What exactly was The Woman?
Why that precise distance?
It’s beside the point.
Warning: contains spoilers forDoctor Whoepisode 73 Yards.
Its hard not to want diagrams, flow-charts and footnoted explanations of every slippery element.
Its worth resisting that urge though, because this episode was designed to evade simple answers.
No amount of close-reading will reveal its definitive truth.
Thats a deliberate choice, lets be clear.
Davies would have conjured up a fictional fix for his fictional whatever-it-is at the click of his fingers.
Itd involve ley lines or mirrors or salt or aGhostbustersGhost Trap, and that would be that.
Instead, he told us this shifting-sands horror story.
The rule that was keeping them so precisely apart while Ruby was alive, dissolves upon her death.
Ahead of her is the TARDIS, the Doctor, and young Ruby.
The Woman speaks: Im sorry I took so long, and I tried so hard.
What else could I do?
Then, The Woman whispers the repeated warning Dont step to her younger self.
Fine, you might nod.
Except ironically, The Woman was the one whocausedRubys isolation by inadvertently sending everybody running scared.
What, we want to ask, was ultimately behind it?
Another God fromThe Pantheon?
One ofThe Toymakers cruel games?
Theres a whiff of all that here.
Ultimately: you decide.
And you decide too, if you like the explanation above, or not.
I was so young are those of the mother who gave Ruby up for adoption instead of Ruby herself.
They certainly sound like it.
Any explanation of 73 Yards will sort of work and sort of fail but mostly, it wont matter.
Because this episode isnt about finding the correct answer, its bigger and more truthful.
Its about fear, mortality, resilience, and ultimately, hope.
Rubys darkest fear, having already been left by her biological parents, is losing her family.
That happens here in a piercingly cruel way.
And what caused this betrayal?
Being… what she is.
What she looks like.
And yet, Ruby perseveres.
She lives her life as best she can until she lands on a purpose and sets about achieving it.
She befriends her ghostly stalker and transforms her from an object of fear into a sidekick.
If The Woman symbolises mortality, then Ruby learns to raise a toast to her at every passing birthday.
As perhaps, so should we.
Maybe, maybe not.
But in the nicest way possible, its not up to him now.
Doctor Whoseries 14 continues next week with episode five, Dot and Bubble.
