this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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The way I see it, it doesn't matter what she said, it was only happening to make her creepy. If Ruby's guess near the end is right, the whole point of her being there, haunting her, making people run away, was to make specifically this one man run away in terror, and there's no way whatever that was had anything to do with anyone else abandoning Ruby. She simply says something so terrifying that people run away, that's it, it doesn't matter what exactly, and it doesn't even have to be the same thing for everyone. Same with the teleport: she did it the same way she time travelled back into her past. How? We don't know either, and it doesn't matter, it's just here to make her creepy.
The Doctor told her about this terrible Welsh minister, and she made it her life's mission to get rid of him, and then went back to her young self. Why did the Doctor vanish? Why 73 yards? Why did her mom and Kate turn on her? We don't know, it's magic. Or it'll be revealed later, maybe, or maybe it won't. The creepiness, the distance, is to make her afraid, to make others afraid, and to make her realize she has an easy way to make the guy run away. It doesn't make sense, it just has to work for her to think "I can weaponize that" and connect the dots. I'm fine with the details not making sense personally, it's not that kind of episode, I thought it was well executed.
Only thing I would have hoped to see at the end is the Doctor again realizing that his memory changed between telling Ruby about Robert and then Robert disappearing from History in the future. Just to tie with the previous one.
Which makes me think that perhaps it's like psychic paper: she could say anything (or even nothing), and the experience would be the most horrifying, disgusting, or terrifying thing to the listener, enough to drive them away from Ruby forever.