That was a really fun buildup and coda. The resolutions to the conflict with Sutekh and the mystery of Ruby’ mum were underwhelming, though. If you’re going to have the big bad simply be put on a leash and dragged through the time vortex, you better have a gut punch up your other sleeve. But they didn’t.

The central conceit is fun but half-baked. Turns out after ages and ages riding the TARDIS, Sutekh had become a scoreboard fanboy like any mortal Whovian who’s been watching since 1975. Everything that happens to the Doctor has to make sense to him (maybe Ruby’s mum is the Rani?!) and he simply can’t kill off the Doctor or Ruby without learning who left her at the church, so he can continue building headcanon from there while the universe spins into entropy. This finale has really been about playing against viewer expectations but I didn’t expect it to be the basis of Sutekh’s defeat…

So now we know Ruby’s mum was a nurse in Coventry all along. That is a nice reversal, of course, and plays into the Doctor’s conviction that everyone is special (see “Space babies,” among others). Good thing Sutekh is gone though, because he would be furious at this development… There’s no complex cosmic puzzle to be solved, Ruby’s birth and abandonment dovetails perfectly with real life statistics as Kate told us last episode.

After a season of teasing Susan Foreman, I found the Doctor’s and Ruby’s talk outside the coffeeshop to be revealing. Trying to talk her out of reconnecting with her mum, he’s really talking about himself abandoning his granddaughter, and rationalising why he never went back for her. That is pretty damning if not for his admission to Kate in the last episode that he might bring disaster on Susan if he were to find her.

I liked those thematic strands and the way they set up for next season, and the general storyline if this double feature finale —but the boss fight might have needed a bit more workshopping before making it to production…