Chibnall during the Jodie Whittaker era. That part’s really sad, because as I’ve said many times, I thought Jodie was a brilliant Doctor in her own right. She was just given bad writing.

But by this point I don’t know enough about what’s going on. There are too many question marks, and he’s doubled down a little too much on the whole thing.

Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday is doing brilliant work. Everyone’s doing brilliant work, UNIT and all the other characters included. I feel like the show went off the rails after they got out of Wales.

The Doctor Steps on a Fairy Circle and Leaves the Show

The episode starts with the Doctor and Ruby arriving in Wales, on a cliff facing the water. The Doctor’s all excited, and he steps on what you later find out is a fairy circle, whatever that means. Ruby picks up one of the scrolls tied up in the thing and reads it. The camera pans to her, pans back, and the Doctor’s gone.

That’s the last time we see him for the entire episode, until the very, very end.

So if you’re hoping for an episode that focuses on the Doctor and has the Doctor doing Doctor things, I still have no clue who Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor is. I’m sorry. So far everything I’ve seen has been mirrors of previous Doctors. I’ve seen him doing his best David Tennant impression, his best Peter Capaldi impression, his best Matt Smith impression. By that I just mean the dialogue, the lines being put in his mouth, all sound similar. Don’t get me wrong, he’s got mannerisms and affectations that are his own, the way he talks and stuff like that. But I don’t know who he is. I don’t know who Ruby is. So for him to be gone for most of this episode, I’m sitting there like, what show am I watching?

Seventy-Three Yards, Exactly

Ruby looks around and sees what looks like a woman not far away on the cliff, under a tree, making these hand gesture type things.

I kind of pegged it almost immediately. Spoilers, and you should know what my show is by now: it’s Ruby in the future. You don’t literally find that out until the final moment. I will say I was wrong about Mrs. Flood being Ruby in the future, because they don’t look anything alike. The two wonderful elderly actors who play them are clearly not the same person. So that’s fine.

As Ruby’s walking back, there’s a lady hiking on the cliff, played by the same actress who played the ambulance’s digital AI face last week. The hiker goes over, talks to the woman who’s gesturing toward Ruby, and immediately goes mad and runs away.

Every time Ruby walks away, the apparition lady, we’re going to call her, is 73 yards away. Exactly, to the T. Hence the name.

Ruby stays in this little Welsh place. She can’t get back inside the TARDIS, for whatever reason. The Welsh people make fun of her and have some fun at her expense. She’s there for about a week or two, constantly going back to the TARDIS, and everyone who ever talks to that lady runs away.

This was the episode at its most interesting, by the way, while it was in Wales. I keep saying Cardiff, because to me Cardiff and Wales are indelibly linked, like it’s the only place in Wales, which isn’t true. I felt like there was mystery to be had there, mystery along the lines of The Hound of the Baskervilles or any number of other dark mysteries. I was thinking, okay, cool, we’re going to find something.

You don’t.

Everybody Turns Their Back on Ruby

Ruby takes the train home, and you know how you can look out the window of something moving and follow a thing for a second? There’s the lady. There’s the lady. There’s the lady. She’s constant.

Ruby explains to her mom what’s going on. Her mom goes over to talk to the lady, she’s got her phone on her and the whole bit, and the next thing you know her mother runs away from her. Ruby keeps coming home. They change the locks on her. Her mother won’t let her in and puts an injunction against her to keep her away.

We still don’t know what’s being said. They give us nothing.

Then we jump a little further along and she gets hold of Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, head of UNIT. Wonderful to see Kate. She tells her people to engage, bring her in, don’t talk to her. My people have training against psychic attacks, the whole nine yards. Sure enough, the UNIT agents go to apprehend the lady, and after a while they stop, they look, and they leave. Through the earpiece, Kate leaves too. They disengage and they turn their back on Ruby. Nobody wants to talk to her about anything.

So we follow Ruby. It’s 10 years later, 20 years later, 40 years later. She’s older, she’s gone through breakup after breakup, and they’re all saying, I feel like you’re distracted.

The Most Dangerous Prime Minister in History

When the Doctor first steps out of the TARDIS, he’s talking about how great Wales is, and then he says, except for this guy Roger ap Gwilliam. Terrifying. The most dangerous prime minister in history. Then he asks Ruby what year she’s from, she says 2024, and he says oh, sorry, spoilers, forget I said that.

We arrive at 2046. Ruby sees the guy in a promo and she assumes, I’m supposed to save the world. So I immediately think, oh my gosh, she’s going to kill this guy. She’s built it up in her head that if she stops him everything goes back to normal, and that’s what the old lady’s there for.

She gets a job working for him, and you find out he’s a horrible person. He’s about to give his acceptance speech. He’s accepting nuclear weapons from Pakistan because he wants to make Great Britain a nuclear power and disengage them from NATO and the UN.

She walks out on the pitch and I thought, oh my God, she’s going to kill him, she’s going to die, it’s going to reset things, who knows. She has her phone. She measures it out, 73 yards, until the lady’s standing right next to Roger ap Gwilliam. He notices and he runs away.

Ruby has saved the world. Nothing changes.

She’s an old lady. She goes back to visit the TARDIS one last time, where people keep bringing flowers, and she’s got to kind of explain it to her orderly, her helper. Finally she’s on her deathbed, and you see the old lady there. Then she becomes the old lady. Now she’s the one on the cliff, she sees them coming out, and somehow she changes events so the Doctor doesn’t step on the fairy circle. When Ruby goes to open the scroll, the Doctor says no, no, don’t do that, have some respect. They survive, and everything we just saw didn’t happen.

There Was No Ending

Did you hear any conclusion come out of my mouth just now? Any resolution?

The acting was wonderful. The effects were wonderful. Everything was hitting on all cylinders, except there was no ending. Not a satisfying one, and not one that makes any sense.

They keep leaning on this supernatural thing, and to me that’s a cop-out. That is 100 percent a writing cop-out. Oh, we’re going to start investigating more supernatural things, because I love supernatural things. That’s what Russell T Davies said in an interview. That doesn’t mean the rules of telling a good story change, my friend. What have you done?

This is a brilliant episode that can stand alongside “Midnight” and the other really creepy ones. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you don’t stick the landing. I don’t know what happened. I guess we’re supposed to assume it was a supernatural event and that’s it, but you don’t tell me that.

Torchwood had its fairies episode, the one where they took your children and stole them away to make fairies out of them. At least that gave you a resolution. Even if it was a tough resolution, you got it.

This took us on a wild goose chase, showed us a red herring of an adventure, and then resolved itself with nothing. If the old lady is her from the future, then she clearly tried once before to stop this thing from happening. We don’t know why. We don’t know why she’s in this predicament. We don’t understand anything about how this whole thing worked. You end with more questions than answers, and that’s not a good thing.

Hell, the writing was brilliant until the ending tells you nothing. I’m a huge Doctor Who fan, and I’m not there.

The Verdict

Doctor Who “73 Yards” gets a 7 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.

It was good until it wasn’t. This barely ekes out a half point higher than last week’s.

I’m not accepting the hashtag RIP Doctor Who. That’s stupid. Stop it. These are real show issues, fan issues, writing issues. This is not haterade, hateration, none of that stuff, so don’t do that. This has nothing to do with Ncuti Gatwa. This isn’t woke. This isn’t because he’s Black. He wasn’t there. I saw nothing of the Doctor in Doctor Who.

Millie Gibson’s given a wonderful episode to act in, and then you give me no resolution at the end. It was extraordinarily unsatisfying, and it made me unhappy. So what are we watching? What has happened? And what’s even left?

I don’t know what’s happening, so give me your thoughts. What do you think is going on here, and are you as disappointed as I am, for the right reasons? The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.