Doctor Who 'The Legend of Ruby Sunday' spoilers follow.
Ahead of this season of Doctor Who, showrunner and Whovian extraordinaire Russell T Davies spoke about wanting to take the TARDIS in a new direction, so the strictly sci-fi frame could be bent to let a little of the fantastical in.
The result of this genre-bending season-long mystery rears its dog's head in the dramatic final scene of 'The Legend of Ruby Sunday'.
What to Read Next
We first met the Toymaker, then Maestro and now the most feared in that pantheon of gods: Sutekh – who may very well be a copy-and-paste job from Disney's Moon Knight VFX folder.
This isn’t the first time we've encountered the jackal deity, last seen on screen imprisoned by the Eye of Horus in the vintage Who episode 'Pyramids of Mars', but it's the first time we've done so with the Disney budget and this new inclination for the fantastical.
With this Big Bad reveal for the season's two-part finale, Who has pivoted from the sci-fi realm of monsters and aliens to one grounded in the supernatural and mythic. In doing so, the show mounts a challenge worthy of our new unflappable Doctor.
There's still the trademark timey-wimey technobabble we've come to love, with things like the Time Window and the utterly nothing insistence by the Doctor that "time is remembered, memory is time"... So Who hasn't completely cast off its roots.
This budding supernatural direction for Ncuti Gatwa's run as the Fifteenth Doctor sees the season-long mystery of Susan Twist's identity slam into the long-teased return of The One Who Waits.
Susan initially appears in the world of episode seven as a thoroughly contradictory Elon Musk-y type with the bedside manner of a Balamory character.
She's the top dog of the tech conglomerate S Triad Technology, which is wilfully rejigged into various anagrams, before it morphs into the final Sutekh reveal. Susan then calcifies into a scary hollow-eyed attendant to Sutekh with a sandy Midas touch.
It isn't the only anagramming business going on, as UNIT's Harriet Arbinger turns into a harbinger of carnage. These reveals have the same of deflating effect they did when we learned the true make-up of the literal Bogeyman in 'Space Babies' and the slugs' alphabetical kill list in 'Dot and Bubble'.
But Davies is nothing if not a lover of wordplay. Perhaps the punning is part of this new rule-less gravity/mavity Who order, where we deal in pagan gods and folk tales.
What triggered the appearance of this deity of death? Most likely, the salt spilt at the edge of the universe in 'Wild Blue Yonder', which has presumably weakened whatever was holding Sutekh out of our harm's way.
More interesting than the introduction of Ancient Egyptian mythology is its conduit: the TARDIS. This is the best piece of breadcrumbing Davies has done in this new era because, unlike Susan Twist, the grumbling TARDIS has largely gone unnoticed.
The TARDIS's groans were not simply the result of a weary time-travelling machine with a tummy ache, as the Doctor joked in 'Rogue', but this deeper malevolent red force penetrating its nuts and bolts.
In most instances where Who becomes genuinely spooky, like here, the Doctor hasn't a clue what's going on. Without the TARDIS, he's stripped of his most basic sidekick. He might have his sonic screwdriver to hand and be dressed like one of the T-Birds in Grease (and somehow look much, much cooler), but what could or should it amount to when faced with "the god of all gods"?
Between this and the introduction of the mythic, it's shaping up to be a singularly interesting Doctor Who finale.
This is what makes the shift in genres gripping. When faced with reality-bending deities, it's not a simple case of yanking the batteries out. The Doctor has been painted into a rules-free corner, now it's how he wriggles a way out. One thing is likely: he won't be able to bring everyone with him.
Doctor Who's 'The Legend of Ruby Sunday' is available on BBC iPlayer in the UK and Disney+ in the US.
You Might Like...
Previously Deputy TV Editor at Digital Spy and, before that, a TV Reporter at The Mirror, Rebecca can now be found crafting expert analysis of the TV landscape, 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 boxset, 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.
