Doctor Who fans rush to social media to reveal the evil monster in the first of 'terrifying cliffhanger' two-part finale

Contains spoilers for the Doctor Who episode The Legend of Ruby Sunday

The first series of Doctor Who starring Ncuti Gatwa as the Fifteenth Doctor is reaching its climax with a two-part finale showing on Saturday 15 and Saturday 22 June.

The series, which has also seen the return of Russell T Davies as showrunner, has featured a couple of ongoing mysteries that fans are hoping will be resolved in the last two episodes. First, everyone wants to know who is the mother of the Doctor’s current companion, Ruby (Millie Gibson), as she was found on a church doorstep on Christmas Eve as a baby, and we have only seen the hooded figure of a woman leaving her there.

The other big question is who is the silver haired woman who has appeared as a different character in each episode – she was a mother in the episode The Dot and the Bubble, a woman in a 18th century painting in Rogue, a computerised ambulance in Boom and a tea lady in the Beatles episode The Devil’s Chord.

While the penultimate episode The Legend of Ruby Sunday, shown on Saturday 15 June, does answer that question – we discover the woman is entrepreneur Susan Twist, and that she has been having dreams about all the other versions of herself – Russell T Davies and his team only give us hints about who Ruby’s mother could be, and they also throw in a whole new puzzle – who, or what, is the baddie threatening the Doctor, Ruby, Ruby’s adoptive gran and the staff at UNIT (Unified Intelligence Taskforce)?

We do learn the monster’s name – it is a god-like being named Sutekh – and that he has a hideous plan for the universe.

“"I bring Sutekh’s gift of death for you and for all your tiny, vile, incessant universe," he says, and Doctor Who viewers were quick to dash to social media to explain that Sutekh is a character that long-time fans have met before - back in the 1975 episode Pyramids of Mars.

“What a terrifying, brilliant penultimate episode to the series and what a cliffhanger. The return of #Sutekh after 49 years,” said one viewer. “I’m currently watching Pyramids of Mars parts 1&2 from 1975 when I was 6! Lol, of course I’ve no recollection of watching this ep nearly 50 years ago! Other than I was probably behind my sofa!” wrote another.

“Bringing Sutekh back is awesome,” said a third, while a fourth fan added: “God, if we get #sutekh trending, a 45 year old character from a one-off Doctor Who episode, I will be in my happy place.”

As fans of the Doctor Whoniverse have confirmed, Sutekh originally appeared in a 1975 episode starring Tom Baker as the Doctor. Sutekh is an Osiran, a god-like power who was worshipped by ancient Egyptians and beings across the universe. He was unleashed after an archaeologist accidentally freed him from a pyramid where he was imprisoned, but the Doctor eventually managed to stop him in a confrontation on Mars.

Sutekh has also been mentioned in one of the 2023 60th anniversary episodes, The Giggle, in which Neil Patrick Harris’s The Toymaker said there was only one being he was afraid of and it was someone known as the One Who Waits, who we discover is another name for Sutekh: “I saw it, hiding, and I ran.”

And now Sutekh seems to be coming for the Doctor, and Mrs Flood (Anita Dobson), Ruby’s neighbour, appears to be one of his minions. She’s currently looking after Ruby’s gran, and Ruby’s mum Carla is on her way home, so it looks like Ruby’s whole family now face extreme danger in the final episode next week.