완전히 소름끼치는 도가니에 새로운 동료를 넣은 의사

닥터 후(Doctor Who) 의 최신 시대 는 축제의 판타지 부터 무모한 공상 과학의 어리 석음, 경쾌하고 고르지 못한 캠프 , 반자본주의 전쟁 스릴러 에 이르기 까지 도처에 있었습니다 . 그러나 최신 주크는 친숙하지만 완전히 새로운 시리즈에 등장하며 마침내 Millie Gibson의 Ruby Sunday에 그녀의 능력을 보여주기 위해 스포트라이트를 주기로 결정했습니다. 그리고 안녕, 그녀가 그 일을 겪게 만들었나요?

"73 Yards"는 아마도 지난주 Steven Moffat 에피소드를 기대하는 Steven Moffat 에피소드 팬들이 "Boom"으로 인해 양말이 벗겨지기 전에 기대했던 것일 것입니다. 스토리텔링에 대한 기대 Russell T Davies가 작가 자리로 돌아오면서 이번에는 현대 영국으로 돌아갑니다. 닥터와 Ruby는 웨일즈에 도착하고 즉시 Ruby에게 정말 소름끼치는 이야기에 빠져들게 됩니다. 청중에게 그녀가 무엇인지 보여주세요. 물론 지난 주 "Boom"에서 그 중 일부를 얻었지만 "73 Yards"는 실행 시간이 5분도 되지 않은 채 한 단계 더 나아갔고, 듀오가 이상한 의식적 순환에 직면하면서 상황에서 닥터를 완전히 제거했습니다. 루비가 하나를 큰 소리로 읽으면 의사가 갑자기 그녀 옆에서 사라지는 것을 보게 되고... 그리고 멀리서 이상하고 초점이 맞지 않는 노인 여성이 그녀를 지켜보며 결코 가까이 다가오지도, 더 멀어지지도 않는다는 것입니다. , 항상 몸짓을 하고, 항상 무언가 에 서명을 하지만, 오히려 단지 존재하는 것에서 관객과 루비 모두에게 두려움을 찾아냅니다 .

This is no longer the case of Ruby having to prove herself to someone, or show that she can match her mysterious new friend on an even standing, as it was in “Boom” with the Doctor rooted in one place. She can’t get close enough to the woman to communicate with her, or find out what she wants, and any attempts she tries to make through a third party—other people can see her, but don’t really notice the distant woman until Ruby points her out—to make contact leads to the woman sending them screaming away from Ruby in terror and disgust. So, Doctor Who asks, even this early into her time with the Doctor, what is Ruby’s mettle made of when she can’t rely on him to be there at all?

What follows is both an incredibly chilling ghost tale—one where everyone can actually kind of see the ghost—but also a chance for Davies to deliver something in Doctor Who that feels a little closer to his post-Who career after leaving the show in 2009, especially in the vein of his near-future political drama Years and Years . Through Ruby, and through this mysterious woman’s ability to essentially get people to somehow suddenly sour on Ruby the second they make close contact, Davies raises an absurdist mirror to modern Britain, and sees how much ugliness is hidden just beneath the surface—and how it doesn’t necessarily need a supernatural entity to bring it bubbling up. Really, the fear of “73 Yards” is not the creep factor of this woman perpetually being the titular distance from Ruby, but the utter loneliness and isolation her power imparts on Ruby over and over. But that loneliness is twisted even further and more potently by the bitterness it leaves in its wake.

First the Doctor goes, leaving Ruby stranded in a tiny Welsh village, where cold, bitter locals gaslight the outsider with tales of an ancient spirit named “Mad Jack” and the real power behind the circle Ruby and the Doctor came across, eventually forcing her out, despite her having no real place to go with the Doctor lost and the TARDIS locked down. When Ruby heads home to London to her mother, Carla not only finds herself afflicted by the mysterious woman’s powers, but amplifies them by not just running away from Ruby, but returning, locking her out of her own home, and then cruelly slinging barbs and insults over her birth mother to push Ruby away even further. Even, years later—scraping by in a dead-end job to make ends meet, utterly cut off—a chance encounter with Kate Lethbridge Stewart and UNIT leads to this one moment of hope, that the Doctor’s world and her association with it could save her, is lost when, for all their own psychic and supernatural safeguards, they too are turned against Ruby, leaving her distraught and ostracized by the passers-by witnessing her breakdown—not the armed police units that just charged through a busy street and then immediately fled, but because this young, distressed woman is brushing up against that stiff-upper reserved nature of public British culture.

It’s here that “73 Yards” really takes its biggest step to feeling like a Doctor Who spin on Years and Years’ treatise on the UK. As the literal years and years pass, told through a montage of Ruby losing boyfriend after boyfriend as they all chastise her for seeming distant and distracted, as she’s unable to explain the supernatural phenomena causing it, Ruby eventually overhears a news broadcast that puts two offhand elements from early on in the episode together. An interview with an up and coming reactionary Welsh political leader Roger ap Gwilliam (Aneurin Barnard), who the Doctor had jokingly mentioned to Ruby upon landing in Wales as Britain’s future worst prime minister —Doctor Who could not have asked for better timing than to have this episode air days after the UK’s next general election was called—sees the politician call upon his working class background by invoking “Mad Jack” as an old nickname. With that, Ruby realizes that she has the chance to avoid the crushing loneliness she’s endured the past few years and go be in a Doctor Who story, with a villain to fight, a kernel of hope, a chance to make everything this mysterious entity has put her through seemingly for no reason into context.

Instead, it just takes ugliness Ruby has endured on a personal scale and brings it to a national one. Infiltrating ap Gwilliam’s political party, Albion, as a volunteer to get close to him, Ruby and the audience alike are instead exposed to this fascinatingly grim caricature of modern politics. Ap Gwilliam doesn’t have a laid-out manifesto or dream as a politician that’s made clear to us—both because this is an episode of Doctor Who rather than The Thick of It, and because also that’s the point—but he has an absurdly unhinged nationalist vibe. All that’s made clear to us about ap Gwilliam’s desire to lead the UK is to make it a bitter, isolated nation, backed by a comprehensive nuclear arsenal it would be unafraid to use at the drop of a hat. But instead of people questioning it, all we’re shown is that from within his party and beyond into the general populace, there is somehow a feverish yearning for such an evil desire. Other countries are cruel bullies, why not us too? Albion is sweeping the polls, as the Doctor warned, ap Gwilliam becomes Prime Minister handily, and yet all we know of his wants is mass nuclear destruction for little reason other than hate—and with that hate, he’s commanding the rapt attention of tens of thousands of bitter British citizens that want the world to notice them.

It’s only Ruby that sees ap Gwilliam for what he is—and eventually clicks that before he can lead Britain into a horrific new age, having purchased a huge nuclear arsenal for the country to deploy, she has to use the presence of the mysterious woman, and her supernatural fear induction, by standing 73 yards away from the now-leader of the UK and get her to work on him. “73 Yards” doesn’t immediately end there though, and it’s where the episode gets a little messy falling over itself in the wrap-up: there’s not some sudden snap-back as time corrects itself, that Ruby has saved the day and gets to be immediately rewarded with being back to normal. The mysterious woman might have been the tool she uses to stop ap Gwilliam, but it’s still there after he’s fled and resigned in sudden, fearful disrepute. She’s still isolated and cut off from the Doctor, and her family, and UNIT, and countless other people from the years of this entity’s existence alongside her, and still has to keep living. It’s only as we flash forward another 40 years to an elderly Ruby (now played by Amanda Walker)—and see that she’s had to live that life alone and be at peace with it, returning to Wales one last time to say goodbye to the Doctor and the overgrown TARDIS for good. Ruby did the right thing, but she still had to suffer terribly for it.

그런 다음 에피소드가 마지막 반전을 공개합니다. 독립체 자체는 이전 Ruby의 역설적인 버전이었습니다. Ruby는 처음에 그녀가 되어 모든 슬픔과 추악함에 직면해야 했기 때문에 그녀는 그 순간 Ruby와 닥터는 먼저 요정 서클을 발견하고 그것이 방해받는 것을 막았습니다. 여기서 에피소드는 약간의 비틀림이 발생합니다. 그 초자연적 고리는 확실히 닫혀 있습니다. 매드 잭의 신비한 정신과 그것이 AP Gwilliam과의 관계가 무엇이든 휴면 상태로 남겨지고, 애초에 닥터와 루비가 어떤 모험을 하게 될지 떠나자 그 독립체는 사라집니다. , 보이지 않는 채로 남아 있습니다. 하지만 우리는 이전 Ruby에 너무 적은 시간을 투자했기 때문에 몇 가지 사항이 에피소드의 초기 비트에서 했던 방식대로 클릭되지 않습니다. ap Gwilliam의 부상에 대한 정치적 논평은 배경에서 무너지게 남겨져 있습니다. 영국이 갑자기 더 친절하고 좋은 정치로 선회했다는 뉴스 캐스터의 한 줄에 의해 끊어졌습니다. (그가 남긴 정부는 여전히 모든 핵무기를 구입했습니다.) 그러나 미사일은 얼마나 친절한 지는 알 수 없습니다!). 마찬가지로, 우리는 엔터티의 진정한 본성에 대한 갑작스러운 왜곡에서 대체로 신속하게 이동하여 해당 루프에서 Ruby의 부분과의 연결을 만족스럽거나 감정적으로 구축하는 데 거의 방해가 되지 않고 닫힌 루프를 유발한 모든 것에서 사라지도록 남겨두고 에피소드의 결말을 남깁니다. 자신의 이익을 위해 너무 갑작스럽게 느껴집니다.

 그러나 이것들은 제쳐두고, 우리가 끝날 때 남는 "73 Yards"의 진짜 소름끼치는 점은 Ruby가 이 회피된 타임라인에 대한 막연한 기억을 가지고 있다는 것입니다. . 우리가 아는 한, 가장 작은 마을에서부터 우리가 가장 사랑하는 사람들, 일반 대중에 이르기까지 표면 바로 아래에 여전히 묻혀 있는 추악함은 무엇이든 눈에 띄게 드러나기를 기다리고 있습니다. 이 뒤틀린 렌즈를 통해 닥터 후가 우리를 떠나는 것에 대한 적절한 두려움 , 아마도 영원히 눈에 띄지 않는 오싹한 경계심일 것입니다. 결론이 혼란스러울 수도 있지만, 그 두려움을 초자연적인 악이 아닌 인간 본성의 본질적인 반영으로 만드는 것은 이 쇼의 새로운 시대가 지금까지 취한 가장 설득력 있는 단계 중 하나일 수 있습니다.

새로운 닥터 후 에피소드는 금요일 오후 7시(동부 표준시) Disney+ 에서 첫 방송 되며, 동시에 영국에서는 현지 시간으로 토요일 오전 12시에 BBC iPlayer를 통해 방송된 후 그날 늦게 BBC One에서 방송됩니다.

---

더 많은 io9 뉴스를 원하시나요? 최신 Marvel , Star Wars 및 Star Trek 개봉 시기,  영화와 TV에서 DC Universe 의 다음 단계 , 그리고 Doctor Who 의 미래에 대해 알아야 할 모든 것을 확인하세요 .