Distance Learning

Shall we do a little autopsy on a ghost story?

Spoilers for "73 Yards" below the fold.

First, some context, because it's been a while since I was last in the business of writing about RTD stories. I really didn't get on with his scripts during his first era, and "73 Yards" is a classic example of his tics that I found most aggravating. It's kind of the ur-story, actually, in its reliance on striking set-pieces to cover up a lack of narrative coherence, and then just sweeping the board clean at the end to save the effort of having to tidy things away.

Both of those problems are present here, but if Davies hasn't put any effort into curbing his worst instincts, he does seem to have thought carefully about how to minimise the damage. In reverse order, the "fuck it, it never happened" switch he once again pulls is at least telegraphed before the episode's halfway point. It's unavoidable from the first moment they start artificially aging Millie Gibson (however subtly), but really the fix is once Ruby is disowned by Carla. And once you know that's built in, you can enjoy where the ride is going to take you. [1] 

The question of the connective tissue here is a much more interesting one. Complaints about this episode seem to commonly revolve around how little sense the rules make. Why 73 yards? Why the fear effect? Why can't cameras photo the woman? Why "ask her"? What the hell was that ending about, other than wanting to rip off Lights Out for some reason?

In fact, the answer to all these questions are the same: because they're unnerving. Davies wanted to go back to the folk horror he's played with much earlier in his career (Century Falls being the first example that jumps to mind), and having made that choice, through every freaky idea he could into the mix.

Of course, that's not quite what people are really asking. What they want to know is what the underlying justification is for the seemingly arbitrary rules of the ghostly figure. This is a somewhat elementary misreading of how ghost stories work, of course. The ghost does what it does because it's a ghost. Trying to tease logic out of its actions is like trying to subject a weasel to a Rorsharch Test. You'll get nothing at best, and more likely you'll get bitten as well.

What we do need is some thematic consistency. A justification for the why of the ghost, as oppose to the how. Here, the haunted ground is far firmer. As others have pointed out, much of what is happening is a supernatural literalising of Ruby's fear of abandonment. The key realisation here - there right from the beginning, as the hiker sent to talk to the woman looks back at Ruby before she runs screaming - is that people aren't afraid of the figure, they're afraid of Ruby. Ruby keeps watching people talking to someone at a distance, looking round at her, and running, refusing to ever talk to her again. They learn the real truth, and that's it forever.

If anything, the text is too obvious about this. Carla explicitly throws Ruby's status as a foundling in her face after changing the locks to keep her out. More than at, we see multiple boyfriends leave Ruby because they've reached a point where they know that there's no future there. Every birthday (hence Christmas), Ruby spends alone, with nothing but the spectre of her fear about herself for company.

The cleverness here comes from the fact that its Ruby herself who is pushing her partners away. This is (frankly not brilliantly) justified in part by a fear of travel, but ultimately her boyfriends leave because she's held them at a distance. Sound familiar?

It's hard for me to figure out when it should become obvious in the narrative that the mysterious figure is Ruby herself, because my partner recognised that was the game being played the instant she showed up on screen (scientists should study F's ability to see a plot twist coming before the first puzzle piece is even laid out) [2]. My guess is its around one of those break-ups. The specific number of 73 may well have no meaning - just a value to hang the dialogue on. But the idea Ruby can't ever get close to her - that's because no-one can get close to Ruby, not really. 

And why is that, really? Up until the woman began to haunt Ruby's life, to what extent did being abandoned at birth actually have upon her life? I can't speak to such an experience, and I want to be very clear that it's not up to me to judge how accurately Doctor Who represents the after-effects of such a start to one's life. What I will say though is that, as regards the character of Ruby herself, it's not clear there's been any external problems caused by being raised by a foster family.  Ruby clearly still gets on very well with her foster mother and grandmother. If she was bullied or harassed by dickhead kids at school over her origins, that would hardly be a surprise, but there's no suggestion that ever happened. The damage Ruby's abandonment seem to be entirely internal. I offer that not as a criticism of show or of Ruby, the pain we inflict on ourselves is just as real as that inflicted from the outside, and often harder to process or escape. The point here though is that the reason Ruby pushes people away, is Ruby. Why does the mysterious woman invoke the need to flee from Ruby and never speak to her again? "Ask her"? [3]

The ending is a little harder to figure out. Maybe the idea is this was Ruby's last day on this earth, which meant it was time to begin her haunt as the ghost itself. Maybe the idea someone was going to be just out of sight, but there to care for her, provided the thematic antacid to constantly seeing a reminder of her own distance from everyone. Either could work, and again: ghost story. I'm not going to get hung up on not knowing precisely why what happened happened. 

One last mystery, also easily cleared up, is where the Doctor went. Honey, he was the one who broke the circle. Wherever he ended up, it was probably a lot worse than Ruby's loop. Whatever forces they unleashed, they punished the Doctor, while giving Ruby a chance to save him. And she did, though it took her a lifetime. After pushing so many people away, she brought someone back to her.

So it works, in so many ways. The only problem in all of this is Roger ap Gwilliam. Even if we bypass the coincidence of the Doctor mentioning him just before breaking the circle (perhaps that inspired the circle in some way, or the timey-wimey effects of the circle break have already begun), the plot around deposing him just doesn't work at all. I can forgive the appallingly broad and shallow depiction of politics RTD deploys here (though fuck him for starting this era off as extremely trans positive and then letting Amol Rajan in front of the cameras). I can laugh off the bathos of trying to wring drama out of the question of whether armed police will shoot a woman for slowly walking backwards across a football pitch (as clear a sign imaginable that the episode needed a rewrite, but whatever). Both are worth it for how cleverly Ruby uses the rules of her personal haunting to do some good in the world.

Except, here's where it really does come undone. Every other time someone has spoken to the old woman, they've refused to have anything to do with Ruby, or with the specific place they spoke to her. Neither of these explain Ap Gwilliam's resignation. Firing Ruby would have been simplicity itself. Getting out of the Cardiff Stadium event would have been a bit more of an embarrassment, but this is the fucking United Kingdom; we voted in a guy who stole an interviewer's phone and hid in a fridge. Finding an excuse to beam in remotely to an event isn't even a blip, let alone something requiring locking yourself out of Number 10.

And this is where the logic needs to come into play, because it's the method by which Ruby is trying to save the world from sliding to the brink of a nuclear war. It's the cumulation of what we're supposed to think is the main plot. Yes, we later learn that isn't the case, and that Ruby is just trying to find a reason for what's happened to her, in the same way she wants there to have been a reason she was abandoned that will make sense to her. Even with that established, though, we need to know why Ruby thinks her gambit will work, and there's just nothing provided to join those dots.

Ultimately, though, that's not the bit that bothers me the most. Almost pleasingly, where I really part ways with this episode, as with so many before it, is with the reset button pushed on the way out the door. Not because of the fact of it - I've already covered that but because the undoing of the episode means Roger Ap Gwilliam is restored to his place in the timeline. Mad Jack himself once again gets to lead the world to the brink of nuclear war, as well as abuse who knows how many other members of his personal staff. You can argue that that's an acceptable price to pay for recovering the Doctor, but that requires a moral calculus I'm deeply uncomfortable about.

The more I think about that, though, the more it feels like a carelessly played bum note in a song that's otherwise meticulously constructed to sound chaotic and disjointed, while building to something filled with sharp beauty. If "Turn Left" is RTD's best attempt at using the logic of Who to consider Britain's disintegrating defenses against fascism, "73 Yards" is him similarly offering a career highlight in the messiness of personal trauma. The wounds everyone can see, but which is hard to make anyone else notice, and impossible to make anyone else understand. Even just trying can makes everything worse.

That's something we all have, and we all drag with us wherever we go. It's always there, at a certain distance, waiting for us to forget we're trying to not focus on it. 

Waiting until we remember the pain again.

[1] See also: "Turn Left". It also helps that both that episode and this one aren't concluding season-long stories, which is where the Etch-a-Sketch shake-style ending becomes particularly annoying. 

[2] I should also note here my partner's parents are Welsh, and she grew up five miles from the border. I asked her for her take on the Y Dren Mawr scene. Her response was that while the Mad Jack windup was brilliant, Welsh pubs will not, in fact, overcharge you for being English, nor is it sensible to assume you can pay by app.

[3] The other moment where the penny is designed to at least potentially drop is the scene in which Lowri asks Ruby what happened to Josh, and Ruby suggests Josh meant a different "her".