I liked this a lot better the second time. The Sutekh stuff: all dumb and silly and bad. The Ruby stuff (other than the her mom pointing reveal) is actually all extremely good and emotionally resonant. Two great performances from Gatwa and Gibson too. It's a shame at all the nonsense going on in the meantime and how dumb the Sutekh stuff ends up being. It's a fun story in a moment, but one of those the more you think on it the more it suffers.

At best, I find this season finale unsatisfying. At worst it is a major disappointment.

It especially hurts as I feel like this story had so much going right for it. The return of Gabriel Woolf as Sutekh is great fun; and I can get past the dog CGI as a bit goofy and on brand for DW. Mel is back! Whilst I still want some more respect to be given to her computer programmer background, Bonnie is a delight to watch perform.

Unfortunately, everything else in this episode sort of just falls apart. Sutekh is built up to be this all powerful god yet is defeated almost trivially. I still think it was an odd choice to make it such that Sutekh had clung to the TARDIS the whole time since Pyramids of Mars - surely the salt at the edge of the universe in Wild Blue Yonder is a much better point to make him reenter.

By far the biggest letdowns of this story is the overall season arc of Ruby’s biological mother. We spend this whole season with this mystery, with the recurring snow, with the almost magical inability for anyone to detect who her mother is. She has no face on the historical reconstruction hologram! All the clues are pointing towards there being something special about Ruby. Even part of the reason Sutekh shows up is because they - a god - cannot find out who Ruby’s mother is! To have the grand reveal at the end of this episode that she’s just a normal girl with a normal mother is so underwhelming. If you’re going to make the companion an ordinary person - just do that! It worked super well for Bill Potts as a recent example!

I get that there was a desire to do a Poirot-esque reveal of the mystery at the end, but none of it makes any sense. There are definitely things revealed here at the end that were never hinted at during the series or impossible for the audience to figure out beforehand - what is the point of putting arc clues in throughout the season if they are all red herrings? What does the snow mean in each episode if her mother is a normal person? Who is she pointing at the street sign for? I find it hard to suspend disbelief here when there are this many ridiculous things going on.

Overall, I found this season and its finale to be rather disappointing, which is a shame as I really like Ncuti and love his performance- I just wish he had much better material to work with!

Yeah, this just wasn’t for me. I must confess I am unsure how exactly to feel about this Series even in Stories/Episodes like these there were plenty of aspects I enjoyed, this one? I am not really sure.

Gabriel Woolf still gives a stellar Performance. And Bonnie, my god, probably the standout performance?
And now to the rest of it: While I can enjoy corny, I feel this way a bit too corny for my taste, the whole pointing and naming her ruby felt a bit dumb to me and overall there were plenty of Moments that left me cold. At points, it felt rather directionless and while normally I am always having a bit of issues with RTD Finales (except for his first) they never feel directionless as this one kinda did. Looking back, this second Part certainly doesn’t help how I view Legend, which tended to have way too much set up in it.

And Sutekh, yeah I don’t know I had my expectations low with him, I love Pyramids and I think you can hardly top or match that, all I expected was a good resolution and I sadly didn’t got one. The way he got defeated left a lot to be desired. I will say I enjoyed the last bit a lot more, even if it went a bit corny at the start, for what it’s worth it did its job really well. And yes classic who references!!! AND TELOS MENTION!!

On my first watch of this episode I liked it better than Legend. It still wasn't very good, nor did it fix my issues with that one, but it was better. On rewatch, all I can say is...it's naff.

We were off to a strong start with UNIT getting dusted; killing off a reoccurring character isn't easy but it is impactful. Unfortunately, then the rest of the world got dusted, and I knew we were going to get a reset that would bring everyone back. It completely removed the stakes that had previously been so high.

It felt like basically nothing happened in this episode; this entire finale could have been condensed down to one episode and given us an extra episode to fill out this terribly short season. Instead we spend an awful lot of time looking at empty space. It's very atmospheric, and I'm all for slow stories that are entirely based on vibes (I loved 73 Yards), but it's completely the wrong choice for a finale.

The time on the dead planet was probably the most emotionally impactful and moving for me of anything this season, but that says more about the quality of this era than anything. On rewatch I found it boring and unnecessary, filler to pad out the runtime, and I get why people don't like it now.

It was nice seeing all the little screenshots and references to Classic Who. A moment from the TV Movie, Mel finding Six and Seven's outfits, all those planets.... Except Calufur was destroyed in Classic, and this episode acts as if this never happened (and the Doctor pronounced the name wrong). Same with Mel and the Doctor meeting Einstein; he was asleep in a chamber for that entire serial and they basically don't interact with him at all. It feels like references for references' sake, with no care for the source material. It's the same way I feel about the return of Sutekh - he has nothing in common with his original incarnation.

Ah, Sutekh. Where do I even start. The other members of the pantheon from this new era of Doctor Who were generally fun and bombastic, but Sutekh just sits there as a big CGI dog. The Egyptian motifs are brushed off for a cultural appropriation joke, completely missing the point of the original, and Sutekh himself is reduced to a generic God of Death rather than a powerful alien, his culture and people completely erased. The Doctor calls him his greatest foe, but it's just not true in any way. The Doctor fought him once, centuries ago, had very little trouble defeating him, and didn't even die in the process. What would the Master, Davros, the Daleks or the Cybermen say about that? It's not even a good line for the new fans in the audience, because it just makes them wonder what they're missing out on.

Then there's the way he's defeated. The whistle has an explanation in a deleted scene, where the Doctor programs it after the fact and sends it to his past self in the memory TARDIS. When I first saw that I wished they had left it in, because it explains an issue I had with that part, except the memory TARDIS and the real TARDIS aren't connected so I'm not sure how the transfer would work, and that just gives me other things to complain about.

Either way, leashing Sutekh to the TARDIS and dragging him through the time vortex, while a fun visual, is plain idiotic. It doesn't make any sense. The Doctor lamenting about killing him also feels out of character considering how often he kills people by sending them into dimensions where they couldn't possibly survive; hell, he did it just this season with Rogue.

The 73 Yards references were unnecessary. They didn't explain anything for the people who complained about how unexplained that episode was, but they made the whole thing feel cheap for people who liked it. Why is this man who was previously all about nukes suddenly interested in testing the DNA of every UK citizen? It's a deus ex machina.

And now we get to my biggest issue with this entire season: Ruby's biological mother. Looking past the fact that they reverted to simply calling her Ruby's mum, despite her not actually raising her and how it belittles Carla as Ruby's adoptive mother, it just doesn't make sense. They spent the entire season building her up as something impossible, and then she's just an ordinary woman.

I want to start by saying that I wanted Ruby to be a regular human with ordinary, human parents, because adopted kids don't get enough stories like that, but the further into the season we got the less possible I thought that was. Nothing makes sense if Ruby's parents are normal humans. What's with the snow? What's with the carol? Why could no one, not even a god, see her face? Why would a 15 year old wear a robe to hide her identity when no one else is around anyway? Why would she point at the sign to "name her daughter" if no one is around to see? And why is everyone just accepting this explanation as if it makes sense???

I have mixed and complicated opinions on Ruby's meeting with her bio mum. It puts her mother in a very difficult position to do it in public, especially if she didn't want to see Ruby, which is what one might assume seeing as she never reached out. Obviously this wouldn't happen in this story, but it still gives me second hand embarrassment (and I feel bad for the barista who called out Ruby's name and then she used it to start a conversation and make a scene rather than pick up her drink). The reunion was mostly nice, and while the ending did drag on a little I'm not super mad about it as a companion send-off. Now, supposedly she's coming back next season, which might make me view this ending in a different light. I didn't really bond with Ruby over this short season, and I'm not particularly sad to see her go.

I was really disappointed with this entire season. I wanted to like it, I really did, but it was too uneven for how short it was, and too many of the stories were just bad. This finale really exemplifies all the issues I had with this season. I can only hope the next one is better.

Holy shit it stuck the landing