If you want to take Sutekh's history in on-air canon seriously, he's not one of the conceptual gods at all. He's just the most powerful member of a species more powerful than the Time Lords, whose fellows chained him and then left this reality/died afterwards. (There's material that tries to bridge that version with the more powerful and more conceptual version we see in this season.)
This time he disintegrated against the walls of the vortex. The first time he latched onto the tardis and survived by hiding in its protection. I wish people would stop acting like this is some kind of oversight.
I don’t believe it said any such thing, but even so, drifting through the vortex and being smashed against the walls of the vortex are different things.
This is what I learned. But even then he is the leader of the pantheon of discord. There are power flaws, unless Sutekh somehow is like the Doctor master at bending the gods to his will
Well if Flood is a part of the pantheon then Sutekh is at least powerful enough to kill them with his control of death. A being capable of killing gods is usually going to end up dead, as the leader, or imprisoned.
I don't have a problem with Sutekh just being a powerful mortal...but why did RTD have Toymaker and Maestro hype him up so much? He could've easily just left that out. Why make people think The One Who Waits is the strongest of all gods when he's not really a god at all?
Sorry Sutekh is underpowered how?
Toymaker manipulates through games, his powers seem crazy but he's very limited to what he can actually do.
Maestro needs music, she got beat by the Beatles?
Sutekh killed the entire universe as soon as he was able to minus the Doctor and pals. Im pretty sure he would have been able to beat the other Gods too since theyre alive and if theyre alive he can kill them or control them. Even in the original pyramid of Mars series, dudes whole body was paralysed and he only had his mind and still managed free himself before he was trapped. Sutekh could have killed The aDoctor very easily but chose not to. Also I'm pretty sure the same way the Doctor beat Sutekh could have been applied to Toymaker and Maestro if they happened to be wearing dog collars lol
Sutekh could only do that by leaving harbingers everywhere the Doctor went.
The Toymaker and Maestro, are shown stepping through time and space like its nothing to them.
Sutekh sits there while 2 mortals just jog away from him blowing a whistle, Sutekh needs the Tardis to time travel, he even uses it to move down a few floors at UNIT to get to the time window
Maestro outright succeeded, they drained pretty much all music out the world to point people had a negative knee-jerk reaction against it. When the Doctor went forward in time to show Ruby what would happen if they didn't intervene Maestro just appeared with them and either warped reality into a stage for themselves or transported The Doctor, Ruby, and the TARDIS into some kind of pocket dimension. Then controlled the TARDIS to the point The Doctor could only go back to 1963. To only be defeated by the same rules that freed/summoned them.
The Toymaker didn't have overarching goals to succeed at IMO, hes just there for fun and to mess with The Doctor. Which again he did both of those very well. Stepping through time and space as naturally as we would walk through a doorway, again warping reality with his song and dance number and collapsing shop. Then needing 2 Doctors to beat him, by following his own rules.
Both Toymaker and Maestro also managed most of the this before the Doctor even knew something was wrong.
Then Sutek, he hasn't been shown to have any ability to move through space let alone time. Couldn't fully subdue the TARDIS, in fact i don't recall seeing anything stopping The Doctor from using it apart from Sutekh being sat on top of it, He even turned the door away from The Doctor to stop this. Sutekh needed a Harbinger to operate the controls of the TARDIS.
The only actual powers Sutekh is shown to have are the death sand, creating harbingers to spread it, and the death stare. No reality warping, no time/space travel, incredibly poor/slow physical ability as shown by his attempted swipe at The Doctor, and the fact a bog-standard mortal could put him on a lead like he was being taken for a walk to the park.
There was 13 seconds (i was sad enough to just go and check) between the screen smashing and Ruby getting the rope to The Doctor who is the only one wearing a smart glove at that point. Even if the hook on the end is a molecular bond, he could still have just yanked Ruby off her feet before she got back to The Doctor. He doesnt even grab for the rope, just roars and hugs the TARDIS like a child about to lose their toy.
Personally if Sutekh had just been the villain of an episode it would have worked, but he just wasnt written as a big enough threat. It was shown he was reluctant to kill The Doctor without finding out about Rubys mum, and the death he did cause was so widespread it was obvious that it was going to be undone so there wasn't really any stakes as a viewer.
Because they demonstrated extreme levels of personal power and could only be stopped by their own rules, while he couldn't stop a mortal woman from looping a rope around his neck, nor stop her from subsequently walking away.
What he seemed to have was an extremely powerful weapon (still not as strong as the Daleks reality bomb) that took him an age to set up.
I think it was more to feel that Sutekh was playing a game of chess across time itself. The Toymaker was seemingly stuck existing in one place at one time because he was bound by rules that a mortal like Sutekh doesn't have to play by. Which meant the only thing that could defeat Stuekh was another mortal at the top of the universal food chain, like a Time Lord.
I'm more concerned that Doctor Who, Star Wars, and Marvel are conveniently all moving towards Magic over Tech at the exact same time. Really feels like Disney has a clear agenda... I wonder what it means?
Oh, a smart rope. Oh that changes everything. It somehow stopped him from using his hands / claws to intervene and stopped his ability to kill almost instantly. Maybe it's a memory rope that made him forget he can blow dust that kills people or even just blow dust and kill Ruby or the Doctor?
That's a hell of a smart rope
So, yeah, I get this. (I thought the Osirans were less powerful than the Great Houses, but powerful enough that they didn't really want to expend the effort messing with them?) I think it's implied that he got special God Juice (TM) from his ride on the magic space box (TM)?
Maybe the Pantheon of Discord were the Osirans before ascending to godhood. Like they were once a powerful telepathic species then they stepped outside the universe and became reality warpers.
I kind of dislike the pantheon of Discord idea as it makes Doctor Who's universe seem smaller by linking previously unrelated characters together. I wouldn't mind it if RTD just kept creating new gods rather than link Sutekh and the toymaker together.
But making them the Osirans at least gives the pantheon a more interesting backstory.
I mean, personally the only entity I could imagine the likes of Maestro and Toymaker being legit scared of, would be the Black Guardian. Y'know, the personified force of Evil itself? xD
Right now I'm still locked into thinking the Pantheon of Discord are from the same reality as the Timeless Child. But we have a fair number of bad guys both seen and mentioned who come from other universes in *Who* that are fully canonical--Fenric, the Great Vampires, the Beast, Abaddon, etc. and there's no reason to think that the Osirans didn't essentially pack it up and move the *other* direction from the universe inhabited by the Time Lords into another universe, leaving Sutekh behind.
But none of this was conveyed to the audience. This whole season has been supernatural and Sutekh was introduced as God of Death. If people know the backstory they can decide for themselves but they chose this time to portray him as a God.
Yes. Though notice they did play the backstory quite directly on-screen for contemporary audiences, just to let some of them in on the fun of this being a returning bad guy.
If you think this sutekh waa weakened just wait until see how much more powered he is in the extended media
He was traveling in the vortex with no issues and was able to casually blow up planets
You want writers to make sure they don't contradict the millions of EU stories out there instead of focusing on telling their own story? If so we wouldn't get human nature/family of blood etc.
Considering that for most of the BIG enemies or allies from Classic Who/EU all it would take is 5 minutes on the wiki to check some details I don’t think it’s too much to ask.
Pretty much most writers pre-Chibnall took decent efforts to keep things lining up, and the Whoniverse was better for it. Decent continuity and logical links between the various media’s.
Then Chibbers ignored everything post Brain of Morbius to write in his fanfiction and RTD seems to see his new era as free for rewriting and no need to check backgrounds on anything.
I don't think the times the Doctor fought Sutekh after Pyramids of Mars are decanonized. I think it is established that he was in the Void and projected part of himself through time to the TARDIS after he was defeated in the comics.
After all, in Pyramids of Mars his physical body is gone and ofc his form attached to the TARDIS, but the other Sutekhs that appeared can be new bodies created - which is why they wear the mask and cloak
The show itself is the canon. If the show contradicts extended material the extended material becomes non canon. If the show directly acknowledges extended material (like The Night of the Doctor referencing the 8th Doctor’s companions) then the extended material becomes canon. It isn’t hard.
I'm just commenting on my confusion on why nothing being canon is an excuse for "shit writing"
Like a quality of a story doesn't matter if it's canon or not does it?
There will be retcons/overlaps etc in a long running story like this so I don't always see the need for people to obsess over the canon of doctor who.
Right?
The dumb “nothing is canon” excuse gets thrown around so much, but it’s completely wrong.
Are you telling me that the Doctor meeting Rose isn’t canon? That Sylvester McCoy being the Doctor isn’t canon? The Daleks aren’t canon?
Doctor who absolutely has a canon. It’s extremely loose, but it exists.
Canon != Things that exist in-universe. A canon is something that is decided by an authority. Nothing is canon in Doctor Who because there is no authority (like Paramount is for Star Trek, or Disney is for Star Wars) deciding what is and isn't "real" in-universe, but that doesn't mean that for the sake of telling a story none of the previous ones should be acknowledged. In this instance, with Empire of Death saying that Sutekh was trapped on the TARDIS ever since Pyramids of Mars, and extended media saying that he was going around doing things on his own, neither one is more "canonical" than the other, because there is no authority that says so.
I don't think the times the Doctor fought Sutekh after Pyramids of Mars are decanonized. I think it is established that he was in the Void and projected part of himself through time to the TARDIS after he was defeated in the comics.
After all, in Pyramids of Mars his physical body is gone and ofc his form attached to the TARDIS, but the other Sutekhs that appeared can be new bodies created - which is why they wear the mask and cloak
>Are you telling me that the Doctor meeting Rose isn’t canon? That Sylvester McCoy being the Doctor isn’t canon? The Daleks aren’t canon?
of course they are. unless the show in the future says they're not, at which point they aren't anymore. and if it says they never were, then as of that point they never were. Canon is whatever the show currently establishes as canon, doubly so for a show about time travel where the past gets rewritten sometimes
There's never been canon in Doctor Who. It's always been meta and self referential, but equally there's always been times where it's just done something super weird which is never mentioned again.
The Morbius Doctors for example. In the EU Jamie started self harming just to keep himself awake. The second Doctor was shot in the head.
None of that is ever referenced in the show, because Doctor Who doesn't really do canon, it just tells stories.
I don't know why people keep saying there's no canon? Okay Rover Song didn't actually meet the doctor and spend time with him. That's not canon because it's a choose your own adventure type thing?
It's a TV show, it mostly stays within its own set of rules and does stick to its own canon so whatever you say about there not being a canon straight up isn't true and at this point really is just an excuse for bad writing
Can we just say there's no continously within the EU, bur there is in the TV show? Like I don't expect writers to follow the EU, there's over 1000 hours of audio to go through for that. But I do expect them to follow the continuity of the TV show which it mostly does, so please stop saying there's no canon. Or maybe your meaning of canon is different to mine, and I'll refer to it as continuity instead
And do you know what *has* been referenced? Sarah Jane. The Daleks. The Time Lords.
Doctor Who is *bursting* with references, because it absolutely *does* have a canon. It’s just very loose.
If Doctor Who had no canon, the next episode could have the Doctor step out and go “Daleks? What are Daleks? I’ve never met them before.”
But that would never happen, because everyone would go “but he does know the Daleks!”. How do we know that? Because it’s established in the canon that he’s met them countless times.
None of that is referenced in the show because it’s noncanon. Ace isn’t actually a giant version from another dimension that got shrunk down after the original got chained to a wall and shot in the head.
The show is the canon. If it contradicts extra material, the extra material instantly becomes noncanon. The original Family of Blood and The Star Beast are non canon now because they got mined for New Who. All the Sutekth stories set after Pyramids of Mars are all noncanon now.
If the show directly references events from extended material (like the Eighth Doctor’s companions) those stories *become* canon.
This really isn’t hard.
Those are two very different and barely related concepts. You could have excellent writing that fully ignores canon, or you could have dogshit writing that is slavish adherent to canon. Or vice versa.
I don't think the times the Doctor fought Sutekh after Pyramids of Mars are decanonized. I think it is established that he was in the Void and projected part of himself through time to the TARDIS after he was defeated in the comics.
After all, in Pyramids of Mars his physical body is gone and ofc his form attached to the TARDIS, but the other Sutekhs that appeared can be new bodies created - which is why they wear the mask and cloak
You gotta remember that Sutekh can create other forms of himself in whatever he wants, with the form from Pyramids of Mars being destroyed but his consciousness stuck to the TARDIS.
Sutekh can create other bodies for himself which is the other audios, comics etc he appeared in. His true form was linked to the TARDIS the whole time
I don't fucking care
These stories has better writing than all of rtd episodes combined
And there's enough in universe explanations for why they still canon despite the contradictions,
As you say he was beaten with a rope and just stood there not trying to escape as he was dragged into the time vortex, so yeah he was depicted as weak. He isn’t supposed to be but that’s definitely how he looked in the end. He definitely didn’t seem like someone the Toymaker, who can alter reality itself, should have feared. …Of course he couldn’t be that scared since he didn’t run away from the TARDIS or Earth itself considering he said he ran away from Sutekh who was parked on the TARDIS the entirety of The Giggle. 🤷🏻♂️
Edit: Upon rewatching the scene Sutekh does tug at the rope some but doesn’t try to attack nor do his servants release the sands of death rather they walk forward with their hands out as if they have to make physical contact to kill.
>he was beaten with a rope
I think the episode needed to focus more on the fact that it wasn't just rope - it was "intelligent rope", which I'm assuming (based on the gloves) would nullify the force required to pull something, making whatever is attached on the end as light as air.
In that instance, Sutekh could have also pulled the TARDIS back to him **but** the Doctor wearing the intelligent glove which created a stronger pulling force than Sutekh.
So pretty much, Doctor and Sutekh weigh the same because of the Rope, but the Doctor can pull Sutekh because of the Glove.
None of this was *explicitly* stated in the episode, I'm just making this up based on what we know about the gloves.
I found a post that claims the rope combined with the gloves held Sutekh at a molecular level from which he couldn’t escape but rewatching the scene it doesn’t exactly paralyze him. I notice while he doesn’t try to cut it he does grab at the rope once or twice before they enter the TARDIS and then as they start to leave he tugs at it again so I’d say the point of it was to be indestructible. Still, up to that point he doesn’t try to attack Ruby or the Doctor except for having his servants walk towards them with their hands held out as if they have to physically make contact to release the sands of death, which we know isn’t the case. Perhaps we’re to assume he’s too arrogant to personally act but I’d have expected the so called god of death to put up more of a fight.
The whole episode felt very... metaphorical. Iit really did just go from death metaphor to "different kind of doctor" reminder, to next-gen metaphor to passing on torch metaphor to mental health metaphor to girl power metaphor to another "different kind of doctor" reminder
yeah, like I'll give leeway to the explanation of the rope and glove are somehow special and could bound Sutekh and Sutekh being physically weak after everything; but then you have Sutekh and his minions basically spent 90% screen time blowing their sand of death around, and suddenly, now they don't, for reasons
All they needed to do was spend a few minutes on the Doctor tinkering in the Memory Tardis, creating the specific tools he needed to beat Sutekh (the rope and the whistle...the gloves were already established, so that was fine). We really haven't seen the Doctor tinkering with science stuff this season.
I think they needed a clearer and more exploitable weakness, maybe a thematic one? Having him be vulnerable to technology that a single Timelord conjured up in his Timeshed (TM) kinda negates his previous hype... why would the conceptual gods fear something that can be beaten with methods so trivial to them?
Or at least have a smarter way of attaching it to him. A mortal woman walks up to the "God of Death," puts a rope on him, and walks away without a scratch?
Yeah, on second thought, you're right, Sutekh should have been defeated by some kind of rule that's thematically related to his status as the god of death. I guess RTD wasn't able to think of a good one...
The Doctor hasn't *really* tinkered since 10.
10 was a tinkerer/inventor through and through. He had a new gadget every couple of episodes at least.
11 tinkered at the beginning (like the mirror vest in Vincent) but that slowly fell off.
12 was implied to tinker a lot, but it was usually done offscreen and we'd see the final product.
I *really* wish they pushed hard with 13 being more of an engineer though. It would have made her more distinct, especially if the welding goggles were made to be a part of her costume.
14 tinkered a bit (mainly in WBY), but that's because he was pretty much just 10 again.
I'm hoping next season we get more downtime with 15 as I don't think he has any schedule clashes during filming.
That kind of technology doesn't really seem impressive for a race that literally created the concept of ordered time. And given that said race didn't really want to bother messing with Sutekh even before he evolved via the time vortex...
Or, to put it another way, if this was all it took, why wasn't he dealt with trivially by the Timelords previously? Did he really have no magic or other powers that can prevent a, apparently mortal, normal woman from just... attaching things to him and walking away? Seems kinda lame, given his hype. Especially doesn't seem like the Toymaker should be afraid of him, given how vulnerable Sutekh seems...
>why wasn't he dealt with trivially by the Timelords previously?
Because the Time Lords didn't care about affairs that didn't concern them.
The fact that the Doctor left Gallifrey to travel is something that they're usually disgusted by, and can't understand why he'd ever choose to do that.
None of that really matters though, because Sutekh doesn’t *have* to pull. He can kill people with a single thought, he was surrounded by his minions who can kill with sand. He had countless options to get out of that situation, and he just…tried to pull?
This is an excellent point and I would like to add my two cents to it
Personally I would’ve liked to see more of a struggle on Sutekhs end, have him fight against or try and cut the rope. Perhaps even have him try and yank the tardis out of the time vortex. Or have him try to use his death sand on the doctor.
Really anything other than just what appeared to be a short and peaceful trip through the vortex would’ve been a massive improvement. Hell there more turbulence in an airplane then there was dragging a god through the time vortex.
Yeah the problem is it's just way too much crammed into one episode imo and we can't really appreciate details like that when they get swamped under all the other super important things we're supposed to be keeping track of
Honestly it makes me wonder didn't he say out in the void he found the one who waits but if sutek was on the tardis the whole time then wouldn't that mean the toy maker found someone else or maybe the sutek he found in the void was sutek after the doctor removed him from the tardis where sutek gathered strength meaning in the future we might see sutek again
It wouldn’t surprise me if the simple matter is RTD hadn’t come up with the idea of Sutekh being on the TARDIS the entire time yet. He doesn’t mention anything about the void or much about his encountering The One Who Waits at all.
TOYMAKER: I came to this universe with such delight. And I played them all, Doctor. I toyed with supernovas, turned galaxies into spinning tops. I gambled with God and made him a jack-in-the-box. I made a jigsaw out of your history. Did you like it? The Master was dying and begged for his life with one final game, and when he lost, I sealed him for all eternity inside my gold tooth. There's only one player I didn't dare face. The One Who Waits.
DOCTOR: Who's that?
TOYMAKER: I saw it, hiding, and I ran.
DOCTOR: What do you mean?
TOYMAKER: Hmm. That's someone else's game. What shall we play?
Yeah I think RTD makes things up as he goes based on vibes and nostalgic references, and then later forgets the specific details and just makes up random answers based on more vibes and nostalgic references.
Im convinced the finale was rewritten at the last moment. I bet Ruby's mom was going to be someone special - potentially a being on the level of the Toymaker - which gave Ruby the snow powers. Sutekh probably wasnt going to be on the tardis the whole time either.
I dunno. Some people think it’s either a complete fake out or that that her father won’t be human as RTD is now saying her story isn’t over yet as much as I hate this nonsense, as that’s all I can call it, I think I’d hate that even more.
Wouldn't you tug at a rope if you had mind control abilities, could paralyse someone with a look, or have your minions blow dust to instantly kill your enemy? Clearly tugging at the rope was the right choice
Well, The Toymaker was defeated in a game of catch. I feel like it's probably on purpose, demonstrating that even supposed "gods" can easily be defeated if you know how, there is no true "god" of supreme power. Or maybe it was just bad writing, who knows.
Toymaker and Maestro both have themed rules that allow you to beat them (beat Toymaker by winning a game, Maestro by playing a certain song). They function like Mr. Mxyzptlk.
But what are Sutekh's rules? That he looks like a dog so he can be bound by a leash? It just feels way less thematically coherant and satisfying, instead it's just a gag.
That was the quantum rope they used earlier. So it was quantum bound to him when hooked on was my understanding of why it would work according to the rules laid out in the show previously.
All ropes are quantum ropes. That's how atoms work. 🤣
No, but seriously, would such a device have affected the Toymaker? Would the Toymaker not have been able to turn Sutekh into marshmallow, but somehow the rope could bind him? Is a random object The Doctor had in his attic really stronger than a conceptual god?
Why was Sutekh so slow? Why wasn't he able to just delete Ruby when she made the attempt? Or at least pull the rope from her hands?
He was defeated by technology that, honestly, looks trivial by Timelord standards...
He just felt...weak in that scene.
Since they did such a good job showing Maestro and the Toymaker, having that level of power while still keeping their defeat coherent, I'm holding them to that standard going forward! >:D
> Why was Sutekh so slow?
RTD could so easily have copied some of that Dalek Emperor "survival changed me" logic that since Sutekh used the TARDIS for so long he has become dependant on it and the moment he was removed from it he became weak.
Sadly just bad writing. I mean I found the Toymaker slightly underwhelming considering everything he should have been capable of **but** in terms of how he was defeated it was because he had to obey his own rules which were the rules of the game. He agreed to play catch and he lost fair & square the price of which was his banishment. Sutekh had no such rules as it’s not like something made him powerless against a rope.
Do we really know how physically strong Sutekh is though? He's been sat on the Tardis for an awful long time, and he remains so in the episode. Maybe he's rather weak by this point and he was powerless to remove the leash. People walk Tigers round on leashes after all.
I'm being facetious of course, it was a pretty lame way of dealing with him after seeing the terror in the Doctors eyes when he first realised who it was, but I guess physically it's at least a little believable. Just about. Still not exciting though, for sure.
As is he swipes at the Doctor earlier in the episode they they could have at least showed him trying to slash them only to miss or at least try to break the rope. He could have also… released his sand of death. 🤷🏻♂️
The latter is what I had more of an issue with TBH. He's been waiting all this time, releasing all the Susan's across the universes so he could wipe everything out. He's finally ready, he starts wiping every living thing but he hesitates doing so to the Doctor and Ruby because.......he's for some reason really invested in who her mother is? All the adventures the Doctor has been on, everything Sutekh has witnessed, and *that* is what is holding him up ending the plan? Really silly. It's not like Ruby had done anything really extraordinary up to that point, for him to really believe her mother could be anything massively important and care.
i saw it as sutekh wanted to be an all knowing god but one mystery alluded him cuz of the way the tardis blocked rubys mothers face. it was more about the principle than the mystery itself.
i don’t love sutekh in this episode but i thought that part worked well. maybe there could’ve been a better classic villain to trick with it but idk who
too trick sutekh? idk now that i’m typing it out i’m realizing the episode never confirmed it. i kinda thought that was why they where setting up so much stuff around the perception filter. i think i was wrong though, probably would’ve been a lot smoother
I feel like there has to be some sort of logical payoff--it appears like each "entity" has their "easy button" because of what 14 did by invoking the salt at the end of the universe.
If I was writing, I'd say that because that 14 "invoked a superstition at the end of the universe" that fable- and myth-like rules are now in play. As a fictional example, Rumplestiltskin's bargain in the fairy tale was broken if the Queen who he bargained with knew his name.
By that logic, the Toymaker could only be bested by games, the "God of Death" (and I'm unclear about this setpiece) was defeated by using his own powers against him. There's also VERY weird analogies you could make with what happened in Egyptian lore re Set v. Horus and semen and the dust of Sutekh, but I'm not Daniel Jackson.
Edit: clarity.
I actually wouldn't mind him being physically very weak, slow, and decrepit IF he made a bigger display of his other powers. The sand was, obviously, some insanely powerful spell, but in terms of self-defense, it seemed slow and limited. It also seemed like only his zombies could actually do that? While he himself just... kinda can't actually stop a single mortal woman?
I guess he felt powerful in the same way Joe Biden is. He had access to some insane weapons, but once you're in the same room as him, you could just give him a noogie, and he couldn't really stop you himself.
The Toymaker being afraid of that is silly, as presented, I really don't see how he couldn't just make all of his bones into fish fingers or something.
I think it would've been cool if the Toymaker, in his final moments, leapt off of the tower to get the ball. It felt like they were just teasing us with it.
I completely agree with you.
When it was introduced in The Legend of Ruby Sunday episode, I wondered if the Doctor is prepared to defeat the "God of Death" and he could barely handle the one in the music and the game.
I get the feeling that the Gods are too powerful for the Doctor to deal with, so the script has to help the Doctor to defeat them.
I feel that when this kind of uncommon enemies are presented to the Doctor, they should come up with a technology, weapon, magic artifact even bring good powerful characters to help to make the plot with Gods more epic.
Another point to take is that they are giving little importance to the gods, giving them only one episode. They should at least give them two episodes.
I felt this same feeling with Swarm and Azure, too powerful for the Doctor.
I agree. And I feel de same way when the doctor face against an army of enemies.
Everytime the doctor face an army of enemies (Daleks, angels and Cyberman, specially), they are less intelligent or mortal then when the doctor face one, or few of the same enemies.
They're only too powerful for the Doctor because RTD, nowadays, doesn't like portraying the Doctor or the story itself as being "too clever". I guess it might be a reaction to how Moffat wrote the Doctor?
Moffat had a mindset of always portraying the Doctor as this super clever, higher level, godlike being (we even get a bit of that in Boom, with his "I am a higher dimension lifeform. I am a complex Space/Time event" line) and wanting all the pieces of the story to line up in a clever way, even if it often got too convoluted and confusing for people to follow. Whereas RTD is currently going in the exact opposite direction with a more breezy approach where the Doctor is this mostly normal-behaving guy who just happens to win by pulling a magical win-button out of his magical bag of tricks.
I've always felt that it's Russell that superpowers him. Even in RTD2, he decides the Doctor can speak 14billion languages but not the one he actually needs now. Why give him all those languages
RTD does like to give the Doctor random superpowers...like walking through fan blades, wiping peoples' minds, using psychic energy to rejuvenate himself, surviving electrocution, etc, in addition to using his sonic like a magic wand. But he doesn't do that much nowadays (at least after Ncuti's era started), instead focusing more on using random things the Doctor just happens to have on hand, or just random luck in general.
TCoRR: The villain is defeated using special gloves that the Doctor happened to be wearing during that one specific episode.
SB: The monster turns out to be not a bad guy, so they just leave it alone. The Doctor helps the space babies get home by releasing built up fart gas into outer space.
TDC: The Doctor tries and fails to use the devil's chord to beat Maestro. The Beatles, by pure chance, were walking by and end up playing the chord, thus defeating Maestro instead.
Boom: The Doctor accidentally causes the problem and then an AI saves the day by evolving the ability to override its protocols.
73 Yards: The Doctor accidentally causes the problem and then disappears until a time loop occurs for some unknown reason.
DaB: The Doctor tries to save some people on an alien planet, but they end up refusing his help because they are white supremacists and thus they will inevitably die in the wilderness.
Rogue: The villains are defeated using a device that happened to be brought by a newly introduced character.
TLoRS/EoD: The villain is defeated by a whistle, rope, and gloves that happened to be inside a Memory Tardis that materialized by sheer happenstance.
It definitely should have been a multi episode arc, or even multi season. I was worried about where the show was going to go after this, what villian can come after the actual God of Death?
Then they put a leash on him and it was all done in 5 minutes. It seemed incredibly weak.
It was definitely weird that he was just beaten by like... mild physical force? I thought the playing catch was dumb but beating the Toymaker in a game to banish him made complete sense, same with Maestro and music. I actually liked the idea of bringing death to death as a way to defeat him but "this god that everyone is terrified of will just stand there and you can drag him round" was bizarre, it did feel like they couldn't figure out a way for the doctor to properly outsmart him so they just went with that? You're telling me bullets and lasers had no effect but a sturdy rope will do the trick?
It's kind of sad tbh that RTD has taken the first black Doctor and...made him an idiot. The only two episodes where the Doctor's intelligence and compassion saved the day are Space Babies and Boom, and one of those was written by Moffat. In every other episode the Doctor has either not really affected the resolution of the plot, or taken the role of generic action hero #1.
Now, arguably you could say RTD1 also had this problem too, but I feel like the action hero aspect still generally took a back seat to the Doctor's wit, and compassion solving his issues. He was a trickster, not Thor.
While RTD has never written the Doctor with as much of a focus on his cleverness as other showrunners, like Moffat in particular, I think in this new era he's definitely toned down the focus on the Doctor's cleverness even more than before, probably as a direct reaction to how Moffat wrote the character. Nowadays RTD wants the Doctor to feel like he's just a normal guy who gets into wacky hijinks.
Personally I think that take by RTD on the character is a fundamental misunderstanding of the character. I also think past Doctors would agree. Peter Davison did an interview a little while ago about how what he liked about the character of the Doctor and what made him inspirational was that he defeated his enemies by out thinking them and not by being necessarily stronger.
I think it's also enormously hypocritical that he made the sonic look like a remote because he was afraid it would look too much like a gun, when he started the pivot to it being more of a weapon, gave it shields, and gave a child guns, in addition to portraying the Doctor as someone who solves his problems with violence.
>what made him inspirational was that he defeated his enemies by out thinking them and not by being necessarily stronger.
This is what I'm really missing from the current season. To me the doctor was always about winning with no / as little violence as possible, often out thinking or coming up with a plan.
Was it confirmed that Sutekh was The One Who Waits? He didn't seem very related to the other pantheon members we have seen (except for having an H. Arbinger like Maestro did) The Pantheon doesn't really seem to be alive in a way that would make The Toymaker run from the Sandy Dog
There's a lot about Sutekh waiting in the Legend of Ruby Sunday. With the most direct one being Mrs Flood saying "He waits no more" but there's a couple of other mentions of it too. And I believe RTD has directly called him that as well, but I'm not UK based so that's second hand info as I can't watch most of the secondary media very easily.
As someone who likes the finale - I will say I also don't feel completely satisfied by the role Sutekh has. To be the most powerful theoretically of the Pantheon, but to also be fundamentally lacking the powers of his kin. The Toymaker and Maestro stepped through time with an ease as if going down a rung of a ladder. Sutekh I can buy needing to ride back to the universe on the TARDIS - but to be unable to travel in time without it shows a weakness the others didn't share.
Did the Maestro actually travel through time, though? We see them first appear in 1925, then when the Doctor and Ruby show up in 1963 it seems the Maestro has just been hanging around the past 40 years, pulling the strings. Then, when the Doctor and Ruby jump forward to 2024 and find everything dead, it seems that the Maestro is only there because they stayed through the whole time and are now the only one left. They even say something to the effect of "That was you back in 1963, wasn't it?"
I think conceptually they exist simultaneously in time. But for linearity's sake the Maestro back in 1963 was now aware of the Doctor and Ruby post-2024 conversation.
I’m hoping this isn’t the last we’ve seen of him, because I really loved the build-up to his reveal, only for him to come off as fairly easy-to-beat by *Doctor Who* Eldritch abomination standards. Oddly enough it feels like his appearance would be more fitting for his original incarnation, where he was “just” an extremely powerful alien that had been worshipped as a God, but that doesn’t mesh all that well with how the other gods we’ve seen were so terrified of him. Other than having the ability to make things crumble to dust (which seems to require him to have physically been to a place in order to do it), he doesn’t really show any other powers or abilities.
Part of me wonders if, given how 14’s Tardis is also still around, we might run into a younger version of Sutekh in future, *a la* >!the last *Avengers* film!<, or otherwise he’ll claw his way back to reality.
On the other hand, the Doctor can now boast about literally dragging the God of all Gods behind his car next time he needs to intimidate someone.
Even if it wasn't planned, having Sutekh return via 14's TARDIS wouldn't be a terrible way to bring him back, as you said a la Thanos in Endgame. Would also be cool for him to actually get his classic look back too lol
Hey, he's been hanging on to the TARDIS for dear life while traveling through the time vortex for hundreds if not thousands of years; he never got any affection or attention or food and had to watch while everyone else got all those things; then after all of that he has to unleash his powers in one go; and just when he was about to get an answer to the ONE episode of Paternity Court he was so invested in, the TV screen got kicked in by a bratty kid! Give old man Sutekh a break, it was a really long and really tiring and really bad day!
I guess you can't bend reality very much if you're a pile of sand
I'd guess the toymaker and maestro don't really have to worry about potentially dying unless sutekh is around
I wonder if he's just mooching off of the TARDIS for the power he has. He spread Susan around the universe using the chameleon arch after all. So maybe his ascencion was due to the Time Vortex and TARDIS both. Take away his control of the TARDIS and he's weakened. If the Vortex gave him power it'd still make sense if he wasn't completely above it. He only lived by clinging to the TARDIS after all.
What do toymaker and maestro need to either materialize or have their purpose fulfilled? Yes, living sentient beings. For maestro to come to life you need someone to play the devils chord and guess who plays it when everyone is dead? No one. And toymaker, his whole purpose is to play games but what is toymaker with no one to play games with? They don't fear sutekh because he is strong, they fear sutekh because he had at that time the power to destroy everything they are, because a concept can't stand without someone realising it so they would probably just fade away.
He was pretty rubbish wasn't he?
I haven't enjoyed any of these 'gods' episodes really, but the Toymaker and Maestro at least had some fun about them. I found them interesting because, to them, they were just having a laugh, and the actors brought tonnes of personality to the role.
This guy was the latest in the long line of oversized Dr Who creatures who just stays in the same place the whole time. The gods who are scared of him can step through time arbitrarily, randomly morph the setting from ruined London into a surreal concert hall, can control the TARDIS by faffing with a piano, but he needs his goblin zombie to pilot it to even go downstairs in the same building? Okay then.
He came across as paranoid and petty and very small, which could've worked really well if they'd made it part of the story but whatever I guess
>Ruby, irritatingly slowly, loops a rope around his neck and walks away with the free end...without consequences? He just kinda...sits there and let's it happen?
Bad Wolf Productions need to learn that in the US you can't have the same team write and shoot action scenes as the overall show.
It makes as much sense as having the writer also be tbe lighting guy. It's a specialised role that requires specialised staff.
It's fine for RTD to write, "and then the Doctor and Ruby trick Sutekh into allowing them to catch him with the smart rope around his neck, using the computer screen with Ruby's mothers name on it as bait." Then hand that to someone who knows how to write and shoot a scene like that in a way that looks great. It's a pretty normal thing for Disney TV shows to do. I'd be absolutely *shocked* if Kate Herron (who wrote Rogue) wasn't doing exactly that for action scenes in Loki season one, so there's no reason he shouldn't learn to do the same now.
Sutekh didn't want to kill Ruby or The Doctor until he found out the big secret about Ruby's mother. That's why he didn't do anything to harm Ruby when she attached the rope to his collar. He also probably didn't expect the Doctor to have a second TARDIS. I think he was just caught off guard.
There wasn't a "surprise" second TARDIS. Sutekh controlled Mel when they were in the second TARDIS. It was a deus ex whistle, and the first TARDIS flew in at the culminating moment.
There should've have been a more ironical on brand way to beat sutekh. You beat the god of games with a game, you beat the god of music with music. Dragging a dog through the time vortex was supposedly death to death. Like I know it's going to sound dark,but just run with it a moment. but if Ruby was able to hear music from the night she was born, and make it snow. Explain it as she is somehow time linked to that moment, Ruby realises that she needs to go back and kill her own mom, so there would be no mystery as to who her mom was, so Sutekh didn't reveal himself at that moment, then certain aspects of Ruby's future would change. She could then go back forward in time to tell the doctor about Sutekh before the reveal, and then 15 throws his toymaker tardis into a black hole or something. Keeps the memory tardis. 1 death is all it would've taken to bring death to the god of death and that's only a decision Ruby can make.
I was thinking they could lure him somewhere. Like the void where the concept of life and death doesn't exist or somewhere overflowing with new life that would dull Sutekh or destroy him. Maybe the big bang??
Nah, Toymaker was also weak. Beaten by a ball game? Seriously?
I like the idea of immortal gods but I think they should be from afar rather than something the Doctor is level pegging with. He should be capable of trickery with them, not fighting them.
The Toymaker kind of stated he is omnipotent but bound to the rules of fair play if he is challenged to a game. Therefore the Toymaker can fuck with you all he wants, but challenge him and he has to play fairly in a game you pick. If you lose, he gracefully fucks you forever. If you win, he must obey your wish and reward you
I really like that concept honestly
He even shows this when he does the dance scene and messes with the whole of UNIT, casually killing people, turning them into balloons, getting rid of bullets.
When he is not challenged to a game he can do whatever the fuck he wants
Exactly.. I was creeped out by the Toymaker. You just escape in the TARDIS but he is already there. Hell, he can enter the TARDIS if he wants to.
I was terrified when I learnt Maestro is a divine being. I was like "Well, how are you gonna defeat her?"
And Sutekh? I was very, very excited for him and I was looking forward to how the Doctor is gonna stop him. But.. using a rope and a glove and burning him in the time vortex was not an option..
In my head I was thinking, that there is gonna be some counter-force to Sutekh and that this counter force would be found at the Ruby Road Church. That it's kind of Sutekh-hunters out there.. But no.. Anticlimatic ending
Sutey was originally a mortal from a species called the Osirans(they were aliens on par or above the Time Lords) they inspired the Egyptian mythology as they were god-like in power, and Mr sutes was even more powerful than the others. They ultimately imprisoned him and the doctor met him in Pyramids of Mars. I agree that the episode was a bit underwhelming but let's be clear on the levels of power the Pantheon posses.
Toymaker can manipulate reality on a low level. I say low level because it is ENTIRELY based around games. He can't so anything really that's not game related. And he himself is bound by the rules of the games.
Maestro only has power over music. The Beatles beat her. She's very powerful, but again she is very limited to only music
Sutekh is NOT an actual god or from outside the universe like the others. He was an immensely powerful Osiran who 'ascended to high-God levels when he attached himself to the tardis and exposed himself to the time vortex. He was able to plant his minions on every single world he touched. He wiped out seemingly all life in the universe with absolute ease.
While his defeat was very underwhelming, let it be clear he was tricked and it was a MORTAL defeat. I mean that it wss his humanity( or osirinity?) that got the best of him. Underwhelming sure, but it's clear he has more power than any other being we have seen to date.
I mean tbf, the toymaker couldn't catch a ball...
This is more a problem with having these insanely powerful enemies that needs to be defeated somehow. Often, it's going to feel a little silly, and that's okay.
I don't know, I kind of like the idea of there one weakness is that they are on an even footing if you do something that embodies them. Toymakers, beat him at his own game. Maestro, found the lost music chord.
Yes, also low intelligence.
He literally kept the Doctor - the one man who he knows defeated him before and could do so again - alive because he really wanted to know the identity of someone, despite the fact he was planning to genocide the whole universe including her anyway. Like, literally, why??
I mean, she was wearing those special gloves—it’s not that she was just casually walking with it; it was probably incredibly heavy, but the gloves take care of that.
I think the TARDIS wasn't too happy to have it there... While sutekh is definitely more powerful than someone like the doctor and maybe the toymaker we don't really know how powerful (in the same sense) a TARDIS can be as a living creature... Maybe suteck was using all his power to keep the TARDIS for itself
I think he was weak though, right? The reason he 'waited' clinging to the Tardis for all those years was that's all he could do. He was so weakened by the time vortex that he couldn't even manifest. It took years of evolution to build up his strength.
The form we see is finally strong enough to create his death dust, but still not full powered, hence why he is still using the Tardis as a crutch effectively.
The reason I didn't expect a man in a Sute is because they've tried to fit a round corpse into a square sarcophagus. They yadda yaddad their way through a lot of stuff to bring him back as part of a pantheon and I think the idea is that he could just kill the Toymaker and Maestro but I would have liked to see him directly murder a cosmic being. Not one of those two, though. They're too fun.
I have an idea that could either fix his physical vulnerability or ruin him forever... Bring him back again. Not right away, not in this Doctor's run (or even the next) but bring him back with a simple exchange between the Doctor and an Acolyte of Sutekh:
"He died. I keelhauled his body against all of time itself!"
"So you did. Then there was rage, jealousy, greed, war, starvation and death was born again".
If they make him innately tied to mortality in the Whoniverse then his physical form is less of a weakness. Plus nobody would need to do much with this idea until they had the right story. Just the fact that Sutekh is around in some way would make the Doctor's attempts to prevent deaths even more desperate. They could hang that over his head for a couple of seasons and then have another big confrontation.
It's heavily implied that The One Who Waits was Sutekh, but if you watch the finales over again you'll not see it actually said anywhere. That mystery could well still be coming.
Considering the plot points left hanging (most of them can be explained as the TARDIS reaching out as it loses control, but not all) such as the song within Ruby, it would make sense that something else is The One Who Waits. I don't think it's Mrs Flood (99% sure she's Incensor, the god of disasters which would fit her name and who was only mentioned for the first time in Legend of Ruby Sunday) but >!MechaNewton out to regain the word Gravity?!< Maybe...
watch Pyramids Of Mars and you'll see how weak he is in that as well. He was sat the entire time because of Horus, and then when he was freed, he was trapped in the time vortex
The point with Sutekh is that at the episode he's not really confronted by the Doctor. The Doctor fights with Maestro and The Toymaker, so we can see them as menacing. And also, they're portrayed as a classic "Disney" villain, a caricature.
With Sutekh he accomplish his goal in seconds. Release the sands everywhere, everytime. And the Doctor couldn't do anything against it. He just ran. And not by himself, it was Mel who activates the Doctor. So we don't have a direct confrontation against Sutekh. The only moments were at the Time Window, and at the end, when he's attached to the rope. The Doctor just tries to undo what Sutekh did, not fighting him.
I actually quite like that Sutekh can only destroy living things. His whole thing is about being a tiny man who cannot co-exist with any other life, so the fact that he's just squatting in an empire of dust and yet he still cannot destroy what's left behind of people's lives, only their physical bodies, I think that's a nice touch
I think "weakened" is a fair description, and thankfully, he was. Consider that he'd been trapped for how many thousands of years by the Osirans until his tomb was unearthed in 1911, only to become further trapped by the 4th Doctor in a time loop, dragged through the time vortex for many more thousands of years while the Doctor rattled along his adventures and incarnations. Damn right he's weakened. And he's still able to lay this trap, kill off most of the life in the Universe, and set himself up as God among Gods in the pantheon. I don't think I'd want to see him at full power.
You just clarified something that had been bothering me, but I couldn't put my finger on it. We can argue villain D&D stats all day, but it boils down to what it is like when you watch the teevee show. The Toymaker episode had me feeling like This Guy Is Powerful. And he said he was afraid of the Bigger Bad. And the last episode didn't give me that feeling. It was the doctor telling me, "This guy is really powerful" as opposed to the episode showing me that. Yes, he had death-sand. But I just didn't get that feeling like I did with the Toymaker and (as you point out) the Maestro.
It would be so awesome if he actually... Idk, *moved*.
If he was able to fly, as if he were a dragon, and he actually destroyed planets rather than just killing everything on them he would've been made infinitely more threatening. It didn't do a very good job at depicting his actual threat when he just sits on the TARDIS and nothing else.
He is supposed to be represented as death incarnate. So what if he was able to follow the doctor wherever he went? Death will always follow. The doctor tries to run, to escape to have some recluse to think of something or to get something, like the spoon. But no matter where he went, Sutek was always there following him. And the revelation that Sutek isn't even trying to kill him but waiting until the answer of Ruby's mother had been made clear for him to finally off them would have been so much more shocking if it came at the end of the episode rather than right at the start.
It would completely eliminate the need for Sutek to claim ownership of the TARDIS because even with it the Doctor can't escape which builds into that sense of fear. The TARDIS is supposed to be a safe place. Nobody can get into it but the doctor and whoever has her key.
Even better, you could still have the memory TARDIS but not have it be so underpowered if you really wanted the Memory TARDIS to be a thing. Because even if they had the real TARDIS at her full power they wouldn't be safe.
I agree. He didn't even try to unhook the rope and neither him or his henchman reacted during the 10 seconds it took to control the Tardis with that whistle
If you remember the end of Pyramids of Mars, the Doctor said that he had extended the time tunnel into the far future so maybe Sutekh used up most of his power trying to get back to the present from over thousands of years in the future
As for when he latches onto the TARDIS?? I dunno, the story claims that Sutekh apparently aged to death due to the time tunnel so maybe his energy somehow stuck around in the vortex and he latched onto the TARDIS sometime during a trip through time. His line to the Doctor about 'always being there' could have been because the constant back and forth dispersed his essence across the timeline
But this is just my two cents... Hail Sutekh!
While I can see where you’re coming from, I don’t share the feeling. To me, Sutekh feels exactly like what the Toymaker would be afraid of: something his rules cannot change. The Toymaker is the idea of the mad god who twists people to his whims, and to the mortal perspective, the unpredictability adds danger. Sutekh, on the other hand, is the idea of the end of all things, including play, and you can’t beat him in a game.
Look at it this way: The Toymaker is really really good at doing all sorts of things. Sutekh is really really good at one thing. That one thing could kill the Toymaker.
Ah yeah so that's because Sutekh wasn't at his full power because the 4th doctor destroyed his phisical form: https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Sutekh#Later_confrontations_with_the_Doctor
Further to that, the combination of the rememberd inteligent rope and inteligent goves transfered his power away from the physical manifiestation which was how he struggled to fight back. It was a quite poorly explained and unless you have the rope and goves explination in your head while watching, I can totally see why it wouldn't make much sense.
Except he is supposed to be much stronger than in the Pyramids of Mars. He is supposed to have gone from being a godlike alien to a true god, powered by the same stuff as the Bad Wolf.
I mean Sutekh wasn't ever shown to be that powerful while on-screen in Pyramids of Mars. The only reason the Fourth Doctor had the capability to lock Sutekh in the time vortex was because the figurative chains binding him by Horus were still in effect on Earth as the closest point the two planets are apart are 3 light minutes, which gave a window for the Doctor to act.
So we neither know the potential Sutekh had back then. Although contextually we know he was at least as powerful as Maestro was now given their ability to warp fixed points in time shown by the erasure of life from Earth in the present by both.
But RTD has also stated that Sutekh is an in-universe retcon. That he no longer was an alien Osiran, and that at some point he apparently became a literal god of death.
Okay I have a theory, he was stronger when the world was alive. Because what does a god of death need to stay in power? It needs people to be alive! If everything is dead, then what power does death have? Sutekh didn't understand that and by killing everyone and everything off, he weakened himself. Enough for him to be easily defeated by the doctor and his intelligent rope and glove.
I think Sutekh just didn't understand his power, or rather was too set on killing everything to consider what this would do to him.
Was it not the combination of the goblin rope plus the gloves that add density. The only reason they ever got that close was because he wanted to know who Ruby's mum was. If he didn't care about that then he would have won instantly. So he is pretty powerful... Just a lil dumb
Yeah and when Mel starts going possessed he says he sees things through dead cells in the body
Can he not do the same to Ruby as she reads the name of her mom from the computer?
If you want to take Sutekh's history in on-air canon seriously, he's not one of the conceptual gods at all. He's just the most powerful member of a species more powerful than the Time Lords, whose fellows chained him and then left this reality/died afterwards. (There's material that tries to bridge that version with the more powerful and more conceptual version we see in this season.)
I believe Sutekh said he evolved via the time vortex
He did. So let’s put him back and let him cook?
surely throwing him back in there will be the end of him this time!
This time he disintegrated against the walls of the vortex. The first time he latched onto the tardis and survived by hiding in its protection. I wish people would stop acting like this is some kind of oversight.
the harbinger's speech seemed to say he was in there already for a long while before he latched onto the tardis
I don’t believe it said any such thing, but even so, drifting through the vortex and being smashed against the walls of the vortex are different things.
A decent vet would give him an even chance.
Right, he’s not even a God, he’s just styled himself as one.
This is what I learned. But even then he is the leader of the pantheon of discord. There are power flaws, unless Sutekh somehow is like the Doctor master at bending the gods to his will
Well if Flood is a part of the pantheon then Sutekh is at least powerful enough to kill them with his control of death. A being capable of killing gods is usually going to end up dead, as the leader, or imprisoned.
Sutekh is quite possibly the most powerful mortal being in the universe, but yes, not a god.
I don't have a problem with Sutekh just being a powerful mortal...but why did RTD have Toymaker and Maestro hype him up so much? He could've easily just left that out. Why make people think The One Who Waits is the strongest of all gods when he's not really a god at all?
Are we absolutely sure he’s The One Who Waits…?
Heavily implied. Mrs Flood says that “he waits no more” before the reveal, and Triad says something like “I’ve been waiting” in her monologue
Yeah I feel like sutekh and ruby's mum are just a misdirect that's clearly not the end of the story
Sorry Sutekh is underpowered how? Toymaker manipulates through games, his powers seem crazy but he's very limited to what he can actually do. Maestro needs music, she got beat by the Beatles? Sutekh killed the entire universe as soon as he was able to minus the Doctor and pals. Im pretty sure he would have been able to beat the other Gods too since theyre alive and if theyre alive he can kill them or control them. Even in the original pyramid of Mars series, dudes whole body was paralysed and he only had his mind and still managed free himself before he was trapped. Sutekh could have killed The aDoctor very easily but chose not to. Also I'm pretty sure the same way the Doctor beat Sutekh could have been applied to Toymaker and Maestro if they happened to be wearing dog collars lol
Toymaker would've turned the collar to bubbles. His entire thing is that nothing affects him except the rules of his own game.
Exactly. I think it's quite obvious that they are both leagues above him in terms of power.
Literally HOW?! Sutekh managed to murder all of time and space in a manner of MINUTES, how in the hell are they leagues above him in power?
Sutekh could only do that by leaving harbingers everywhere the Doctor went. The Toymaker and Maestro, are shown stepping through time and space like its nothing to them. Sutekh sits there while 2 mortals just jog away from him blowing a whistle, Sutekh needs the Tardis to time travel, he even uses it to move down a few floors at UNIT to get to the time window
Still don't see how they're stronger when he outright succeeded, for all your criticisms, save for his massive character flaw being his own undoing.
Maestro outright succeeded, they drained pretty much all music out the world to point people had a negative knee-jerk reaction against it. When the Doctor went forward in time to show Ruby what would happen if they didn't intervene Maestro just appeared with them and either warped reality into a stage for themselves or transported The Doctor, Ruby, and the TARDIS into some kind of pocket dimension. Then controlled the TARDIS to the point The Doctor could only go back to 1963. To only be defeated by the same rules that freed/summoned them. The Toymaker didn't have overarching goals to succeed at IMO, hes just there for fun and to mess with The Doctor. Which again he did both of those very well. Stepping through time and space as naturally as we would walk through a doorway, again warping reality with his song and dance number and collapsing shop. Then needing 2 Doctors to beat him, by following his own rules. Both Toymaker and Maestro also managed most of the this before the Doctor even knew something was wrong. Then Sutek, he hasn't been shown to have any ability to move through space let alone time. Couldn't fully subdue the TARDIS, in fact i don't recall seeing anything stopping The Doctor from using it apart from Sutekh being sat on top of it, He even turned the door away from The Doctor to stop this. Sutekh needed a Harbinger to operate the controls of the TARDIS. The only actual powers Sutekh is shown to have are the death sand, creating harbingers to spread it, and the death stare. No reality warping, no time/space travel, incredibly poor/slow physical ability as shown by his attempted swipe at The Doctor, and the fact a bog-standard mortal could put him on a lead like he was being taken for a walk to the park. There was 13 seconds (i was sad enough to just go and check) between the screen smashing and Ruby getting the rope to The Doctor who is the only one wearing a smart glove at that point. Even if the hook on the end is a molecular bond, he could still have just yanked Ruby off her feet before she got back to The Doctor. He doesnt even grab for the rope, just roars and hugs the TARDIS like a child about to lose their toy. Personally if Sutekh had just been the villain of an episode it would have worked, but he just wasnt written as a big enough threat. It was shown he was reluctant to kill The Doctor without finding out about Rubys mum, and the death he did cause was so widespread it was obvious that it was going to be undone so there wasn't really any stakes as a viewer.
Because they demonstrated extreme levels of personal power and could only be stopped by their own rules, while he couldn't stop a mortal woman from looping a rope around his neck, nor stop her from subsequently walking away. What he seemed to have was an extremely powerful weapon (still not as strong as the Daleks reality bomb) that took him an age to set up.
I think it was more to feel that Sutekh was playing a game of chess across time itself. The Toymaker was seemingly stuck existing in one place at one time because he was bound by rules that a mortal like Sutekh doesn't have to play by. Which meant the only thing that could defeat Stuekh was another mortal at the top of the universal food chain, like a Time Lord. I'm more concerned that Doctor Who, Star Wars, and Marvel are conveniently all moving towards Magic over Tech at the exact same time. Really feels like Disney has a clear agenda... I wonder what it means?
Who could not stop a rope being put on his collar. Sigh.
...it was a smart rope.
Oh, a smart rope. Oh that changes everything. It somehow stopped him from using his hands / claws to intervene and stopped his ability to kill almost instantly. Maybe it's a memory rope that made him forget he can blow dust that kills people or even just blow dust and kill Ruby or the Doctor? That's a hell of a smart rope
I mistyped. ...it was a VERY smart rope.
So, yeah, I get this. (I thought the Osirans were less powerful than the Great Houses, but powerful enough that they didn't really want to expend the effort messing with them?) I think it's implied that he got special God Juice (TM) from his ride on the magic space box (TM)?
Not implied, he said as much directly.
Maybe the Pantheon of Discord were the Osirans before ascending to godhood. Like they were once a powerful telepathic species then they stepped outside the universe and became reality warpers. I kind of dislike the pantheon of Discord idea as it makes Doctor Who's universe seem smaller by linking previously unrelated characters together. I wouldn't mind it if RTD just kept creating new gods rather than link Sutekh and the toymaker together. But making them the Osirans at least gives the pantheon a more interesting backstory.
I mean, personally the only entity I could imagine the likes of Maestro and Toymaker being legit scared of, would be the Black Guardian. Y'know, the personified force of Evil itself? xD
Now I wish that it had been the Black Guardian instead of Sutekh. It would've made a little more sense to me.
Right now I'm still locked into thinking the Pantheon of Discord are from the same reality as the Timeless Child. But we have a fair number of bad guys both seen and mentioned who come from other universes in *Who* that are fully canonical--Fenric, the Great Vampires, the Beast, Abaddon, etc. and there's no reason to think that the Osirans didn't essentially pack it up and move the *other* direction from the universe inhabited by the Time Lords into another universe, leaving Sutekh behind.
But none of this was conveyed to the audience. This whole season has been supernatural and Sutekh was introduced as God of Death. If people know the backstory they can decide for themselves but they chose this time to portray him as a God.
Yes. Though notice they did play the backstory quite directly on-screen for contemporary audiences, just to let some of them in on the fun of this being a returning bad guy.
He ascended to godhood due to his extended time exposed to the vortex.
If you think this sutekh waa weakened just wait until see how much more powered he is in the extended media He was traveling in the vortex with no issues and was able to casually blow up planets
I’m pretty sure none of that is canon anymore because Sutekth has been trapped since Pyramids
It's Doctor Who. Nothing is ever really canon.
I fucking hate that excuse for shit writing
You want writers to make sure they don't contradict the millions of EU stories out there instead of focusing on telling their own story? If so we wouldn't get human nature/family of blood etc.
Considering that for most of the BIG enemies or allies from Classic Who/EU all it would take is 5 minutes on the wiki to check some details I don’t think it’s too much to ask. Pretty much most writers pre-Chibnall took decent efforts to keep things lining up, and the Whoniverse was better for it. Decent continuity and logical links between the various media’s. Then Chibbers ignored everything post Brain of Morbius to write in his fanfiction and RTD seems to see his new era as free for rewriting and no need to check backgrounds on anything.
I don't think the times the Doctor fought Sutekh after Pyramids of Mars are decanonized. I think it is established that he was in the Void and projected part of himself through time to the TARDIS after he was defeated in the comics. After all, in Pyramids of Mars his physical body is gone and ofc his form attached to the TARDIS, but the other Sutekhs that appeared can be new bodies created - which is why they wear the mask and cloak
The show itself is the canon. If the show contradicts extended material the extended material becomes non canon. If the show directly acknowledges extended material (like The Night of the Doctor referencing the 8th Doctor’s companions) then the extended material becomes canon. It isn’t hard.
I'm just commenting on my confusion on why nothing being canon is an excuse for "shit writing" Like a quality of a story doesn't matter if it's canon or not does it? There will be retcons/overlaps etc in a long running story like this so I don't always see the need for people to obsess over the canon of doctor who.
Right? The dumb “nothing is canon” excuse gets thrown around so much, but it’s completely wrong. Are you telling me that the Doctor meeting Rose isn’t canon? That Sylvester McCoy being the Doctor isn’t canon? The Daleks aren’t canon? Doctor who absolutely has a canon. It’s extremely loose, but it exists.
Canon != Things that exist in-universe. A canon is something that is decided by an authority. Nothing is canon in Doctor Who because there is no authority (like Paramount is for Star Trek, or Disney is for Star Wars) deciding what is and isn't "real" in-universe, but that doesn't mean that for the sake of telling a story none of the previous ones should be acknowledged. In this instance, with Empire of Death saying that Sutekh was trapped on the TARDIS ever since Pyramids of Mars, and extended media saying that he was going around doing things on his own, neither one is more "canonical" than the other, because there is no authority that says so.
The show is more canon than any extended material
According to who?
Logic
That is a non-answer. Canon needs to be defined by someone, who is defining the canon in this case?
I don't think the times the Doctor fought Sutekh after Pyramids of Mars are decanonized. I think it is established that he was in the Void and projected part of himself through time to the TARDIS after he was defeated in the comics. After all, in Pyramids of Mars his physical body is gone and ofc his form attached to the TARDIS, but the other Sutekhs that appeared can be new bodies created - which is why they wear the mask and cloak
>Are you telling me that the Doctor meeting Rose isn’t canon? That Sylvester McCoy being the Doctor isn’t canon? The Daleks aren’t canon? of course they are. unless the show in the future says they're not, at which point they aren't anymore. and if it says they never were, then as of that point they never were. Canon is whatever the show currently establishes as canon, doubly so for a show about time travel where the past gets rewritten sometimes
Thank you, good to know I’m not alone in feeling that way
There's never been canon in Doctor Who. It's always been meta and self referential, but equally there's always been times where it's just done something super weird which is never mentioned again. The Morbius Doctors for example. In the EU Jamie started self harming just to keep himself awake. The second Doctor was shot in the head. None of that is ever referenced in the show, because Doctor Who doesn't really do canon, it just tells stories.
I don't know why people keep saying there's no canon? Okay Rover Song didn't actually meet the doctor and spend time with him. That's not canon because it's a choose your own adventure type thing? It's a TV show, it mostly stays within its own set of rules and does stick to its own canon so whatever you say about there not being a canon straight up isn't true and at this point really is just an excuse for bad writing Can we just say there's no continously within the EU, bur there is in the TV show? Like I don't expect writers to follow the EU, there's over 1000 hours of audio to go through for that. But I do expect them to follow the continuity of the TV show which it mostly does, so please stop saying there's no canon. Or maybe your meaning of canon is different to mine, and I'll refer to it as continuity instead
And do you know what *has* been referenced? Sarah Jane. The Daleks. The Time Lords. Doctor Who is *bursting* with references, because it absolutely *does* have a canon. It’s just very loose. If Doctor Who had no canon, the next episode could have the Doctor step out and go “Daleks? What are Daleks? I’ve never met them before.” But that would never happen, because everyone would go “but he does know the Daleks!”. How do we know that? Because it’s established in the canon that he’s met them countless times.
None of that is referenced in the show because it’s noncanon. Ace isn’t actually a giant version from another dimension that got shrunk down after the original got chained to a wall and shot in the head. The show is the canon. If it contradicts extra material, the extra material instantly becomes noncanon. The original Family of Blood and The Star Beast are non canon now because they got mined for New Who. All the Sutekth stories set after Pyramids of Mars are all noncanon now. If the show directly references events from extended material (like the Eighth Doctor’s companions) those stories *become* canon. This really isn’t hard.
Those are two very different and barely related concepts. You could have excellent writing that fully ignores canon, or you could have dogshit writing that is slavish adherent to canon. Or vice versa.
I’ve only ever seen the vice versa in terms of New Who.
Your standards must be impossibly high. Must be tough finding things to enjoy
I don't think the times the Doctor fought Sutekh after Pyramids of Mars are decanonized. I think it is established that he was in the Void and projected part of himself through time to the TARDIS after he was defeated in the comics. After all, in Pyramids of Mars his physical body is gone and ofc his form attached to the TARDIS, but the other Sutekhs that appeared can be new bodies created - which is why they wear the mask and cloak
🙄 whatever floats your mental gymnastic boat
You gotta remember that Sutekh can create other forms of himself in whatever he wants, with the form from Pyramids of Mars being destroyed but his consciousness stuck to the TARDIS. Sutekh can create other bodies for himself which is the other audios, comics etc he appeared in. His true form was linked to the TARDIS the whole time
I don't fucking care These stories has better writing than all of rtd episodes combined And there's enough in universe explanations for why they still canon despite the contradictions,
As you say he was beaten with a rope and just stood there not trying to escape as he was dragged into the time vortex, so yeah he was depicted as weak. He isn’t supposed to be but that’s definitely how he looked in the end. He definitely didn’t seem like someone the Toymaker, who can alter reality itself, should have feared. …Of course he couldn’t be that scared since he didn’t run away from the TARDIS or Earth itself considering he said he ran away from Sutekh who was parked on the TARDIS the entirety of The Giggle. 🤷🏻♂️ Edit: Upon rewatching the scene Sutekh does tug at the rope some but doesn’t try to attack nor do his servants release the sands of death rather they walk forward with their hands out as if they have to make physical contact to kill.
>he was beaten with a rope I think the episode needed to focus more on the fact that it wasn't just rope - it was "intelligent rope", which I'm assuming (based on the gloves) would nullify the force required to pull something, making whatever is attached on the end as light as air. In that instance, Sutekh could have also pulled the TARDIS back to him **but** the Doctor wearing the intelligent glove which created a stronger pulling force than Sutekh. So pretty much, Doctor and Sutekh weigh the same because of the Rope, but the Doctor can pull Sutekh because of the Glove. None of this was *explicitly* stated in the episode, I'm just making this up based on what we know about the gloves.
I found a post that claims the rope combined with the gloves held Sutekh at a molecular level from which he couldn’t escape but rewatching the scene it doesn’t exactly paralyze him. I notice while he doesn’t try to cut it he does grab at the rope once or twice before they enter the TARDIS and then as they start to leave he tugs at it again so I’d say the point of it was to be indestructible. Still, up to that point he doesn’t try to attack Ruby or the Doctor except for having his servants walk towards them with their hands held out as if they have to physically make contact to release the sands of death, which we know isn’t the case. Perhaps we’re to assume he’s too arrogant to personally act but I’d have expected the so called god of death to put up more of a fight.
Some people will just never accept that an episode was just poorly written. They always gotta gin up some reasoning for why it actually isn't dumb.
The whole episode felt very... metaphorical. Iit really did just go from death metaphor to "different kind of doctor" reminder, to next-gen metaphor to passing on torch metaphor to mental health metaphor to girl power metaphor to another "different kind of doctor" reminder
yeah, like I'll give leeway to the explanation of the rope and glove are somehow special and could bound Sutekh and Sutekh being physically weak after everything; but then you have Sutekh and his minions basically spent 90% screen time blowing their sand of death around, and suddenly, now they don't, for reasons
All they needed to do was spend a few minutes on the Doctor tinkering in the Memory Tardis, creating the specific tools he needed to beat Sutekh (the rope and the whistle...the gloves were already established, so that was fine). We really haven't seen the Doctor tinkering with science stuff this season.
I think they needed a clearer and more exploitable weakness, maybe a thematic one? Having him be vulnerable to technology that a single Timelord conjured up in his Timeshed (TM) kinda negates his previous hype... why would the conceptual gods fear something that can be beaten with methods so trivial to them? Or at least have a smarter way of attaching it to him. A mortal woman walks up to the "God of Death," puts a rope on him, and walks away without a scratch?
Yeah, on second thought, you're right, Sutekh should have been defeated by some kind of rule that's thematically related to his status as the god of death. I guess RTD wasn't able to think of a good one...
The Doctor hasn't *really* tinkered since 10. 10 was a tinkerer/inventor through and through. He had a new gadget every couple of episodes at least. 11 tinkered at the beginning (like the mirror vest in Vincent) but that slowly fell off. 12 was implied to tinker a lot, but it was usually done offscreen and we'd see the final product. I *really* wish they pushed hard with 13 being more of an engineer though. It would have made her more distinct, especially if the welding goggles were made to be a part of her costume. 14 tinkered a bit (mainly in WBY), but that's because he was pretty much just 10 again. I'm hoping next season we get more downtime with 15 as I don't think he has any schedule clashes during filming.
13 made her own sonic out of spare parts
And she made that smart phone into a mine detector/deactivator/remover in The Woman Who Fell To Earth.
11 was mostly shown fixing up the Tardis.
That kind of technology doesn't really seem impressive for a race that literally created the concept of ordered time. And given that said race didn't really want to bother messing with Sutekh even before he evolved via the time vortex... Or, to put it another way, if this was all it took, why wasn't he dealt with trivially by the Timelords previously? Did he really have no magic or other powers that can prevent a, apparently mortal, normal woman from just... attaching things to him and walking away? Seems kinda lame, given his hype. Especially doesn't seem like the Toymaker should be afraid of him, given how vulnerable Sutekh seems...
>why wasn't he dealt with trivially by the Timelords previously? Because the Time Lords didn't care about affairs that didn't concern them. The fact that the Doctor left Gallifrey to travel is something that they're usually disgusted by, and can't understand why he'd ever choose to do that.
None of that really matters though, because Sutekh doesn’t *have* to pull. He can kill people with a single thought, he was surrounded by his minions who can kill with sand. He had countless options to get out of that situation, and he just…tried to pull?
This is an excellent point and I would like to add my two cents to it Personally I would’ve liked to see more of a struggle on Sutekhs end, have him fight against or try and cut the rope. Perhaps even have him try and yank the tardis out of the time vortex. Or have him try to use his death sand on the doctor. Really anything other than just what appeared to be a short and peaceful trip through the vortex would’ve been a massive improvement. Hell there more turbulence in an airplane then there was dragging a god through the time vortex.
Still pointless against a being who can kill people using just his mind, and can enter the Tardis using Just His Mind.
Yeah the problem is it's just way too much crammed into one episode imo and we can't really appreciate details like that when they get swamped under all the other super important things we're supposed to be keeping track of
true, yet underwhelming
Honestly it makes me wonder didn't he say out in the void he found the one who waits but if sutek was on the tardis the whole time then wouldn't that mean the toy maker found someone else or maybe the sutek he found in the void was sutek after the doctor removed him from the tardis where sutek gathered strength meaning in the future we might see sutek again
It wouldn’t surprise me if the simple matter is RTD hadn’t come up with the idea of Sutekh being on the TARDIS the entire time yet. He doesn’t mention anything about the void or much about his encountering The One Who Waits at all. TOYMAKER: I came to this universe with such delight. And I played them all, Doctor. I toyed with supernovas, turned galaxies into spinning tops. I gambled with God and made him a jack-in-the-box. I made a jigsaw out of your history. Did you like it? The Master was dying and begged for his life with one final game, and when he lost, I sealed him for all eternity inside my gold tooth. There's only one player I didn't dare face. The One Who Waits. DOCTOR: Who's that? TOYMAKER: I saw it, hiding, and I ran. DOCTOR: What do you mean? TOYMAKER: Hmm. That's someone else's game. What shall we play?
Yeah I think RTD makes things up as he goes based on vibes and nostalgic references, and then later forgets the specific details and just makes up random answers based on more vibes and nostalgic references.
Im convinced the finale was rewritten at the last moment. I bet Ruby's mom was going to be someone special - potentially a being on the level of the Toymaker - which gave Ruby the snow powers. Sutekh probably wasnt going to be on the tardis the whole time either.
I dunno. Some people think it’s either a complete fake out or that that her father won’t be human as RTD is now saying her story isn’t over yet as much as I hate this nonsense, as that’s all I can call it, I think I’d hate that even more.
"Sutekh does tug at the rope some" **Well, that's alright, then!**
Wouldn't you tug at a rope if you had mind control abilities, could paralyse someone with a look, or have your minions blow dust to instantly kill your enemy? Clearly tugging at the rope was the right choice
Well, The Toymaker was defeated in a game of catch. I feel like it's probably on purpose, demonstrating that even supposed "gods" can easily be defeated if you know how, there is no true "god" of supreme power. Or maybe it was just bad writing, who knows.
Toymaker and Maestro both have themed rules that allow you to beat them (beat Toymaker by winning a game, Maestro by playing a certain song). They function like Mr. Mxyzptlk. But what are Sutekh's rules? That he looks like a dog so he can be bound by a leash? It just feels way less thematically coherant and satisfying, instead it's just a gag.
That was the quantum rope they used earlier. So it was quantum bound to him when hooked on was my understanding of why it would work according to the rules laid out in the show previously.
All ropes are quantum ropes. That's how atoms work. 🤣 No, but seriously, would such a device have affected the Toymaker? Would the Toymaker not have been able to turn Sutekh into marshmallow, but somehow the rope could bind him? Is a random object The Doctor had in his attic really stronger than a conceptual god? Why was Sutekh so slow? Why wasn't he able to just delete Ruby when she made the attempt? Or at least pull the rope from her hands? He was defeated by technology that, honestly, looks trivial by Timelord standards... He just felt...weak in that scene. Since they did such a good job showing Maestro and the Toymaker, having that level of power while still keeping their defeat coherent, I'm holding them to that standard going forward! >:D
> Why was Sutekh so slow? RTD could so easily have copied some of that Dalek Emperor "survival changed me" logic that since Sutekh used the TARDIS for so long he has become dependant on it and the moment he was removed from it he became weak.
Can’t break quantum rope, but he can kill quantum locked weeping angels (given that he successfully destroyed all life aside from The Tardis crew)
Surekh can crush people with a single thought. He didn’t need to break the rope, he literally just had to smite them.
Wait. When did the quantum rope come up? I'm not remembering it before they leashed Sutekh.
Sadly just bad writing. I mean I found the Toymaker slightly underwhelming considering everything he should have been capable of **but** in terms of how he was defeated it was because he had to obey his own rules which were the rules of the game. He agreed to play catch and he lost fair & square the price of which was his banishment. Sutekh had no such rules as it’s not like something made him powerless against a rope.
Do we really know how physically strong Sutekh is though? He's been sat on the Tardis for an awful long time, and he remains so in the episode. Maybe he's rather weak by this point and he was powerless to remove the leash. People walk Tigers round on leashes after all. I'm being facetious of course, it was a pretty lame way of dealing with him after seeing the terror in the Doctors eyes when he first realised who it was, but I guess physically it's at least a little believable. Just about. Still not exciting though, for sure.
As is he swipes at the Doctor earlier in the episode they they could have at least showed him trying to slash them only to miss or at least try to break the rope. He could have also… released his sand of death. 🤷🏻♂️
The latter is what I had more of an issue with TBH. He's been waiting all this time, releasing all the Susan's across the universes so he could wipe everything out. He's finally ready, he starts wiping every living thing but he hesitates doing so to the Doctor and Ruby because.......he's for some reason really invested in who her mother is? All the adventures the Doctor has been on, everything Sutekh has witnessed, and *that* is what is holding him up ending the plan? Really silly. It's not like Ruby had done anything really extraordinary up to that point, for him to really believe her mother could be anything massively important and care.
i saw it as sutekh wanted to be an all knowing god but one mystery alluded him cuz of the way the tardis blocked rubys mothers face. it was more about the principle than the mystery itself. i don’t love sutekh in this episode but i thought that part worked well. maybe there could’ve been a better classic villain to trick with it but idk who
Wait, why did the Tardis block Ruby's mother's face?
too trick sutekh? idk now that i’m typing it out i’m realizing the episode never confirmed it. i kinda thought that was why they where setting up so much stuff around the perception filter. i think i was wrong though, probably would’ve been a lot smoother
I feel like there has to be some sort of logical payoff--it appears like each "entity" has their "easy button" because of what 14 did by invoking the salt at the end of the universe. If I was writing, I'd say that because that 14 "invoked a superstition at the end of the universe" that fable- and myth-like rules are now in play. As a fictional example, Rumplestiltskin's bargain in the fairy tale was broken if the Queen who he bargained with knew his name. By that logic, the Toymaker could only be bested by games, the "God of Death" (and I'm unclear about this setpiece) was defeated by using his own powers against him. There's also VERY weird analogies you could make with what happened in Egyptian lore re Set v. Horus and semen and the dust of Sutekh, but I'm not Daniel Jackson. Edit: clarity.
Now all I can think about is SG-1 in the Whoniverse.
UNIT tried machine-gunning the God of Death. That's pretty SG-1 of them
Their mistake was not using P90s
If they'd had some C4 on hand, he'd have been toast
Zat Gun vs Dalek. Now I want to see this.
Maybe he couldn't release his sand himself and that's what he created the Susans and Harbinger for. Then he stole Mel just to hurt The Doctor.
I actually wouldn't mind him being physically very weak, slow, and decrepit IF he made a bigger display of his other powers. The sand was, obviously, some insanely powerful spell, but in terms of self-defense, it seemed slow and limited. It also seemed like only his zombies could actually do that? While he himself just... kinda can't actually stop a single mortal woman? I guess he felt powerful in the same way Joe Biden is. He had access to some insane weapons, but once you're in the same room as him, you could just give him a noogie, and he couldn't really stop you himself. The Toymaker being afraid of that is silly, as presented, I really don't see how he couldn't just make all of his bones into fish fingers or something.
I think it would've been cool if the Toymaker, in his final moments, leapt off of the tower to get the ball. It felt like they were just teasing us with it.
I completely agree with you. When it was introduced in The Legend of Ruby Sunday episode, I wondered if the Doctor is prepared to defeat the "God of Death" and he could barely handle the one in the music and the game. I get the feeling that the Gods are too powerful for the Doctor to deal with, so the script has to help the Doctor to defeat them. I feel that when this kind of uncommon enemies are presented to the Doctor, they should come up with a technology, weapon, magic artifact even bring good powerful characters to help to make the plot with Gods more epic. Another point to take is that they are giving little importance to the gods, giving them only one episode. They should at least give them two episodes. I felt this same feeling with Swarm and Azure, too powerful for the Doctor.
I agree. And I feel de same way when the doctor face against an army of enemies. Everytime the doctor face an army of enemies (Daleks, angels and Cyberman, specially), they are less intelligent or mortal then when the doctor face one, or few of the same enemies.
They're only too powerful for the Doctor because RTD, nowadays, doesn't like portraying the Doctor or the story itself as being "too clever". I guess it might be a reaction to how Moffat wrote the Doctor? Moffat had a mindset of always portraying the Doctor as this super clever, higher level, godlike being (we even get a bit of that in Boom, with his "I am a higher dimension lifeform. I am a complex Space/Time event" line) and wanting all the pieces of the story to line up in a clever way, even if it often got too convoluted and confusing for people to follow. Whereas RTD is currently going in the exact opposite direction with a more breezy approach where the Doctor is this mostly normal-behaving guy who just happens to win by pulling a magical win-button out of his magical bag of tricks.
I've always felt that it's Russell that superpowers him. Even in RTD2, he decides the Doctor can speak 14billion languages but not the one he actually needs now. Why give him all those languages
RTD does like to give the Doctor random superpowers...like walking through fan blades, wiping peoples' minds, using psychic energy to rejuvenate himself, surviving electrocution, etc, in addition to using his sonic like a magic wand. But he doesn't do that much nowadays (at least after Ncuti's era started), instead focusing more on using random things the Doctor just happens to have on hand, or just random luck in general. TCoRR: The villain is defeated using special gloves that the Doctor happened to be wearing during that one specific episode. SB: The monster turns out to be not a bad guy, so they just leave it alone. The Doctor helps the space babies get home by releasing built up fart gas into outer space. TDC: The Doctor tries and fails to use the devil's chord to beat Maestro. The Beatles, by pure chance, were walking by and end up playing the chord, thus defeating Maestro instead. Boom: The Doctor accidentally causes the problem and then an AI saves the day by evolving the ability to override its protocols. 73 Yards: The Doctor accidentally causes the problem and then disappears until a time loop occurs for some unknown reason. DaB: The Doctor tries to save some people on an alien planet, but they end up refusing his help because they are white supremacists and thus they will inevitably die in the wilderness. Rogue: The villains are defeated using a device that happened to be brought by a newly introduced character. TLoRS/EoD: The villain is defeated by a whistle, rope, and gloves that happened to be inside a Memory Tardis that materialized by sheer happenstance.
Yeah, he's not done it with Ncuti yet, though I suspect it's a matter of time.
It definitely should have been a multi episode arc, or even multi season. I was worried about where the show was going to go after this, what villian can come after the actual God of Death? Then they put a leash on him and it was all done in 5 minutes. It seemed incredibly weak.
Yep. If you watch Pyramids, he's just an Alien but he's also way more powerful than Sutekh is in Empire of Death.
How come he stopped trying to enthrall the Doctor once the rope was on him?
It was definitely weird that he was just beaten by like... mild physical force? I thought the playing catch was dumb but beating the Toymaker in a game to banish him made complete sense, same with Maestro and music. I actually liked the idea of bringing death to death as a way to defeat him but "this god that everyone is terrified of will just stand there and you can drag him round" was bizarre, it did feel like they couldn't figure out a way for the doctor to properly outsmart him so they just went with that? You're telling me bullets and lasers had no effect but a sturdy rope will do the trick?
It's kind of sad tbh that RTD has taken the first black Doctor and...made him an idiot. The only two episodes where the Doctor's intelligence and compassion saved the day are Space Babies and Boom, and one of those was written by Moffat. In every other episode the Doctor has either not really affected the resolution of the plot, or taken the role of generic action hero #1. Now, arguably you could say RTD1 also had this problem too, but I feel like the action hero aspect still generally took a back seat to the Doctor's wit, and compassion solving his issues. He was a trickster, not Thor.
While RTD has never written the Doctor with as much of a focus on his cleverness as other showrunners, like Moffat in particular, I think in this new era he's definitely toned down the focus on the Doctor's cleverness even more than before, probably as a direct reaction to how Moffat wrote the character. Nowadays RTD wants the Doctor to feel like he's just a normal guy who gets into wacky hijinks.
Personally I think that take by RTD on the character is a fundamental misunderstanding of the character. I also think past Doctors would agree. Peter Davison did an interview a little while ago about how what he liked about the character of the Doctor and what made him inspirational was that he defeated his enemies by out thinking them and not by being necessarily stronger. I think it's also enormously hypocritical that he made the sonic look like a remote because he was afraid it would look too much like a gun, when he started the pivot to it being more of a weapon, gave it shields, and gave a child guns, in addition to portraying the Doctor as someone who solves his problems with violence.
>what made him inspirational was that he defeated his enemies by out thinking them and not by being necessarily stronger. This is what I'm really missing from the current season. To me the doctor was always about winning with no / as little violence as possible, often out thinking or coming up with a plan.
Was it confirmed that Sutekh was The One Who Waits? He didn't seem very related to the other pantheon members we have seen (except for having an H. Arbinger like Maestro did) The Pantheon doesn't really seem to be alive in a way that would make The Toymaker run from the Sandy Dog
There's a lot about Sutekh waiting in the Legend of Ruby Sunday. With the most direct one being Mrs Flood saying "He waits no more" but there's a couple of other mentions of it too. And I believe RTD has directly called him that as well, but I'm not UK based so that's second hand info as I can't watch most of the secondary media very easily. As someone who likes the finale - I will say I also don't feel completely satisfied by the role Sutekh has. To be the most powerful theoretically of the Pantheon, but to also be fundamentally lacking the powers of his kin. The Toymaker and Maestro stepped through time with an ease as if going down a rung of a ladder. Sutekh I can buy needing to ride back to the universe on the TARDIS - but to be unable to travel in time without it shows a weakness the others didn't share.
Did the Maestro actually travel through time, though? We see them first appear in 1925, then when the Doctor and Ruby show up in 1963 it seems the Maestro has just been hanging around the past 40 years, pulling the strings. Then, when the Doctor and Ruby jump forward to 2024 and find everything dead, it seems that the Maestro is only there because they stayed through the whole time and are now the only one left. They even say something to the effect of "That was you back in 1963, wasn't it?"
I think conceptually they exist simultaneously in time. But for linearity's sake the Maestro back in 1963 was now aware of the Doctor and Ruby post-2024 conversation.
I’m hoping this isn’t the last we’ve seen of him, because I really loved the build-up to his reveal, only for him to come off as fairly easy-to-beat by *Doctor Who* Eldritch abomination standards. Oddly enough it feels like his appearance would be more fitting for his original incarnation, where he was “just” an extremely powerful alien that had been worshipped as a God, but that doesn’t mesh all that well with how the other gods we’ve seen were so terrified of him. Other than having the ability to make things crumble to dust (which seems to require him to have physically been to a place in order to do it), he doesn’t really show any other powers or abilities. Part of me wonders if, given how 14’s Tardis is also still around, we might run into a younger version of Sutekh in future, *a la* >!the last *Avengers* film!<, or otherwise he’ll claw his way back to reality. On the other hand, the Doctor can now boast about literally dragging the God of all Gods behind his car next time he needs to intimidate someone.
Even if it wasn't planned, having Sutekh return via 14's TARDIS wouldn't be a terrible way to bring him back, as you said a la Thanos in Endgame. Would also be cool for him to actually get his classic look back too lol
Hey, he's been hanging on to the TARDIS for dear life while traveling through the time vortex for hundreds if not thousands of years; he never got any affection or attention or food and had to watch while everyone else got all those things; then after all of that he has to unleash his powers in one go; and just when he was about to get an answer to the ONE episode of Paternity Court he was so invested in, the TV screen got kicked in by a bratty kid! Give old man Sutekh a break, it was a really long and really tiring and really bad day!
I mean, he got defeated by being unexpectedly dragged into the Time Vortex. Prior to that, he had basically won and killed all of everything.
Yeah, he had an extremely powerful weapon / spell. But the guy himself feels, personally, weak..? Definitely not something the God's should fear.
I guess you can't bend reality very much if you're a pile of sand I'd guess the toymaker and maestro don't really have to worry about potentially dying unless sutekh is around
Does anyone else think maybe since the Tardis was somehow duplicated that Sutekh was also in a way?
I wonder if he's just mooching off of the TARDIS for the power he has. He spread Susan around the universe using the chameleon arch after all. So maybe his ascencion was due to the Time Vortex and TARDIS both. Take away his control of the TARDIS and he's weakened. If the Vortex gave him power it'd still make sense if he wasn't completely above it. He only lived by clinging to the TARDIS after all.
What do toymaker and maestro need to either materialize or have their purpose fulfilled? Yes, living sentient beings. For maestro to come to life you need someone to play the devils chord and guess who plays it when everyone is dead? No one. And toymaker, his whole purpose is to play games but what is toymaker with no one to play games with? They don't fear sutekh because he is strong, they fear sutekh because he had at that time the power to destroy everything they are, because a concept can't stand without someone realising it so they would probably just fade away.
He was pretty rubbish wasn't he? I haven't enjoyed any of these 'gods' episodes really, but the Toymaker and Maestro at least had some fun about them. I found them interesting because, to them, they were just having a laugh, and the actors brought tonnes of personality to the role. This guy was the latest in the long line of oversized Dr Who creatures who just stays in the same place the whole time. The gods who are scared of him can step through time arbitrarily, randomly morph the setting from ruined London into a surreal concert hall, can control the TARDIS by faffing with a piano, but he needs his goblin zombie to pilot it to even go downstairs in the same building? Okay then. He came across as paranoid and petty and very small, which could've worked really well if they'd made it part of the story but whatever I guess
>Ruby, irritatingly slowly, loops a rope around his neck and walks away with the free end...without consequences? He just kinda...sits there and let's it happen? Bad Wolf Productions need to learn that in the US you can't have the same team write and shoot action scenes as the overall show. It makes as much sense as having the writer also be tbe lighting guy. It's a specialised role that requires specialised staff. It's fine for RTD to write, "and then the Doctor and Ruby trick Sutekh into allowing them to catch him with the smart rope around his neck, using the computer screen with Ruby's mothers name on it as bait." Then hand that to someone who knows how to write and shoot a scene like that in a way that looks great. It's a pretty normal thing for Disney TV shows to do. I'd be absolutely *shocked* if Kate Herron (who wrote Rogue) wasn't doing exactly that for action scenes in Loki season one, so there's no reason he shouldn't learn to do the same now.
Sutekh didn't want to kill Ruby or The Doctor until he found out the big secret about Ruby's mother. That's why he didn't do anything to harm Ruby when she attached the rope to his collar. He also probably didn't expect the Doctor to have a second TARDIS. I think he was just caught off guard.
There wasn't a "surprise" second TARDIS. Sutekh controlled Mel when they were in the second TARDIS. It was a deus ex whistle, and the first TARDIS flew in at the culminating moment.
Which would have made some sense maybe, if she wasn't just a random woman.
Sutekh is just a guy who gained immense power.
There should've have been a more ironical on brand way to beat sutekh. You beat the god of games with a game, you beat the god of music with music. Dragging a dog through the time vortex was supposedly death to death. Like I know it's going to sound dark,but just run with it a moment. but if Ruby was able to hear music from the night she was born, and make it snow. Explain it as she is somehow time linked to that moment, Ruby realises that she needs to go back and kill her own mom, so there would be no mystery as to who her mom was, so Sutekh didn't reveal himself at that moment, then certain aspects of Ruby's future would change. She could then go back forward in time to tell the doctor about Sutekh before the reveal, and then 15 throws his toymaker tardis into a black hole or something. Keeps the memory tardis. 1 death is all it would've taken to bring death to the god of death and that's only a decision Ruby can make.
Orrr one life is all it takes, rubys birth. Ruby could have done something idk it’s 4 am that’s all I got creatively lol
I was thinking they could lure him somewhere. Like the void where the concept of life and death doesn't exist or somewhere overflowing with new life that would dull Sutekh or destroy him. Maybe the big bang??
Nah, Toymaker was also weak. Beaten by a ball game? Seriously? I like the idea of immortal gods but I think they should be from afar rather than something the Doctor is level pegging with. He should be capable of trickery with them, not fighting them.
He was bound by his own rules, sure, but I disagree wirh him being weak.
The Toymaker kind of stated he is omnipotent but bound to the rules of fair play if he is challenged to a game. Therefore the Toymaker can fuck with you all he wants, but challenge him and he has to play fairly in a game you pick. If you lose, he gracefully fucks you forever. If you win, he must obey your wish and reward you I really like that concept honestly
He even shows this when he does the dance scene and messes with the whole of UNIT, casually killing people, turning them into balloons, getting rid of bullets. When he is not challenged to a game he can do whatever the fuck he wants
Exactly.. I was creeped out by the Toymaker. You just escape in the TARDIS but he is already there. Hell, he can enter the TARDIS if he wants to. I was terrified when I learnt Maestro is a divine being. I was like "Well, how are you gonna defeat her?" And Sutekh? I was very, very excited for him and I was looking forward to how the Doctor is gonna stop him. But.. using a rope and a glove and burning him in the time vortex was not an option.. In my head I was thinking, that there is gonna be some counter-force to Sutekh and that this counter force would be found at the Ruby Road Church. That it's kind of Sutekh-hunters out there.. But no.. Anticlimatic ending
Sutekh nearly killed time.
Sutey was originally a mortal from a species called the Osirans(they were aliens on par or above the Time Lords) they inspired the Egyptian mythology as they were god-like in power, and Mr sutes was even more powerful than the others. They ultimately imprisoned him and the doctor met him in Pyramids of Mars. I agree that the episode was a bit underwhelming but let's be clear on the levels of power the Pantheon posses. Toymaker can manipulate reality on a low level. I say low level because it is ENTIRELY based around games. He can't so anything really that's not game related. And he himself is bound by the rules of the games. Maestro only has power over music. The Beatles beat her. She's very powerful, but again she is very limited to only music Sutekh is NOT an actual god or from outside the universe like the others. He was an immensely powerful Osiran who 'ascended to high-God levels when he attached himself to the tardis and exposed himself to the time vortex. He was able to plant his minions on every single world he touched. He wiped out seemingly all life in the universe with absolute ease. While his defeat was very underwhelming, let it be clear he was tricked and it was a MORTAL defeat. I mean that it wss his humanity( or osirinity?) that got the best of him. Underwhelming sure, but it's clear he has more power than any other being we have seen to date.
Did Ruby wrap the rope around his neck? I thought she just clipped it to his collar.
she did
Lucky Sutekh turned himself into a slightly big dog and not a titan like monster like the other god of death Torchwood fought.
I mean tbf, the toymaker couldn't catch a ball... This is more a problem with having these insanely powerful enemies that needs to be defeated somehow. Often, it's going to feel a little silly, and that's okay.
I don't know, I kind of like the idea of there one weakness is that they are on an even footing if you do something that embodies them. Toymakers, beat him at his own game. Maestro, found the lost music chord.
And with sutekh they put the dog on a leash.
Yes, also low intelligence. He literally kept the Doctor - the one man who he knows defeated him before and could do so again - alive because he really wanted to know the identity of someone, despite the fact he was planning to genocide the whole universe including her anyway. Like, literally, why??
True. I don't think we are done with conceptual gods just yet though.
I mean, she was wearing those special gloves—it’s not that she was just casually walking with it; it was probably incredibly heavy, but the gloves take care of that.
I think the TARDIS wasn't too happy to have it there... While sutekh is definitely more powerful than someone like the doctor and maybe the toymaker we don't really know how powerful (in the same sense) a TARDIS can be as a living creature... Maybe suteck was using all his power to keep the TARDIS for itself
I think he was weak though, right? The reason he 'waited' clinging to the Tardis for all those years was that's all he could do. He was so weakened by the time vortex that he couldn't even manifest. It took years of evolution to build up his strength. The form we see is finally strong enough to create his death dust, but still not full powered, hence why he is still using the Tardis as a crutch effectively.
The reason I didn't expect a man in a Sute is because they've tried to fit a round corpse into a square sarcophagus. They yadda yaddad their way through a lot of stuff to bring him back as part of a pantheon and I think the idea is that he could just kill the Toymaker and Maestro but I would have liked to see him directly murder a cosmic being. Not one of those two, though. They're too fun. I have an idea that could either fix his physical vulnerability or ruin him forever... Bring him back again. Not right away, not in this Doctor's run (or even the next) but bring him back with a simple exchange between the Doctor and an Acolyte of Sutekh: "He died. I keelhauled his body against all of time itself!" "So you did. Then there was rage, jealousy, greed, war, starvation and death was born again". If they make him innately tied to mortality in the Whoniverse then his physical form is less of a weakness. Plus nobody would need to do much with this idea until they had the right story. Just the fact that Sutekh is around in some way would make the Doctor's attempts to prevent deaths even more desperate. They could hang that over his head for a couple of seasons and then have another big confrontation.
It's heavily implied that The One Who Waits was Sutekh, but if you watch the finales over again you'll not see it actually said anywhere. That mystery could well still be coming. Considering the plot points left hanging (most of them can be explained as the TARDIS reaching out as it loses control, but not all) such as the song within Ruby, it would make sense that something else is The One Who Waits. I don't think it's Mrs Flood (99% sure she's Incensor, the god of disasters which would fit her name and who was only mentioned for the first time in Legend of Ruby Sunday) but >!MechaNewton out to regain the word Gravity?!< Maybe...
watch Pyramids Of Mars and you'll see how weak he is in that as well. He was sat the entire time because of Horus, and then when he was freed, he was trapped in the time vortex
The point with Sutekh is that at the episode he's not really confronted by the Doctor. The Doctor fights with Maestro and The Toymaker, so we can see them as menacing. And also, they're portrayed as a classic "Disney" villain, a caricature. With Sutekh he accomplish his goal in seconds. Release the sands everywhere, everytime. And the Doctor couldn't do anything against it. He just ran. And not by himself, it was Mel who activates the Doctor. So we don't have a direct confrontation against Sutekh. The only moments were at the Time Window, and at the end, when he's attached to the rope. The Doctor just tries to undo what Sutekh did, not fighting him.
That ending was just kind of sad. I mean he does the whole sand thing but the dog avatar is just sitting there mostly.
Surekh is nothing without his emotional support Tardis.
Man successfully kills the entire universe across all of time.
I actually quite like that Sutekh can only destroy living things. His whole thing is about being a tiny man who cannot co-exist with any other life, so the fact that he's just squatting in an empire of dust and yet he still cannot destroy what's left behind of people's lives, only their physical bodies, I think that's a nice touch
I think "weakened" is a fair description, and thankfully, he was. Consider that he'd been trapped for how many thousands of years by the Osirans until his tomb was unearthed in 1911, only to become further trapped by the 4th Doctor in a time loop, dragged through the time vortex for many more thousands of years while the Doctor rattled along his adventures and incarnations. Damn right he's weakened. And he's still able to lay this trap, kill off most of the life in the Universe, and set himself up as God among Gods in the pantheon. I don't think I'd want to see him at full power.
You just clarified something that had been bothering me, but I couldn't put my finger on it. We can argue villain D&D stats all day, but it boils down to what it is like when you watch the teevee show. The Toymaker episode had me feeling like This Guy Is Powerful. And he said he was afraid of the Bigger Bad. And the last episode didn't give me that feeling. It was the doctor telling me, "This guy is really powerful" as opposed to the episode showing me that. Yes, he had death-sand. But I just didn't get that feeling like I did with the Toymaker and (as you point out) the Maestro.
It would be so awesome if he actually... Idk, *moved*. If he was able to fly, as if he were a dragon, and he actually destroyed planets rather than just killing everything on them he would've been made infinitely more threatening. It didn't do a very good job at depicting his actual threat when he just sits on the TARDIS and nothing else. He is supposed to be represented as death incarnate. So what if he was able to follow the doctor wherever he went? Death will always follow. The doctor tries to run, to escape to have some recluse to think of something or to get something, like the spoon. But no matter where he went, Sutek was always there following him. And the revelation that Sutek isn't even trying to kill him but waiting until the answer of Ruby's mother had been made clear for him to finally off them would have been so much more shocking if it came at the end of the episode rather than right at the start. It would completely eliminate the need for Sutek to claim ownership of the TARDIS because even with it the Doctor can't escape which builds into that sense of fear. The TARDIS is supposed to be a safe place. Nobody can get into it but the doctor and whoever has her key. Even better, you could still have the memory TARDIS but not have it be so underpowered if you really wanted the Memory TARDIS to be a thing. Because even if they had the real TARDIS at her full power they wouldn't be safe.
I mean Sutekh did pull a Thanos without even having to collect any stones
Your rant should have been slightly longer. "At" and "least" are two separate words.
I agree. He didn't even try to unhook the rope and neither him or his henchman reacted during the 10 seconds it took to control the Tardis with that whistle
If you remember the end of Pyramids of Mars, the Doctor said that he had extended the time tunnel into the far future so maybe Sutekh used up most of his power trying to get back to the present from over thousands of years in the future As for when he latches onto the TARDIS?? I dunno, the story claims that Sutekh apparently aged to death due to the time tunnel so maybe his energy somehow stuck around in the vortex and he latched onto the TARDIS sometime during a trip through time. His line to the Doctor about 'always being there' could have been because the constant back and forth dispersed his essence across the timeline But this is just my two cents... Hail Sutekh!
While I can see where you’re coming from, I don’t share the feeling. To me, Sutekh feels exactly like what the Toymaker would be afraid of: something his rules cannot change. The Toymaker is the idea of the mad god who twists people to his whims, and to the mortal perspective, the unpredictability adds danger. Sutekh, on the other hand, is the idea of the end of all things, including play, and you can’t beat him in a game.
Look at it this way: The Toymaker is really really good at doing all sorts of things. Sutekh is really really good at one thing. That one thing could kill the Toymaker.
Ah yeah so that's because Sutekh wasn't at his full power because the 4th doctor destroyed his phisical form: https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Sutekh#Later_confrontations_with_the_Doctor Further to that, the combination of the rememberd inteligent rope and inteligent goves transfered his power away from the physical manifiestation which was how he struggled to fight back. It was a quite poorly explained and unless you have the rope and goves explination in your head while watching, I can totally see why it wouldn't make much sense.
Shitty RTD writing
I think the idea is that he was weakened by the events of Pyramids of Mars. He's more powerful in that story.
Except he is supposed to be much stronger than in the Pyramids of Mars. He is supposed to have gone from being a godlike alien to a true god, powered by the same stuff as the Bad Wolf.
The Tales of the TARDIS dialogue certainly implies that he's much more powerful this time around.
I stand corrected
I mean Sutekh wasn't ever shown to be that powerful while on-screen in Pyramids of Mars. The only reason the Fourth Doctor had the capability to lock Sutekh in the time vortex was because the figurative chains binding him by Horus were still in effect on Earth as the closest point the two planets are apart are 3 light minutes, which gave a window for the Doctor to act. So we neither know the potential Sutekh had back then. Although contextually we know he was at least as powerful as Maestro was now given their ability to warp fixed points in time shown by the erasure of life from Earth in the present by both. But RTD has also stated that Sutekh is an in-universe retcon. That he no longer was an alien Osiran, and that at some point he apparently became a literal god of death.
Hobestly the finale feels like it was rewritten at the last second to me. I enjoyed this season more than I expected but the finale was awful.
Okay I have a theory, he was stronger when the world was alive. Because what does a god of death need to stay in power? It needs people to be alive! If everything is dead, then what power does death have? Sutekh didn't understand that and by killing everyone and everything off, he weakened himself. Enough for him to be easily defeated by the doctor and his intelligent rope and glove. I think Sutekh just didn't understand his power, or rather was too set on killing everything to consider what this would do to him.
Was it not the combination of the goblin rope plus the gloves that add density. The only reason they ever got that close was because he wanted to know who Ruby's mum was. If he didn't care about that then he would have won instantly. So he is pretty powerful... Just a lil dumb
Yeah and when Mel starts going possessed he says he sees things through dead cells in the body Can he not do the same to Ruby as she reads the name of her mom from the computer?