It’s been nearly seven years since The Last Jedi sparked the flames of a culture war Star Wars still finds itself embroiled in, and nearly five since The Rise of Skywalker managed to… well, make things a lot messier beyond that. But never, in all that time, would I ever thought we would continue to be in such a grip that it would end up inspiring a season finale of Doctor Who.
“Empire of Death,” this weekend’s eighth and final episode of Doctor Who’s latest season, finally put an end to the questions behind companion Ruby Sunday’s true parentage—which had been teased and woven throughout the show since last year’s Christmas special as the big mystery subplot of the season, aside from why Susan Twist kept showing up. At last, we got the reveal of Ruby’s birth mother: Louise Miller, a completely ordinary young woman who became pregnant as a teen, fled an abusive home, and left her newborn child on the doorstep of a church on Ruby Road. Doctor Who’s big mystery was that there was no mystery at all. And that also, like a lot of people, showrunner Russell T Davies had some thoughts about the Star Wars sequel trilogy.
“This is kind of my reaction to, bear with me now, the Star Wars films,” Davies said of the reveal about Ruby’s birth mother on an audio commentary track for “Empire of Death”released by the BBC.“I can’t remember their titles but in the last trilogy, [The Last Jedi] said that Daisy Ridley was nothing special. There was nothing special about her parentage. That she just got the Force, and was an ordinary person with the Force. And then in the next one they changed it all so that she was this child of the Emperor… and I really loved the version where she wasn’t special.”
“[Ruby’s] not the daughter of Sutekh. She’s not the daughter of the Time Lords, or Rassilon, or something like that,” Davies continued. “Her mum is Louise Miller, who was 15 years old and pregnant, from a dangerous home, an abusive home, and left her child on the doorstep. That’s my reaction to [The Rise of Skywalker], because I think that’s a better story.”
Let’s put aside for a moment the fateful oddity that the Star Wars sequels created such a moment in culture that, years on from release, we are having a TV show like Doctor Who offer up a response to them—an oddity further complicated and made hilariously weirder by the fact this is now happening in the first year that Doctor Who is, technically, basically a cousin of the Disney family Star Wars is now firmly a part of. But whatever you can say about The Rise of Skywalker (which is a lot! you can say a lot about that movie!) it feels bizarre that what it actually did with the Palpatine reveal—where the reveal wasn’t the actual point, instead it was Rey’s choice to explicitly reject the “special” origin thrust on her by the film and set her own path in spite of it—that Doctor Who’s response to that was to create a mystery box subplot where the mystery was that there wasn’t one at all.
Why even make a mystery in the first place? I guess we just cannot stop talking about Star Wars, no matter where in time and space we actually are.
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