#im gonna finish my dw complaining in a few days and go rewatch the s10 finale

[moonlitlex]

honestly i could write essay after essay about everything that made that finale bad. and i will. however comma i genuinely do not care about any of these characters enough to want to do that. i don't want to spend my time critiquing and analysing a show where all the characters are boring and the plot is all deus ex machina.

LIKE. WHO IS RUBY. WHO IS SHE. WHO FUCKING IS SHE.

she's done with the whole SEASON. she was in EVERY episode. and we literally don't know anything about her apart from the whole mom mystery thing which is all for the big reveal at the end anyway?

and i can talk about the ways in which that was unsatisfying and so on. but like what does that tell us about RUBY? what do we know about HER

and the answer is honestly very little. ruby is such a stock doctor who companion that it's just kind of boring. she gets a big mystery, because of fucking course she does, and who is she outside of that? nice?? sweet?? does as she's told?? (this one is fucking boring btw) kind of like the chibnall companions, she's whoever she needs to be for the situation at hand. the writers say ruby needs to be shocked by landing on a planet after 6 months of travelling with the doctor, so she is. she isn't a person. she has one desire, which is to find her mother, and the only reason she gets to have that is that rtd needs to set up whatever the fuck was going on with her mom for the finale. that's it.

and the doctor. like why should we care about this doctor specifically, outside of the fact that this is the character we have been following for the whole show? who is he??? like seriously who is he? he doesn't get any character development? what makes him different from other doctors? who the fuck is this guy????

i said earlier that ncuti's doctor is what you get when you throw all the doctors in a blender and i stand by that. he's definitely the doctor, but he's like an average of all the other doctors with nothing particularly unique or special about him. ruby is what you get when you throw all the companions in a blender. definitely a companion, with nothing unique or special about her either. much like chibnall's companions, all she gets to do is stand around and watch.

and the crucial missing factor is we don't get to see what they see in each other. which from the companion's perspective is still excusable because here's a dude with a spaceship time machine and that sounds kind of sick so lets go and travel with him is an understandable motivation. but what does he see in her? because there's always a moment where you can see the doctor sort of think, oh yeah, i should travel with this person.

but there isn't really this moment with ruby. it's kind of like with how thirteen meets her companions. she just sort of runs into them, and now they're stuck together. and ncuti does get to emote more than jodie, so at least you can see that ruby and the doctor do like each other, but their relationship isn't really fleshed out ever. and like i can buy ruby risking her life for him, because that is just sort of what happens on doctor who, but it's not based on anything. we don't see them develop this trust of each other. their relationship doesn't get developed. it just appears fully formed.