A lot of my feelings got summed up here: basically, the episode had a lot of momentum and incoherence. Beyond that,

• Having just watched “Pyramids of Mars,” I’m puzzled Davis revived this villain, and that the impatient Sutekh acquired the patience to wait centuries (millennia?) to complete his plan.
• I love the Memory TARDIS!
• I thought 15 was supposed to be the “healed” doctor.
• Davies is playing with the idea of concepts, perception, memory and faith influencing reality; but the handwavy, cursory explanations for how it all works makes it impossible to anticipate events or solutions to the challenges thr Doctor faces, which limits how the viewer can interact with the story and how engaged I feel. (E.g. when the Doctor says “there’s nothing I can do” we just have to take him at his word, until it turns out all he had to do was leash Sutekh and drag him into the time vortex, and likely could have from the very start, given how Sutekh was restraining himself even before they discovered Ruby’s mother. So the show becomes less of a thought exercise, more of waiting for the Doctor and plot to strikefamiliar chords.)
• This isn’t Davies’ best work, but I’m hoping he’s getting back into his groove. Either way, I’m hyped for Moffat’s upcoming special!

I still don’t understand WTF Ruby’s mother had to do with Sutekh. Why was knowing who she was important to the god of death?

I feel a bit let down really 73 yards was completely overlooked as a story line and I’d say it was one of the most important of the series

Posting body note as a comment to avoid unnecessary detection. So, there it is, the end of the first season with a new Doctor! We witnessed the largest “polarity reversal” in all of (and across) existence. And what’s with the 4th wall breaking Mrs. Flood??

The season had a rather flat start but had just enough for me to stay with it. Thought it was rather good from episode 4 onwards and ended really well.

Episode 8 no?

That was a really fun buildup and coda. The resolutions to the conflict with Sutekh and the mystery of Ruby’ mum were underwhelming, though. If you’re going to have the big bad simply be put on a leash and dragged through the time vortex, you better have a gut punch up your other sleeve. But they didn’t.

The central conceit is fun but half-baked. Turns out after ages and ages riding the TARDIS, Sutekh had become a scoreboard fanboy like any mortal Whovian who’s been watching since 1975. Everything that happens to the Doctor has to make sense to him (maybe Ruby’s mum is the Rani?!) and he simply can’t kill off the Doctor or Ruby without learning who left her at the church, so he can continue building headcanon from there while the universe spins into entropy. This finale has really been about playing against viewer expectations but I didn’t expect it to be the basis of Sutekh’s defeat…

So now we know Ruby’s mum was a nurse in Coventry all along. That is a nice reversal, of course, and plays into the Doctor’s conviction that everyone is special (see “Space babies,” among others). Good thing Sutekh is gone though, because he would be furious at this development… There’s no complex cosmic puzzle to be solved, Ruby’s birth and abandonment dovetails perfectly with real life statistics as Kate told us last episode.

After a season of teasing Susan Foreman, I found the Doctor’s and Ruby’s talk outside the coffeeshop to be revealing. Trying to talk her out of reconnecting with her mum, he’s really talking about himself abandoning his granddaughter, and rationalising why he never went back for her. That is pretty damning if not for his admission to Kate in the last episode that he might bring disaster on Susan if he were to find her.

I liked those thematic strands and the way they set up for next season, and the general storyline if this double feature finale —but the boss fight might have needed a bit more workshopping before making it to production…

This season was kind of a letdown for me. There were way too many cringe things.

I am kind of surprised that so many people noticed the racism metaphor in Dot and Bubble but no-one (including Russell I’m guessing) noticed the uncomfortable AIDS allegory in the last episode, especially with the first queer actor for the Doctor… “While you were having fun around the universe, everywhere and everyone you were with were infected and now they’re going to die”

I feel bad for the memory TARDIS. It was the MVP and saved everyone, then I guess they just dumped it as soon as they got the proper one back.

It’ll probably end up getting its own Big Finish series or something though.