Doctor Who just released its latest Christmas special, "Joy to the World," and while I enjoyed the episode as a whole, it doubled down on a concept from the season one finale. The show keeps telling us that Ruby is incredibly important. Maybe not to the fate of the universe, but certainly to the Doctor. The problem is, I don't buy it.
When they parted ways in "Empire of Death," the Doctor said that Ruby "changed me. I talk about family in a way that I never did before. It's because of you. You have made my life bigger and better." That's a fairly common sentiment for the Doctor to hold when losing a companion, but it bothered me then and it bothers me now. Because we just haven't seen enough of their relationship for that kind of comment to feel earned.
The official stance of the show is that Ruby is a turning point in the Doctor's life, making him reconsider the way he sees the world and how he interacts with it. But that sentiment just isn't born out by the show itself. The show, as written, actually makes Ruby have less of a relationship with the Doctor than practically any companion before her, which makes it hard to accept the idea that their dynamic is unique and impactful.
Ruby and the Doctor spent very little time together—on or off-screen
Relationships take time, but the Doctor and Ruby didn't spend much time together. Her entire term as a companion took less than a year, and six months of that happened off-screen between "Space Babies" and "The Devil's Chord." That might have been acceptable if they were demonstrably closer after that time jump, but Ruby still doesn't know anything about the Doctor, and he doesn't seem to know much about her. After more than half of their time together passes, the Doctor is still having to exposition-dump basic facts about his life.
Now, time spent with a companion is complicated for Doctor Who, because technically several companions should just be a blink of an eye in the Doctor's life. His entire time as the 10th Doctor takes place in the years between age 904 and 907, so Rose, Martha, and Donna should seem pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things. But they don't, because the writers took the time to show how they changed the Doctor.
The structure of this last season actively works against the feeling that Ruby and the Doctor were closer than their time together would suggest. From her introduction to her choice to leave, Ruby was in a total of nine episodes. That's less than the standard 13, sure, but not so bad. Until you start to look into the way the episodes themselves worked.
"The Church on Ruby Road" is a great character introduction, giving equal time to Ruby and the Doctor and establishing their relationship. But the pair doesn't stay together like this at any other point in the season. In "Space Babies" and "The Devil's Chord," they spend most of the episode together but then split up to play different roles in the climax. This is fine, but it means that their most significant moments happen as individuals, not as a team.
That wouldn't be a problem if not for the next four episodes. Ruby spends about a quarter of "Boom" unconscious. The Doctor is gone from "73 Yards" for all but the first two minutes and the last three or so. "Dot and Bubble" hardly features either character, especially together. And in "Rogue," they're quickly thrown onto different plotlines, the Doctor with Rogue and Ruby with Emily.
By the time we get to the two-part finale, the relationship between the Doctor and Ruby should have been firmly established, but it wasn't. There are clues that they have a close relationship, but it's a bad case of telling, not showing. The early Davies days spent a lot of time on the companions, giving them intricate home lives and having those home lives clash with the Doctor, physically and morally. But that's just not present in the latest season.
Anita had better development with the Doctor
To really drive the point home, let's get back to the Christmas special. In "Joy to the World," Anita gets the Doctor to admit that he wants to talk to Ruby, mentioning that he keeps staring at the phone. He laments that he has to "let people get on with their lives," despite the fact that there's no real reason he couldn't call. Ruby left to get to know her family; she didn't reject him.
But while we're being hit over the head with the idea that the Doctor has this relationship with Ruby that is fundamental to his being, the episode creates another relationship that feels more earned. The Doctor stays at the Sandringham Hotel for a year, and his dynamic with Anita shows it. "Joy to the World" includes an eight-and-a-half minute interlude of the Doctor's time at the hotel, and it is rich with detail.
In addition to plenty of Doctor Who jokes (I was a personal fan of the plunger gag), we see the Doctor changing. He enjoys working on the mundane tasks around the hotel, and he realizes the importance of slowing down to spend time with people. He and Anita tell each other stories, play games, develop inside jokes. Even without her knowing all of the sci-fi elements of his life, Anita connects with the Doctor on a personal level. While the actual events included in this section aren't anything particularly unique, they have a distinctly intimate feel.
That's the thing, really. Intimacy. We can feel the connection when the Doctor tells Anita that the TARDISes like her. A couple clips of joking and games make it work when Anita tells him that Chair Night is her favorite part of the week. When he finally leaves to handle the situation with Joy and the star, the Doctor has been changed. He's more emotionally available, and he truly understands what it means to leave Anita behind.
After less than ten minutes of screen time and approximately the same length of in-universe time he shared with Ruby, I believe that the Doctor loves Anita. Maybe not romantically, maybe not the way she seems to love him, but he loves her. Their lives will forever have a before and after of this year. And I love Millie Gibson, and I enjoy the character of Ruby Sunday, but she just doesn't have that.
There are theories that Anita will be back, and I'd be happy if she was, but otherwise this is a one-off character that has a more effective dynamic with the Doctor than a companion who was there for a full season. That's a problem, especially if they're going to continue talking about how special Ruby's bond with the Doctor was.
This is because of Davies's not-reboot, reboot style
Part of this problem came down to scheduling, as Ncuti Gatwa was finishing Sex Education concurrently with filming the first season. Part of it is the writing not doing enough to make that connection feel real. But overall, I'd blame this problem on Russell T. Davies's perspective this past season.
The 60th anniversary specials were a celebration of the 2008 season, and the finale brought back a companion from 1986 and a villain from 1975. Even so, the newest season was intended as a fresh starting point for new fans. That's why it's called Season One, and why the Doctor is having to explain so much about himself, the TARDIS, and Gallifrey to Ruby.
While that worked pretty well in 2005, when there hadn't been new Doctor Who on screens since the 1996 TV movie or the final season in 1989, it really doesn't work when there hasn't been a gap. Fans watched Jodie Whittaker's era end with a love letter to the previous Doctors and companions, relished seeing David Tennant come back to fix his greatest failure in abandoning Donna, and then tuned in to a new season that seems to say that none of that matters anymore.
The show claims that Ruby fundamentally changed how the Doctor understands family, and there's a little bit of evidence supporting that. They have a shared foundling background, and Ruby is the first person to really push the Doctor about his own abandonment of Susan. But this all seems to hinge on the idea of the Doctor as some loner incapable of true connection until he met her, a plotline that just doesn't work anymore.
While there are many possible options, the Ponds and Donna Noble are the most obvious examples of characters who changed the Doctor's outlook on family. The Doctor said goodbye to everyone he had been close to during the Tenth Doctor's era and closed himself off, only to find Amy Pond and Rory Williams. They quickly became his closest friends, who then became his family. Sure, "The Power of Three" indicated that he couldn't stay in one place for a year without losing his mind, but "The Husbands of River Song" proved that he had grown out of that, spending 24 years with his wife.
But according to the 60th anniversary, he never slowed down to feel the loss of that. That seems to undermine an excellent episode that demonstrated the Doctor's character growth, but let's accept it. That same episode had the Fourteenth Doctor move in with Donna as her pseudo-brother, tasked with slowing down and living with the people who loved him. How is that not family? We don't know how long the Fourteenth Doctor will live with the Noble family, but it's heavily implied to be decades. How does his year or less with Ruby trump that?
The simple, obvious answer is that it doesn't. Whether you look at episodic connections, actual time together, intimacy, or really any other measure, there are other characters that have had bigger impacts on the Doctor's understanding of family. More importantly, they are proof that the plotline has already been done. In the context of the entire show, the idea of Ruby fundamentally changing the Doctor just falls flat.
Davies seems to have decided that this soft reboot is intended to bring back Classic Era characters while ignoring most of the New Who Era altogether. As someone who has been watching since 2007, I feel incredibly cheated to be watching the same man who started the revival ignore the character growth that writers, actors, and fans have invested in for the last 20 years.
Within just the context of the last season, it's hard to believe Ruby has changed the Doctor that much. But in the context of the last 20 years, or the last 60, it's ludicrous. If you want the audience to believe that somebody has changed the Doctor, then you have to show it. The last season didn't do that successfully, so every line about how much Ruby has changed the Doctor is going to feel inconsistent with the story as audiences actually experienced it.