At this level, trendy Physician Who has been round for nearly so long as traditional Physician Who was—which implies the chance for returning legendary baddies that the collection hasn’t already taken is operating relatively skinny. However this week, Physician Who lastly performed another acquainted ace up its sleeve (no, not that Ace), and introduced again certainly one of its most notorious one-off villains.
“The Legend of Ruby Sunday,” the penultimate episode of the present season of Physician Who, revealed the mysterious cause why Physician and Ruby have been seeing the identical girl (performed by perpetually persistent visitor star Susan Twist, a reputation born for use in Physician Who in such a capability) throughout their adventures in Time and Area. Now manifested in modern-day London as nebulous tech mogul Susan Triad, the top of Triad Applied sciences, the episode climaxed with the reveal that Triad was in actual fact a herald for an additional of the gods which have been menacing the Physician from the shadows since final yr’s sixtieth anniversary specials. First there was the Toymaker, then Maestro, and with an apart point out of Sarah Jane Adventures baddie the Trickster, we acquired to the ultimate reveal: the god of Loss of life of this nice pantheon, Sutekh!
Who Is Sutekh?
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Though re-introduced right here because the God of Loss of life—in contrast to the Egyptian deity he’s named for, Set, whose domains included the desert, violence, and dysfunction—Sutekh appears a bit completely different from after we final noticed him in Physician Who. Now a large, multi-eyed doglike apparition, who has apparently been hidden across the TARDIS itself since as early as final yr’s anniversary particular “Wild Blue Yonder,” manifesting solely as a peculiar groan and wheeze sound from the time ship, Sutekh beforehand appeared as a big, humanoid doglike creature, sporting darkish robes and an Egyptian-inspired masks to cover his true face.
Sutekh was the final surviving member of a race referred to as the Osirans, an interstellar empire of beings with huge godlike powers that impressed the cosmologies of many cultures throughout the universe by their affect and look—together with historical Egypt on Earth. Initially the the guardian of the ruling order of the Osiran civilization, the Osirian Court docket, Sutekh finally betrayed his personal folks in a lust for additional energy, believing he might free the universe from the chaos of free will by granting them the inevitability of loss of life. He destroyed his personal homeworld, Phaester Osiris, and commenced to carve a path of bloody destruction throughout the galaxy, earlier than the surviving Osirans—together with Sutekh’s personal brother, Horus—managed to imprison Sutekh in a pyramid on historical Earth, utilizing a robust system referred to as the Eye of Horus. Itself positioned on an identical pyramidic construction on Mars, the Eye suppressed Sutekh’s huge psionic powers and his true type, imprisoning him for 1000’s of years.
The place Has Sutekh Appeared Earlier than?
Sutekh has solely appeared in a single Physician Who story previous to “The Legend of Ruby Sunday”: the long-lasting 1975 serial “The Pyramids of Mars.”
Starring Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen because the Fourth Physician and Sarah Jane Smith, “Pyramids” is essentially set in 1911, when an Oxford College professor named Marcus Scarman inadvertently uncovered the tomb Sutekh was imprisoned in throughout an excavation in Egypt. Instantly killed by the Osiran, Sutekh tried to make use of Scarman’s type as a vessel to lastly hatch a plan to flee imprisonment and proceed is quest to carry loss of life to all life within the universe: utilizing Scarman’s assets in addition to some creepy Osiran robo-mummies, Sutekh deliberate to launch a rocket on the pyramid on Mars holding the Eye of Horus, liberating his true type. Defeated by the Physician moments earlier than he might escape—locked right into a time tunnel that the Physician shunted the exit for into the far future, believing he had aged Sutekh to loss of life—Sutekh was by no means seen on display once more till “The Legend of Ruby Sunday,” revealing that the Osiran seemingly escaped the Physician’s lure.
In the UK at least, this week the BBC will re-broadcast “Pyramids of Mars” in an omnibus format as a part of the Tales of the TARDIS collection, that includes new interstitial materials starring Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson because the fifteenth Physician and Ruby. Presumably that new materials gained’t be essential to understanding the occasions of this week’s season finale, “The Empire of Loss of life,” however if you happen to can entry it, “Pyramids” is often hailed as a traditional Physician Who story, so it’s price trying out!
What Does Sutekh’s Return Imply for Physician Who?
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Proper now, it’s tough to say—however even when dealing with Sutekh in “The Pyramids of Mars,” the Physician acknowledged, and struggled to beat, Sutekh as a particularly highly effective entity in contrast to something he’d confronted earlier than. Even within the constrained type of his imprisonment, Sutekh was able to psionic energy that might overwhelm the Physician. The implication in “The Legend of Ruby Sunday” is that that is Sutekh really unleashed to his full potential. Nonetheless he managed to outlive the time tunnel he was trapped in, or how he turned a part of this new pantheon of gods, stays to be seen. And that’s even earlier than you get into all the opposite questions raised by the construct as much as his reveal in “Legend”—why Susan Triad and all the opposite variations of her have been essential to his return, how he’s been in a position to seemingly be hidden and linked to the TARDIS for therefore lengthy, and if he has any connection to the thriller behind Ruby’s delivery mom.
We’ll discover out, hopefully, in “The Empire of Loss of life”—in addition to how the Physician will handle to defeat him this time.
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