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For those expecting Millie Gibson’s Ruby Sunday to be right in the thick of things through the entirety of the new season of Doctor Who — think again. While the character is returning for the new season, showrunner Russell T. Davies says that she’s there to serve an entirely different purpose than fans might have been expecting.

“The point of the Ruby story is that we pause in Episode 4 and find out what happens to a companion once the Doctor’s out of their lives,” Davies told TV Insider in a recent interview. “And I mean, talk about PTSD. We talked a lot about this. You would genuinely have a form of PTSD after that. Also, that then becomes a love story for her, and that’s something you never get a chance to tell. You don’t get a chance to tell that kind of story when you’re running around with the Doctor, you save a planet from blowing up and then it doesn’t matter if it was full of handsome men, you’re gone.”

Ruby’s new potential partner will be Conrad, played by Jonah Hauer-King, but Davies suggests the course of love will not run smoothly. “How can he ever live up to the ideal of the Doctor though?” he asked. “She’s been with someone who can save the universe with the click of the fingers, and he’s just a nice lad from London. So how on earth can he ever live up to what Ruby Sunday wants? And that becomes part of the story as well. How can she ever calm down and settle and abandon the mad life that she once led?”

The concept of what companions do after the Doctor leaves is one that Davies keep returning to; in his first outing as showrunner, he not only brought the original series’ Sarah Jane Smith (Elizabeth Sladen) as well as Rose and Martha from his own run. In the new series, he’s already brought back Donna and Mel Bush (Catherine Tate and Bonnie Langford, respectively). Perhaps ‘Lucky Day’ — that’s what the fourth episode is called — will be enough for Davies to finally feel as if he’s said all he needs to on the topic.

Doctor Who returns to Disney+ and, in the UK, the BBC on April 12.

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