Doctor Who's Doctor-lite episode 4 is so nearly flawless (2024)

Coming off Doctor Who's season high-water mark 'Boom', Russell T Davies might have wanted to follow Steven Moffat's episode with a reminder of his own writing prowess. The result is '73 Yards', which comes almost frustratingly close to being faultless.

The Doctor-lite episode gives Millie Gibson's Ruby her Donna Noble 'Turn Left' moment, with breathing room from Ncuti Gatwa's often scene-stealing charisma, so she can try to save the day herself.

Clad in coordinated burnt orange, the Doctor and Ruby emerge from the TARDIS onto a cliff edge overlooking the sumptuous beauty of Wales. While exchanging their down pat pitter-patter, the Doctor stumbles into a "fairy circle", comprised of artfully arranged evidence board string and plucked flowers. It looks like a dreamcatcher woven into the grass.

While the official synopsis says the Doctor and Ruby embark on "the strangest journey of their lives", it's after knocking a bit of string out of place that the Doctor vanishes into the Welsh ether. So maybe we'll see what he got up to next episode.

With the Doctor gone and the TARDIS locked, Ruby has to reckon with a new companion of her own: a creepy nightmare fuel woman with white hair, who is torn straight from the premise of It Follows.

She clings to Ruby from a distance of exactly 73 yards – get it? The woman only appears as a blurred figure in photographs and when others approach her to ask what she's playing at, they run howling off into the night.

Director Dylan Holmes Williams shoots the hell out of Wales, which has become the BBC show's production home.

But with no Doctor and no answers, Ruby soon boards a suspiciously speckless train back to her doting mum Carla (Michelle Greenidge) and dotty grandmother Cherry (Angela Wynter) in London, with the white-haired woman still along for the ride.

All the old tricks of this season are back. There's more snow. There's more Susan Twist, whose recurring presence is even acknowledged in the dialogue. But these motifs are starting to feel stale the more they come back without actually shedding any new light on what they might be gearing us up to.

What happens after Ruby leaves Wales? The introduction of nascent politician Roger Ap Gwilliam (Aneurin Barnard) takes us on an unlikely turn, but that's about all we can say.

Once we step from the world of the unnerving occult into the political fray, all the spectacular promise of the episode seeps away to reveal another banal baddie whose malevolence is skated over. As with previous villains this season, we're still stuck in the depressing rhythm of being told things that would be so much better shown.

Gwilliam's devilry comes to a head in a strange showdown which joins the ranks of the Christmas special's hacky sack confrontation and 'The Devil's Chord' music-off as another of the show's deeply anti-climactic ways to save the day.

But '73 Yards' finds its feet with a superb final reveal of who the white-haired woman really is. It comes with a dose of cinematic horror and, while the reasoning behind the whole thing doesn't entirely cohere, it's enough fun to recover from the third-act stumble.

Doctor Who's '73 Yards' airs Saturday, May 25 on BBC One and iPlayer in the UK and Friday, May 24 on Disney+ in the US.