'Empire of Death' (Story Code 14.08) by Russell T Davies

“Now I know every beat of the heart of your time machine. And I can bend it to my will. It will stand as my alter. The Temple of my Empire of Death… Never yours again, Doctor. Never” - Sutekh

Mel pulls the Doctor away from the zombie Susan Triad’s deadly touch. They try to evacuate the studio staff, but Susan unleashes a cloud of Sutekh’s Dust of Death, which kills everyone on contact. Mel rushes the Doctor to the car park, and together they escape on her moped. In UNIT headquarters, Kate and her team open fire on Sutekh and Harriet, but their bullets turn to dust before they can do any harm. Unscathed, Harriet unleashes a blast of dust across the command centre, killing Kate and her comrades. Mel and the Doctor speed to UNIT HQ, desperately trying to outrun the huge dust cloud now spilling across London, destroying everything in its path - including Carla, Cherry, and Mrs Flood. The Doctor and Mel join Ruby in the Time Window’s projection of the VHS tape. To their surprise another TARDIS appears, but when the Doctor goes inside, he finds a small room crammed with a mish-mash of previous TARDISes - this is a ‘Remembered TARDIS’, somehow created from Ruby’s memories [Ruby remembers the TARDIS, and the Remembered TARDIS remembers the parts of its real self that Ruby never experienced?]. The Doctor grabs a portable screen from the Time Window’s controls, noting that it is now showing his first encounter with Sutekh. The real TARDIS materialises, Sutekh still wrapped around it; with Harriet now operating the TARDIS controls, Sutekh now has full command of the ship. Sutekh gloats that although the Doctor sent him to his death in the Time Vortex, he secretly latched onto the TARDIS; hiding inside, he fed off the ship’s energy and evolved into this new titan form. Using the TARDIS to discover the Doctor’s secrets, Sutekh learnt of Susan and planned a trap: Sutekh has left an apparition of Susan everywhere the Doctor has travelled since, scattering his angels of death across the universe. Vowing to defeat Sutekh, the Doctor urges Ruby and Mel into the Remembered TARDIS and takes it into orbit above Earth. But the unorthodox ship starts to break apart, so the team use ‘intelligent rope’ to lash the haphazard controls together, stabilising it for a while. The Doctor works out that Sutekh used the TARDIS’ perception filter - which is set at 66.7 metres, or 73 yards - to blend the copies of Susan into history, each getting stronger with every iteration, until the final version: Susan Triad. Opening the TARDIS doors, the Doctor, Ruby and Mel watch in horror as the deadly dust cloud sweeps over the planet below - not only in 2024, but in every time period the Doctor has visited it. But it isn’t just Earth that is dying: every planet the Doctor has visited has been destroyed too, all across time and space…

Time passes: Obsessed with discovering Ruby’s secret, Sutekh and his angels of death, Susan and Harriet, use the TARDIS’ controls to search the desolate universe and locate the Doctor. On a barren world, the Doctor meets a survivor of the dust, a kindly woman who has forgotten the names of her planet and her dead family. When the Doctor asks for precious metal, the woman gives him a spoon; she then crumbles to dust, as the death wave travels backwards through time along her family line. Returning to the TARDIS and his friends, the Doctor uses the spoon to repair the Time Window device. Mel is exhausted and keeps forgetting her past, and she rests as the Doctor and Ruby make a discovery: the Time Window is now responding to Ruby, showing images of her mother. The Doctor realises that Sutekh wants to know her identity too, and is keeping his enemies alive until he finds out. Mel hears Sutekh’s voice in her head, as he takes over her mind. The Time Window device also shows a recording of Roger ap Gwilliam’s television appearance in 2046; Ruby doesn’t recognise him, but the Doctor recalls how the mad prime minister made DNA testing compulsory in the UK - they have a way to find Ruby’s mother! Unaware that Sutekh is watching through Mel’s eyes, the Doctor takes the TARDIS to 2046. They arrive in an empty Houses of Parliament, where the Doctor plugs the Time Window device into a computer terminal in the Department of Health. Sending Mel to keep watch in the hall, the Doctor takes a DNA sample from Ruby and then runs it through the computer to check the UK database; as the search runs through seventy-six million people, snow begins to fall. To Ruby’s joy a DNA match is found, but the results confuse her; Before Ruby can ask the Doctor, Mel returns, now transformed into one of Sutekh’s skull-faced harbingers. Harriet uses the TARDIS to somehow teleport the Doctor, Ruby and Mel to UNIT HQ, where Sutekh threatens the Doctor and demands to know Ruby mother’s name. Ruby offers up the Time Window to save the Doctor - then smashes the device to the ground. In the confusion, Ruby ties intelligent rope to Sutekh’s collar, then passes it to the Doctor, who holds it with his Mavity glove. Summoned by the Doctor’s whistle, the TARDIS activates an energy beam that destroys Harriet and sends the ship blasting free of Sutekh’s grip, knocking over Susan and Mel in the process. Racing inside the TARDIS, the Doctor takes the ship into the Vortex, pulling Sutekh behind them; as Sutekh starts dying from the powerful forces, his claws rake the Vortex walls, exposing reality. Somehow the death of Death causes life - and on Earth, everyone comes back to life, including UNIT, Mel, the Sundays and Mrs Flood. The Doctor watches as Sutekh’s death restores all life across the universe; he then closes the TARDIS doors on Sutekh, snapping the rope, and dooming the god to burn to ashes in the Vortex...

Later, friends and family are reunited in UNIT HQ. Susan is here too, and even receives a job offer from Kate. Somehow, Morris uses UNIT’s systems to complete a DNA search and locate Ruby’s mother after all: Louise Alison Miller, a fifteen-year-old mother who kept her daughter’s birth a secret from her teenage father, Will. Despite being ordinary, the importance of Ruby’s mother to the events surrounding her somehow hid her from Sutekh. When the Doctor realises that Louise wasn’t pointing at him, but a street sign on a lamp-post behind him, Ruby is delighted that she was always meant to be named after the road where she was left.

The Doctor and Ruby watch from afar as Louise sits in a café. Despite the Doctor’s warning, Ruby goes inside and introduces herself, and he watches as the two women share a tearful hug… With the Doctor’s help Ruby takes Louise to meet her foster mum and grandmother. Ruby nips away from them to see the Doctor in the TARDIS, now parked in her flat’s hall; she explains how she wants to catch up with her mum for a while - but when a message on her phone tells Ruby that her father has been found too, the Doctor knows she has to go for good. After a tearful goodbye, the two friends part, the Doctor promising to see Ruby again. The Doctor departs in the TARDIS, leaving Ruby to start her next adventure with her family… Up on the roof of the Sundays’ flat, Mrs Flood, now dressed in a white fur coat and talking to camera, tells an unseen audience that the Doctor’s story will end in absolute terror…

Ncuti Gatwa (The Doctor), Millie Gibson (Ruby Sunday), Gabriel Woolf (Voice of Sutekh), Susan Twist (Susan Triad), Bonnie Langford (Melanie Bush), Jemma Redgrave (Kate Lethbridge-Stewart), Yasmin Finney (Rose Noble), Genesis Lynea (Harriet Arbinger), Lenny Rush (Morris Gibbons), Aidan Cook (The Vlinx), Nicholas Briggs (Voice of the Vlinx), Alexander Devrient (Colonel Christofer Ibrahim), Jasmine Bayes (Corporal Alice Sullivan), Anita Dobson (Mrs Flood), Michelle Greenidge (Carla Sunday), Angela Wynter (Cherry Sunday), Sian Clifford (Kind Woman), Amol Rajan (Himself), Tachia Newall (Colonel Winston Chidozie), Fela Lufadeju (Bailey Sinclair), Faye McKeever (Louise Miller)

Directed by Jamie Donoughue

Produced by Vicki Delow
Executive Producers Russell T Davies, Julie Gardner, Jane Tranter, Joel Collins and Phil Collinson
A Bad Wolf / BBC Wales production

TX (BBC 1 & BBC 1 HD):
22nd June 2024 @ 6.40 pm


Notes:
*Featuring the Fifteenth Doctor, Ruby, Mel, Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and UNIT

*Part two of a two-part story

*This episode is fifty-four minutes long

*There’s Always a Twist at the End: Actress Susan Twist appears again as Susan Triad

*The episode premiered in the UK on the BBC's iPlayer in Ultra-High Definition (UHD) at midnight on 15th June 2024, and simultaneously streamed on Disney+ outside the UK and Ireland

*The episode also premiered in UK cinemas at midnight on 22nd June, following a screening of 'The Legend of Ruby Sunday'


*‘Tales of the TARDIS’: On Thursday 20th June 2024, a repackaged omnibus version of 'Pyramids of Mars' was released under the banner of 'Tales of the TARDIS'. Broadcast on BBC Four and released on the BBC's iPlayer in the UK only, it had linking scenes featuring Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson as the Doctor and Ruby, set during the events of 'Empire of Death': 'In the ‘Remembered TARDIS’, the Doctor tells Ruby Sunday about the first time he fought Sutekh, deep in the English countryside of 1911. He was a different Doctor back then, travelling with his best friend, Sarah Jane Smith…'