The Church on Ruby Road - A Review

The Church on Ruby Road is our first Christmas Special since Peter Capaldi handed over to Jodie Whittaker in 2017, and follows hot on the heels of the third 60th Anniversary story which introduced us to the latest incarnation of the Doctor, as portrayed by Ncuti Gatwa. (Apparently Disney are counting this as the fourth 60th Special, and it's only from this point that they are seriously plugging the show).

Our first proper look at the 15th Doctor, this episode also introduces Millie Gibson's Ruby Sunday - her character named from the titular church, for her backstory is that she was found abandoned as a baby there. She has since been brought up by a family in Notting Hill, West London.

It's a very long time indeed since we had a companion who simply wanted to travel with the Doctor for the fun of it. They all have to have ulterior motives or have some complex mystery in their past these days, and they have to be embedded within a family unit of some kind (even if they are sometimes rarely used).

With her true parentage unresolved, Ruby is obviously going to be no exception to the rule. (RTD2 has already said that the church will be revisited at some point in the next couple of seasons).

We've conditioned ourselves not to expect too much from the festive specials, the argument always being that they're aimed at a general audience which might not normally watch the series. With the way people view TV nowadays, that argument should no longer hold. There's a great deal of material available on streaming services, so Doctor Who on 25th December, or 1st January, is only really being watched by those familiar with the programme.

Not expecting too much would have done you a favour with The Church on Ruby Road, however.

The plot is wafer-thin. We get only two significant sequences with the Goblins, one of which was already featured heavily in the recent music video. The other was their defeat, which was rather hurriedly done.

The bulk of the 55 minute running time was pure soap.

I can well imagine any casual viewer losing patience with the opening section, which dragged. We had a pointless cameo from Davina McCall then a very lengthy set-up of Ruby and her adoptive family - mother Carla and gran Cherry.

The Doctor comes across Ruby a few weeks beforehand, and is interested in her due to the interest that the Goblins have in her. There's a lot about the power of coincidence, as Carla takes in a new baby on the same day she had taken in Ruby.

The exact nature of the Goblins is never explained, other than they have some relationship to Time, and eat babies. 

As mentioned, they are really underused, with RTD2 borrowing from Gremlins and Return of the Jedi for their makeup. 

If the plot is lightweight and soapy, we need some decent performances to hold our attention. Luckily Gatwa and Gibson are eminently watchable. Her character is still a bit of a "make-your-own" companion cliche, but we are already starting to see some of Gatwa's range. A lot of people were spouting the "he's already my favourite Doctor" garbage after he'd only appeared on screen for a few minutes, but others - myself included - cautioned that we really needed to see how he handled the darker material before judgement could be made.

We saw some of this here, like the scene in which he realises that Time has been rewritten, but overall the episode was too flimsy and cartoonish to allow him to really demonstrate what he can do with the role.

Plot, 3 / 10, visuals, 8 / 10, performances, 7 / 10. A harmless bit of fluff for Xmas, and that's really the best thing you could accuse it of.

When the thing people are probably talking about the most is a comment by an incidental character in a pause in the closing credits, then you know it can't have been a terribly strong episode.

(And the song? Could easily have been cringeworthy but I thought it worked okay as incorporated into the sequence. Singing or dancing to distract your enemy is perfectly compatible with the Doctor's style. Just don't make a habit of it...).