Doctor Who‘s latest season is officially in the books, culminating the first trek for Ncuti Gatwa as the iconic Time Lord with this week’s season finale, “Empire of Death.” The finale answered a lot of questions surrounding this season, including the parentage of Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), whose mysterious abandonment on Christmas Eve in 2004 has permeated throughout the episodes. Spoilers for the season finale of Doctor Who, “Empire of Death”, below! Only look if you want to know!
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Amid The Doctor and Ruby’s conflict with Sutekh, who has bonded himself to the TARDIS for decades and is now working to spread his plague of death across the universe, the question of the identity of Ruby’s mother has still remained. As The Doctor eventually realizes, Sutekh has kept him and Ruby alive in order for them to discover who Ruby’s mother is, as it is the one thing that has eluded him across his time secretly traveling time and space with the TARDIS. They travel to 2046 to utilize Roger Ap Gwilliam’s (Aneurin Barnard) mandatory DNA logs to identify Ruby’s mother, which gets complicated even further once Mel Bush (Bonnie Langford) becomes possessed by Sutekh. The Doctor and Ruby use this as a ploy to draw the attention of Sutekh, only to not reveal the name, tie him to the TARDIS with a cosmic bungee cord, and transport him across time and space undoing the plague.
Who Are Ruby Sunday’s Parents?
Once everything is restored, U.N.I.T. are able to use the DNA to correctly identify Ruby’s parents — Louise Allison Miller and William Benjamin Garnett, two ordinary people who had Ruby as a teenaged pregnancy. Louise did not tell William that she was pregnant, and because she grew up with an abusive stepfather, she decided to get Ruby “out of that house” and leave her on the church steps. (The pointing she did when leaving the church, which The Doctor originally thought was targeted at him, was actually at the “Ruby Road” street sign she wanted her daughter to be named after.) The Doctor determines that this mystery was so enticing to Sutekh because Ruby and those in her life decided Louise’s identity was important.
Ruby then tracks down Louise — now a 35-year-old nurse — introduces herself to her, and folds her into her adopted family. U.N.I.T. is also able to track down William, who Ruby is preparing to go meet when she and The Doctor say their goodbyes (for now). While this answer of Ruby’s parentage still raises some questions — namely, was Ruby able to make it snow whenever she thought of her abandonment because of Sutekh, the TARDIS, or something else — it at least solves her central mystery in an unexpected way.
Doctor Who will return with a new holiday special in December.
