It’s likely that “73 Yards” will be the most divisive episode of this season of Doctor Who, thanks to its twisted plot and unanswered questions. The most pressing of which is: what was the old woman saying?
Spoilers ahead. In case you’re wanting to avoid salient plot details, here’s some trivia so you didn’t waste the click. In the episode “The Devil’s Chord..” The elderly woman who is killed by Maestro for playing piano was portrayed by June Hudson. She was the costumer during Tom Baker’s run as the Fourth Doctor and was responsible for his iconic scarf.
The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby (Millie Gibson) land in modern day Wales (Wales), where The Doctor immediately steps on a fairy circle made of string, bird skulls, and handwritten notes. He disappears, and Ruby sees an old woman in the distance. No matter where Ruby moves to, the old woman stays exactly 73 yards away from her, repeating an incomprehensible series of hand gestures.
Ruby finds a few people willing to confront the woman. However, whenever they speak to her, they run away screaming in terror. Even Ruby’s own mother changes the locks and disowns her daughter after confronting the woman. This continues throughout the next seven decades. Ruby is haunted by this specter that never attacks her, but which cannot be gotten rid of.
Eventually, Ruby uses the woman to trap a nuclear weapon-obsessed prime minister (The Doctor had mentioned him before disappearing), who resigns in mad panic after speaking with the woman. Later, Ruby dies, and the woman finally comes closer, revealing Ruby was the woman the whole time. The time loop starts again, but Ruby warns The Doctor about stepping on the fairy ring, averting the events that made the episode happen.
At no point does the audience learn what the woman said that scared everyone so much, so we’re left with speculation. It must be something incredible to make Ruby’s mother throw her daughter out and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemme Redgrave) abandon a companion of The Doctor’s. Here is my theory.
This season, going back to the Christmas specials, has been about the invasion of Lovecraftian deities from beyond the known universe and which defy the laws of accepted physics. The things from “Wild Blue Yonder,” the Toymaker and Maestro, even the goblins from “The Church on Ruby Road” all have strange powers related to reality itself, shifting and changing the matter of the universe with pure thought.
All of them are also summoned or called with intangibles. The Fourteenth Doctor invoked superstition at the edge of the universe, letting things in. The Toymaker works through play, Maestro through song, the goblins through accident. These are personifications of forces, specifically aspects of fiction and creation.
The fairy circle is yet another portal The Doctor activates. In this case, I think what comes through is something I am calling The Finish.
In the podcast series The Magnus Archives, the paranormal happenings in that universe are the result of Dread Powers leaking into our universe through holes. These powers include The Stranger (fear of things not quite human), The Vast (agoraphobia and deep water), and The Corruption (fear of disease, rot, and insects). The most ominous of these is The End, which is the fear of death.
In one episode (“Dead Woman Walking”), there is a corpse that beings talking to student protesters. Every time it speaks to them, they have a complete mental shutdown, going catatonic until they die. One person survives by placing her hands over her ears, but she still hears the phrase: “The moment that you die will feel exactly the same as this one.” It puts her in a coma, but she recovers.
Obviously, the phrase itself has no power. I heard it in the podcast and I’m fine, and you read it just now, and you’re fine (I hope). The words are not where the horror comes from. It’s the fact that something dead was able to look people in the eyes and reveal the meaningless of life and existence in a concrete way.
When people hear the term Lovecraftian they think of tentacle aliens, but that’s not really what the term means. Beings like Cthulhu are priests of the outer void, heralds of the knowledge that the universe is utterly indifferent to human suffering. Most people, when confronted with their insignificance among the cosmic vastness, go mad. One of the most terrifying of all the Lovecraftian deities is Nyarlathotep, who appears almost human but drives people insane by revealing the secrets of creation.
Doctor Who has dabbled in Lovecraftian ideas before. The formless repeating thing in “Midnight” and the sentient sun in “42” are great examples of how the show handles these themes. In those adventures, we see how something intangible and strange from Outside eradicates what makes us human.
The Finish came through when The Doctor stepped on the fairy circle and is one of these intangible powers, or at least an aspect of it. It’s clearly centered around death and endings. Ruby connects it with a man who is implied to start a nuclear holocaust. She can only finally approach it as her own death nears. It removes The Doctor, who Lethbridge-Stewart acknowledges was keeping a host of terrible deaths at bay.
I believe that when people approached the old woman, she told them how it all ends. Maybe it was their own death, maybe the death of the world, or maybe it was the fact that they were all in a television show that will one day go off the air. The people who saw her recognized that she was Ruby, and they were instinctively afraid of her afterward because people fear death above all else.
The old woman was death, distant but never gone, and everyone who confronted her was exposed to the inarguable fact that they were going to cease to be one day. I think Kate realized there is no saving the world forever, the prime minister faced the consequences of his nuclear dreams, and Ruby’s mother saw her child as the omen of her own mortality.
It was a truth too cold to stand. The only reason Ruby was able to defeat The Finish is that it needed that time loop to operate. Ruby had just enough presence to warn herself before The Doctor restarts the loop again.
Even then, though, The Finish wins. That prime minister will still get elected, and this time Ruby likely won’t be around to stop him or have the means to do so without the old woman and her terrible knowledge. One must assume that nuclear holocaust is imminent. The circles isn’t broken anymore, but if this season’s themes hold true, I expect more powers like The Finish to leak out soon.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
