The Church on Ruby Road

The one where Doctor Who meets Labyrinth.

The first full-length Fifteenth Doctor era episode, on top of being the prelude of Fifteen's first season (Season 1), and the first Christmas Episode in the revival series since the Twelfth Doctor's Grand Finale, "Twice Upon a Time".

---

One dark Christmas Eve night, a baby was left on the steps of a church on Ruby Road. The congregation found the child, took her in from the cold, and named her Ruby, after the road she had been discovered on. But nobody saw the woman who had left Ruby behind...

Nineteen years later, Ruby Sunday relates her story to Davina McCall on her programme Long Lost Family, hoping that Davina and her team can help locate Ruby's mother. During their conversation, nobody notices several tiny creatures moving the set equipment around, setting things up so that when the make-up supervisor reaches for her coffee, she trips over an outstretched cord, causing the entire lighting setup to fall to the ground.

A few weeks later, Ruby is playing in a band with some of her friends at a pub, watched by the Doctor, when their sound equipment suddenly loses power. While they try to fix the problem, none of them notices a small creature having unplugged the equipment. The next day, Ruby is at a nightclub, where her eye is drawn to the Doctor at the center of the dance floor, dancing joyfully among the crowd. She is too distracted watching him to notice yet another small pair of hands move her glass of water to the edge of the table, leading to her absent-mindedly knocking it over... only for it to be caught by the Doctor, who introduces himself as "Health and safety, gin & tonic division", and when she tries to brush the incident, along with the other recent accidents happening around her, as just bad luck, he tells her it's something worse than that, before wishing her a merry Christmas.

Later that night, Ruby and her friends leave the club and catch a taxi back home, laughing and joking about Ruby's seemingly "cursed" bad luck. Unbeknownst to them, they are followed shortly after by the Doctor. As the taxi stops for a red light, the Doctor looks up above them , and sees a large inflatable snowman display, beginning to come apart from the building it's attached to. Acting quickly, he uses his newly-upgraded Sonic screwdriver to change the light to green, causing the taxi driver to move the cab to safety. The Doctor breathes a sigh of relief, but then sees a woman with a pram about to cross the street, directly underneath the snowman's now-falling head.

The Doctor runs into the road, reaching the woman just in time for the snowman's head to land - on top of him! Luckily, it landed just the right way, so he went right through the snowman's open neck. After getting out of the fallen head, the Doctor returns to the TARDIS, while a policeman who saw the incident takes his name down for his report. The Doctor's sonic screwdriver detects an engagement ring in the policeman's pocket, and he takes a moment to reassure the policeman that his girlfriend will say yes to him when he proposes on Christmas Day, before popping back into the TARDIS.

A few days later, it's Christmas Eve, 2023. After returning from the grocery and chatting up Mrs. Flood outside her flat, Ruby arrives home, where her adopted mother, Carla, has some exciting news: they're fostering another baby! After the social worker arrives with the baby, she explains that her name is Lulubelle, and that she'll only be with them a few days, since the ward is understaffed over the Christmas holidays. Unfortunately, soon after Ruby's mother goes out to get more supplies, Ruby gets a phone call from Davina, who tells her that they've been unable to find any trace of her birth parents. And not only that; ever since they filmed the show together, Davina has had terrible luck - accidents, collisions, she's even been trampled by a moose! And she can't help thinking that it all goes back to when she met Ruby. As Davina is asking Ruby what's happening to her and how to stop it, she sees something out of the corner of her eye, and screams, as the line goes dead...

Dejected, Ruby puts her phone down, only to find that Lulubelle has vanished. Frantically searching the room, she barely catches a couple small creatures pulling the baby out of the window. She chases them up to the roof, and finds the creatures lifting the baby up a ladder into the sky. Mustering her courage, she grabs the ladder just as it lifts up into the air, carrying Ruby through the sky above her home. As she struggles to hang on, she spots the man from the nightclub, jumping across the rooftops to keep up with her. He cheekily admonishes her for deciding to just grab into a mysterious ladder in the sky, until she tells him that a baby has been taken, upon which he jumps onto the ladder with her, and asks for her name.

The Doctor: "What's your name?"
Ruby: [a little breathless] "Ruby! Ruby Sunday."
The Doctor: "Hello, Ruby Sunday." [chuckles] "And it's Sunday right now! That's a coincidence!" [laughs] "I'm the Doctor. Hi!"

Seeing that Ruby is close to losing her grip, the Doctor gives her a "smart glove", of his own invention, which takes on the effects of mass, density, and mavity, allowing him to hang on effortlessly to the ladder. He tells her that the creatures are goblins, and that they want to eat Lulubelle, as the ladder rises above the clouds, bringing the two onto their ship, where they are immediately captured and tied up. Within the ship's cellar, the Doctor, upon hearing that it's both Ruby's birthday and Lulubelle's, explains that that's how the goblins work: coincidence and luck are what give them power, so they followed Ruby around over the past month, giving her bad luck to build up their power.

By this time, the Doctor has slipped out of his bonds, and after scanning the ship's walls with the Sonic, he begins fiddling with the ropes and knots which wind all around the ship. As he explains, the ropes seem to be the goblins' equivalent to technology, so if he unravels the right one, he can open a way for the two of them to travel through the ship unnoticed.

One rope pull later, the Doctor and Ruby are crawling through a small corridor above the ship's main chamber, where the goblins dance and cheer as a goblin band sings about their impending feast, and baby Lulubelle is rolled out on a conveyor belt towards a very large creature - the Goblin King! The Doctor begins frantically untying knots until he finds one that seems to be larger than the others; when that one is untied, the wooden floor beneath them gives way, and the two drop down to the conveyor belt, in front of the entire assembly of goblins. As the goblins stare at the Doctor and Ruby, he has an idea: why stop singing?

He and Ruby continue the song, distracting the goblins long enough for them to grab Lulubelle, as the Doctor explains through song that the last rope he pulled was the master rope. Said rope drops down right in front of him, and the Doctor grabs it with his gloved hand, and Ruby and Lulubelle in the other. Setting the glove to reverse, he jumps off of the conveyor belt, and the weight generated by the reversed glove causes the three to break through the ship's hull and rocket back towards the ground, slowing down as they near the roof of Ruby's house.

The two bring Lulubelle back inside and set her in her cot, but when the Doctor nearly trips on a loose cord, he remembers that the goblins can also gain power from accidents. He and Ruby scramble to check the rest of the house for any possible accidents in the making and prevent them. The Doctor stops in front of the refrigerator when he notices several Polaroid photos stuck on the door, which Ruby tells him are each of the 33 children her mother has fostered. At that moment, Carla returns with the supplies for Lulubelle, and questions who the Doctor is, and why a Doctor is needed. As they try to explain, the conversation eventually turns to Ruby's call from Davina, and her disappointment at not being able to locate her mother. The Doctor, thrown off by the similarities between his background and Ruby's, mentions that he, too, was adopted, and that they were both foundlings. As Ruby's mother comments on the coincidence of it all, lightning flashes distantly, getting closer, until suddenly, the window near them shatters, and a large crack opens in the ceiling.

The Doctor runs through the house, following the crack as it spreads, until it slows and eventually stops. Relieved, he runs back to Lulubelle's room to say his goodbyes, only to realize that Ruby has disappeared. And her mother doesn't remember having fostered her, much less adopted her. In fact, Carla Sunday swears she's only ever fostered five or six children, only for a couple days at a time, just to get some extra money, that's all.

Carla: "Why would I want a daughter? I'm happy as I am."
The Doctor: "Then why are you crying?"
Carla: "I don't know. Why are you?"

Putting together the pieces, the Doctor realizes that the goblins took a different baby this time... they took Ruby. He runs at full speed out of the house and into the TARDIS, which dematerializes, right in front of a surprised Mrs. Flood.

In the past, on the night Ruby was abandoned at the church, the Doctor arrives in the TARDIS and watches in tears as Ruby's mother leaves. Determined, he races to the church to find only a blanket where the baby should be, and above the church, the goblin ship. He enters the church and climbs to the top of the tower, where the ship's rope ladder has come to rest. With the gloves reversed, he grabs the ladder and jumps from the tower, pulling the ship down with him. The spire of the tower breaks through the hull, impaling the Goblin King, and causing the ship to dissolve into nothing. As baby Ruby falls down to the ground, the Doctor catches her in his gloved hands, laying her back down at the doorstep of the church.

The Doctor returns to Ruby's home in the present day, and is overjoyed to find that Ruby is back. While explaining what's happened, he realizes that he forgot one more thing, and rushes off once again. Earlier in the day, while Davina McCall is talking to Ruby on the phone, the Doctor prevents the goblins from dropping the Christmas tree in her house on top of her, saving her life. He wishes her a merry Christmas before leaving in the TARDIS once again.

Meanwhile, Ruby, thinking over the things the Doctor has told her, comes to a realization, and runs outside, asking Mrs. Flood if she saw where the Doctor went. She directs Ruby to the police box on the nearby street corner. Ruby walks inside the box... and runs out again, shocked. She looks at Mrs. Flood, who wishes her luck. She walks back into the TARDIS, where she sees the Doctor, standing majestically by the console.

Ruby: [absolutely gobsmacked] "Who are you?"
The Doctor: "I'm the Doctor."

---

Tropes featured in "The Church on Ruby Road" include:

But Wait, There's More!...Abdul, one of Ruby's neighbors, is in spluttering astonishment at the TARDIS dematerializing, and Mrs. Flood sends him on his merry way, smiles, and has this to say directly to the camera:

"Never seen a TARDIS before?"

---

Alright, for real this time.

• Actually Quite Catchy: On both sides — the Doctor is clearly impressed by the Goblin's song about how they plan to eat babies, and the Goblins happily dance along to Ruby and the Doctor's song about how they're going to stop them from eating those babies.
• Abstract Eater: While the goblins feast upon human flesh, they also find coincidence quite tasty, so they seek out and create coincidences around their targets to season the meat, in a way.
• Adipose Rex: The Goblin King, as revealed by "The Goblin Song".
• Admiring the Abomination: The Doctor's as fascinated and excited by "The Goblin Song" as Ruby is horrified.
• Air-Vent Passageway: The Goblin ship may be made of wood and rope, but, as the Doctor points out, it still has air vents big enough for him and Ruby to crawl through.
• All Myths Are True: In-universe example; the Goblin King, as lampshaded in "The Goblin Song", isn't a myth, but an actual thing.
• All There in the Manual:
  • The novelisation has the Doctor theorize that the Goblins are part of the Toymaker's legions, considering them his legacy. This explains why they seem to operate outside the normal laws of physics and why they vanished when defeated.
  • Tie-in posters name the members of the Goblin band as Janis Goblin, Gob Dylan, Brian Fairy, Ralph McTelf and Pixy Not.
• Ambiguous Situation: The mystery of Ruby's birth parents. When we see her mother dropping baby Ruby off at the church, she's only seen completely shrouded in a cloak, no element of her body visible outside of the lower half of her face. Davina McCall later calls Ruby and tells her they could find absolutely no trace of her birth parents. After rescuing baby Ruby from the goblins in the past, the Doctor sees the shrouded figure walking off in the distance and, for one reason or another, decides not to approach her, only silently departing in the TARDIS.
• Arc Word: Coincidence. The goblins run on it.
• Aside Comment: At the very end of the episode, Ruby's neighbour Mrs. Flood turns to face the camera and asks, "Never seen a TARDIS before?", as she winks at the audience.
• Awesome McCoolname: The Doctor considers Lulubelle to be one, in contrast to everyone else's opinion. He's also fascinated by Ruby's grandmother's name, Cherry Sunday.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: The Doctor is able to deduce that a policeman plans to propose to his girlfriend when he detects a ring in his pocket, and can tell she'll say yes because he couldn't wait for the Boxing Day deductions to buy the ring. Later, the Doctor analyzes the ropework of the Goblin ship to open a few doors and move him and Ruby through it, even though the sonic screwdriver doesn't work on it, and he's never seen anything of its like before
• Bamboo Technology: Goblins have no electronics, not even any screws, all they use are knots. Still they have flying ships and time travel capability.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: The Doctor tampers with the goblins' knotwork so it begins coming apart, but he and Ruby drop down in the middle of their gathering while he's doing so. So he has the band continue the music as he and Ruby add a few more verses so there's time enough for his plan to work.
• Bear Hug: When the Doctor returns from fixing the past he's so happy to see that Ruby has been restored to the timeline that he pulls her into one of these.
• Be Careful What You Say: After rescuing Lulubelle, the Doctor, Ruby and Carla all discuss the coincidences and similarities surrounding the former three. This draws the goblins' attention and gives them the idea that Ruby is as viable as target as Lulubelle since the Doctor is a fellow foundling, leading them going back in time to snatch her after she was abandoned.
• Big Bad: The Goblin King, who has his Goblin subjects steal babies for him to eat, including Lulubelle and later baby Ruby.
• Big Eater: The Goblin King unsurprisingly turns out to be one according to "The Goblin Song".
• Bigger on the Inside: Ruby has to walk around the TARDIS to understand its size, similar to Donna Noble and Clara Oswald before her.
• A Birthday, Not a Break: The inability to find her birth parents and the calamity of getting tangled up with the Goblin King happens on Ruby's birthday, Christmas Eve. She has minor meltdown over how overwhelming everything happening on her 19th is for her.
• Bloodless Carnage: The Doctor happens to impale the Goblin King with the church spire, yet not a drop of blood is seen.
• Butterfly of Doom: The Goblins taking Ruby as a baby in the past, lead to her mother Carla not fostering children, and having a different view of life.
• Call-Back:
  • The Doctor again uses the psychic paper to pass himself off as "Health and Safety", this time for the "Gin and Tonic division".
  • The Doctor once again gets out of ropes thanks to a trick he learned from Harry Houdini.
  • The Fifteenth Doctor improvising a musical number may sound new, but he actually took a page right out of the Sixth Doctor's, back when he had to deal with pirates from the 19th century.
  • The Doctor mentions that, like Ruby, he was a foundling who doesn't know where he comes from.
• Casting Gag: Mrs. Flood is played by Anita Dobson, who was prominently featured in one of EastEnders' most infamous Christmas Episodes. When this episode first aired, the BBC continuity announcer lampshaded the timing of her appearance by joking about her not being served divorce papers this time.
• Celebrity Casualty: Narrowly subverted with Davina McCall, with the Doctor coming in to save her at the end.
• Chekhov's Gun: The "intelligent gloves" used to get the Doctor and Ruby onboard the Goblins' ship are used in tandem by the Doctor to bring down the ship itself.
• Chekhov's Skill: Ruby is in a band as a pianist, and later turns out to be a pretty good improvisational singer.
• Christmas Episode: Who's Christmas Special for 2023 (and the show's first one since "Twice Upon a Time" in 2017).
• Clarke's Third Law: While the Goblins are technically creatures of Fantasy and Myth, the Doctor insists their "magic" is really just a different kind of science (not unlike the Carrionites appearing to be witches).
• Commonality Connection: Why the goblins target Lulubelle; She's a foundling born on Christmas Eve that ended up fostered by Carla Sunday, just like her new foster sister Ruby, who was also found on Christmas Eve. Once they rescue Lulu, the goblins overhear the Doctor mention he was also a foundling like Ruby, so they decide she is a viable target as a baby and travel back in time to snatch her.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Once again, a companion gets roasted for grabbing a ladder that was just hanging in mid-air.
  • While extolling the benefits of his super-gloves, the Doctor references mavity, the term coined in "Wild Blue Yonder".
  • A crack appears in the wall before history is erased or changed due to an outside factor.
  • After a person is erased from existence, their loved ones are left to mourn without knowing why.
  • The fourth-wall break at the end may remind people of a much, much older Christmas episode from the Classic Series, "The Feast of Steven" (which was part of "The Daleks' Master Plan"), which also ended with an old person talking to the fourth wall.
• Contrived Coincidence: Enforced by the goblins, who engineer bad luck streaks in humans they target to build up coincidences around them, apparently as some sort of abstract seasoning on the material flesh of their victims.
• Crash in Through the Ceiling: The Doctor, followed by Ruby, clumsily enters the goblin ship in this manner (just in time for "The Goblin Song" to be over)... and also ends up right in front of the Goblin King for good measure.
• Dead Star Walking: Narrowly subverted, with Davina McCall last seen screaming as a sharp metal ornament plunges into her head. It's only in the last few minutes of the episode that the Doctor goes back and saves her.
• Eats Babies: "The Goblin Song" is an entire Villain Song dedicated to how they're going to prepare and eat a human baby.
  We've got a baby, we can feast!
  We can dine three days at least!
• Edible Theme Naming: Ruby's (adoptive) grandmother is named Cherry Sunday.
• Embarrassing First Name: It's a running gag throughout the first half of the episode that no-one thinks Lulubelle is a good name, with Carla even noting that Lulu by itself is a vastly superior name. This gag ends as soon as the Doctor hears the name and thinks it's brilliant, to the point of wishing that his name was Lulubelle.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: A variation. During the "Goblin Song" sequence, the Doctor and Ruby are crawling through the Goblin Ship's ducts, trying to find a way to rescue Lulubelle. And then, the Doctor comes to a dead stop as he finally realizes something: If they're on a Goblin ship, then who does it belong to? Cue the Goblin King's entrance, complete with a verse about him.
• The Fair Folk: The goblins are similar to stories of fae in that their ways are esoteric, but what's apparent is their malicious mischief and predatory targeting of human infants. Oh, and they have a thing for music, even by mortal singers, which can be a good way to distract them. They also appear to be actual supernatural goblins and not just goblin-like aliens, with no "they're from Planet Such-and-such" explanation given for them.
• Fat Bastard: The Goblin King. Not only is he too big to move, Janis Goblin enjoys pointing this out in her song, he relishes every meal, rumbling in anticipation and opening his mouth wide as Lulubelle rolls along a conveyor belt to her fate.
• Foreshadowing: Carla says she doesn't know who she'd be if she hadn't adopted Ruby. Shortly afterwards, the Doctor finds out.
• For the Evulz: The goblins give Ruby a bad luck streak to invoke specific circumstances in her life that drew them to steal her baby foster sister. They give Davina McCall a much worse bad luck streak that more seriously injures her and would have eventually killed her without the Doctor's intervention, apparently just as a fun side-quest.
• Fostering for Profit: Carla Sunday is the happy adoptive mother of Ruby Sunday and has fostered 32 other children. However, in the broken timeline created when Ruby is kidnapped by the goblins as a baby, Carla only ever fostered five children and did so entirely for the money.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: A passing bus has an advert for Triad software, the "final IT solution", on its side.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Davina McCall is sitting in a wheelchair with many injuries, unable to react in time to a Christmas tree and its very pointy star falling right on top of her. Subverted when the Doctor makes a stop to catch the tree and rescue her at the last moment.
• Gonk: Subverted with the Goblins, who border on invokedUgly Cute. Played completely straight with the Goblin King.
• Happily Adopted: Ruby was adopted into the Sunday family after years of being fostered. Even while she is still looking for her birth parents, she is loved in the Sunday household.
• Haven't You Seen X Before?: During the coda, Mrs. Flood breaks away from her conversation with Abdul to ask the audience if they have "never seen a TARDIS before?"
• Hero vs. Villain Duet: After they land in front of the Goblin King and swipe baby Lulubelle, ending the "Goblin Song", the Doctor takes Refuge in Audacity by asking why they've stopped singing, telling the Goblin band to hit it, and improvising a couple of verses with Ruby that distract the Goblins long enough to screw around with the ship and make an escape.
• Homage:
  • Die Hard: The Doctor and Ruby are crawling around in ventilation shafts at Christmas.
  • It and Harry Potter are both mentioned by elements of their lore in the Goblin Song.
  • Singing goblins that kidnap babies? Sound like Labyrinth, does it not?
  • The Goblin King appears to be a CGI replication of the character in the 2D version of The Hobbit.
  • It's a Wonderful Life: The Doctor discovers how the absence of someone in the lives of people who care for them changes them for the worse.
• Hungry Menace: Downplayed. The Goblins eat people, and most of their acts are dedicated to feeding — but they also show genuine cruelty and malice outside of this, most notably tormenting Davina McCall in a way that doesn't benefit their plans at all, with the Doctor chalking it up to the Goblins having some fun between business.
• Hypocritical Humor: The Doctor sasses out Ruby for jumping aboard the Goblin Ship's Sky Ladder without any thought or plan of action... while simultaneously chasing the same ladder across the rooftops and also jumping aboard it moments later.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: The Goblin King and his ship is defeated by the Doctor dragging it down with his gloves, impaling it on the church's spire — which just happens to go right through the King's chest.
• Incredibly Long Note: "The Goblin Song" ends with a typical high-pitched one, which fits for such a big-band/Broadway-esque inspired number.
• In Medias Res: The story starts with the Doctor arriving on Christmas Eve 2004 to witness the infant Ruby be delivered to the church on Ruby Road. The story then flashes forward to December 2023 and shows how he came to be there.
• In Spite of a Nail: Even though Carla in the "cracked timeline" has only fostered a tiny minority of the children her counterpart has, and resents doing so, especially at Christmas, she still fostered Lulubelle.
• Irony: Meta example with "The Goblin Song". Sales of the Single are intended to be donated to Children in Need. And yet, the song itself is about Goblins eating human children. Naturally, the Doctor Who social media accounts wasted no time lampshading the irony.
• Jumped at the Call: Ruby immediately springs into action to retrieve Lulubelle from the kidnapping goblins, and hangs onto their ship's rope ladder as it travels through the sky. In the end, Ruby pieces together that the Doctor must be a time traveller himself and immediately runs out to find him after he leaves.
• Keystone Army: The Goblin King's death causes all of the goblins, and even the ship itself, to vanish.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The Goblins "seasoning" their victims with bad luck and coincidence sounds very similar to how It seasons the children he feeds on with fear. He's later alluded to in the Goblin King's Villain Song.
• Leitmotif: Ruby Sunday's leitmotif debuts in this episode, while the Fifteenth's is expanded upon. The main melody in "The Goblin Song" also crops up in the horns as Ruby encounters the goblins for the first time.
• Lighter and Softer: The episode sets a lighter tone for the Fifteenth Doctor's tenure with fantastical enemies, a goofy musical number, and everybody living (well, except for the Goblin King).
• Load-Bearing Boss: The death of the Goblin King leads to the entire Goblin ship disappearing.
• Lyrical Dissonance: "The Goblin Song" is as tonally catchy as it is lyrically macabre.
• Make Wrong What Once Went Right: Having been prevented from eating Lulubelle, the Goblins opt to travel back in time and abduct Ruby as a baby instead.
• Man in a Kilt: When Ruby first sees the Doctor at the club, he's wearing a kilt that twirls out as he dances.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: A slightly more pedantic version of the trope with the Goblins. The Doctor is adamant that they're not magic, they're just using a different set of physics to humanity. Ruby doesn't see the distinction, and keeps referring to them as magical.
• Meaningful Background Event: When Ruby is gone, the photos from the fridge disappear well before the Doctor notices their absence.
• Meaningful Name: The Doctor tells Ruby that goblins get their name from the fact that they'll gobble you up.
• Mickey Mousing: The Goblins chant "On with the feast, baby we shall feast!" in time with "The Carol of the Bells" being sung at the church during the climax, as they prepare to eat an infant Ruby.
• Morality Pet: Ruby was apparently this to Carla — when she's erased from time, Carla's a much colder, more selfish woman then the warmhearted mother she is in the real timeline.
• No Body Left Behind: The Goblins all dissipate with their ship after the King dies.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: A self-aware Janis Goblin does this during "The Goblin Song" when the Goblin King makes his grand entrance.
  Janis Goblin: He's the Goblin King, yes, the Goblin King! He's not a myth, he's an actual thing!
• Not the Fall That Kills You…: Fortunately for baby Ruby, who the Doctor catches just before she hits the ground.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Mrs. Flood acts like a scatterbrained old woman and initially blames Abdul for the TARDIS being present on the sidewalk. But at the end, it is revealed that she knows what it actually is, making her accusation against Abdul little more than an act. The next season reveals she's the Rani in disguise, confirming her looniness was just an act.
• Our Goblins Are Different: According to the Doctor, the Goblins live on the fringes of Earth's dimension up in the sky, dipping in to orchestrate bad luck surrounding select humans as a prelude to kidnapping victims to eat. Like the Carrionites, their science of manipulating and exploiting coincidences can look like magic to humans. Their technology is based entirely around knotwork on wooden parts, not even having screws for the Sonic to work on.
• Outside-Context Problem: The Goblins, as the Doctor is normally used to dealing with more traditional sci-fi threats than creatures of myth and legend.
• Parent Service:
  • Ruby Sunday's outfit gets a lot of... upward shots showing her legs and her skirt when she's chasing down the Goblins and Lulubelle, and her outfit is quite complimenting.
  • The Doctor in a tank top isn't exactly rough on the eyes, either.
• Peeve Goblins: The goblins start off the episode by moving certain objects in a way to cause various slapstick pranks, such as causing people to trip or objects to crash. They steadily get more lethal as the episode goes on. Ruby brings up the question of whether all accidents are actually caused by goblins, with the Doctor genuinely considering the possibility.
• Plot-Irrelevant Villain: While the Goblin King is nominally the Big Bad, he does essentially nothing during the show, with the Goblins themselves providing all of the conflict of the episode. Had the Goblins staged a revolution and guillotined the guy, it seems the plot would have gone identically.
• Popularity Polynomial: Carla discusses this trope in-universe about her Polaroid camera, to the social worker who dropped the baby off with her:
  Carla: "You wait long enough, they get fashionable again."
• Pretender Diss: The Doctor takes offense to Ruby referring to the goblins as time travellers:
  The Doctor: "Oh!" [tsks at Ruby] "They are not time travellers! Excuse me? Time travellers are great. Like, the best! Like, wow! This lot just bimble."
• Refuge in Audacity: The Goblin Song is a song about goblins eating babies. Which was made into a single whose proceeds would go to Children in Need, a charity that benefits children. And then the Doctor himself takes refuge in that same audacity when he and Ruby land in front of the Goblin King by performing his own version with improvised lyrics!
• Ret-Gone: After the Goblins go back in time and abduct Ruby as a baby, the Doctor briefly finds himself in an alternate timeline where Ruby died as an infant and her family has never heard of her.
• Reveal Shot: Davina McCall calling Ruby is first shown from the head up. Then the camera slowly zooms out as she asks about Ruby's luck, revealing she's in a wheelchair with an arm and a leg in a cast.
• Reverse Polarity: The Doctor reverses the polarity of his super gloves so that, instead of making the wearer weightless, it makes them heavier. He uses this for leverage to drag down the goblin ship by its rope ladder, before jumping off the roof to impale it on the church spire.
• Ripple Effect Indicator: When the Goblins take Ruby before she ever gets adopted, it erases her impact on Carla's life, which in turn erases all the photos of the 33 kids she was inspired to foster, changes the colours of the flat walls and the kitchen cabinets, and erases the giant crack running through their flat's roof caused by the goblins' departure to do so. Just before this is focused on, the goblin in a picture it took of itself that got left in Ruby's flat disappeared.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: As a time traveller, the Doctor remembers Ruby even after the Goblins go back and snatch her as a baby.
• Roofhopping: The Doctor has to chase after Ruby (who's clinging to the Goblin Ship's sky ladder for dear life) across rooftops.
• Running Gag: Cherry frequently grouses about delays in getting her cup of tea. She finally gets it near the end of the episode.
• Science Fantasy: Thanks to the Genre Shift and pitting the Doctor and his science-fiction setting against creatures of myth and legend like goblins.
• Sequel Hook:
  • The identity of Ruby's mother is still unrevealed, and something odd seems to be going on with her, given that — as Ruby herself points out — it's a little strange that literally no trace of her or a father exists in any system.
  • More overtly, the episode ends with The Reveal that Mrs. Flood, the seemingly inconspicuous old woman who lives next door to Ruby and her family, knows what a TARDIS is.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: After the goblins eat her as a child, the Doctor has to go back in time and save Ruby. He also takes the time to rescue Davina McCall from being murdered by the goblins.
• Sherlock Scan: When the Doctor is interviewed by a bobby after a snowman inflatable crashes on the former's head, the Doctor's sonic screwdriver detects a diamond ring in the bobby's pocket. The Doctor correctly deduces that the bobby intends to propose to his girlfriend on Christmas and makes an educated guess that he's probably going to succeed, since he couldn't wait for the post-Christmas sales to purchase the ring.
• Sky Pirate: The goblins fly around on a flying ship, some in pirate attire. According to the Doctor they come from another dimension that intersects with Earth in its skies.
• Special Guest: Davina McCall plays herself, with her role as presenter of Long Lost Family (which isn't named within the episode) facilitating Ruby's introduction.
• Time Skip: The story jumps from Ruby's meeting with Davina McCall in early December to Christmas Eve.
• Time-Traveling Jerkass: Goblins have access to time travel technology and use it to set up coincidences of bad luck to make their victims tastier. They also set up much worse bad luck just for fun, culminating in lethal accidents when the victim is too injured to survive any more.
• To Serve Man: The Goblins and their desire to eat the abducted infant during "The Goblin Song".
• Tricked-Out Gloves: The Doctor presents new super-gloves that let the wearer hang onto anything without getting fatigued by concentrating their body's mass and weight into them, demonstrating it to Ruby by swinging from the Goblin ship's rope ladder one-handed, hundreds of feet in the air, as if his body were weightless. They can also be reversed to make the person super-heavy, which the Doctor and Ruby use to escape, and the Doctor later uses to pull down the airship. The only downside to the gloves is that they run on some sort of battery.
• The Un-Reveal: After rescuing baby Ruby from the goblins, the Doctor notices the woman who delivered Ruby to the church walking away. He visibly considers approaching her to get some answers about Ruby's origins, but ends up deciding against it.
• Villainous Glutton: The Goblin King, in spades. He's eaten so many stolen babies, he's too fat to move, and meals need to be brought to him by conveyor belt.
• Villain Song: "The Goblin Song".
• What Were You Thinking?:
  • After saving a woman with a pram from the falling snowman, the Doctor chews her out for seemingly having her infant child out at midnight. Turns out, the pram merely contained Christmas shopping.
    The Doctor: "A pram? At midnight?"
  • The Doctor later sasses out Ruby for jumping onto the Goblin Ship's sky ladder without having any kind of a plan (let alone not even batting an eye at such an impossibility).
    The Doctor: "What the hell are you doing?"
    Ruby: "I'm just... there's—"
    The Doctor: "But what did you do that for? Who sees a ladder and just pops on? A ladder in the sky, and you thought, "Yeah, I'll give that a go, babes!"?"
    Ruby: [upset] "They've got the baby!"
• Who Are You?: The episode ends with an awestruck Ruby entering the TARDIS and asking this of the Doctor. Standing on one of the spiralling paths in the console room, he smiles and replies, "I'm the Doctor!"
• Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: Ruby and Carla find the name "Lulubelle" ridiculous. The Doctor loves it though.
• Would Hurt a Child: The Goblins kidnap babies to eat them. It's kind of their thing, though the Doctor makes it clear that they won't be too bothered about eating adults.

---

NEW HOME
NEW WHO
SPRING 2024

---