10 Most Confusing Scenes In Doctor Who History

2. What The Hell Is She Pointing At?

Doctor Who Empire of Death Ruby's mother pointing
BBC Studios

When we first meet Ruby Sunday in The Church on Ruby Road, we're told that she was named after the road on which she was abandoned as a baby.

But at the end of Empire of Death, it's revealed that Ruby's mother chose the name by pointing at a street sign that magically appears before our very eyes at the end of the episode.

Literally. It literally just appears out of nothing.

Doctor Who Empire of Death Ruby Road sign
BBC Studios

Confusingly, Ruby's mother doesn't point at anything in The Church on Ruby Road, she just walks off into the night. The pointing only starts in Space Babies, where it's framed as a portent of something sinister. Which it isn't.

Factor in that both the sign and the pole it's attached to don't even exist in The Church on Ruby Road, and it's a plot development of head-scratchingly baffling proportions.

Doctor Who The Church on Ruby Road ending Ruby Road
BBC Studios

The pointing adds absolutely nothing to Ruby's story either, because we already know that the people who found her chose the name of their own volition, not from a pointing woman on a CCTV camera. And if Ruby's mother didn't want to be noticed, why would she point dramatically at a road sign and hope that someone around her would cotton on?

It's all very strange. All we can say is it's a good job she didn't leave Ruby on Butthole Lane. Which, before you ask, is a real street in England.

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Citizen of the Universe, Film Programmer, Writer, Podcaster, Doctor Who fan and a gentleman to boot. As passionate about Chinese social-realist epics as I am about dumb popcorn movies.