Doctor Who Christmas Special Recap: Fifteen’s Team-Up With Ruby Sunday Is a Most Entertaining Gift

Hayden Mears
·4 min read
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Doctor Who Christmas Special Recap: Fifteen’s Team-Up With Ruby Sunday Is a Most Entertaining Gift
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Ncuti Gatwa’s first full episode as the new Doctor boasted goblins, song and dance, and a heartfelt origin story for new Companion Ruby Sunday (played by Coronation Street‘s Millie Gibson).

The Doctor Who Christmas special, The Church on Ruby Road (now streaming on Disney+), gets right to it, briefly expositing about a baby girl left on a church doorstep on a wintry Christmas Eve. Immediately after, the child’s mother disappears without a trace. The priests name the baby Ruby (after the road on which she was found), while she gets her last name, Sunday, from Carla Sunday (Code 404‘s Michelle Greenidge) her adoptive mother.

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Fast forward 19 years. Ruby, now a young woman, sits opposite interviewer Davina McCall (portraying herself) and answers questions about her sad past. She doesn’t know much, but she does talk about her foster mother. McCall says the point of this specific segment is to reunite orphans, or “foundlings,” with their birth parents. But as the two women talk, a tiny creature tampers with the filming equipment and causes parts of the set to collapse….

The special then cuts to several scenes showing Ruby in various public places. She is mostly unaware the Doctor is watching her from afar, but during one of these social outings, she notices him amongst a throng of dancers. As Ruby stands up to get a better look, another tiny, clawed hand reaches up from offscreen and pushes the glass closer to the edge of the table. The Doctor somehow appears and catches the glass before it can shatter.

“Does that happen to you a lot? Knocking things over?” he asks. “All the time but I’m just clumsy,” Ruby says. “No, you’re not. It’s worse than that,” Fifteen teases as he glides back to the dance floor.

Later, we follow Ruby as she brings groceries back to her foster home. As she puts the food away, she’s informed they’re expecting a new baby later that afternoon. The baby, Lulu Bell, arrives and is just getting settled when those crafty little creatures snatch her up and vanish! Ruby notices Lulu Bell’s absence immediately and glimpses her kidnappers escaping to the roof.

Ruby climbs onto the roof just in time to spot a group of goblins spiriting Lulu Bell away. She chases them and manages to follow them partway up a rickety ladder furled down from an unseen, airborne ship. The ever-on-brand Doctor joins her on the ladder and uses a special pair of black gloves (intelligent gloves, he calls them) to shift their mass and ascend the ladder with relative ease. They board the ship, where the goblins promptly capture them.

The Doctor explains that the goblins are drawn to coincidence and bad luck, which is how Lulu Bell and Ruby sharing a birthday caught their attention. (“The language of luck,” he calls it.) He also mentions the goblins’ ability to time travel, which will be important shortly.

Ruby and the Doctor escape their bindings and — using derring-do combined with the ability to effortlessly join a rousing song-and-dance number (by composer Murray Gold and showrunner/writer Russell T Davies) — rescue Lulu Bell, whom the goblins are conveyor-belting toward the hungry-hungry, salted baby-craving maw of a pile of gray glob referred to as the Goblin King.

The two return to Ruby’s home and immediately start removing potential accidents from each room. Moments later, the ceiling cracks and thunder rumbles in the clouds outside. The Doctor thinks the goblins have said goodbye, but when he realizes that Ruby has vanished and her family has no memory of her, he panics.

The Doctor deduces that the goblins went back in time and took baby Ruby from the church doorstep, altering her history. He in turn travels back to the night Ruby’s mother left her at the church and pursues the goblins up the side of the building.

Using his mavity gloves to pull the wooden ladder earthward, the Doctor impales the goblin ship and the Goblin King on the church’s steeple. He returns newborn Ruby to the church and heads back to the TARDIS. Before he leaves, though, he spots Ruby’s mother as she hurries into the night. He stares after her, knowing what Ruby will lose if he stops the mother from leaving.

Ruby and the Doctor reunite in the present before the Doctor abruptly leaves. Ruby pursues him, meets up with him in the TARDIS, and thus begins her adventures with him, through time and space!

What did you think of The Church on Ruby Road, Ruby Sunday’s introduction, and her dynamic with Fifteen?

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