We Need To Talk About That ‘Doctor Who’ Adoption Story

Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for the season 1 finale of Doctor Who.

The big picture

• Doctor Who
  focused on Ruby Sunday's origin story this season. However, there is a problem when it comes to Ruby's adoption history.
• One of the criticisms is the show's excessive focus on finding Ruby's birth mother, which some viewers find essential.
• The emphasis on biology feels like a missed opportunity to explore adoption and family dynamics, and the parallel with the Doctor's origins falls short.

Mrs. Flood (Anita Dobson), River Song (Alex Kingston), Rose Tyler (billie piper)… Theories about who Ruby Sunday was (Millie Gibson) birth mother has taken the Internet by storm over the past few months. Since then Doctor Who“The Church on Ruby Road” aired on December 25, 2023, we were all dying to know the true identity of the woman who abandoned baby Ruby on the steps of a church on Christmas Eve. And perhaps no one was more anxious to find out this information than the Fifteenth Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) first mate herself. Over the course of eight regular episodes and a holiday special, Ruby and the Doctor have done their best to reveal the face of this mysterious character, traveling through time and using experimental devices to try and recreate that fateful night. In the end, after much snow and Christmas carols, there was, of course, a twist: Ruby's mother is revealed to be just an ordinary woman named Louise Miller (Faye McKeever), a woman who was once a teenager who found herself out of her depth with a baby in her arms. In the end, Ruby's mother is nobody special.

Except that's not true, is it? To begin with, if there is anything Doctor Who has taught us throughout all these decades on the air, is that every human is special in their own right. Second, while the identity of Ruby's birth mother may not be relevant to viewers, it certainly matters a lot to one specific person: Ruby herself. Much of her character's personality was informed by the fact that she was abandoned as a baby and does not know who her birth mother is.. Or, rather, her real mother Because when push comes to shove, this is the expression that Doctor Who refers to Louise throughout its newly renewed first season. Although Ruby has a foster mother who cares for her very much, Carla's (Michelle Greenidge) role in his life ends up diminishing because of this strange choice of words. Not only that, but the show also seems to be saying some really weird things about adoption, things that might make sense to one of its characters, but not to the other.

Finding Ruby's mother is central to the new first season of 'Doctor Who'

Now of course Doctor Who Season 1 isn't entirely about finding out who Ruby's birth mother is. Between alien cosplay Bridgerton characters from Regency England and ultra-intelligent babies running an almost adult-free space station, the Doctor and Ruby have their hands full with their fair share of timely adventures. However, discovering Louise's identity is something that takes up a considerable part of the show. After all, not only is she apparently a master of disguise, but she's also depicted as a rather ominous presence when the Doctor sees her in the past. Ruby goes through numerous databases and even enlists the help of a TV show dedicated to reuniting families, all to no avail. Meanwhile, the Doctor is unable to see the woman's face under his hood, and can't seem to make out what she's pointing at when she turns to look at him and the TARDIS. It's like it's accusing him of something or maybe indicating a presence lurking behind the time machine. He could be pointing to Sutekh (voiced by Gabriel Woolf), the god of death who attached himself to the vehicle and waited for years to bring about the doom of all existence?

No. As a result, she only names her daughter. Seeing the street sign that says Ruby Road, she points it out as a way of saying that's what she wants her baby to be called. He's telling the Doctor that Ruby should be called Ruby. As for why Louise was so hard to find, to the point where even a TV show with the latest technology on her side couldn't locate her, well, she simply managed to evade the system for all his life In the future, during the reign of Roger Ap Gwilliam (Aneurin Barnard), all citizens are required to provide DNA samples. In this database, the Doctor is able to find a match with Ruby's DNA and thus locate Louise. Nervous but sure of what she wants, Ruby goes to her birth mother and the two embrace. The end of Doctor WhoThe Season 1 finale, “Empire of Death,” sees Ruby side with Carla and Louiselinking to their memories.

This is a good conclusion for Ruby. He didn't just do it Doctor Who managing to give the definitive twist by making the now classic The Last Jedi bait and switch, propping up the mystery of Ruby's mother only to reveal that she's just a normal person, also gave its main character a happily ever after. However, one has to wonder why finding her birth mother is so important to Ruby given the life she has. Of course, we are not denying the importance of knowing the origins, however Ruby's insistence on finding her “real mother,” in those precise words, sounds strange when he has a family as warm and loving as Sundays. It makes sense that she wants to find the person who left her on the church steps, but why does she refer to her as her real mother? Why is this epithet not dedicated to Carla, the woman who raised her from childhood and who loves her endlessly?

Ruby's story serves as a parallel to the Doctor's own origins

One possible explanation is that Ruby's story is meant to serve as a parallel to the Doctor's personal drama about his origins. At the end of the Chris Chibnall/Jodie Whittaker era, the Thirteenth Doctor learns that she is not a Gallifreyan by birth. Instead, she is, like Ruby, an encounter, an abandoned girl on an abandoned planet and taken in by a Time Lord by the name of Tecteun (Seylan Baxter). However, instead of being loved and cared for, the Doctor was experimented on and had his memory wiped. He does not remember beyond his twelve previous regenerations, although he knows that he has lived a much longer life. And speaking of regeneration, this was a power that belonged only to her—and perhaps her kind—and that Tecteun extracted to give to the other Time Lords.

Now, throughout his many regenerations, the Doctor has always been something of a black sheep among his own. Misunderstood and often mistreated by others on Gallifrey, he has often preferred the company of humans or even other aliens. When the show returned to the BBC after its long hiatus in 2005, he felt even more lonely at the fact that his entire career had been wiped out of existence, by himself, let's not forget, something that be recognized by Steven Moffat in the 50th anniversary special, “The Day of the Doctor.” But then came Chibnall, and there was the Master (Sacha Dhawan) killing all the Time Lords once more.

For someone who has lost their supposed race more than once and didn't even get along with them to begin with, finding their birth family seems like an extremely important thing. It's a punishment for the Doctor that he can't ask the Time Lords where he comes from. The whereabouts of her biological family is as mysterious as that of Ruby's mother in the first seven episodes of Season 1. In this sense, Ruby's relationship with her adoption and her struggle to find her birth mother parallels the Doctor's own trauma and longings.. Just as Rose's desire to be reunited with her dead father served as a parallel to the Doctor's inability to return to Gallifrey, so too does Ruby's arc reflect the main character's plight of the program. And if Rose going back in time to meet her father ends up wreaking havoc on Earth, showing us all that could happen if the Doctor traveled back in time to an ancient version of Gallifrey, Ruby shows the Doctor that he can still find his true family.

“Doctor Who” overemphasized Ruby's birth mother

However, this parallel falls short when we consider it Ruby, unlike the Doctor, is not an abused child. Instead, she is loved by Carla and her grandmother, Cherry (Angela Wynter). She has seen many children come and go from her home, but she has stayed behind as the most beloved of them all. Ruby has a real family, a family that stands by her side even as she struggles to find her birth mother. May be Russell T. Davies he wanted to show viewers that there are many types of adoption after the Doctor's background was so tragic, but if he really wanted Ruby to be a mirror for the Doctor, he should have come through a traumatic past for her as well. . As things turned out, the insistence on Ruby's “real mother” feels too heavy-handed and even a little graceless.

We never get to see how Carla processes Ruby's desire to find her birth mother, or how she manages to accept the fact that Ruby doesn't consider her to be her real mother. What we do see is a show that seems to be telling its viewers that even if you have an adoptive family that loves you, none of that matters if you don't know who your birth parents are. In fact, now, as much as Ruby also wants to know who her father is, the whole emphasis of the show is on the mother, the person who actually gave birth to Ruby. The value of his character is therefore intimately related to his biology. In the end, this proves to be an extremely essentialist plot point, which doesn't really convert Doctor Whoa show about humans evolving beyond who the world tells them they are.

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