In the wake of Russell T Davies’ uncanny episodes, including 73 Yards, AJ Black argues that mystery is a vital part of storytelling.
NB: The following contains spoilers for Doctor Who episode 73 Yards, and a few light spoilers for TV’s Lost.
Life is mysterious. We live in a chaotic universe where some moments in life to defy logic. Why is it that, when I think of someone I haven’t seen in decades, I see them only a day or two later? It has never satisfactorily explained quite who it was, many years ago, a close family member reporting a customer complaint to a company spoke to, on learning later said person didn’t exist and had never worked there.
There must surely be an answer to these, but I’ll probably never know. I just have to live with that and move on. What I don’t understand is why some audiences of popular fiction can’t accept that mystery is also a vital part of storytelling. There seems to be a curious need for stories to make complete sense, regardless of artistic intention.
The most recent example of this is Doctor Who’s fourth episode in its rebooted first season, 73 Yards. A creepy slice of initial folk horror before segueing into a haunting, decade-spanning tragedy, the Russell T Davies-written episode contains at the heart a temporal paradox that, intentionally, doesn’t quite add up. The Doctor’s companion, Ruby Sunday, lives a full lifespan before becoming the strange woman who haunts her younger self for all those years, completing the loop as part of a warning that ultimately prevents Ruby going down that path in the first place.
On one level, therefore, it isn’t quite a loop at all, because the purpose of the loop is for it to ultimately break. It’s rather an alternate timeline of some kind that we see playing out. Yet Davies also peppers in a core mystery that is never resolved: why does the seemingly benign older Ruby cause anyone who approaches her to not just run away in fear from her younger self, but actively seem to erase her from existence? It plays into the broader narrative anxieties about Ruby’s unknown parentage, but it also stands out as running contrary to the episode’s internal logic.
Read more: Doctor Who series 14 epsiode 4 | 73 Yards spoiler-free review
Davies, to his credit, has absolutely no intention of spoon-feeding viewers any kind of resolution to this seeming plot hole: “You will never know,” he told the Radio Times. “I’m never gonna tell you what she says. It’s kind of up to you to sit there and think, ‘Well, what could someone say that would make a mother run away from her daughter forever?’”
He argues that this is the greater horror of the episode, where Ruby confronts the fear anyone adopted or fostered would probably consider their greatest terror – being separated from the last people they’re connected to in this world.
This, to me, makes complete sense from a narrative perspective. Yet audiences were quick to leap on the mystery of what old Ruby said and decry Davies’ storytelling for not serving everything up clearly by the end of the episode. On his return to Doctor Who, he has arguably already begun to pivot the series away from traditional sci-fi and closer to the uncanny or Lovecraftian in episodes such as Wild Blue Yonder, The Giggle or The Devil’s Chord (though I’d argue 2008’s Midnight is proof that Davies has been interested in weird fiction for a long long time). All of this feels intentional.
Read any HP Lovecraft and you will bask – and shudder, as do his characters – in the cosmic wonder of the unknown. His stories are set in a universe we can’t fathom, filled with answers beyond us, that send the majority of his protagonists mad. His work has influenced writers such as Stephen King in much of his work, principally It (whose evil clown Pennywise appeared to inspire Doctor Who’s recent monsters the Toymaker and Maestro). In fact, we’re seeing an increasing swerve in toward Lovecraftian enigma in Doctor Who.
My point being that generations of readers haven’t rejected or avoided Lovecraft or King due to their stories’ lack of concrete fact. I’d argue it’s a major reason why audiences are drawn to their storytelling. Yet, for some strange reason, the rules appear to be different for television series. Consider how maddening the core mysteries at the heart of The X-Files mythology were to viewers (though it largely adds up if you’re paying attention). Think about how baffled audiences were by the end of seminal 1960s series The Prisoner, or arguably its surrealist heir, the early 90s mystery Twin Peaks. More egregiously, remember just how many audiences reacted, and still do react, to the mystery-filled television drama, Lost.
Read more: Doctor Who series 14 epsiode 4 | 73 Yards spoiler-filled review
I’m more than willing to accept criticisms of Lost on a fundamental storytelling basis. It’s not perfect. Few TV shows are. Yet a great many bad faith audience members of that show continue to pillory the series for refusing to provide clear answers. Fans will recognise many of them. Why was Walt special? Who made the Frozen Donkey Wheel? What exactly was the Smoke Monster? Only one of those three questions truly warrants a concrete answer, arguably one buttressed by the realities of TV show production and teenage growth (Malcolm David Kelley, the actor who played Walt, simply aged out of the role).
“Every answer will simply lead to another question,” said one character, late on in Lost. It’s a sentiment aimed at both another character and the audience. That was always the beauty of Lost, a series that never detached from being about character and the thematic idea of people ‘lost’ in life finding their purpose, largely through destiny. So much of that ended up becoming lost (pun intended) as audiences became desperately hung up on the factual minutae, forgetting they were watching a Judeo-Christian myth play out on screen within an overtly magical construct.
Indeed, series showrunner Damon Lindelof, discussing the ‘Frozen Donkey Wheel’ (it’ll take me too long to explain what it is), once cited the famed Arthur C Clarke maxim that advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Lindelof suggested that everything strange and uncanny about the Island, be it delivering eternal life, healing the sick or being able to travel through time, could in theory be explained by a form of science beyond our current understanding. Lost works, however, precisely because we don’t understand aspects of what everything means, as many of the characters within the show don’t either. The mystery is the point.
This to me feels the point that detractors of mystery box storytelling and television in particular miss. Lost, late in the final season, improbably brought back a long dead character to directly explain what the ‘whispers’ – a long-held core mystery dating back to the beginning of the show – actually were. It was a rare instance of Lost’s writers explicitly telling us what an uncanny aspect of the show was and the revelation turned out to be… dull and ultimately underwhelming. We were better off not knowing.
To return to Doctor Who’s latest foray into strangeness: would we be better off knowing specifically what the old woman told those people? Or can the imagination provide a far greater truth than any in-world explanation? I would argue that the former is true. As in life, we’re often left with open questions. In storytelling designed to frighten, intrigue or captivate, mystery is every bit as wonderful as revelation.
You can find A J. on social media, including links to his podcasting and books, via Linktr.ee here.
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