Millie Gibson is Ruby Sunday

I learned long ago to stop assuming that a surname can't possibly be real because it's too unusual. Most of the time, if you look it up, you'll find real people with that name.

 

Maybe she's from Pete's Earth where the Stones sang about Ruby Sunday instead.

 

Sad but true. The lovey-doveyness of series two aside, my biggest complaint about Davies' original run was how horribly rooted he was to contemporary Earth, frequently London specifically, and that's where all of his companions came from. UGH.

 

And a lovable and charming grandfather.

 

Ruby will work a minimum wage job at a fish and chip shop with a boss who get's killed by a monster who craves vegetable oil.

 

Only one out of three had that though

 

If she's 16, and the Doctor falls in love with her, is he going to pedo jail this time, because he's twice as old as he was last time he fell for a teenager?

 

I can’t find a story to back it up (yet) but it’s being claimed here that "Ruby is an ordinary 21st Century girl who works part-time in a shop whilst studying telebiogenesis at uni. Then a mysterious man in a blue box sweeps her off her feet!"

https://twitter.com/whohats/status/1595374772610801664?s=46&t=vNIFDHwq8FvjzZSr1kpoeA

 

Hooray. Another contemporary Earth companion. Hooray.

 

Kinda feel like Ruby being a modern-day companion is expected, especially when you're trying to capture new viewers. It never bothered me that most companions come from contemporary times. They tend to get offset by a third companion being from another time - Jack, River, Nardole.

 

Even then, when they became really prominent characters, their backstories were altered so that they had lived through contemporary times and therefore could be considered contemporary characters anyway. IE, Jack got thrown back in time to the 19th century and lived all the way through to early twenty-first century. River became Mels and grew up with Amy and Rory. Nardole was with the Doctor for fifty years on Earth guarding the Vault.

 

Actually committing to realistically portraying a non-contemporary companion would be a lot of work, which is why televised Doctor Who has never really done it. They all became indistinguishable from contemporary teenagers pretty quickly.

 

Sure it has -- Susan, Vicki, Steven, Sara, Jamie, Victoria, Zoe, Leela, K9, Romana, Adric, Nyssa. And Turlough, sort of, though he did live on contemporary Earth for a time before joining the crew. The only classic Doctors who had only contemporary companions were Three, Six, and Seven.

Maybe Susan and Vicki, but I wouldn't say that about most of the others.

 

Except modern unis don't offer telebiogenesis as a course, because it's a reference to regeneration. Which, even assuming the tweet is not just bollocks, could mean Ruby is from the future (note the 21st century has about 80 years left in it) and we know that shops are still a thing even in the time of New New York...

 

Is it really, though? The Wiki says so, but I think it's wrong. When Nyssa mentions telebiogenesis in "Castrovalva," it's right after saying "We have to think of Adric too." She then asks a librarian if they have books on telebiogenesis, and she and Tegan later complain that the books in the library won't help them with Adric. So the context indicates that the word is related to Adric's situation, not the Doctor's.

More basically, the word "telebiogenesis" literally means "creation of life at a distance." There's no reason the "tele-" prefix would be associated with regeneration. The term makes more sense as a reference to the way the Master created a remote-controlled clone of Adric. (And I've just copied the above to the Wiki entry's Talk page, so we'll see if they amend the article.)

Of course, TV writers today often just copy things from the show wikis and take them on faith, so it's possible that the new season will be (erroneously) using the word as a reference to regeneration. Even so, just because it's a scientific topic that relates to regeneration doesn't mean it's exclusively about regeneration. It might be a broader science that applies to many things, including that. And just because Ruby is studying it doesn't mean there's a course specifically about it. It could be a personal research topic she's chosen to focus on as part of a larger major in biology or genetics.

 

I shall laugh when she turns out to work in a Wetherspoons.

 

I will say the telebiogenesis part was the one thing in her character description that caught my interest. It'll be good to have a scientist in the TARDIS again, first time since...Mel? I was going to say Grace but then remembered she was a cardiologist.

 

Martha. Do medical doctors not count in your eyes?

Edit: Just caught the Grace bit - apparently not.

They do research too, you know.

 

Post-Brexit, I'd laugh to find out ANYONE does.