TV Review: ‘Doctor Who’ Episode “73 Yards” Fails to Stick the Landing

Rating: 36/100

You’ve almost certainly heard of “sticking the landing.” The phrase comes from gymnastics and reminds us that, no matter how impressive something is, it has to finish strong to really impress the judges. With this week’s episode of Doctor Who, the strange, Welsh folk-horror style episode “73 Yards”—written, like most episodes this season, by Russell T. Davies—the show pulls off an amazing and incredibly impressive routine but then, rather than sticking the landing, the episode lands on its head, snaps its neck, and has to be taken out of the competition on a stretcher without being scored.

In this episode, the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and his faithful companion Ruby (Millie Gibson), land on a clifftop in Wales. They accidentally walk into what’s known as a fairy circle, a circle of cotton that seems to be associated with some sort of witchcraft. After disturbing the fairy circle, the Doctor disappears, and a mysterious old woman starts following exactly 73 yards behind Ruby wherever she goes. Whenever someone tries to approach the woman and ask her what’s going on, the woman says something that makes the person absolutely terrified of Ruby, no matter how much they cared about her before. Ruby is forced to live out her whole life with the old woman following her before she can figure out exactly what’s going on.

While this episode creates a truly terrifying mystery, it completely fails to offer up many explanations at the end of the episode. Almost every question raised in this episode remains unanswered by the end, making for a frustrating conclusion. Some people have suggested that there’s more explanation to come later in the season, but I’m not entirely certain, given Russell T. Davies’ track record, that he has something more up his sleeve. It feels like, as the show has shifted from sci-fi to fantasy in this new season, Davies thinks it gives him an excuse to sidestep his biggest weakness as a writer: his inability to wrap up things in a satisfying way. But fantasy, as a genre, still requires a satisfying explanation using the story’s own internal logic, and this episode doesn’t have that.

That being said, this being what’s known in the Doctor Who world as a “Doctor-lite” episode (an episode where the Doctor himself actually has very little screen time) gives Millie Gibson a real chance to shine on her own without the Doctor there to steal the show. Gibson proves herself up to the task and, despite the shortfalls of the episode’s ending, it gives us a chance to get to know and sympathize with Ruby a little bit more. There’s a heartbreaking storyline where Ruby’s own mother, Carla (Michelle Greenidge), speaks to the old woman and refuses to ever speak to Ruby again. You’ll find yourself begging Ruby’s mother to take her daughter back if you have any sort of heart at all.

The episode skips over the opening credit sequence and, to the best of my memory, there’s only one other time that’s happened, with the Series 9 episode, “Sleep No More.” That was one of the worst and most universally hated episodes of the show, and I always took the absence of the theme as a sort of apology for the episode. If that’s the case, I’m not surprised that this episode required the same sort of apology.

I’ve talked a little bit before about the show’s shift from sci-fi to fantasy in this new season, and I was mostly okay with it because the show has largely always been a fantasy show with shoehorned scientific explanations anyway. But this episode takes us deeper into the realm of fantasy than the show’s ever gone before, focusing on witchcraft, fairies, and curses. The previous forays into the more fantastical were easily explained by the crossover between the Toymaker’s realm and the Doctor’s universe. But this episode seems to be forsaking that explanation entirely and taking a harder turn into the supernatural. The Doctor Who universe has never had room for supernatural before, and I’m not certain how I feel about the show venturing down that road. I’m especially not that thrilled if Davies thinks that fantasy doesn’t need to have rules and a real cause-and-effect the way sci-fi does. It absolutely needs those things.

As this is my favorite show, I hope I’m wrong about there being no plan to further explain the ending of this episode down the road. I really hope that there will be an episode that explains what the hell happened in this episode later in the season. But I don’t personally think that Davies has earned enough faith in me that I trust he’s going there. If this episode is to stand as it is, with no further explanation, then it will go down as the most poorly written ending in Doctor Who history.

The new season of Doctor Who is streaming now on Disney+.

Photo courtesy of Disney+