When do the rules matter?
Millie Gibson excels in a captivating episode that leaves questions unanswered.
Warning: thisDoctor Whoreview contains spoilers.
We see something inexplicable and invent the rules to make it work.
Theres been plenty of discussion aboutDoctor Whos engagement with fantasy.
What were the rules supposed to be, exactly?
With 73 Yards, however, the rules are very much the focus.
There is a promise of satisfaction as all the disparate elements snap neatly into place.
Details that seem significant are left by the wayside in a way that feels unsatisfying.
There is simultaneously too much specificity and too much ambiguity.
To pick one example, what exactly does the old woman say to everybody?
Similarly, Kate Lethbridge-Stewart doesnt look scared, just disgusted.
If there was less focus on such details, it wouldnt matter so much.
But it also means that some threads feel short-changed.
But overall, the villain just doesnt get enough screen time to make the necessary impact.
In fact, there are several echoes here of previous Russell T Davies episodes.
The aforementioned Doctor-lite experiments like Blink, of course.
A bit of Torchwood: Children of Earth in the bleakly scathing politics.
A sprinkling of Midnight in the queasy horror and cynical view of human nature.
She survives and saves the world, showing just how capable and courageous she really is.
And fair play to her.
But then, like Last of the Time Lords, its all undone.
In that episode, the Doctor turns back time so that the year of hell never happened.
However, unlike Last of the Time Lords, nobody remembers any of it.
On one level, its basically like ending the episode with And it was all a dream.
And at least with that hoary old trope, the characters remember the dream!
What are we to make of this?
Does character development that didnt really happen that only the audience gets to see still count?
Does it still matter?
That would be orders of magnitude more traumatic than her ordeal in Boom.
But the episode leaves us perhaps appropriately in a weird liminal state.
It happened but it didnt happen.
We remember but they dont.
