Doctor Who spoilers follow.
After the weird and wacky two-part premiere for this season of Doctor Who, the middle portion of our zippy eight-part series has been a curious run for our Time Lord (Ncuti Gatwa) and his companion Ruby (Millie Gibson).
We’ve had two instalments – ’73 Yards’ and ‘Dot and Bubble’ – in which our charming Doctor barely featured and another in which he was stuck, almost motionless, on a landmine. For our latest and possibly greatest episode of the series, ‘Rogue’, he was split off from Ruby as they became embroiled in their own Regency capers.
Now as we gear up for the two-part season finale which guarantees to answer the riddle of Ruby, her parentage and the inescapable Susan Twist, the question of where the Doctor sits in all this feels oddly murky and distant.
The puzzle of Ruby is a gripping enough mystery, in part because she’s ceased to operate as a companion typically would. She takes all of this – snot bad guys, near-death, a creepy older incarnation of herself stalking her through the decades – in her stride.
Perhaps once you have met a time-travelling alien with the boyish charm of the Doctor, nothing ceases to surprise you. Or perhaps, as has been hypothesised, Ruby is already a little more other-worldly than we might have anticipated. All will surely be revealed soon.
But the by-product of Ruby’s snow-capped Susan Twist secret is that she’s felt elevated from sidekick to main character.
This may be the result of some questionable ordering of the mid-season episodes. Entering the sumptuous world of ‘Rogue’ after the emotional blow of the ‘Dot and Bubble’ ending felt jarring, with no real probing into what happened in Finetime.
Using the Fifteenth Doctor’s race as a cheap end-of-episode reveal is a huge missed opportunity, particularly if nothing else comes from probing his experience of being a person who was white and is now Black.
But given that the implications of the Thirteenth Doctor’s gender swap were never satisfyingly explored within Jodie Whittaker’s run, perhaps the show will again largely steer clear of its own identity politics.
It might be too much heavy lifting for a season which has felt like gently ascending a ramp onto the intellectual property. The further away we get from ‘Space Babies’ the slighter it appears in the rearview mirror. But more than that, it was clearly a primary school-level primer for new viewers.
That may also be why the show has been reluctant to dive into the deep psychological waters of the Doctor, where previous seasons were bent by the arc of the Time Lord wrestling with his/her trauma.
It could be the result of Disneyfied Who. The show’s deep lore can be overwhelming and not easily accessible, and explaining the Doctor’s survival of a genocide doesn’t easily gel with the Mouse House’s fledgling young viewership.
But the show’s most compelling character is the Doctor and at times it has felt like they have lost sight of him.
An inherent tension of the show is that we want to learn more about the Doctor, who in turn is deeply reluctant to learn more about himself because of everything he would have to face if he did so. But while Gatwa’s Doctor feels much less like someone fleeing their past, this season has only ever played footsie with what he has overcome.
The sense of distance between us and the Doctor may be because we’ve spent so little time with him lately, but also because we’ve spent even less with him and Ruby together.
After the wilderness string of Doctor-lite episodes, ‘Rogue’ appeared to be a more straightforward entry. But it was with Jonathan Groff’s bounty hunter that the Doctor bonded over a shared experience of loss – instead of with Ruby.
The show’s companion is typically the stand-in for the audience and the means by which we get to know the Doctor, but this season has been more concerned with us getting to know Ruby. Maybe after decades probing the Doctor’s noggin, the show doesn’t feel there’s anything left to learn.
The upshot of a season cohered around the question of Ruby and where she comes from is it has curiously relegated the Doctor to a supporting role. What this is all in service of remains to be seen.
Doctor Who is available on BBC iPlayer in the UK and Disney+ in the US.
Deputy TV Editor
Previously a TV Reporter at The Mirror, Rebecca can now be found crafting expert analysis of the TV landscape for Digital Spy, when she’s not talking on the BBC or Times Radio about everything from the latest season of Bridgerton or The White Lotus to whatever chaos is unfolding in the various Love Island villas.
When she’s not bingeing a box set, in-the-wild sightings of Rebecca have included stints on the National TV Awards and BAFTAs red carpets, and post-match video explainers of the reality TV we’re all watching.