73 Yards

The one where...

...

...well, you'll just have to ask her.

Also the first Doctor or companion-lite episode (in this case the former) since "Heaven Sent" nine years prior.

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The Doctor and Ruby arrive on a cliff in the Welsh countryside, ready for a day of taking in the sights. After all, Wales is a lovely country, full of lovely people! Well, except for Roger ap Gwilliam, a Prime Minister of Welsh ancestry who nearly caused a nuclear war... but that's 20 years past Ruby's time, she doesn't need to worry about that. Before they can head out, however, the Doctor ends up accidentally breaking a strange circle composed of things like cotton and bird skulls when he doesn't watch where he's going. Ruby bends down to examine the circle and finds a set of poems. She reads them out aloud and finds that they are seemingly memorials, with one saying "Rest in Peace Mad Jack". Ruby turns to ask what the Doctor thinks of all this... only to find that he's gone. On top of this, the TARDIS is now locked, seemingly from the inside, and there's a mysterious woman watching Ruby from a distance, waving to her but seemingly teleporting around when she isn't looking, maintaining a fixed distance from the girl.

Uh-oh. It's gonna be one of those episodes.

As Ruby descends down from the cliffs to look for help, the woman follows. Eventually reaching the outskirts of a village, Ruby finally runs into someone else, a hiker with the very familiar face of Susan Twist. This time, Ruby actually does briefly recognise her, before dismissing it and instead drawing her attention to the woman. The hiker cheerfully offers to go and have a chat with her and apologise on Ruby's behalf for breaking the fairy circle. When she goes over to the woman, however, the hiker suddenly looks to Ruby... and immediately runs away in terror. Naturally, Ruby runs in the opposite direction, all the way to a nice little pub. Her stalker scares off a random patron, leading everybody to start talking about grim supernatural forces. Only that was just the natives pranking Ruby. She still gets evicted, though, after that patron comes back and begs the pub owner to get rid of her. Resigned, Ruby leaves for England. Of course, the strange woman follows her.

Ruby meets up with her mum and recounts the situation. Well, that could've just been the Welsh being the Welsh, could it not? Carla goes to check the woman herself (communicating with Ruby on the phone), utters a bizarre phrase: "She looks like what she looks like", then screams and runs away. She abandons Ruby entirely, later locking her out of their apartment. What?

Time Skip. Ruby has found a job, even tried to photograph the woman to no avail. She measured the "Sempre distant": exactly 73 yards. At a café, she is greeted by Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and a UNIT squad. It's revealed that they have kept tabs on Ruby and know about the anomaly. In true Five Rounds Rapid fashion, the squad attempts to capture the woman, but they are also affected, despite supposed protections against the supernatural. Kate, in contrast to her polite demeanor beforehand, looks at Ruby hatefully and orders UNIT to disengage.

Ruby moves into an apartment and turns 25. We follow some botched dates Ruby has with a few guys, the mysterious woman always on her mind.

Ruby is 40 now. In a montage, she toasts the woman permanently located outside every birthday. But one day, in a bar, she hears mention of one Roger ap Gwilliam: the future nuke-happy Prime Minister who the Doctor briefly warned her about before he disappeared. She catches him mentioning a childhood nickname: "Mad Jack"! She immediately drops out of a date, once again, now on a mission to save everybody. What's her idea? Volunteer in Gwilliam's party, Albion, as a mole. She waits for a while, running errands, holding coats, and chatting with another secretary named Marti. Marti is disturbed by Gwilliam, calling him monstrous. But the general public does not know that, and as the Doctor foretold, the politician successfully runs for Prime Minister.

It's inauguration day. Today, the nuclear codes are going to be passed to Gwilliam. The new PM occupies a stage placed on a football pitch. Ruby goes for the opportunity, and, despite threats of being shot by security, manages to get exactly 73 yards away from Gwilliam. The mystery woman appears behind him. Following the established logic, Gwilliam turns around, runs away in horror and immediately resigns. Victory for Ruby! Ruby goes to the window and gives one last toast, but she needs to know: will the woman leave her alone, now that it's done?

Forty years later, the answer would appear to be "no".

With a carer, a now elderly Ruby visits the overgrown TARDIS, which has become a makeshift monument in the sixty years that passed. Then we see her in the hospice a few years after that. The lights go off and on, and, nightmarishly, the strange woman approaches Ruby on her deathbed. Everything goes black...

...until Ruby opens her eyes. She's on the Wales cliff, somehow transported into the body, or becoming, the mysterious woman. She looks at her younger self and the Doctor arriving, and whispers: "Don't step!". With her younger self hearing her warning, she's able to stop the Doctor walking into the fairy circle. The fairy circle stays undisturbed, and the woman disappears, having fulfilled her purpose. Young Ruby notes she has visited Wales three times, but, of course, does not remember the third...

---

Ask her.

• Ambiguously Gay: Ifor Jones, the goth guy in the pub. The others make a joke that he'd know all about fairy circles, and, when pretending that Mad Jack is attacking the pub, he claims that he'd be the first to be attacked, and that the others all know why.
• Ambiguously Human: The woman, even if she is a displaced version of Ruby’s future self, can teleport to wherever Ruby is, never sits down, sleeps, eats, ages or changes her clothes, doesn’t show up as anything but a blur on photos (even on UNIT's high-tech cameras), and causes anyone who talks to her to look at Ruby in horror, run away screaming and refuse to speak to Ruby ever again. Even when Carla gets close enough to describe her, all she can say is a cryptic, "She looks like what she is."
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • Everything to do with the woman. The ending implies that she is Ruby’s future self, but this isn’t explicitly stated (the woman also has visibly different hair and clothes to old Ruby, and is played by a different actress). It also doesn’t explain how she could be there, or how she is able to follow Ruby everywhere. And if the woman was always future Ruby, then why did her warning fail to reach them the first time around but succeed on the second? And if she's just Ruby from the future, why are people so frightened of her that they're unable to even properly describe her?
  • What exactly the fairy circle was about, and how it connects to what happens. Would breaking the fairy circle always have had this effect, or did superstitions like this only start becoming powerful after Fourteen unwittingly invited the Toymaker and his legions into the universe by using a salt circle at the universe's edge in "Wild Blue Yonder"? After all, Kate notes to Ruby that UNIT have been facing supernatural threats in addition to the extra-terrestrial ones more and more these days.
• And I Must Scream: Somewhat downplayed, but Ruby's life with the woman always 73 yards away has shades of this. She can't ever let herself get close to anyone, because she knows that either her constant distraction by the woman will alienate them or they'll eventually talk to the woman and be driven away by whatever she says. If she ever tries to actually speak out about this, it will only make those around her more likely to be affected by the woman. This isolation lasts for decades, and, while she seems to have made some peace with it by the end of her life, it has clearly taken an immense toll on her.
  Elderly Ruby: "Everyone has abandoned me my whole life, but I haven't been alone for 65 years."
• Arc Symbol:
  • Susan Twist shows up yet again this episode as a hiker. In a season first, Ruby actually comments on this, asking if they've met before.
  • Snow—appearing twice this time; once while Ruby walks away from the TARDIS to try to reach the town (it's unclear whether Ruby causes this or not), and the second time after Carla disowns Ruby, while Ruby sits outside the apartment door. Forty years later, Ruby mentions that "it never snowed again" following that.
• Arc Words: Whenever a person who's contacted the mysterious woman is asked why they ran away, all they will say is "Ask her". The inn keeper thinks this means asking Ruby, but Ruby instead believes it means asking the mysterious woman.
• As Himself: BBC presenter Amol Rajan interviews Roger ap Gwilliam in a future election-themed version of BBC Politics Live.
• Bait-and-Switch: With the pub patrons twice.
  • When Ruby asks if she can pay with her phone since she doesn't have any cash, the inn keeper questions it as though it's a foreign concept to her, implying the Doctor may have travelled back a few years too early for phones to be used in this way, forcing Ruby to try to explain it... right before she pulls up a scanner and states with visible irritation that of course Ruby can pay with her phone.
  • Then Ruby mentions breaking the fairy circle, and they all begin to act creepily and freak out when someone starts pounding on the door until Ruby screws up the courage to open it... and it's a delivery man trying to get someone to let him in because his arms are full. Cue group laughter at Ruby's expense.
• Big Bad: Roger ap Gwilliam, a corrupt politician who wants to start a nuclear war and whom Ruby must take down in order to break free of her curse.^note Russell T Davies confirmed that Ruby taking down Gwilliam is what allowed Ruby to prevent the events of the episode from occurring at the end.invoked
• Bilingual Bonus: The name of the pub, Y Pren Marw, is Welsh for "The Dead Wood".
• Break the Cutie: Poor Ruby really gets put through hell in this one. It even feels somewhat like a companion's equivalent of "Heaven Sent", with bits of "The Girl Who Waited" and "Turn Left" sprinkled in.
• Butterfly of Doom: Somehow, disturbing the fairy circle managed to warp time so that the Doctor was completely absent despite the TARDIS being nearby. Apparently he just utterly vanished from reality, as UNIT noted his absence after a year.
• The Caligula: Roger ap Gwilliam thankfully doesn't get the chance to become one before being forced out by Ruby, but, had he remained Prime Minister, he was planning on starting a nuclear war, either out of an extreme sense of nationalism, just for the sake of it or as compensation for a feeling of inadequacy.
• Call-Back:
  • The TARDIS's fate mirrors the Fourteenth Doctor's musings on where the TARDIS ends up when the HADS is activated: On an outcrop by the sea, still standing tall after most everything else fades away.
  • Just like in "Space Babies", history is thrown out of whack because a time-traveller carelessly trod where they shouldn't have.
• Chekhov's Gag: In the intro sequence, the Doctor makes an offhanded mention of Roger ap Gwilliam, a particularly dangerous Prime Minister, but then hushes himself to prevent spoilers. It seems to be just small talk, but Ruby eventually lives to see him take power and has to stop him from triggering nuclear Armageddon.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The Doctor drops River Song's old "spoilers" line when talking about events in Ruby's future.
  • When Ruby meets up with a hiker played by Susan Twist, she seems to recognize her as some she met before, but then trails off muttering "no, that was a different—"
  • Kate Stewart explains how a perception filter works to Ruby in a very similar way to how the Tenth Doctor explained it to Martha in "The Sound of Drums", saying that "people notice it, but sort of—sort of don't."
• Crazy-Prepared: Every member of UNIT has gone through extensive psychic training in order to be prepared for everything (even the supernatural), and Kate is apparently so adept at dealing with time fluxes that she's able to recognize on some level that the timeline has been unnaturally suspended based on some event involving Ruby.
• Creator Thumbprint:
  • The episode features a divisive politician and takes place over several years, much like Davies' Years and Years.
  • The episode also features a supernatural force that causes people to irrationally turn against the story's protagonist for reasons they can't adequately explain, much like "The Curse of Clyde Langer" from The Sarah Jane Adventures, with it kicking in when they're exposed to an auditory trigger in both cases (talking to the woman who's following Ruby, hearing Clyde's name).
• Curse Escape Clause: Subverted. When Ruby sees Gwilliam about to take power, she concludes that stopping him will finally break the curse. However, siccing the woman on him seemingly fails to appease her, and it isn't until Ruby dies that the timeline is rewritten and her younger self is freed. Only for Word of God to state that the good deed Ruby did in stopping him was in fact what allowed the timeline rewrite. Eventually.invoked
• Darker and Edgier: Although there is a small amount of levity with the pub patrons pranking Ruby, the episode is otherwise bleak, especially compared with the rest of Fifteen's tenure up to this point. The most cheerful and warm incarnation of the Doctor is almost completely absent, and Ruby is left trapped in an unending nightmare that haunts her every waking moment and destroys all of her relationships. The true villain is a Corrupt Politician hell bent on starting a nuclear war who is strongly implied to also be an honest-to-god rapist (two things that can and do exist in real life, and not infrequently in the same person) and even though Ruby does triumph over Gwilliam, her stalker does not release her until the day she dies. Only the ending preventing the events of the episode from occurring in the first place stops it being utterly depressing.
• Death Glare: Both Carla and Kate shoot some rather vicious glares at Ruby after being exposed to the woman's influence, now both fearing and hating her despite being nothing but loving and friendly mere minutes earlier.
• Deconstruction: You know that thing where the Doctor will offhandedly mention some off-screen adventure he had or some knowledge he has about the future from a companion's perspective, such as future wars or the fate of humanity? In this episode, we get to find out that living through history without the Doctor letting you skip the boring bits really sucks.
• Doing In the Wizard: Seemingly averted, which is very unusual for Doctor Who proper. The various spin-off series and the Expanded Universe materials have sometimes been more open to the genuinely supernatural, but the main series – and more to the point, the Doctor as a character – has generally been deeply insistent that no matter what insanity is happening, it's not magic. Here, the plot seemingly gets kicked off by the Doctor and Ruby breaking a fairy circle. Kate even says very casually that UNIT accepts the existence of the supernatural and takes precautions against it. To put things in perspective, back in the 80s when "Silver Nemesis" depicted Lady Peinforte's magic actually working, the writers felt obliged to throw in a line in "The Curse of Fenric" establishing that the "magic" had in fact been the work of Fenric, an entity that could be seen as a Sufficiently Advanced Alien.
• The Dreaded: The woman turns Ruby into this for anyone who speaks to her.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: Gwilliam's campaign has a lot of women and people of color volunteering.
• Face-Revealing Turn: Near the end of the episode, when Ruby is on her death bed, the woman slowly turns to reveal herself, but the lights flicker off before the audience sees anything.
• Fantasy Creep: Openly addressed by Kate, who notes that UNIT has recently found itself dealing with more and more overtly supernatural threats, to the point that her response team has started arming themselves with salt and silver "in case of witchcraft" in addition to their standard anti-alien gear.^note Though silver bullets had previously been established as something UNIT kept on hand just in case.
• Faux Affably Evil: Roger ap Gwilliam, from what little we see of him in person, seems superficially polite to those around him and has a habit of constantly stopping to greet everyone nearby, but this is all to endear himself to the public when his actual goal is to start a nuclear war and he is hinted to be a sexual predator behind closed doors.
• Foreshadowing:
  • There are a couple of hints that the pub patrons are just trolling Ruby with their tale of "Mad Jack":
    • The pub owner reacts with confusion when Ruby asks if she can pay with her phone, suggesting to viewers that the episode is set in the past. However, an earlier blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot shows one of the teenagers using a modern smartphone which indicates that she was just messing with Ruby.
    • One of the teenagers in the pub visibly starts laughing when the other patrons start the whole "fairy circle" spiel, foreshadowing that they were making it up for a joke at Ruby's expense.
  • The first time "ask her" is heard in the episode proper, the bartender immediately approaches Ruby and demands answers, only for Ruby to point towards the mysterious woman. Later on, Cherry asks what Ruby said to cause Carla's disappearance, but Ruby again blames the woman. Come The Reveal, we find out they're (possibly) one and the same.
  • Ruby tells Kate that she tried positioning the woman in front of a police car to see what would happen. This shows that Ruby has some control over where the woman is standing, something she uses against Roger ap Gwilliam later in the episode.
  • One of Roger ap Gwilliam's aides bemoans the fact that he still stops to greet everyone nearby. That ends up including the mysterious woman who appeared right next to him (despite the suspected perception filter over her), which proves to be his undoing.
• For the Evulz: Roger ap Gwilliam's motive, as best as we can guess it. He apparently wants to start a nuclear war purely because he gets to use Britain's nuclear arsenal (bemoaning the fact that NATO didn't use any nukes in the Great Russian War of 2031), with no apparent reason beyond that as to why he would want to nuke any other country, other than a vague (and possibly insincere) comment about how he refuses to let the UK be looked down on by other nations.
• Friendly Enemy: By the time she's in her forties, Ruby considers the woman to be the closest thing she has left to a friend.
• From Bad to Worse: Things start out pretty bad for Ruby in this episode, with the Doctor suddenly vanishing right next to her and an old woman appearing out of nowhere and following her everywhere she goes. Whenever anyone tries talking to the woman something happens that causes them to run away from Ruby in fear, including Ruby's own mother who abandons her to fend for herself. However, just when things appear to be at their bleakest, UNIT get involved, moving in to try and save Ruby from her nightmarish situation... and then they get affected by the woman as well, causing Ruby to lose the support of the only people left that could have possibly helped her. From this point on, Ruby is well and truly alone, and is ultimately forced to live her entire life in near-isolation with the old woman following her.
• Gainax Ending: At the end of the episode, it turns out that the old woman is seemingly Ruby herself at the end of her life. How did she go back in time? How did she survive all this time? What did she say that terrified everyone so much? If the elderly Ruby immediately prevents the fairy circle from being broken, then where did the old Ruby who's been following her for 65 years fit into the timeline and why did she only succeed on the second round? Or was she a completely different entity who simply swapped places with old Ruby at the end? This episode leaves all these questions unanswered, and it's all the scarier for it.
• Gilligan Cut: When Ruby offers to volunteer for Gwilliam, she says she'll do anything, even carry the coats. Smash cut to her looking incredibly bored standing at an event holding a bunch of coats.
• Glasses of Aging: 40-year-old Ruby wears a pair of glasses, but otherwise does not look significantly different from her younger self.
• Great Offscreen War: Apparently there was a "Great Russian War" in 2031 that did not go nuclear, with "not a single rocket" fired, implying either that the war was conventional and that NATO and Russia played it safe and chose not to use nuclear weapons, or that the war involved other methods of making war such as cyberwarfare.
• Hero of Another Story: Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and UNIT. When Ruby wonders out loud how the Earth has been managing in the Doctor's absence, Kate tells her that's classified but "by the skin of [their] teeth."
• Hope Spot:
  • A year after being followed by the strange woman and losing contact with her mother, Ruby meets with Kate. Kate assures her that UNIT are prepared for the woman, and it seems like she might finally get some answers. And then all of the UNIT officers, including Kate, go dead silent... and then they leave.
  • After using the woman's effect to defeat Roger ap Gwilliam, Ruby believes that this is what the woman wanted and that she would finally leave her alone. Cut to 40 years later, and the woman is still following her.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Ruby's main foe this episode isn't the ominous figure that follows her and makes everyone (including her own mother) abandon her; it's Roger ap Gwilliam—a nationalistic young man from Wales who wants nothing more than to get power and do as much damage as possible with it.
• I Have No Daughter!: Following her conversation with the woman, Carla disowns Ruby, stating that "even [her] real mother didn't want [her]".
• Implied Rape: It's never outright stated what Gwilliam did to Marti, but from the interest he takes in her, her saying that he's a monster in a hollow tone when talking to Ruby after his victory and Ruby apologizing for not helping her sooner, it can be inferred that raped her.
• Internal Homage: An episode written by Russell T Davies that sees the main duo separated, while the in-focus character encounters a mysterious entity in the form of a woman that has completely inexplicable abilities, that is able to turn people against the protagonist just with their words, and by the end its origin, nature and abilities are all left completely unexplained? Sounds familiar...
• Jack of All Trades: When Ruby first spots Roger ap Gwilliam on the television, he's telling an anecdote about how he did a lot of manual labor jobs when he was younger, name-dropping this trope as the origin of his nickname, "Mad Jack".
• Kick the Dog: Ruby goes through the wringer with people being made to abandon her, but the worst is her mother, Carla, who disowns her, giving no further explanation besides stating that not even her birth mother wanted her.
• Lousy Lovers Are Losers: One of Ruby's partners over the years complains that she's always distant, including in bed, even as she stops paying attention to him, distracted by an election broadcast showing a debate starring Mad Jack. She comes back to the conversation by acknowledging he's right about everything, that it was never going to work, and it's all her fault... except for the bed thing, that was all him.
• Lower-Deck Episode: This is the first of three Doctor-lite episodes in Fifteen's era.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Roger ap Gwilliam sharing his former "Mad Jack" nickname with the demon from the village legends. Is it a coincidence, or is he a reincarnation of said demon, released when the Doctor disturbs the fairy circle?
• Mind Screw: All over the place. Despite the ostensible reveal that the old woman is actually a glimpse of Ruby's future self on her deathbed, we have basically no answers as to what is going on, and in fact that reveal actually raises a lot more questions than it answers. The reason for the 73 yard distance, the origins of the fairy circle, the fate of the Doctor after his disappearance, and the reason why everyone - including Carla - abandoned her upon hearing from the woman are all left completely unexplained.
  • To add another level of strangeness, Ruby tells the Doctor that she's been to Wales twice at the start of the episode. When events are repeated at the end of the episode she tells him she's been to Wales three times. There's a clear implication that she somehow remembers at least parts of the alternative universe, but this is muddled by the fact that this version of Ruby exists before the Doctor stepped in the circle, suggesting that the timelines may have occurred earlier than we thought. The Doctor's dialogue is the same, but an eagle-eyed viewer will see that his delivery and movements are different.
  • Even though the episode strongly implies that the woman is Ruby from the future, she is not played by the same actress as old Ruby (the woman is played by Hilary Hobson, and old Ruby is played by Amanda Walker.) Walker is clearly mobile enough to stand in one spot and gesticulate (especially as the footage of the woman is a repeating loop), so the decision to cast two different people only adds to the weirdness.
• Mirthless Laughter: Both Ruby and Marti start laughing uncontrollably when the mystery woman causes Gwilliam to run away in terror and resign as Prime Minister.
• Mythology Gag: This isn’t the first time one of the main characters recognised a minor character because their actor (in this case Susan Twist) appeared in a different role in a previous episode, as the First Doctor recognised a minor character called Man in Macintosh in British-set episode "The Feast of Steven" because his actor, Reg Pritchard, appeared in another role in "The Crusade", set centuries earlier in Jaffa.
• Nature Tinkling: After the Doctor disappears, Ruby at first suspects him of doing this behind the TARDIS.
• Neologism: Enid Meadows, a woman in a pub that Ruby takes shelter in, coins the word Sempre distant by combing some Latin words to describe the woman following her; she's not quite following her but also never too far away, always maintaining the same distance, but always distant.
• Nerves of Steel: Downplayed with Kate. She's affected by the woman, just like everyone else, but while everyone else immediately runs away from Ruby after speaking to the woman, Kate keeps enough of her composure to speak to Ruby and walks away relatively calmly.
• Never Trust a Trailer: Both the trailer and synopsis for the episode made it seem like the episode would be focused on the Doctor and Ruby trapped in an isolated Welsh village, being stalked by some kind of supernatural entity called "Mad Jack". In reality, almost all of the scenes shown in the teaser are from the first few minutes of the episode, the Doctor is barely present at all, and Ruby leaves the village after getting kicked out of the pub and never comes back except to visit the cliff where the TARDIS is parked.
• Next Sunday A.D.: The vision of 2046 doesn't look much different from 2024. No flying cars, no super-fancy tech. And neither does 2086, with Ruby even commenting that a voice-activated light that the nurse told her about was around when she was young. The only hints of technological advancement are when Gwilliam talks about the "ap" in his name and says it's "not like those old apps people used to have on their phones", a holographic advertisement outside Ruby's block of flats, and when Ruby's driver mentions that she can't get any closer to the cliff because there's "no signal" for the car's engine. Also, as usual for SF depictions of the future, all the screens become glassy and transparent at some point, TVs even reverting to a bulbous and rounded, magnifying glass-like design.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!:
  • The Doctor seemingly caused the events of the episode by breaking the fairy circle when he stopped looking where he was going.
  • Ruby accidentally enables Gwilliam to do...whatever he did to Marti by reassuring him about her loyalty, allowing him to single her out as someone who won't report what he does to her.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Roger ap Gwilliam is a Composite Character based on various real-life politicians, most of them right-wing populists.
• Nothing Is Scarier: While we do ultimately learn that the old lady was Ruby at the end of her life, we don't learn how or why this happened, nor do we get any clear indication it can't happen again. Nor do we learn why the Doctor disappeared, where he went, or what the old lady said to make everyone run away scared from Ruby and shun her. We don't learn who placed the fairy circle or why, since the pub patrons (their pretence about Mad Jack being the ghost of a psychotic ex-patron aside) don't appear to have known about it before Ruby mentioned it, despite the cliff being close to their village, and think what Ruby and the Doctor stepped in was just "bits of string". All these unsolved mysteries just add to the nightmarish feel of the episode.
• Nuke 'Em: The central plank of Gwilliam's election platform, and his primary goal while in office. Thankfully, Ruby managed to put a stop to that.
• Number of the Beast: 73 yards is 66.7 meters, as noted by Kate during her conversation with Ruby.
• Oh, Crap!: Two in a row. First Ruby hears Roger ap Gwilliam's name mentioned in a news interview, then a bigger moment when she hears him say that his nickname was "Mad Jack."
• Out of Focus: As a Doctor-lite episode, Fifteen only has two scenes at the beginning and the end.
• Out-of-Genre Experience: Arguably even more so than the deeply fantastical "The Devil's Chord". While Doctor Who is of course no stranger to frightening episodes, this one feels like a true horror movie, with a threat that cannot be reasoned with, run from, or explained. Fittingly, it's one of only four episodes in the series to date not to feature any version of the show's intro^note The other three are "Sleep No More", "The Woman Who Fell to Earth", and "Resolution", and it's one where the Doctor is pretty much completely absent.
• President Evil: A Prime Minister Evil in the person of Roger ap Gwilliam, the British Prime Minister in 2046. Not only is he heavily implied to be a rapist, but, according to the Doctor, he would have brought the world to the brink of nuclear war had Ruby not ended his premiership prematurely, and an interview we see him giving on Politics Live implies that he actively wants a nuclear war purely for the sake of being the person to launch the nuclear weapons.
• Putting on the Reich: In a more subdued take on it, Roger ap Gwilliam's party logo is clearly inspired by the logo of the British Union of Fascists under Oswald Mosley.
• Rape as Drama: It is heavily implied but not outright stated that Roger ap Gwilliam sexually assaulted Marti, given her traumatised stare and referring to him as a "monster" after he wins the election. She also joins Ruby in laughing mirthlessly as Gwilliam runs away after the old woman speaks to him. To make it worse, Ruby unintentionally inflicted the man on Marti as part of her plan to "save the world", and she apologises to Marti for not acting sooner.
• Red Baron: Roger ap Gwilliam was called "Mad Jack" as a boy due to bring a jack-of-all-trades.
• Ret-Gone: After old Ruby is on her deathbed, she somehow time-travels back to when her younger self and the Doctor first arrive in Wales. Ruby noticing her older self prevents the Doctor from breaking the fairy circle, preventing the timeline shown in this episode, and the old Ruby is wiped out of existence.
• Riddle for the Ages:
  • What was the woman whispering to people that caused all of them, even Carla and Kate, to completely turn their backs on Ruby? And what exactly happened to the Doctor at the moment all this began?
  • Why 73 yards precisely? It's apparently important enough to be the title of the episode, and both Kate and Ruby confirm that the Woman's distance is always exactly 73 yards, implying some scientific or supernatural significance, but no hint as to what that significance might be is ever given. It becomes even stranger in the season finale when it turns out that 73 yards is exactly the range of the TARDIS' perception filter, but there's no hint at all how these two things might be connected.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Downplayed. In the revised timeline, Ruby mentions that she has been to Wales three times: once to see Shygirl, once because a boy invited her, and once "now" (read: in the "Mad Jack" timeline, now wiped out).
• Scenery Gorn: That lonely bit of hillside with a single tree bent into a curve by the wind, filmed with dim lighting and low saturation perfectly captures the lonely abandonment Ruby feels throughout the episode.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: The woman has this effect on people, causing them to completely run away and/or abandon Ruby and only cryptically say "Ask her!" when begged for a reason. Roger ap Gwilliam resigns as Prime Minister and seemingly becomes a recluse after Ruby manipulates him into talking to her.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Ruby eventually surmises that this is the woman's goal when the Doctor's warning about Roger ap Gwilliam starts to come true in 2046, and weaponizes the woman's presence and mysterious powers to force Roger to resign, averting a global nuclear crisis. Eventually, however, it's revealed that the woman's purpose is even greater than this: she's the old Ruby from this timeline, traveling back to the moment the Doctor stepped on the fairy circle to influence her younger self to prevent him from disappearing... or something to that effect.
• Shaped Like Itself: When asked to describe the woman, Carla can only say, "She looks like what she is."
• Smash to Black: After Ruby delivers the last line of the episode, the screen cuts to black before the Next Time trailer.
• Special Edition Title: For the fourth time in the show's history, the title sequence and theme do not appear, instead being replaced with text overlays naming the episode, actors, and producers. Given the Doctor's sudden absence this episode, it's a cheeky wink at the audience.
• Surreal Horror: The Doctor vanishes without warning, and Ruby is stalked by a strange woman who remains 73 yards away from her at all times, no matter where she goes or how fast she travels. The woman is constantly repeating the same phrases in sign language, but these phrases are meaningless in relation to anything else that happens in the episode. Anyone who talks to the woman runs away screaming and turns hostile to Ruby, but won't explain what the woman said to them other than telling people to "Ask her!" This lasts for Ruby's entire life until she is on her deathbed, at which point the woman appears facing away from her and turns around, but the shot cuts away before we see her face. The ending implies that the woman is a future version of Ruby, but there are many details left hanging that don't support this interpretation. The ending raises significantly many more questions than it answers, and nothing is explained.
• Take That!: Roger ap Gwilliam implies on an TV interview with the BBC that he wants to use the UK's nukes, and the presenter spells this out to the audience as he tries (and fails) to get a confirmation out of him. It's unlikely that it got cut out from the interview, despite Gwilliam wanting it to be (since interviewees don't generally have the power to decide what gets cut), and it's the sort of admission that'd be in all the newspapers and news websites. He still gets voted in as MP and his party still gets a majority of seats.
• Time-Compression Montage: Shots of Ruby's birthday cards appear in between snippets of her daily life to show the passing of the years, with the Roger subplot occurring after a shot of a card that Ruby received for her 40th birthday.
• Time-Shifted Actor: Ruby is still played by Millie Gibson while in her 30s and her 40s during the Time Skips, but the final version of her in her 80s is played by Amanda Walker.
• Title Drop: 73 yards is how far away the mysterious figure stays from Ruby at all times.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Anyone who directly converses with the woman becomes far more hostile to Ruby. This is especially pronounced with Carla, who goes from being Ruby's loving adopted mother to evicting her, disowning her, invoking the fact that her birth mother abandoned her, and filing an injunction against her.
• Transparent Tech: Shows up in the 2040s and beyond to signify time passing. The first instance we see is a screen replacing a decorative glass pane at a bar, which could well be a normal OLED, but then during the inauguration scene Ruby's smartphone is fully transparent, though the back panel is black (presumably for privacy). In her apartment, we also see a bulbous semi-transparent television that looks a lot like a CRT screen without the electron-gun box.
• Trumplica: Despite being Prime Minister of the UK instead of president of the US, there are some similarities between Roger ap Gwilliam and Trump: Roger puts an "our country first" approach at the forefront of his political campaign (with "Bigger, Better, Bolder Britain" being a similar catchphrase to "Make America Great Again"), he's implied to be terrible to his employees and especially women, including sexual harassment/rape, and, according to a line of the Doctor, he would eventually cause a nuclear war, something some people feared would happen during Trump's presidency.
• The Un-Reveal: In this episode, it isn't revealed what the woman said that made people turn on Ruby, nor just why the Doctor disappeared.
• Wham Shot:
  • When Ruby looks at a political debate on TV and sees that the chyron identifies one candidate as "Roger ap Gwilliam" — a man identified by the Doctor as the most dangerous Prime Minister in British history at the beginning of the episode.
  • At the start of the episode, Ruby ducks below a hill and can see that the woman is no longer behind her. Then she turns around and sees that the woman is now standing 73 yards ahead of her.
  • Ruby thinks that giving up and leaving Wales will make the woman leave her alone, but she can see the woman everywhere when she looks out of the train windows, proving that no matter how fast she travels or how far she goes, she cannot escape.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Played for Horror. Even by the end of the episode, with at least some answers as to what the woman was and the loop apparently broken, we get absolutely no hint as to what happened to the Doctor in the original timeline.
• Writers Cannot Do Math: According to Kate, 73 yards is 66.7 metres. In reality, it's 66.7512m.

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