Doctor Who Season Finale Features One Mother of a Reveal, Ends With ‘Terror’-ble Tease — Grade It!

The following contains spoilers from the Doctor Who season finale, now streaming on Disney+.

Doctor Who done Last Jedi‘d us.

The Disney+ sci-fi series with its season finale pitted Fifteen and friends against no less that Sutekh, the God of Death whose mission, we came to learn, was to himself solve the mystery of Ruby Sunday’s lineage. After all, Sutekh was also there on Christmas Eve 2004, tethered to the TARDIS, and was unable as anyone else to make out the hooded mother’s face.

The Doctor gleaned that Roger ap Gwilliam, the future politician from the episode “73 Yards,” may hold the key, seeing as in his time he enacted forced DNA registration. The Doctor, Ruby and Mel then made tracks for the 2040s, hoping to match Ruby’s DNA to someone in that government database. Once the result seemingly popped up on the monitor, Ruby taunted Sutekh with her mother’s identity (claiming, “I don’t understand it!”), stepping closer and closer to the god… before letting the screen drop to the floor, shattering.

Ruby had used the ruse to get close enough to attach a leash to Sutekh’s beastly form, after which the Doctor attached the other end to the TARDIS. Fifteen then took Sutekh for a violent drag through the cosmos, and by “bring[ing] Death to death everywhere!,” he resurrected everyone and anyone who had been turned to dust at the top of the hour.

After ditching Sutekh in a void, everyone congregated back at UNIT, where tech was used to actually procure a match from the 2040s DNA database. And Ruby’s birth mother is…?

Louise Allison Miller, a 35-year-old nurse in Coventry, who at age 15 gave birth to Ruby. But since Louise’s stepfather was “trouble,” she decided to do “the right thing” and get her newborn daughter “out of that house,” Kate surmised.

Ruby’s father is similarly unremarkable, a bloke named William Benjamin Garnett who was also 15 at the time, and never even knew Louise had been pregnant!

Why would so ordinary a woman vex Sutekh so?

“She was important because we think she’s important,” it dawned on the Doctor.

“Her sheer existence was more powerful than Time Lords and gods,” he added. “In the end, the most important person in the universe was the most ordinary — a scared little girl making her baby safe.”

Everyone at UNIT then realized that what Ruby’s mother was pointing at, back in 2004, was a lamp post bearing the street name, Ruby Road. Ruby had always assumed that a social worker or paramedics had picked her name based on where she was found, but “my own mother chose it,” she beamed.

After finding Louise and bonding some with both her and Carla, Ruby returned to the TARDIS, ready for more timey-wimey adventures. But when she got word that her father had also been tracked down, it became clear that he time as a companion was up.

“Don’t be sorry at all,” the Doctor reassured a conflicted Ruby. “I’ve shown you monsters and planets and legends, but this…? Honey, your adventure is just beginning.”

“Will I ever see you again?” asked Ruby, noting how the Doctor had lost touch with his own granddaughter.

“That was my mistake,” he nodded. “Maybe I’ll find her again one day, but you, Ruby Sunday, I will see again, because you changed me. You made my life bigger and better.

“And now, Ruby Sunday… goodbye.”

Before the season finale faded to black, however, it was made clear that the Doctor’s Ruby-less travels are heading in a terrifying direction.

“What a very happy ending for little Ruby Sunday,” Mrs. Flood, clad in white and carrying a white parasol and travel bag, observed to the camera from a rooftop. “But life goes on, doesn’t it, ruthlessly. And what happens, you might wonder, to that mysterious traveler in time and space known as the Doctor?

“I’m sorry to say, his story ends in absolute terror,” the enigmatic woman grinned, before bidding us, “Night-night!”