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Even before anyone knew about Susan Triad, suspected the return of Sutekh, or any of the other mysteries of the current season of Doctor Who, there was one question that lingered over everything: who is Ruby Sunday’s mother, and why was she abandoned as a baby? It’s been the one core part of Ruby’s story throughout the entire season, and one question that the Doctor wasn’t willing to use the Tardis to solve. And now, because showrunner Russell T. Davies is nothing if not sentimental, we have an answer… and it’s a remarkably satisfying one.

Ruby Sunday’s mother is… Louise Alison Miller (played by Faye McKeever). A perfectly ordinary woman who gave her baby away when she was 15, because she couldn’t take care of her, and didn’t want her to be raised in the abusive household that she herself came from. Ruby’s father didn’t even know Louise was pregnant. It’s a very human, very down-to-earth story… which, as the Doctor points out, is kind of the entire point.

“She was important, because we think she’s important,” he says at the end of ‘Empire of Death’. “It’s how everything happens, every war, every religion, every love story… We invest things with significance. So, while the whole of creation was turning around her, it made her sheer existence more powerful than Time Lords and gods. In the end, the most important person in the universe was the most ordinary: a scared little girl, making her baby safe.”

But… wait. What was that about her being more powerful than Time Lords and gods?

The normal of it all

As above, so below, so to speak; just as Sutekh was setting a trap for the Doctor while hitching a ride on the Tardis, Ruby had unwittingly set a trap for Sutekh: the mystery of who her mother was proved to be his undoing, because no-one knew who she was — not even the Doctor. His need to know who she was proved to be his undoing, in that it allowed Ruby to attach the rope to his collar (why didn’t he simply unfasten his own collar? Apparently, even death gods don’t think of the obvious solutions in the moment). And all because of people reading things into the most normal, mundane things.

To wit: We knew that Ruby was abandoned as a baby on Christmas Eve on Ruby Road, and that she was rescued by the vicar of the church where she was found; we knew, too, that there is some confusion around what actually happened on that night, thanks to time traveling goblins and the intervention of the Doctor to ensure that she did not, in fact, get kidnapped or eaten as a baby. (Something more complicated than usual because the Doctor had already met the adult Ruby by that point in his own personal timeline.)

When the Doctor visited Ruby Road on the night Ruby was abandoned — in 2004, a year before the Doctor Who should returned to television after more than two decades — he saw Ruby’s mother, but he didn’t see her; he saw a cloaked figure whose face was hidden by a hood. She apparently saw him too, with the video evidence revealed in ‘The Legend of Ruby Sunday’ suggesting she was pointing at him… but that wasn’t what happened at all; she was pointing to the Ruby Road sign as a way of signifying to the camera she knew was there that she had called the child Ruby.

That she knew the camera was filming explains why it didn’t catch her face; she was intentionally keeping herself hidden from it. Everything else was being read into things by viewers: the Doctor, Sutekh, Ruby, and we, the Doctor Who viewers, as well.

But what about the snow?

If Louise is a regular person, then why did it snow when Ruby thought of being abandoned as a child? We can chalk that up to showrunner Russell T. Davies offering up a red herring, or being particularly poetic with his “time is memory” conceit — or, for those who want a more concrete explanation, there are no less than two already baked into the show’s set-up since it returned last November:

• Ruby was exposed to some crazy time travel stuff as a baby… who knows if there’s some latent Tardis energy that’s messed with her DNA that we don’t know about? After all, when Amy and Rory had a kid, Tardis energy made River Song into a quasi-Time Lord way back when, so who’s to say something similar didn’t happen to baby Ruby…?
• I mentioned this as an idea before, but the laws of the universe might just be different now that the Pantheon keep showing up, which is a concept explicitly called out in ‘The Giggle’ last year. If that’s true, it’s very possible that it might be snowing just because Ruby wants it to snow when she thinks of that night, and reality is far more malleable than it used to be.

All of which is to say: Louise Miller is a very normal person. Ruby’s father, although we don’t see him — something that may change when the show returns, as it certainly sounded as if he was about to be introduced as a character — is likely very normal, as well. That’s the point of them, and of Carla and Cherry Sunday, as well; demonstrating, bluntly, that regular people change the world every single day through random acts of kindness and malice just as much as any more “powerful” beings can. Just when I thought this was the most misanthropic season of the show, perhaps it’s just the opposite; it’s the season that instead asks us to take responsibility for our actions and accept the power that we have each and every day, by showing us the good and the bad that can result from them.

Now that we know the answer to Ruby’s central mystery, it’s enough to make you want to go back and rewatch the entire season to see what seems different as a result, doesn’t it? Thankfully, thanks to Disney+ and BBC iPlayer, you can. After all, you’ll need something to do until the show returns in December.

If you want to start watching Doctor Who and don't know where to start, check out our handy Doctor Who watch guide. Or maybe you're already finished with the show - We've got the perfect Ten shows to watch when you're done watching Doctor Who guide for you too. If you're already heads over heels for the Fifteenth Doctor and want to learn more about the actor playing him, check out what he's been in before here. Or maybe you just need to figure out how the new series numbering is going to work (Are there really gonna be two series 1s? Yes.) - if so, this is the explainer you want.