By The fourth episode of the new season of “Doctor Who” aired this weekend, pulling in the biggest numbers of the new run thus far in terms of overnight audience for BBC One in the UK.
The episode was one of the most mysterious ahead of release, and the result turned out to be a Doctor-lite episode that served as a homage to Welsh folk horror and even Stephen King’s “The Dead Zone” for part of its run.
Showrunner Russell T. Davies penned the script which harkened back to past ‘Who’ episodes like the mostly Doctor-free “Turn Left” and the dark tone of “Midnight”.
SPOILERS AHEAD FOR “DOCTOR WHO: 73 YARDS”
The episode spans a lifetime after The Doctor breaks a fairy circle and disappears, meanwhile his companion Ruby is haunted by a mysterious elderly woman always staying a fixed distance of 73 yards from her – no matter what.
When anyone approaches the woman, we see them listening to her say something, turn to look at Ruby and then run away – refusing to ever engage with Ruby again (even her adoptive mother).
Speaking with Radio Times after the episode’s airing, Davies says he’ll never reveal what the woman was actually saying and that’s part of why it works:
“You will never know. I’m never gonna tell you what she says. It’s kind of up to you to sit there and think, ‘well, what could someone say that would make a mother run away from her daughter forever?
You could look at yourself and think, ‘What would make me do that?’ And once you start to do that, you enter the real horror story. The dreadful things that are being said there, terrible things.”
Asked about the episode’s title, he confirms the distance was done via measurements he conducted himself from Swansea Pier – a distance far enough that “she’s a blur, but she’s not a blur, I can just about see her.”
The ending of course reveals something of a time loop and of the episode’s cyclical nature he says:
“Something profane has happened with the disturbance of that fairy circle. There’s been a lack of respect. The Doctor, who’s very respectful of alien cultures and alien lifeforms and alien mythologies, he’s just walked through something very, very powerful.
So something has gone wrong, and something has just corrected. It’s like Ruby had to spend a life of penitence, in which she eventually does something good, which brings the whole thing full circle, which kind of forgives them in the end.”
Next week’s episode is another Davies-penned one titled “Dot and Bubble” and has been dubbed the show’s “Black Mirror” episode.
Davies reveals to the outlet the episode actually life back in 2010 when Steven Moffat had taken over the show and asked Davies to come back and pen a episode for the Matt Smith-Karen Gillan run of the show. It didn’t happen at the time though because the “idea was literally too expensive”.
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