Doctor Who just finished Season One…which is really Series 14 or Season 40, depending on how you count. The season offered many new features, from a new Doctor played by Ncuti Gatwa to more money behind the scenes courtesy of a deal with Disney. It also offered new (or at least underexplored) themes to the show, including a heavy lean toward the supernatural.

If there’s one thing that defines this most recent season of Doctor Who, it’s the theme of stories. The season is structured like a fairy tale, and the stories the characters experience–and one they invent–drives the narrative of the Doctor’s latest adventure.

To illustrate what I mean, let’s go episode by episode through the tale of Ruby Sunday.

Episode 1: The Church on Ruby Road

Doctor Who‘s first Christmas special in six years introduces Ruby Sunday, the Doctor’s next companion. Although he appeared during the previous 60th anniversary special, this episode also serves as the first prolonged look at Ncuti Gatwa’s 15th Doctor.

This episode plants the seeds of a mystery that runs through the entire season: who is Ruby Sunday’s birth mother? In the midst of time-traveling goblins and baby-stealing shenanigans, the Doctor gets a single brief glimpse of the mystery woman after she leaves baby Ruby at a church.

The goblins in this story evoke mythological creatures, but Ruby herself is the biggest storybook element. By establishing her as a foundling and hiding her mother’s identity, the show sets her up as a “chosen one” figure. From Moses to Harry Potter, the foundling is a central figure in stories for as long as humans have told them. The scene of Ruby’s mother walking away with a cloak hiding her face creates the expectation that she is someone of potentially cosmic importance–and the subversion of that expectation turns out to be the key to the season.

Episode 2: Space Babies

Ruby’s first adventure aboard the TARDIS is a silly-seeming romp with a lot of heart in it. Whisked away aboard a ship where babies are genetically engineered and then abandoned as unwanted immigrants, Ruby and the Doctor find themselves seeking a home for the children while also trying to solve the mystery of the bogeyman.

“Space Babies” continues the season’s storybook theme by presenting a monster that is literally a character in a book. The bogeyman was created by a computer glitch that turned mucus from the ship’s babies into a living creature. Notably, the monster isn’t truly evil–it was designed to scare people, but never actually harms anyone. The bogeyman’s true nature is more than just a twist in this story; it demonstrates that people create their own stories based on limited evidence. Because the bogeyman looks scary and lurks in a broken part of the ship, everyone on board believes it to be a monster. They become invested in the story of the bogeyman, even without strong evidence to back that story up.

This episode also includes some very notable foreshadowing from the Doctor: “There’s no one like me in the whole wide universe. No one like me exists, and that’s true of everyone.
It’s not a problem…it’s a superpower.”

Episode 3: The Devil’s Chord

In a season meant to be a jumping on point, “The Devil’s Chord” standsout because it calls back to the 60th Anniversary specials, particularly “The Giggle.” Here the Maestro, daughter of the Toymaker, attempts to extinguish all music from the universe.

The fact that the Maestro is banished from the universe with the playing of a single chord hearkens to the way villains from fables often get defeated: finding the answer is difficult, but putting it into action is easy.

The Maestro defeats the Doctor and Ruby, but their actions allow others (in this case John Lennon and Paul McCartney) to finish the job. This is old Doctor Who tradition, dating as far back as the First Doctor story “The Space Museum.” The episode includes several other callbacks to classic Who, such as the Doctor bringing Ruby back to the present to show that actions taken in the past can destroy the future (a very clear reference to “The Pyramids of Mars,” when he does the same thing for Sarah Jane Smith).

Finally, this episode contains a rare reference to Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter and original companion. That reference, seemingly just part of a conversation at the time, becomes a major factor in the series finale.

Episode 4: Boom

With the Doctor stuck on a landmine for most of the episode, “Boom” provides little opportunity for the storybook theme that runs through most of the season. It does, however, reinforce a couple of recurring motifs. The Doctor once again talks about being a father, bringing up his connection to Susan for the second time this season. And, for the third episode in a row, Ruby makes it snow.

The snow falls after Ruby has been shot, when the ambulance treating her searches for her next of kin and finds none. It snows when Ruby is reminded that she doesn’t know who her mother in, emphasizing that this secret is very important in the grand scheme of things.

Episode 5: 73 yards

In terms of greater Doctor Who lore, this episode and “Empire of Death” combine to establish that the perception filter on the TARDIS extends out to 73 yards. As a Doctor-lite episode, “73 yards” gives Ruby the spotlight while leaning hard into the supernatural storybook elements that run through this season.

The Doctor vanishes moments after a faerie circle in Wales gets broken, and Ruby finds herself stalked by a woman who stays exactly 73 yards away and causes anyone who approaches the strange figure to flee in terror. This power extends even through UNIT’s psychic shielding, although in the Doctor Who universe it’s rare for anything UNIT makes to actually work as intended.

“73 Yards” evokes old faerie tales and ghost stories. Although we discover the strange woman’s identity, we never get an explanation as to what she says that drives people away or how she remains semper distance from Ruby.

A few episodes prior to this season, in “Wild Blue Yonder,” the Doctor accidentally unleashed the Toymaker by spreading salt at the edge of the universe, “where the walls are thin and all things are possible.” Here, the Doctor disappears after meddling in a superstition on a cliffside, “a boundary between the land and the sea…a liminal space, neither here nor there, where rules are suspended.” Thus, we see an important recurrence of the idea that strange things happen at boundaries, where the rules of reality twist and change.

So what happens at 73 yards, the boundary where the perception filter of the TARDIS ends and perceived reality begins? Perhaps the most dangerous superstition of them all…

Episode 6: Finetime

The season began with goblins and a bogeyman–creatures that have a place in horror but also humor. After “73 Yards,” we see more of the harmful effects of stories. “Finetime” delves into social media bubbles, but ultimately what we put out on social media is a story we tell about ourselves.

The computers used to record these stories eventually turn on their creators out of sheer malice. The rich kids of Finetime are arrogant, callous, and self-centered, and their stories reflect that. Ricky September is the exception to that rule, primarily because he turns his bubble off and looks outside to learn from others.

Ultimately, the people of Finetime flee their community and strike out into the wilderness, a place of fables and legends itself. Their fate seems dire given their ignorance and inexperience, and it seems unlikely that they will learn from their past mistakes. After all, they reject the Doctor’s offer of safe passage to a peaceful planet simply because he doesn’t look like them. They have “standards” to maintain, and like many racists their blind adherence to those “standards” lead them to ignore others who could broaden their horizons or even save their lives.

Episode 7: Rogue

The most traditional Doctor Who episode of the season, “Rogue” presents shapeshifting aliens with a twist: they are cosplayers drawn by drama.

The Doctor and his new romantic interest Rogue use the Chuldurs’ need for drama against them, baiting them with soap opera theatrics. The aliens’ ultimate defeat comes because they can’t help themselves and simply must complete the drama with a climactic wedding scene. Sometimes, you can’t just walk away from a good story.

Episode 8: The Legend of Ruby Sunday

The two-part finale deals with the effects of the stories we tell and how they can read us to the wrong conclusion. In the first part, the Doctor winds up on the receiving end of this lesson. Convinced throughout the episode that his granddaughter Susan has somehow been following him through time and space, he walks right into what he knows to be a trap.

The figure the Doctor thinks is his granddaughter is actually an avatar of Sutekh, the previously-defeated god of death. (Well, technically he’s an immensely powerful alien known as an Osiran, but that’s effectively a god by Doctor Who standards.)

The twist about Susan is targeted not only at the Doctor but also the audience. From the mention of the Doctor’s granddaughter in “The Devil’s Chord” to the name of the actress who kept appearing in different roles throughout the season (Susan Twist), everything seemed pointed at a return of this long-lost character. Like the Doctor, we pulled together coincidence and incidental evidence to lead us to the conclusion we wanted.

In this episode, it was the Doctor who fell for this trap. Fortunately for everyone, Sutekh would fall for the same thing in the conclusion.

Episode 9: Empire of Death

After Sutekh reveals that his “Susan” was merely a trap for the Doctor, he executes an eons-spanning plan to eliminate all life in the universe. Ultimately, he leaves only two people alive: the Doctor and Ruby.

Why does he leave them alive? Because they are investigating a secret that Sutekh himself is obsessed with: the identity of Ruby’s mother.

Riding on the TARDIS as an undetected hitchhiker for potentially thousands of years, Sutekh has seen just about everything in the cosmos. But when the Doctor landed near the church on Ruby Road, he didn’t see the face of Ruby’s mother. As it turns out, Ruby’s mother was spotted by a CCTV camera near the TARDIS…66 meters, or just shy of 73 yards, away. The moment that Sutekh, the Doctor, and the security camera all spotted Ruby’s mother, she was right on the edge of the TARDIS’ perception filter. In other words, she was at one of those all-important boundaries.

Ironically, Sutekh had already killed Ruby’s mother when he spread his dust of death across the Earth. But he didn’t know that for sure. Something that the great Sutekh didn’t know couldn’t just be a single woman walking the edge of an unseen boundary; it had to have greater significance. Sutekh’s obsession with Ruby’s mother invested the moment with extreme importance–enough to make it snow whenever the mystery became a focus, and enough to keep him from killing his old enemy.

Ultimately, Sutekh is defeated because of the story he tells. He never accepts the possibility that Ruby’s mother is a normal human, and that’s what she is–a scared girl getting her child out of an abusive household. But, as the Doctor stated back in “Space Babies,” everyone has the superpower of being unique. By being a normal human in an abnormal situation, Ruby’s mother saved the universe.

This season of Doctor Who explored boundaries and stories. When we reach the boundaries of our knowledge, we tell stories to explain what we don’t understand. Those stories can become terrifying horrors or slices of hope to keep us going. They can lead us into traps, but they also have the power to overthrow the gods themselves.

Images: BBC