I really hate hinging my criticism of anything on the notion that the plot sucks, but in this case, this episode hinges on its plot. The Doctor faces off against a god of death and it seems the show was unprepared for the ramifications of that. Sutekh ends up being one of the blandest foes I've ever seen the Doctor face.

This season built up the idea of the pantheon, that Doctor Who would fully abandon the pretense of grounded science fiction and introduce gods that could alter the laws of reality like playthings. I was critical of last week's Sutekh reveal, in part just because hinging the episode on a twist reveal of a guy most people won't recognize is boring, but also because nothing about Sutekh, the supposed god of gods, fits into this pantheon. For starters, he's based on a real mythological deity (or at least willingly adopted the image of one) unlike Toymaker or Maestro. For another, those gods presented a less direct challenge than simply overcoming them. They followed their own esoteric rules, being defeated not with science, but by their own nature. Toymaker is defeated by winning his games. Maestro is defeated in a music battle. Is there really a way you can slot a god of death into the same mechanics?

The answer is no, not really. At least not in an interesting way. Sutekh doesn't represent just some abstract concept of death, an inevitable end. He just kills people with magic dust. So efficiently that you'll blink and suddenly the entire universe is dead. Yeah, Sutekh kills the entire universe across all of time in this episode. This happens because doing a death god in a show like this traps you in a corner if you're not clever. Obviously the death god can't just snap his fingers and kill our main characters.

This episode's solution is to provide a reason he doesn't decide to kill our heroes. But it's also desperate to have Sutekh live up to all of that god of gods hype, so he just kills everyone else. Everywhere. This doesn't ratchet up the tension the way the episode thinks it does, it deflates it because now there's nothing left to save and you just know they're gonna pull off some nonsense to bring everyone back. The episode is so uninterested in even trying to sell the illusion that these deaths matter that the only character to react with any sort of emotion is the Doctor as he blames himself for unintentionally providing Sutekh the means to do his omnicide. Ruby and Mel, who are also there, don't get a chance to despair over the deaths of everyone they love but they're quick to assure the Doctor that it's not his fault, seemingly just to get the plot moving again so we don't have to focus on all that pesky "character" stuff.

The solution the heroes arrive at doesn't have anything to do with their characters, really. Nor does the Doctor have to arrive at some solution that beats Sutekh in some way that doesn't diminish his omnipotence like we saw with Toymaker and Maestro. Even the mystery that implied Ruby's mother was connected to the pantheon is a red herring. No, the Doctor just drags the death dog by a leash through the time vortex. He brings death to the god of death. This creates life, undoing all the deaths by Sutekh's hand the last two episodes. It's exactly as stupid of an ending as you'd expect when Sutekh kills the universe. Sutekh, god of gods, ends up being one of the most anticlimactic villains I've seen in this show, with one of the most pathetic endings. Real good payoff for all that "one who waits" stuff.

Oh speaking of terrible payoff, let's go back to Ruby's mother. Ruby's entire character in this season is being sad that her mysterious birth mother abandoned her. They do wring some decent emotional scenes out of this throughout the season, but if you're hinging this entire character on this mystery, you'd better hope it's a good one. So who is Ruby's mother? Well, she's exactly who you'd expect if you met Ruby Sunday in the real world. A teen mom forced to make a difficult choice that would scar them both.

Yeah, they spent the whole season building up to a fakeout. No explanation for why this made it snow all the time, and as for how her mother ended up being on the radar of Sutekh, god of gods, it turns out she only seemed important because people thought she was. Yeah, the answer to the mystery is that the mystery is the answer. The episode tries to be about the folly of ascribing too much meaning to these things, searching for convoluted answers to simple questions. But at the same time, the writers wrote this mystery. Ruby making it snow out of nowhere is not a natural phenomenon. There is reason to believe Ruby's mother is important outside of being a crackpot fan theorist drunk on hype culture, like what happened with Rey in the Star Wars sequels.

Also in contrast to Rey or any similar anticlimax is that this reveal isn't a difficult answer on a character level. This is already the story Ruby was telling herself her whole life up until she met the Doctor and unexplainable things began to happen. She was already prepared to hear this. Hell, when the Doctor suggests it might do more harm than good to try to form a relationship with her birth mother after all this time, Ruby ignores him, proves him wrong, and everything's great. Everyone gets along and it's one big happy family. Ruby gets everything she ever wanted with no consequences because in 22 years Britain starts doing dystopian mandatory DNA cataloguing for the entire population. The end!

I don't like most season finales in this show but oh my god I thought there was nowhere to go but up after Flux and The Power of the Doctor. I was sorely mistaken. Doctor Who desperately needs to interrogate its relationship to serialization because these running plots somehow get worse and worse, barring Series 10 because that was good and Series 11 because it didn't have one. What new depths of horror will we bear witness to next season?

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