The season finale of Doctor Who, “Empire of Death,” finally provides the answer to the central mystery of Ruby Sunday’s mother, revealing a human teenage girl, Louise Miller, as the mother who wanted to protect her child. The episode concludes the story of Sutekh, the god of death, who destroyed the universe by hiding in the TARDIS for decades and planting his harbingers across time and space. The Doctor and Ruby part ways after undoing Sutekh’s apocalypse, but promise to reunite one day.
The episode picks up where the previous one left off, with Sutekh unleashing his “gift of death” upon the Earth. The Doctor and Melanie Bush outrun the initial onslaught of carnage, but by the time they return to UNIT headquarters, everyone has evaporated into dust. Desperately hoping to piece together her mother’s identity, Ruby programs the Time Window back to the night of her birth, and the Doctor and Mel reunite with Ruby, with Sutekh joining the gathering. The god of death has been hiding inside the TARDIS, gathering power to ascend to godhood and planting his sleeper agents everywhere the Doctor visited.
As the trio watches as life across time and space is eradicated, the despondent Doctor blames himself for the destruction of the universe. Grasping at straws, the Doctor realizes that the Time Window screen displays certain memories whenever Ruby thinks about her mother. Ruby doesn’t recognize one of them, a live broadcast of a politician’s interview, because it’s from the alternate future she lived and forgot. They take the Memory TARDIS to a “dead” future, scan Ruby’s blood into the system, and find a match.
A Still From Doctor Who (Via IMDB)
Unfortunately, no one can escape the god of death’s reach. Sutekh possesses Mel through her body’s dead skin cells, even though the Doctor’s former companion valiantly resists. Sutekh summons the Doctor and Ruby back to 2024, where, ironically enough, Sutekh is just as puzzled by the mystery of Ruby’s mother as they are. Ruby agrees to give Sutekh her mother’s name, stopping inches from his giant jackal nose. Just as she’s about to reveal the twist, she tosses a rope from the Memory TARDIS around Sutekh’s neck, and the Doctor seizes hold of the rope with his intelligent glove and hooks it onto the real TARDIS console.
Together, the pair drag Sutekh along for another ride through time and space, reaping the effects of his death wave, and reversing its destruction. The Doctor draws no joy from the occasion; he somberly tells Sutekh that because Sutekh attached himself to the TARDIS, he essentially turned the Doctor into the god of death. Sutekh fades to ash in the time vortex, a karma-filled ending for the Doctor Who villain.
After the revelation, Ruby introduces herself to Louise inside a coffee shop, and the women share a tender moment, holding one another as they cry. Louise integrates herself well with Carla and Cherry Sunday, and the Doctor, once again, stands on the emotional sidelines. Ruby healed the Doctor’s heart, and he vows to honor that bond. The curtain closes on the legend of the marvelous Ruby Sunday and her ordinary, yet extraordinary, birth mother, with the promise of a reunification in the future.
