Lucky Day: Ranking n/a (but around #75ish)

 

"Lucky Day” (15^th Dr, 2025)

(Series 15/2A episode 4, Dr 15 with Ruy and (briefly) Belinda, 3/5/2025, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Pete McTighe, executive producers: Julie Gardner, Jane Tranter, Joel Collins, Phil Collinson and Vicki Delow, director:  Peter Hoar)

Ranking: #N/A but #75ish reviewed 4/5/2025

‘I, Conrad, have broken into the headquarters of the Alonsy Alien Reviews site and am exposing what really goes on behind the scenes. Here is my live-stream of, umm, someone sitting in their pyjamas watching a Dr Who episode and typing very very fast It’s clearly all a scam. I mean who writes this much just for the love of a TV programme? He’s clearly dfoing it to gain, err, three views online’ 

 

The truth, dear reader, is not what it used to be. You’ve probably noticed, if you’ve reached double digits, that something has changed since you were little: that people no longer have the trust in authority figures and specialists that they once did. That we no longer take on automatic trust the word of someone who has spent their life in a particular field, learning things so the rest of us don’t need to know, ready for the day we might all need to use it. A little scepticism is healthy and a programme like Dr Who has spent much of its lifetime making sure you only put your trust in the people who deserve it, who taught you not to trust Trojans who come bearing gifts (‘The Myth Makers’) bright orange aliens who come bearing gifts (‘The Claws Of Axos’) or bright green aliens who come bearing gifts (‘Aliens In London/WWIII’) depending on your age. But the thing is, it’s gone too far and people are ignoring the people who really are there to keep us safe. I can’t move online for covid deniers (if you doubt this story is about covid just look at the antidote which Conrad refuses to take even though it’s meant to save his life), climate deniers, disabled haters and rightwing racists who think society is collapsing because of the people at the bottom rung of society (rather than the rich at the top) who tell you not to trust doctors, scientists, that nice little lady from the corner shop and that poor bloke in a wheelchair are really up to something based on nothing more than made up lies designed to get clicks. We’re at the stage in Human existence where anyone can get on a platform and make up nonsense and there just aren’t enough people to fact-check it and nobody would trust the fact-checkers anyway. The sad fact is that the truth is boring and people would rather believe a cleverly told lie than an inconvenient truth. We’re living in a time when you can’t trust anything anyone says at face value anymore, because you’re always trying to work out the context and what agenda someone has. Are they trying to make money out of what they say? Are they picking on people’s prejudices as a way to shock people? Are they doing it in a perverse way to get the love and attention they didn’t get in everyday life? Or are they using it as a platform to get into power and take control? Trust in people is a an all time low. Is that person you’re striking up a conversation with or matching on a dating app a secret catfisher? ASbuser? Covid denier? Trumper? Brexiteer? A racist? A homophobe? A MAGA moron?And if you’re under double digits then I’m really very very sorry, because you’ve never known a world where it’s normal to trust automatically and that’s scary, having to look over your shoulder all the time and work out if you can take what people say at face value: far scarier than any Dr Who monster. This is not the future those of who were brought up on classic Dr Who ever thought we’d have and very much not the one those brought up on ‘modern’ Who deserve.   

What Pete McTighe does in this very clever script is take the biggest authority figures still alive in Dr Who (assuming for the moment that most of the timelords really are dead) and use them as an example. We all know UNIT are the goodies. We’ve seen them help take down many an alien invasion and we know what deep dark secrets they keep in their vaults. We cheer them on as an example of everything that’s right with humanity: they’re brave, clever (well, some of them) and always ready to do the right thing. But in the context of the people living in the Whoniverse they’re shadowy figures, the great unknown who only turn up when there’s a sudden invasion that gets swept under the carpet or when a peace meeting is taking place (and a bunch of guerrillas randomly turn up to blow the place up: see ‘Day Of The Daleks’). In the Whoniverse, just as in ‘our’ world, people have stopped trusting: what goes on behind those closed walls? What do they do with our taxpayer’s money? Is there really such a thing as aliens – or is it all a cover up for something else? It’s a neat twist on the usual way we’ve been taught to think about Dr Who stories, where conspiracy theories tend to be ‘right’ more often than not and particularly in the UNIT era (think of ‘The Ambassadors Of Death’ and ‘Invasion Of the Dinosaurs’ in particular). To question what you’re told is second nature to most Dr Who fans, who saw their hero take out a generation of authority figures who didn’t know what they’re talking about. But some people in both our real world and the TV world have gone too far: people are getting hurt, even getting killed, because of bad advice (you only need to look up ‘covid denier dies of covid’ in Google to see how many times this has happened; even in Dr Who circles most French fans of the ‘classic’ series came to the show through the regular scifi slot ‘Temps Time’ presented by the twins Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff who talked about how they didn’t believe in the covid vaccine and encouraged fans not to take it– and then died of covid a month apart in 2021-2022). There’s a point where people have spent so much time and put so much effort into denying reality and hiding from facts that they are injuring themselves and other people. Speculation is fine until someone gets hurt because you’ve told someone it was a fact. And McTighe has had enough, writing a Dr Who story that’s the equivalent of the saying about how a lie travels halfway round the world in the time it takes a fact to get verified and put its shoes on.
The writer is making a welcome return under Russell T after a couple of really promising scripts in the Chris Chibnall era that were ruined by the worst hallmarks of the era (clumsy editing, weird pacing, variable acting). ‘Lucky Day’ has the same feel of ‘Praxeus’ in the sense that it wrings its hands going ‘what are we doing?’ along with the capitalist damning tale ‘Kerblam!’ but rises a million miles above both by sticking the ending: there’s no cop out this time, no waving a sonic screwdriver and putting things right or letting Amazon-style warehouses off the hook for shady business practices. Instead McTighe pushes deeper than we expect, to the point where this story resembles ‘Dot and Bubble’ (a similar Russell T Davies script) in the sense that The Doctor ‘loses’ at the end, even when we know he’s ‘right’. The baddy walks off, with a smug grin on their face, still convinced that they’re right and that the deaths they caused don’t ‘matter’. Everything is a game to them and even The Doctor can’t stop them. It fits in with the general air of helplessness that’s built up across the 15^th Doctor era, the sense that things are getting ever more wildly out of control and that even he can’t stop it. The baddies in this show are getting worse and more blatant, but they don’t invade with boots on the ground anymore, they do it by stealth, by stealing hearts and minds one at a time. Even in prison you get the sense that the baddy of this story will end up a martyr for his cause, even when it’s fake.

Not that the Doctor is in it much. This is another Doctor-lite episode but unlike last year (when Ncuti still had projects to finish before he could commit himself to Who) this one seems to have started from the first as an attempt to do something Dr Who has only hinted at before now: what happens when a companion gets left behind. It hits slightly differently with Ruby to what we’ve seen in the past though (‘Sarah Jane Adventures’ was a whole series looking at a companion rebuilding their life after years as a recluse, while Jo Grant left precisely to go down the Amazon and do good, the way The Doctor taught her, with ‘Power Of the Doctor’ showing that off-screen Tegan and Ace have both been doing the same). But for Ruby it hits a little differently: we thought at the time that she left The Doctor to pend more time with the dad she’d re-discovered, but really she’s suffering from shock, from ptsd. She’d been through so much in such a short space of time (‘I’ve been eaten by a double bass, gobbled by goblins and seen the world end’ Ruby gabbles to a disbelieving Conrad in one of the story’s best lines; the other being ‘Ruby Sunday if that’s your real name – because that’s just ridiculous!’) that her fight or flight system is permanently switched on and she’s exhausted (she might want to get her vagus nerve checked; same for anyone reading this in the same boat). She’s really struggling to fit in with real life and work out what’s ‘normal’. So she doesn’t see through the admittedly very clever lies of her new boyfriend Conrad, someone who seems at last to be normal and stable and a little sweet, if a bit clueless. Only (huge mega spoilers) it’s all a lie and as Stephen Stills once sang love can be an accident of faith if you’re unlucky enough to pick the wrong person. It turns out that he’s just using her as the weak link in UNIT, to expose UNIT as liars and frauds. Even before the twist you sense that something’s not right, that Ruby’s pouring everything about her life out too fast, but that’s what you do after trauma: you have no way of working out what’s normal anymore and who you can trust. So you make mistakes and trust the wrong people, in your desperate attempts to find someone who believes you and that you can finally lay down a lot of the things that have been running through your head. You can see why she picks Conrad too: he seems ‘one of us’, he’s met the Doctor, he believes in aliens, he has a podcast discussing the finer elements of paranormal activities. At first he seems a copy of ‘Redacted’, the fictional podcast set in the Whoniverse from 2023 about a bunch of similarly sweet but clueless friends who try to track The Doctor down using ‘clues’ but really discover more about each other.

Except that Conrad’s not sweet or clueless and his podcast isn’t friends having a chat. He’s evil, making up lies even when he knows that UNIT and monsters are real and trying to ‘expose’ what he knows to be his own made up lies without caring who gets in his way. He’s the opposite of Ruby, the opposite of The Doctor, the opposite of everyone watching this show. He gets people killed without a second thought. He insults the disabled (Shirley) and the Brigadier (sacrilegious to Whovians!) He’s the Andrew Tate or the Yaxley Lennon or even the Elon Musk of the Whoniverse (there’s a telling line from Kate Stewart about how what he exposes today will be in the hands of rightwing dictators tomorrow and they don’t have to mention names for us to get the gist). Had this story not been filmed a whole year earlier I’d also say this story was about the lies spread in the wake of the Southport stabbings (which happened just down the road from me, in the sunniest poshest quietest town round these parts) and how a church-going Christian with mental health problems got transformed by racist idiots into a Muslim fanatic overnight, with scores of innocent refugees attacked around the country. But even without that event there has long been something in the air: it’s why Brexit happened with lies written on the side of a bus, it’s how Boris got in, it’s how Trump got in twice (with a bit of help from his buddy Vlaldimir fixing results for him, because even America isn’t that stupid en masse). In the future of Dr Who, when people look back, ‘Lucky Day’ is going to scream ‘2025’ the same way that ‘The Chase’ screams 1965, ‘Vengeance On Varos’ screams 1985 and ‘Aliens Of London’ screams 2005. It’s a brave episode that screams ‘how did we get here?’ and ‘where could we possibly be going next?’ Like the rest of series two of the Disney era it packs no punched about the state of the world and asks all the right questions, the way good Dr Who should and returns to that age-old theme that Humans who lose their humanity because they’re scared by differences and things they don’t understand are bigger monsters than any alien.
But is it any good? Mostly, yes. If Ruby had been drawn more like this last year, as someone we properly got to know behind the bubbly exterior, then the character and series as a whole would have been a lot more loved than they were (the only episode that pointed towards ‘this’ Ruby was ’73 Yards’ and that story got reset). Millie Gibson gives the performance of her life, effortlessly slipping back into her usual ‘buddy’ role with Ncuti (she admits on the ‘Unleashed’ documentary that it took precisely ten seconds for them to get back to their mischief-making ways and it shows!) but also making Ruby vulnerable, scared, isolated. You feel her trying to put the brakes on with this new boy in her life, while recognising that it’s the first good thing to happen to her since she left the Tardis. She craves a bit of that attention and feeling ‘special’ she used to have, so it’s easy to see why she’s flattered by Conrad and eager to pour out her life story to him. I would have loved more of this actually, to see where Ruby is working now and what her day to day life is with the Tardis-shaped hole to fill it, as well more of Ruby’s shock at the end after being betrayed. It isn’t easy for her to trust after everything she’s seen, so for the first person outside her family she did trust to turn out to do that to her must have huge ramifications on her character we don’t get to see (at least not yet, though we’re running out of time). Her family are well handled: happily teasing her for her apparent good fortune but also full of maternal instincts to try to push her into a settled life before she’s fully ready (all very believable given what we know about her adopted mum and her gran).

You think right up to the halfway point that Dr Who is finally going to do a true love story (something they’ve actually done very few of and which I’ve love to see properly), potentially a doomed one after it looks as if Conrad has refused to take his ’antidote’. McTighe cleverly tries to make us think that Conrad is a softy pretending to be a hard nut by showing off to Ruby and proving that he can match the Doctor, even though we all think he’s going to pay the price for that with his life. ‘He’s nice, he’s normal’ says Ruby to her family earlier , apparently setting us up for as sad death. Only for the story to do one of the greatest 180 degree switches in the series history by doing a ‘Rescue’ and having the monsters we see in darkness outside turn out to be his mates in suits. Conrad doesn’t know what normal is after the home life he’s had, but he happens to be very good at acting it and giving people what they want and he wants to expose UNIT. I did wonder if something was up when we saw Conrad using a locker with the ‘UNIT’ logo but still didn’t guess in time. He is, to quote the 4^th Doctor from ‘The Face Of Evil’, someone ‘who doesn’t alter their views to fit the facts., they alter the facts to fit their views – which can be uncomfortable if you’re one of the facts that needs altering’.  It’s very smartly done: it’s natural for Conrad to take Ruby out on a date to a place he arranges (the same pub as in ’73 Yards’? Ruby seems to do a lot of drinking, unusual for a Who companion), then it seems to be in character when he gets up to check on the flickering lights. We think he’s a goner, until he turns out to be a traitor. It’s only later you see how flimsy the suits actually are compared to the CGI Shreek we saw earlier (the poor sculptor was shown a picture of the computer model for a few seconds, then given a couple of hours to knock up a facsimile head from memory – as you’d expect, it’s basically right nut not entirely accurate, as would fit someone recalling a memory from when they were eight years old). It’s quite the shock as we’re used to Who companions riding into the sunset: Ben and Polly (hopefully), Jo with that nice Clifford Jones, Donna (eventually), Rose (with that nice Human David Tennant lookalike). Companions usually get rewarded for their hard work and closure, something nice that’s even better than life in the Tardis. Not since Dodo was brainwashed and leaves off screen in ‘The War Machines’ or possibly Tegan have a strop in ‘Resurrection Of The Daleks’ have we seen one suffer (with the obvious exceptions of the ones who died/got zapped back in time/had their memories wiped and even they seemed quite happy. Except Adric. Poor Adric). It’s a brave episode to go there and show that being, but equally in keeping with a programme that allowed the Doctor a whole bi-regeneration to heal.

The showdown in UNIT HQ is well handled too, despite going on a bit too long. McTighe nails Kate Stewart like never before (only in Peter Harness’ ‘Zygon Invasion/Inversion’ was she ever this good): she’s protective of her job, protective of her family legacy, protective of her staff, protective of her country, so for some little tyke to come along and make stuff up makes her madder than we’ve seen her so far. She’s quite happy to throw Conrad to the Shreek without the Doctor there to stop her, with Jemma Redgrave enjoying having some anger to work with instead of her usual unruffled exterior. The insult to the Brigadier was a nice/nasty touch – you can see her bristle and her calm manner nearly break before she reigns it back in. Millie too excels at the scene where Poor Ruby is torn, still trying to process, alternating between lashing out and and wanting to believe that the person she loves is still in there somewhere. Conrad, meanwhile, alternates between cowardly snivelling and still play-acting. It is a shame they don’t just let the Shreek get him, though it also supports the theme that ‘we’re better than that’ (think of the 10th Doctor shouting ‘I never would!’ in ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’) and gives Ncuti the chance for one of his best speeches at the end. It’s nice to see the rest of UNIT too, though they don’t get much to do, Shirley apparently there just for Conrad’s wisecracks about ‘taking welfare’ (even though she’s clearly in a job) and Vlinx reduced to a couple of lines (as someone has already pointed out it’s a good job Mel was away that day, or Conrad would have been thrown down the stairs). 
The acting award surely goes to Jonah Hauer-Clark as Conrad though, who seems to switch personalities in a second. You fully believe in him as a sweet but hopeless romantic and as a cruel psychopathic liar. I would have liked more backstory for how he turned out the way he did though: we do get the brief scene of his mum being distant and cold with him as an eight year old boy and the addition that Conrad lies about her death to Ruby and has really bought her a house (is he still trying to impress her? It felt as if the script was trying to make a point about toxic parenting and how people’s upbringing shapes them, but shied away from it, even though it would have made a good contrast with Ruby’s loving adopted family and the best gag of the episode, when Shirley comments after her hug with Kate ‘are you collecting mums?’ After all, one reason Ruby trusts Conrad so easily and readily is that she’s never actually known a male in her life till the Doctor and he’s, for lack of a better way of putting it, Trans, switching from gender to gender – she simply doesn’t know what mean are meant to be like. Equally Conrad, apparently brought up without a dad, doesn’t know how to behave. But alas it’s a fleeting moment. There are generations who only ever mix with people of the other gender at school, where they tend to stay apart or end up bullies. What with the incel Alan in ‘Robot Revolution’, too, it feels as if someone at the production office or maybe lots of them have just broken up with a boyfriend). Conrad, too, could so nearly have become a companion (the same way that Rory became one as Amy’s boyfriend) but chose the ‘wrong’ path with the Doctor later commenting that only ‘special’ people are allowed in his Tardis and that Conrad is ‘special…in a different way’. It’s something Russell T tried to do with Adam in ‘Dalek’ and ‘The Long Game’ but comes off better here (not least because nobody could understand what Rose saw in him). It’s part of a bigger theme across series two of an angrier, feistier Russell too who is no longer trying to make a Saturday teatime show that’s ‘for everyone’ – because some people, who watch Dr Who then go out and judge and attack people based on colour, ability, gender, lifestyle or species haven’t understood the series at all. 

It is a shame, though, that the story is so top heavy with that scene and that the Doctor’s cameos are so short. I was enjoying the ‘Luck and Monsters’ aspect of the beginning, with the eight year old boy seeing the CGI Shreek, of someone who would grow up to want to know all about The Doctor. I never got the part of the ‘lucky 50p’ either: is the idea that The Doctor tries to pass on a kindness but that his kindness backfired by what the boy grew up to become? He wears it as a talisman around his neck into adulthood (he’s apparently 25 when he meets Ruby but looks older) but that seems an odd thing to do for someone who either thinks or wants other people to think it’s all a ‘scam’. It feels like a ‘cheat’ – we probably all felt watching this the first time that the ‘lucky day’ was Ruby meeting Conrad, until it wasn’t, but trying to turn this into Conrad’s ‘lucky day’ doesn’t quite work (is he lucky because no one can stop him and he doesn’t have to abide by the laws of truth-telling like most of us? Or is he lucky not to be eaten at the end? It can’t  be meeting Ruby as that was all his doing).  Plus why does Ruby react to the coin? She didn’t see it, Belinda did. Which is one of the worst things about the episode: Ruby never actually meets her successor, who gets a brief minute scene at the beginning in 2007 and is never seen again. They don’t get to swap notes ‘School Reunion’ style, Ruby doesn’t get to confront that she needs to move on and Belinda doesn’t get to see what might happen to her too one day. In fact Ruby doesn’t even meet The Doctor who turns up alone in Conrad’s prison cell, which is a huge shame. Another thing that was a missed opportunity too: Conrad’s secretly working for an operation named ‘Thinktank’. There’s already been one of those in Dr Who before (in ‘Robot’) and it felt for a moment there as if we were going to get a rematch. But they can’t be the same: they were a shady bunch of liars too, but only because they were trying to prevent their shady secrets about their giant killer robot getting out (till Sarah Jane inevitably stumbles across it) and their cover ups were terrible: they surely can’t be the same or Conrad would know the ‘truth’ and indeed know hos hard cover ups are. So why mention it? Why not have him work for, say, BOSS or Wotan? This is either the clumsiest Easter Egg ever or a mistake, but you’d think Russell alone would be enough of a Dr Who fan to notice something like that.    

Worst of all, Ruby never gets closure and we – apparently – leave her story there, wounded and betrayed, unable to trust again. While other regenerations haven’t liked going backwards it feels as if the more huggable Dr 15 would and they parted on good terms at the end of ‘Empire Of Death’, with the promise of seeing each other again. You think the Doctor would turn up for a hug and to tell Ruby he’s proud of her. She deserves better and while a hug from a Lethbridge-Stewart is always special its no consolation for having to pick her life back up all over again. While, good as it is to see UNIT deal with Conrad alone, where is The Doctor anyway? He clearly knows about Conrad and has a time machine – he ought to be able to nip back and join in, by setting Conrad up for a fall. It’s in his best interests to keep UNIT’s ‘borrowed’ alien tech out of the hands of certain people too. But then I guess without that there’s no story). The 2007 scene feels tacked on in retrospect, a last minute fudge to get Conrad involved in The Doctor but honestly it would have been better if he’d been caught up in a ‘real’ Who event, like the Autons in London or the Slitheen in Downing Street and seen that with his own eyes. Far better to have skipped the Belinda scene altogether and had more time of The Doctor and Ruby together, apparently fresh from the end of ‘The Devil’s Chord’ (I’m amazed she’s still running that hard eight hours after dancing the twist!)   

Like the Doctor and Martha’s cameo in ‘Blink’ fighting the Hoix the Shreek are clearly cobbled together with extras out of the CGI box too, a ‘filler’ monster rather like Torchwood’s Weevils. We get no back story for where they’ve come from or why they want Earth, but for all that I rather like the design and having a more animalistic alien for a change makes sense (they can’t all be Shakesperian Draconians out there). It’s a clever idea for something we only see sparingly until the end anyway, while Ruby’s discussion of everything she learned about it fills in a nice bit of back story (such as the way is it gives off background radiation that feeds off the lights and causes power fluctuations – a nice cheap way of getting spooky thrills, such as when the train timetable flickers or the pub lights go out – and the way it feeds off adrenalin so likes its victims scared. Which is more back story than we got for any of the monsters invented for the Chibnall era). I love the way, too, that the costume Shreek is quite small but the CGI ones are huge (and we can’t tell the perspective of the ones in the dark outside the pub at first till the lights go on). Very clever! Sadly we don’t find out what happens to it at the end (does he go back into the UNIT vaults? If so what does The Doctor think about them keeping actual beings down there? Come to think of it, what did he think about Torchwood doing that?) I worry, too, that there was too much love and betrayal and not enough monsters in this story for a lot of fans: if we’d had the CGI Shreek chasing Conrad down corridors for a couple of minutes it might have made a few more ‘traditionalist’ viewers happy.

I forgive everything, though, for The Doctor’s glorious speech at the end which is ever so good. Ncuti is such a playful, fun-loving Doctor that it’s still fairly rare to see him angry, turning on ‘the little boy who can’t bear to be found out’ so he covers up lies with lies, using them to get attention and love he doesn’t know how to get any other way. His other greatest moment so far, in ‘Dot and Bubble’, still beats it for range and rage but it’s a powerhouse, as Ncuti gets to say everything to Conrad we’ve been thinking, about the liars who muddle the truth and harm people indirectly, in ways where they can’t be stopped. The look of quite rage is something to behold, but it’s the moment when Conrad fights back and tells The Doctor that he ‘still’ doesn’t believe in his ‘truth’ and that he should ‘get off this planet’ that really sells this scene. He totally doesn’t see it coming and for a second is as flustered as Ruby and Kate before angrily dematerialising. This is exactly what having a rightwing troll turning up on your social media is like: you’re trying to save them but they won’t save themselves and make life as difficult for you as possible, for no other reason than they enjoy it, while if you fight back at the same level they point out you’re not ‘meant’ to act the way they do. This Doctor also gets his best characterisation without even being in the room this episode, when Conrad asks if Ruby and The Doctor has a ‘thing’ and she laughs ‘oh no, if he was here he’d be flirting with you too, he’s just like that’.    

That just leaves our by now traditional slot for Mrs Flood to turn up. At least she makes more sense here. It’s a sign of how involving this story was that I’d forgotten about her so her entrance was a shock (not like ‘The Well’ last week). Still not a clue what she’s doing there as a governor of all things though. Next week suggests she’s some sort of pantheon God of storytelling though, so maybe she has the ability to turn Dr Who into a story and rewrite it? One puzzling thing too: she’s now dressing up in character which she never did last year (when she mostly dressed up as old companions, Romana I and Clara). But how can she hijack the narrative? Is it something to do with the AL machine rewriting history in ‘The Robot Revolution’? Is she a bi-regeneration of another timelord/lady (many people say The Rani but I still fancy the Romana idea, or perhaps the nastier sceptical side of Belinda that seemed to suddenly disappear at the start of ‘Lux’. Or it something to come (the hint about a ‘reality bomb’ that could explode things is interesting given the finale is called ‘The Reality War’). Answers on a postcard…

Overall, then, while I wouldn’t say ‘Lucky Day’ is an absolute top tier most loved episode for me, it is a super  brave and courageous one that does things we’ve never seen the series do before and which deserves applause for that alone. It’s sort of like the ‘Extremis’ three parter in the way it’s all about lies, but that was more ‘traditional’ in that a Dr Who monster wanted us to choose the soft lies and give them power over us rather than living with the harsh truth; this one is very different and the monster is one of ‘us’ (I have to wonder, too, given the podcast bit and the way Conrad seems to be interested in aliens if this isn’t Russell chuntering a bit over the criticism he’s been getting lately by people who used to be supportive, but if so it’s  another fleeting moment). Like a few Moffat stories (‘Silence In The Library’ springs to mind) it’s one we can only really appreciate first time round when we don’t know the surprise that’s coming -  once you do you just see a dopey love story that never was and a Shreek attack that was called off at the last minute and that’s not what stories are made to re-watch for. Even so, it’s a big enough surprise to warrant a whole episode built around it and it’s well handled, given extra dimensions to Ruby retrospectively in a way we’ve only really seen with Sarah Jane (and, as said, that took a whole spin-off series to achieve what happened here).  There’s a lot of love and care and attention poured into this show and these characters (in stark contrast to Conrad’s personality) and it’s welcome indeed to see McTighe given the space to grow, to put the last pieces of the puzzle together in a way that he was never allowed under the nervier, more chaotic Chibnall years.  Russell really didn’t need to be this brave when he brought Dr Who back and the fact that he’s going for the jugular as much as he is and using Dr Who as very much a force for good in a world that’s becoming increasingly bad is wonderful to behold.  Tough ‘Dot and Bubble’ wins for me for being darker still, this story leaps straight into second place in my Disney rankings, a powerful story that packs a lot of punch and does exactly what Dr Who was always meant to do: encourage those of us left fighting the good fight to keep going despite lowering odds, to help us feel less alone and show that it is us that are on the right side of history, not the liars making things up for clicks and stirring discontent. This, right here, is Dr Who as it always was, always is and always should be and for that alone, even with the odd bit of dodgy pacing, ‘Lucky Day’ made my day. Oh and it goes without saying #istandwithunit

POSITIVES + The cameos. It’s just like old times! Apparently Trinity Wells is still going strong in America after twenty years: fantastic. The British newsreaders, meanwhile look just like ours! Also that was the single best episode of The One Show I’ve ever seen (not least because it was also the shortest). Other writers have tried to use them too but they just come across as a gimmick: when Russell uses them it’s a clever way of making a plot point, such as here about how these liars can be given a platform to spread their message in the sake of ‘equality’ and ‘free speech’, even though we never used to give such room over to lies without checking them first.   

NEGATIVES – Where did the Disney budget go? So much for worrying it would overshadow and spoil our low budget show, this episode in particular looked more low budget than usual. The only money I saw spent this episode was a two scene CGI monster, a pub without lights and the already built Unit HQ, while it speaks volumes that a couple of cheaply made monster suits still felt like they slotted into this episode without raising suspicions. Where is it all going? Did the budget get slashed? So far we’ve had one robot and  one really good sky shot and that’s it for scenes that couldn’t have been done on a ‘classic’ series budget never mind a ‘new’ one).  

BEST QUOTE: ‘I am fighting a battle on behalf of everyday people who just want to get through their day and feel safe and warm and fed and then along comes this noise, all day long this relentless noise. Cowards like you weaponising lies. Taking people’s insecurities and fear and making it currency. You are exhausting. You block the truth, cloth our bandwith and shred our patience. The only strategy you have is to wear us down. But the thing is, Conrad, I have energy to burn and all the time in the universe’.

 Previous ‘The Well’ next ‘The Story and The Engine’

The Well: ranking - n/a (but #230ish)

 

"The Well” (15^th Dr, 2025)

(Series 15/2A episode 3, Dr 15 with Belinda, 26/4/2025, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writers: Russell T Davies and Sharma Angel Walfall, executive producers: Julie Gardner, Jane Tranter, Joel Collins and Phil Collinson, director:  Amanda Brotchie)

Ranking: #N/A *but #230ish reviewed 27/4/2025

 

Did you hear about the planet full of diamonds where a monster lay sleeping? Do you know where he/she/it’s hiding? Well well well.

I start with a joke this week because there was almost none of that sort of thing in this week’s sombre episode, seemingly deliberately made to be dark and monochrome in contrast to last week’s riot of technicolour. That’s maybe not a surprise because it’s  sequel to another famously sombre episode – I’ll assume that everyone reading this knows which one but if you don’t look away now, because that really would spoil the twist. No? Still here? Okay, ‘The Well’ is what happens when the clock strikes ‘Midnight’ a second time. It is, in Russell’s own words from this week’s ‘Unleashed’ behind-the-scenes documentary ‘the sort of story you should never ever make a sequel to – so of course we dove in headfirst!’ A lot of fans are confused and/or upset that we got one. After all ‘Midnight’ is as close to perfect as TV comes, the story that many fans consider Russell’s best work (me included) I can still absolutely see why he wanted to go back to it: that story was the last (specials aside, the first of two which were written mostly concurrently) that Russell wrote the first time around, after different episode fell through. It came at a difficult time in his life: his husband Adam was dying and he was preparing to leave the job he adored to look after him. It is a story about language, about how your words can be taken away and used against you and my pet theory, as put forward in the ‘Midnight’ review, is that it came from Russell realising that he’s got too full of himself in his ‘old’ job, that the 10^th Doctor who was his spokesman had become ‘like a God’ (being in charge of a show this big for five years will warp anyone’s brain) and could bend the universe to his whims – while the universe has just handed him a gigantic reminder that he couldn’t. So, then, I for one am not surprised he felt like ‘Midnight’ was an itch he couldn’t scratch. This time though things are different. Russell is coming to this story from a humbler place. He knows, now, that his job isn’t just to entertain and raise big issues but to protect those without a voice
We know from the first time round that the Midnight monster likes to create a ‘host’ for itself, picking on the nearest Human and that in ‘Midnight’ it jumped on The Doctor, using his own words – the one thing that gets him out of trouble – against him. What we learn in this story is that the monster jumps into whichever being it thinks is most likely to attack it. Notably that’s no longer The Doctor even though the creature seems to remember him (and whispers his real name in his ear, something only The Doctor and – at a push – River Song actually know).So this time he writes the same scenario from the point of view of a deaf survivor attacked by a monster who makes people talk in whispers, with the 15^th Doctor – his new, softer, kinder, more humanistic mouthpiece – promising that she isn’t going to be abandoned ‘because we’re here for you – we’re all here for you’. Just look at what Russell’s been doing these past two years, writing strong parts for the LGBTQ and disabled communities and casting two actors of race in the main parts: the message is no longer an angry stomp round his writer’s room that ‘I could do so much more!’ but a gratitude that he’s in a position to do so much good for so many people.

I love that angle of this story, which I say is as good a reason as any for writing a sequel, even if there are still aspects of this episode I’m not best keen on. After all, since Russell wrote that story sixteen years go, we have more whisperings going on than ever and even more human paranoia in the world (this is a story that shows it’s source material even more openly than ‘Midnight’, the brilliant Twilight Zone episode ‘The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street’, where a mob kills an innocent little boy for play-acting his innocent story about aliens from a book he’s reading). It turns out the ‘Midnight’ monster – ejected into space at the end of that story – has been sleeping (or perhaps it’s offspring have been sleeping) down the bottom of a well. The planet is no longer a tourist trap and the planet has been mined almost completely for its diamonds but it’s left a well at the bottom that’s just enough to live in. Until this latest bunch of humanoids come along and wake it up, accidentally causing a massacre. Aliss has survived precisely because of her disability, because being deaf she can’t hear anyone whisper to her. Russell is clever in making her out to be as ordinary as possible though rather than having a ‘super-power’, in a lovely line telling us that she’s the ‘cook’, though in this era all that amounts to is ‘getting things out of packets’.  The thing is, though, the massacre has taken place before we get to this base: what we see instead are a bunch of soldiers pointing their guns at her while the same paranoia starts again. What is so different about her? Maybe the monster is inside her? Or maybe it’s this mysterious thing they can just see out the corner of their eye when they look at her, hiding behind her back. Being around someone disabled makes them uncomfortable. Much as they pride themselves on being an inclusive society in the future. How I wish we had the options of suits with subtitles we could turn on) they keep forgetting what it’s like; even The Doctor has to be reminded to please turn his captions back on so that Aliss (a perpetually terrified Rose Ayling-Ellis, who seems to be in everything at the moment) can understand what’s happening. Because without them she’s scared and alone and cut off even from her peers. She’s no different to how they are, except for one thing, ‘no different except that I’m the only one left’. So why are they acting as if she’s the monster?

I would say that it’s about people turning their backs on the disabled (though, of course, in the context of the story it’s about people too afraid to turn their backs on the disabled because they might be ‘scary monsters’ despite looking just like ‘us’). As someone with an invisible illness myself I know exactly where this story is coming from. The looks you get from people who don’t understand it. The intolerance from people who only vaguely remember being sick and think it’s an easy life rather one that’s a struggle for survival each and every day. The people who think it’s a sign of weakness and little realise that it could just as easily happen to them, that everyone will end up disabled if they don’t die of something that kills them first. Some days it feels very much like being stared at with soldiers with guns who’ve been stirred up by online whispers about where your taxes are going and what you do all day (write in my pyjamas and nap mostly, if you’re wondering, it’s the best way to stay connected to the world the days I can actually sit upright and the pain stops enough to be able to think straight). Just being alive seems to make people jumpy, perhaps because they’re aware that one day they can end up like you. Though not on benefits I’ve also seen how friends of mine are affected by that discussion, by the media fixation on ‘other people taking things from you’ despite the fact that next to no one was ever successfully prosecuted for benefit fraud and even then it was pennies through mistakes for the most part (compare this to millionaires dodging the system with tax havens and getting out of paying taxes). This isn’t a world where the strongest helps the weak, it’s a world where the weak are seen as the perfect scapegoats because no one cares and they’re too ill to fight back for the most part. The thing is, though, it could be you tomorrow: getting rid of the target for the abuse doesn’t ends the abuse, it just switches people and minority groups until, unchecked, only one person is left standing. If you’ve ever read that famous Niemoller quote: ‘First they came for…But I did not speak out’ that ends with them coming for you, then that’s what this story is about: the thing that makes people hate on other people is always changing hosts. When one is killed it just jumps to another.  Until it jumps to you for being ‘different’ in some small way. We need to help each other or we all fall. One telling line is the way one of the soldiers tells Aliss to hush, that ‘you will be quiet or you will be considered a threat to life’. A lot of disabled people will identify with that, tolerated as long as you don’t speak out and make people feel awkward.   

I’ve never been deaf but I can imagine that’s even more isolating: everyone else is connected in a way you aren’t and you feel left behind, through no fault other than an accident and/or a quirk of genetics. Too often the universe feels like it’s deliberately made to keep you left out of it. So when The Doctor turns round and tells Aliss/me/us that ‘whatever the monster does to you, you’ve got us’ and that we’re not going to be left behind (because, after all, he knows what it’s like to have a mob turn on you) it’s one of those golden moments of Dr Who that I live for, that no other series could offer. The Doctor is saving us from the whispers this time rather than himself though once again it’s not him who saves us all but a human (or humanoid anyway, given that the Earth apparently no longer exists) dies through a moment of great sacrifice having realised the ‘truth’ (because the squadron leader, played with no-nonsense charm by Shaya Costallion) saves her because ‘that’s my job’, hurling the monster back down the well it was lurking in, deep in the planet (it might be significant that, like the air hostess on ‘Midnight’, if she has a name I can’t remember it: our heroes are the unsung nameless people we never get to thank. It might also be relevant that, once again in a Russell-era story, the ‘Devil’ lives down a ‘pit’ and Humans reach it when they’ve ‘mined’ it for its resources too far: see ‘The Impossible Planet/Satan’s Pit’). I love the message of ‘The Well’: we don’t need to wait for The Doctor, for an outsider, even for Russell’s wise words to save us because we have the power to protect each other. If that isn’t the true Tardis-blue message at the heart of Doctor Who then I’ll eat my scarf.

The central idea then? Fantastic. I’ll even buy the fact that Russell is mining children’s games again, with this episode an extended version of ‘What’s The Time Mr Wolf?’ (given that Aliss is the cook apparently it’s ‘dinner time!’ The script keeps mentioning the monster being at ‘midnight’ like a hand on a clock, while the stage directions set out at which angle of the clock face the soldiers spread out) even if it’s nowhere near as creepy as the ‘repeating everything you say’ game of ‘Midnight’. However in every other way ‘The Well’ is a poor sequel that misses out on all the things that made ‘Midnight’ so special. That story was claustrophobic, full of easily identifiable characters who only too believable went off like a powder keg when lit the right way. This story is a bunch of cool-headed soldiers in an open-planet (Ncuti’s first ever quarry! In Bridgehead, for a change. That has to be a record, right? Hartnell aside, back in the days when telly didn’t really do location filming, it’s never taken any Doctor as long as their twenty-first episode to have some quarry filming. And yet Ncuti still got a quarry before meeting a Dalek. If he does get a Dalek story – as I hope he does – then that will be a record too. The 8^th Doctor, obviously, is an exception to both rules given that he only got one ‘proper’ story, though even then if you count the minisode ‘Night Of The Doctor’ as a second he ticked both boxes. Sort of. I mean, Daleks were the cause of the crash that caused his regeneration after all).  Though you can see they’re spooked, it’s not in the same way. They’re also far too similar to each other. ‘Midnight’ was made to be like a play, in a contained environment, with everyone talking at once with a largely static camera shot for the most part. ‘The Well’ isn’t. We keep jumping from one character to another. The creature doesn’t use people’s words against them this time so there’s less of Russell’s delicious dialogue to go on. ‘Midnight’ was full of sudden jump-scares, ambiguous noises that could be the monster trying to get in or just the sound a space-shuttle makes in outer space, while the whole point was that the beings were stranded with nowhere to run. ‘The Well’ has no real scares, just lots of people staring around them, being petrified. The ‘Midnight’ monster was terrifying the first time round despite never being seen, one that takes over your own wordsd and personality and turns people against you. This incarnation doesn’t steal your immortal soul and personality and thoughts from you, it just hides behind people’s backs and chucks things. It’s an invisible toddler basically, hardly the greatest threat The Doctor’s ever seen and we miss the ‘worst’ this monster did by it happening before we get there.   
There are a few little niggling plot details too, such as the rather odd little bit at the beginning about the Tardis being too far to run to, which suggests it was patched on at the last minute when someone asked Russell why, once The Doctor has learned the planet’s name, there’s no reason The Doctor doesn’t simply get everyone the hell away and off to safety (surely there’s something in the Tardis that can block out a monster, however invisible? ‘Midnight’ was a budget saver, one that did a lot on a little and that was part of its charm: there’s a reason why it’s this story that’s one of a small handful of stories that have been re-created on stage (albeit without The Doctor, for copyright reasons: it still works surprisingly well). ‘The Well’ just feels cheap when it doesn’t need to be, with just the one (admittedly magical) shot of a space sky showing how far we’ve come from the 1980s days of digitally enhanced pink skies. Even so, so much for worrying that the Disney budget would ruin the series: it’s being used a bit too sparingly lately (or maybe everything is being saved for a season finale again? I just hope it’s not a big dog this time): we don’t even see the diamonds or the same sense of scale of the planet we had last time when we were on a much tighter budget. Having a companion along for the ride really changes the feel too: on ‘Midnight’ the Doctor was alone like never before, but this time Belinda’s along for the ride and to accommodate the pair Russell has to split them up, having The Doctor off fiddling with stuff with Belinda talks to Aliss, then when The Doctor comes back she barely says another word. There’s just not enough room here for ‘unlucky thirteen’ characters either, plus Aliss and the monster. After years of wishing Dr Who had proper troops, with full proper army units to look more in keeping with what a situation would really be like, now there’s too many to serve the story who get in the way tripping over each other’s feet. Typical!

Most controversially of all we actually hear and see this monster this time, albeit briefly and quietly. It’s only there for a few frames but you can see it, both in one shot behind Aliss and in another when The Doctor looks back. The monster looks like ‘Captain Zero’ from ‘The Eleventh Hour’ in its purest form (and might well have regurgitated some pixels), skeletal and reptilian. ). It turns out controversially that the midnight monster whispers in people’s ears to make them paranoid – something that’s a bit of a shame given that ‘Midnight’ works better as a ‘humans getting paranoid under pressure’ scenario rather than a ‘monsters made me do it, honest! scenario (I rather like the fact that, up until the last five minutes, there might not even be a monster – that they’ve just been in an unfortunate traffic accident that killed the two co-pilots – and contemplated murder over their own shadows). Things are complicated by the fact that the Midnight monster appears to act completely differently, no longer using people’s words or copying them and simply whispering something we can’t hear, while the standing in shadows where it can’t be seen is new (and a bit too like the Vashta Nerada from ‘Silence In the Library’). But hey ho, we’re 400,000 years of evolution down the line, this one had days to gather data as opposed to their first contact with ‘aliens’ (i.e. us) and maybe there’s more than one monster here with more than one characteristic anyway? (I mean, even invisible monsters can procreate, right? Maybe they aren’t invisible to each other?)

There are all sorts of nods back to other stories which made even the most inventive and original ideas in this story seemed repetitive: we’re back to a ‘Caves Of Androzani’ type world where people mine into the planet’s crust the way they did in ‘Inferno’ (waking up a monster that lies sleeping: I’m surprised the Doctor doesn’t point out more that it was people’s greed trying to get that last diamond that woke up the monster) with soldiers very like the ones in ‘Time Of The Angels/Flesh and Stone’, though the story didn’t quite live up to any of these (even that last, sometimes dodgy one). There were no sub-plots to give us detail and character and though the episode ran surprisingly long (forty-eight minutes to Lux’s forty three) we could easily have lost twenty without changing the story at all. They could have done a lot more with that main plot too: I wish Aliss had been just a little more proactive, just to prove that disabled people aren’t wimps who always need protecting: I totally understand the being traumatised after losing your friends part, but how much better for the message it might have been if Aliss fought as hard as anyone once she had an army round offering protection, rather than being sent home. It’s a bit of an odd idea to show something we’ve all imagined the past sixteen years and which can’t possibly match up to the image we have in our head and breaks the magical illusion for no real purpose. It’s like writing a sequel where Romeo and Juliet both wake up or ‘Waiting For Godot’ where Godot finally turns up.

The biggest problem though? ‘Midnight’ crackles with tension, each sentence pushing the story further out of control from where The Doctor could stop it until he’s a mere ‘passenger’, in all senses of the word. ‘The Well’ is just a wee bit dull. I’m not one of those fans who think ‘Midnight’ was so perfect he should never have tried re-writing it: this story does lots that’s new and worthy. But I wish that he’s made it a short story, a coda for a Dr Who annual or for a Target novelisation of the story: after coming up with the idea for the story there just wasn’t anywhere else to take it. We have the same lengthy scene in the middle that must have taken days to film, but compared to ‘Midnight’, where the energy was constant and ebbed and flowed, this story is just filled with empty space and people staring. There’s  no sense of buildup to match Russell at his earlier best and more padding than an Abzorbaloff in a fat suit. What could have been time spent getting to know the members of this base, of seeing how different they are to each other and what they’re like before a crisis hits, we just see soldiers following orders to greater or worse effect. There are moments in the dialogue that make it come alive, such as the idea that the monster is hiding behind Aliss ‘as if a clock hand was pointing to midnight’ and Belinda’s suggestion that she and the Doctor have arrived like ‘mystery shoppers’ is a great gag that would have solved lots of earlier stories full of suspicion as to who these interlopers are stepping out of a blue box. A lot of the dialogue is perfunctory though, without the spark or wit or character of ‘Midnight’ and the story drags until the two-thirds part when something finally happens (it speaks volumes that the major thing to happen – the monster attack – isn’t seen, just its aftermath).

The coda also spoils it all to some extent. Mrs Flood turns up again and while her cameo was welcome in her other stories, giving them an extra ‘lift’, it feels somewhat forced in this one. Apparently she was the one back at base in charge of things, which raises some awkward questions that may or may not be answered (although it does, at least, solve my biggest gripe for most of the story: that the Doctor and Belinda knew exactly what costumes to get out of the Tardis wardrobe, that frustratingly we still haven’t seen in Ncuti’s era despite getting lots of mentions, without seeing what the soldiers were wearing first; presumably Mrs Flood gave a memo though it’s still odd neither of them comments on it. I’m starting to wonder if the wardrobe is like Mr Benn’s shop – see  ‘Joy To The World’ – with costumes ready for every adventure. I’m also grumpy that The Doctor’s not in his old orange spacesuit for old time’s sake but a darker number closer to the frogsuits of ‘Enlightenement’). She is apparently keen that The Doctor is carrying a ‘vindicator’. What that all means we’ll have to wait and see, along with how she seems to know where The Doctor will be and can travel far further in time than we’ve seen her manage before. It’s also unclear whether the seeds of doubt that are obviously still in the minds of the survivors are caused by Mrs Flood starting whispers, human paranoia or the monster returning, which is a shame (the idea worked better when it was kept simple and seemed to be human paranoia solved by human sacrifice – throwing a possible pantheon God/timelord/bi-regenerational villain/postmodernist storyteller at it seems the wrong way to go).     

There are, at least, some really strong performances this week. Rose does well given that Aliss has nothing much to do than blub, while Caoilfhionn Dunne is one of Dr Who’s better soldiers, tough and uncompromising and all the things soldiers have to be (but which UNIT mostly weren’t!) but with enough humanity and gentleness to make her the sort of leader you follow because you want to, not because you have to. Everything she does, even when it puts The Doctor and Belinda in danger, is because she thinks it’s the best way to save people. Varadu has her best episode as Belinda yet, someone who has by now fully acclimatised to travel but still doesn’t quite trust the process yet, with a good line in looking terrified without overdoing the scared part (especially when the monster takes her and they have to shoot her and bring her back to life – a surprising ending, to say the least and I’m not quite sure what that says to the overall metaphor. That to protect people you end up with a damaged heart perhaps?) This is Ncuti’s show, though, as he shines, demonstrating all the ways The Doctor has changed since he was David Tennant.  He is no longer bossy and authoritarian, strutting in to take charge like he owns the place and is far more careful with his words. He knows when to tease (‘It’s inappropriate to call me babes’ snaps a soldier. ‘Okay hun’ he smiles’). Russell was keen enough on the plot to send the whole cast to ESL (European Sign Language Courses) and Ncuti, especially, looks a natural doing it, a reminder that this Doctor isn’t of England in the 21^st century but a traveller that belongs everywhere (it’s a surprise that shouldn’t be a surprise but has become one through familiarity, like when the 3^rd Doctor suddenly started speaking Mandarin in ‘The Mind Of Evil’. Because why wouldn’t he know it, even if we’ve never seen him use it before?) This Doctor knows what it’s like to be scared and alone, so is way more sympathetic to Aliss than anyone else on the base. Just look at the quiet smile he gives Aliss after he’s got to her safety, a sad bittersweet smile for all that she’s been through and all the trauma she’ll have to recover through, but that she’s safe now, protected from any more attacks. Though ultimately it’s the soldier who gives up her life to save Belinda, The Doctor tries to offer his first and Ncuti’s wide-eyed look of pleading innocence and care makes you believe this Doctor really would lay down his life for strangers, never mind friends. I know not everyone has taken to Ncuti’s Doctor, that they find him too emotional and flamboyant, but I’m really enjoying his portrayal, a regeneration that really wants to have fun and strut through life looking cool, but has seen too much of the sadder part of life to turn his back on people who are hurting. The Doctor has spent too long being closed off, full of anger over the timewars and afraid to let people in; I love having someone who’s open-hearted. It shows how far he’s come as a character: if he’d stayed the same hard-nosed demi-God Tennant was at the end of Russell’s run then the same story of ‘Midnight’ would just have happened again and the monsters would have won. It’s not just the Doctor either of course, Russell has come this far too: just look at all the series he’s written in between his Dr Who stints which all give a voice to the disenfranchised.  

So what we have is an odd little story, one with a brilliant concept (‘Midnight’ whispered about the power of our words to hurt but ‘The Well screams it) and some excellent acting across the board, but also one where not a lot happens and one that undoes a lot of the good work that made the original so memorable. I don’t think many people will be talking about ‘The Well’ the same way they do ‘Midnight’ in years to come because there’s no one moment that’s memorable and lodges in your brain, although it has gone down better than I was expecting (ditto ‘Lux’ last week). It’s not a story I’m going to particularly look forward to re-watching given how little happened and once the ‘Midnight’ reveal is out of the bag the story goes exactly where you expect it to, right down to the running down corridors (the whole point of ‘Midnight’, after all, was that there were no corridors to run down to get away from the monster). And yet I love what the showrunner protector in chief was trying to do, mining the well of his human compassion and writing a story that made a whole group of fandom, not often catered for, feel seen. It’s a story that screams out about the injustices of the world and does so by having the monster whisper – such things are mobs born from and from the beginning of his time in Who Russell hates humanity when they get together in mobs (though he quite likes individuals, such as the trooper who gives her life). ‘The Well’ is a worthy sequel then, dripping with compassion in all the right places, it just needed to be turned into a better story. Just don’t expect it to be another ‘Midnight’, because it very much isn’t and even a writer as gifted as Russell T Davies can’t make the clock strike ‘Midnight’ twice. Oh well. Nor could anyone else. 

POSITIVES + I might have been quite hard on Murray Gold’s incidental scores in the past, which tend to like telling us how we should feel rather than give us the space to work it out for ourselves. I wasn’t expecting much from him on a score for a story that’s all about deafness. Credit where it’s due though, his work is gorgeous across this episode and it’s easily one of his best. While Russell’s dialogue can’t quite build the tension layer by layer this time around Murray’s score very much does, filling in the silences and building the layers. It reminded me of the ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?’ theme music in the way that it builds the tension subtly, layer by layer, until the tension is ready to burst by the time all hell breaks loose. However it’s subtle: you’re not beaten over the head with tears this week. It’s quite beautiful too, sparkling the way the score for a diamond planet should.

 NEGATIVES – Apparently the Earth doesn’t exist anymore, not even in records. Not again! The last series of Russell’s original run (the one with ‘Midnight’ in it funnily enough) was all about the bees going missing and the Earth being moved out of its co-ordinates. Other stories have had The Earth apparently absent. Are we really going to go through this plotline again? Plus wasn’t it just there an episode ago that we were there, in 1952 (‘Lux’ had the Tardis jumping off the Earth’s present day, not the planet itself). Did something change in the few seconds between episodes? (There can’t be any ‘missing time’ here as The Doctor and Belinda are still in the same clothes). However yet again it’s not a thrust of the story, just an extra detail we have to carry in our heads – and honestly Russell’s not as good at writing those sorts of things compared to Moffat. I agree though, ‘Earth’ is a stupid name for a planet (in case you’re wondering it’s a derivation of two Greek words, for ‘terrain’ and ‘ground’. Which is a bit rude given that most of our planet surfaces are made up of water to be honest).

BEST QUOTE: Aliss: ‘If you kill me then it goes behind you’

Previous ‘Lux’ next ‘Lucky Day’

Lux: Ranking n/a (but #110ish)

 

"Lux” (15^th Dr, 2025)

(Series 15/2A episode 2, Dr 15 with Belinda, 19/4/2025, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, executive producers: Julie Gardner, Jane Tranter, Joel Collins, Phil Collinson and Vicki Delow, director:  Amanda Brotchie)

Ranking: #N/A *But around #110 reviewed 20/4/2025

‘No way, my favourite show has just fallen through the television and started talking to me! Hello Doctor, come and have a cup of tea and a sit down and a chat about all your back stories and continuity problems. So, that Russell T Davies eh? What’s he like to work with? What, you call him ‘The Master’? No seriously? Wow – you’ve just changed the channel to ‘Star Trek’. Rude! Anyway my favourite episode? Not ‘Blink’ surprisingly, it’s the one where you wander round a museum for an hour. You don’t remember it? No, nobody else does either. Anyway stay and have some Dalek crumpets!'

Well, this is new. Admittedly I can name a few other Who stories that also felt like we were watching the writer have a breakdown/coma hallucination/fever dream, but none have ever been quite as…animated as ‘Lux’, which feels at times as if Russell T Davies had a bang on the head and wrote down everything he saw, however weird (quite possibly while suffering the psychedelic experience that is ‘The Celestial Toymaker’ animation reconstruction with it’s hero, The God of Migraines). It’s the sort of episode that seems guaranteed to divide fans, to annoy the heck out of people who only like their science-fiction dark and brooding, when this is a (literal) cartoon. One which even has the audacity to point this out during a postmodernist meta middle section that breaks the fourth wall to camera quite literally (what am I supposed to do with all the glass from my TV screen over the floor, Doctor?) and has The Doctor sit down with ‘us’ for a cup of tea and a discussion of everyone’s favourite episodes. It’s a very different story to say the least and I can see why this story, a sort of cross between ‘The Mind Robber’ and ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ (the show’s two most meta stories squared) might end up in people’s  bottom five. After all, few series can get away with a (literal) cartoon villain God, a plot that has The Doctor and Belinda trapped by actual celluloid film and where they discover they’re ‘fictional’,  but I love this show when it breaks the rules and few modern stories have broken those rules quite as comprehensively as this one.

It’s worth looking at those two stories to understand that this story hasn’t come out of the blue. ‘All good empathetic writers have wondered before now about the responsibilities they have to their characters and the moment they become so real they start talking to themselves. ‘The Mind Robber’ was Peter Ling, freed of the need to write for the same old characters on ‘Crossroads’ every week for years, handed the toys to the biggest experimental toybox on telly and having great fun, asking what it meant to be a fictional character who didn’t know they were fiction, whose lives are interrupted by another fictional character who thinks that he’s real (the 2^nd Doctor). It’s a fight to stay real, to stay relevant, when everyone else wants to trap him and his companions and keep them stuck in one place forever. It’s a very 1960s flavoured acid dream, full of elements from storybooks past present and not yet written, in a world maintained through the sheer force of one kidnapped Human’s (or is he timelord?) imagination. Similarly ‘The Greatest Show’ is Stephen Wyatt’s barbed 1980s take on that same hippie dream, with the idea that all the 1960s hippie ideals that everyone used to live by have been warped and destroyed, so that a circus in the sky that used to be so fun has become tired and decayed, filled with acts who are expected to perform and judged harshly when they fail. The show fell apart because it got stuck in one place and even their biggest nerdiest fan is watching for loyalty more than anything else, before getting zapped by the television Gods along with the pompous convention bores stuck in place, the critic werewolves who were nice in the day and savage by night and the clowns who are too sad by the state of the world to be funny. If you like ‘Lux’ then you seriously need to check out both of them – you’ll find much to love there. The meta sofa of fans is also so close to the ‘Greek chorus’ commenting on the action in ‘Vengeance of Varos’ as to be worth noting, even if the main stories themselves are rather different (while it’s notable that two out of three of these stories were picked for the ‘Tales From The Tardis’ re-runs on the Whoniverse i-player masterminded by Russell). You know what all four have in common though? They all went to air when Dr Who was at its biggest crisis and closest to cancellation, in 1968, 1984 and 1988 respectively. When the audience ratings were plummeting and critics had got bored enough with the formulas to move on to something else. The first time round the show was only saved by drastic changes (moving into colour, with a new Doctor, new companions and a new Earth=-bound format); the second time the show died altogether.       

The difference was neither man knew scifi or Dr Who very well and were writing their own skewed versions of what they saw in old episodes. Russell T Davies, however is Dr Who’s biggest fan. He’s revived it from the dead twice already and has a shed full of toys living together (because it was a condition of being showrunner that he got a copy of everything). He doesn’t want Dr Who to die, especially on his watch – not after he put his career on the line to revive it twenty years ago. He’s already had a bash at his own postmodern story with ‘Love and Monsters’, which shares this episode’s similar affection for Dr Who and knowing winks to camera and features a similar dig at a nice happy community all getting along until someone (The Abzorbaloff) comes in to disrupt their fun and eat them alive, a story closer to this than you might realise. The difference now is that Dr Who isn’t something kept alive in the hearts of the faithful (the characters in that story are basically at a ‘wilderness years’ fan convention) but a multi-billion franchise everyone knows (even if a lot of people have for now stopped watching). The people watching are us, lots of us, who all have affection for this show as big as our opinions. So even though ‘Lux’ himself (Latin for ‘light’, although I did wonder if it was a return of Charlotte Abigail Lux, the little girl from ‘Silence In the Library’ using her CTV), Mr Ring-A-Ding, is far crueller than anyone in the Land of Fiction and even though the sarcasm is at times far nastier than the chief clowns, this is nevertheless a kinder story with so much more love for it. Just check out that much-discussed middle when the Doctor talks to his own fans, who tell him how much they love him and how watching this sweet silly funny courageous little show has brought such light into their world and – most importantly – brought them together. Dr Who might technically be as one-dimensional as the cartoon The Doctor and Belinda are on the run from, but for a moment, given that it’s a series of pixels, but look at what it means to people. This is almost a plea from Russell to Disney not to cancel the show because of what it means to people and the light it shines in a world that seems to have turned very dark recently. 

It could all have been nauseatingly self-congratulatory but Russell has enough humour to laugh at himself too. He’s been trapped by the one thing a timelord should never be trapped by – time – the fact that his first era of the show casts such a long shadow that people have stopped caring about his second and he can never match it, no matter how traditional or groundbreaking or meta he goes. There he was, the chief wallah-wallah who brought Dr Who back when who gets all the credit for it and Dr Who’s first ever bafta? That Steven Moffat! That’s Russell laughing at himself and his close friend when the three fans say their favourite story is ‘Blink’.  ‘Not the one with the goblins?’ asks Dr 15 (referring to ‘The Church On Ruby Road’). ‘But I met the Beatles!’ (‘The Devil’s Chord’). The highlight of the episode is Belinda’s sarcastic eye-roll: ‘What happens in that one then?’ ‘Well, you basically don’t have to blink’. ‘That sounds totally epic!’ (The Doctor, too, would surely be cross if he knew so many people’s favourite episode was one he barely appeared in!) Russell knows that his biggest obstacle is the show’s recent past, because how can he revive it again and still match the old days. Nobody knows why ‘Blink’ suddenly worked: it just did. It’s one of those once in a generational things and here Russell T is, throwing things at the series and trying to get them to stick in the same way. But times have changed and he can’t write the same stories again or we’re back in ‘The Mind Robber’, with The Doctor trapped as one thing forevermore. The problem is, he’s fighting us too: we want the show to be what we remember, not what it has to evolve to be today. If it told the same stories forever, if it didn’t go through this current difficult growing process, it might not last to the next era. ‘Lux’ goes further than even ‘Greatest Show’s whizzkid nerd by showing that the biggest enemy of Dr Who’s future right now isn’t some fictional enemy but the show’s fans themselves.

Not the trio on the sofa though: they’re a rather sweet and affectionate portrayal from a man who was once close enough to them for real to care for the people watching this show. No it’s Mr Ring-A-Ding himself, the cartoon villain with ideas above his station. For the first half of the story he’s almost normal – if a story that has a cartoon come to life in a cinema can be considered ‘normal’. He is, though, like many a Dr Who baddy: he wants the life that Humans have, to become them, to take over their immortal souls and grow into a ‘real’ person (he’s Pinocchio, with the same gameplan as The Wire in ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’, a slightly clumsier 10^th Doctor story that is to TV what this story is to cinema). The Doctor tracks him down to an old deserted building where he’s being kept alive by the projectionist who keeps ‘feeding’ him with light and people, under threat of his beloved wife being burnt on the celluloid stock (in a scene that’s stolen wholesale from the creepy-as-hell Sapphire and Steel story ‘The Man Without A Face’ from 1981, where a character is ‘burned alive’  by being trapped in a photograph that’s then set alight, which is exactly what they should have been doing in Tom Baker’s final year). It’s well-written motivation: the being if light and pixels wants to be ‘real’, the way his audience are, while the poor man who caused it all was married to his wife of twenty years and can’t let her go. He needs her memory to be preserved on film, because film (and TV) are precious): they bring back so many happy memories we don’t want to see them lost. But, argues the story, you have to let go of the past to step forward into the present or you end up trapped there forever, stuck in one place (like ‘The Mind Robber’ and ‘Greatest Show’ both). In a metaphor that would be perfect if only telly was filmed the same way as cinema celluloid can never stop turning or it would literally burn (old cinemas used to have lots of fire extinguishers handy). However I think Lux is a metaphor beyond all this too: he’s the people you see leaving comments on Dr Who boards and social media that the show is awful and past the point of watching (even though they seem to still watch it every week and leave comments). Not that people can’t have opinions: no two Dr Who fans ever agree on anything (the one way the ‘meta’ section falls down rather). No, it’s the people who take it to extremes, who make up accounts that aren’t real to amplify their feelings, who try to take ‘control’ of the direction of the show and make the fans in the middle believe that everyone thinks like that. The people who say Doctor has to be a certain set way and has to be serious (it’s not for nothing Mr Ring-A-Ding’s catchphrase when he gets angry is ‘don’t make me laugh!’)  

The irony of it all, to Russell T at least, is that they’re clearly fictional creations often only created that week without a profile picture, who don’t really exist, controlled by people who live in the darkness of their parents’ basements and who haven’t been outside in ten years. They hof the limelight but they’re a ’projection’, for what after all is Lux as a baddy but a literal projection on a screen? They spend the episode talking about their God-like powers (another part of the story and this era I’m not keen on: Dr Who is too science based to have this many immortal beings around. I always had a hard time when it was The Celestial Toymaker but now we have Maestro and Sutekh and goodness knows who else) but really all they want to do is belong, to feel important, so Russell writes in the perfect ending (however much the meta fans don’t seem to like it) whereby Lux grows into the light and id dispersed, inside every atom (because he doesn’t want to shut these fans up completely, just get a better sense of proportion of how fans feel so the ones shouting loudest don’t get their way all the time). He gives them what he thinks they secretly want themselves and what he and the fans on the sofa have always got from this show: a sense of community, of kindness, of belonging to something special, of fifty minutes of love. It works both ways though: by now Russell knows The Doctor better than most real people and wants to give him that moment of love back from the audience, a moment when he knows he’s being ‘watched’ with love and not a little awe (and if that’s too ‘modern’ for you it is basically the plot of ‘The Savages’ fifty-eight years ago!)  It’s wish-fulfilment both ways from a writer to whom The Doctor is far more ‘real’ than most of the people commenting on his adventures, who gets to tell his creation that he’s loved and his critics that they’re not hated, just hat they don’t understand this show.

Russell also has fun breaking a lot of conventions by showing that he knows and we knows that this is a work of diction, even if his fictional characters don’t. Quite apart from the debate about which is more real, the fictional Doctor and companion or the fictional characters watching him, we get all sorts of ;writing’ references in the script: ‘the third act’ when the plot is resolved after moments of tension (which was typically after the third episode cliffhanger in the ‘classic’ series four-parters), The Doctor and Belinda also manage to escape the confines of the cartoon they’re trapped in by becoming emotional and having feelings and becoming more 3D. There are more Dr Whoy ones too, such as the clumsy fashion sense (a Beep the Meep t-shirt with a UNIT badge and a Telos Cyberman print with a scarf? Good grief no!), the hash-tag ‘ripdrwho’ that has become a joke now so many fans use it so often and a reference to it being ‘like Galaxy Quest’ (a very meta 1999 scifi-comedy where a group of rather literal-minded aliens kidnap the lead actor in a ‘Star Trek’ type show in the belief that he really does have secret powers that can save them all) Oh and there’s a dig at the ‘leaks’ that spoil shows (including this one, funnily enough: the general consensus amongst fans, even those who hated this story, is more relief that it wasn’t as bad as it sounded from the bits that had leaked than anything else. But then Russell gave quite a lot away on the series trailer and ‘coming next’ throw-forward, which are nothing more than ‘licensed leaks’ anyway ).

‘Lux’ is also, in a sense, both a knowing nod to and an inevitable part of the Disney linkup that they would never have contemplated, never mind been able to afford, if purely funded by the BBC (for nothing takes more time nor costs more money than animatyion. Except animation on already-printed film). Though the company did more than its fair share of live films too it’s for their cartoons they will always be remembered. Given that Dr Who has been slowly moving into cartoon form over the past decade (with some variable quality animations of reconstructed missing episodes) so a crossover where The Doctor and Belinda become cartoons themselves briefly makes far more sense now than it would to a fan of ten-sixty years ago. The animation is well handled too, as you’d expect from Disney, with Mr Ring-A-Ding as believable as a rogue cartoon character can be and the special effect when he reaches out of the cinema screen into the audience is genuinely terrifying. He’s also played with aplomb by Alan Cumming, I’m not sure what it says about this character or the last that he’s perfect for the part, breathing so much more life into two-dimensional cartoon than he did the very real King James in ‘The Witchfinders’ (a cartoon villain if ever there was one). Right on the borders of playful and sinister, he’s incredibly creepy despite not on the surface doing or saying anything that scary. Like all the best Dr Who villains, though, it’s the fear of the unpredictability and what he might do next that makes him come alive.  I do have a few issue with him though. Where is his back story? Why did he suddenly arrive that day at that cinema? Why is he so interested in Earth? I mean, it might just be the side of the planet I live on but there’s not much light here – surely he’d be better off on Skaro and running around in a Dalek casing? Though I love the gag about a two-dimensional character not being deep enough to have a back story it would have really helped the story and a scene of that would have saved the need for so much padding in the story’s second half (such as the ‘fake’ plot resolution with the policeman in a ‘dream world’, that seemed more like Russell having an idea then changing his mind and not wanting to throw his first draft away more than anything else). 

He’s also clearly not a 1950s cartoon but a 1930s one. I know why they went with a 1950s setting (because it’s as ‘modern’ as they could get with the shock of segregation – more on that later) but, seriously, you would not get a family audience like that happily watching such a crude animation in the 1950s. Mr Ring-A-Ding is, however, perfect for the late 1920s or early 1930s when cartoons were seen as being more for adults than children and were cheekier, more subversive and sexier before regulations in the 1940s tightened up what children could watch (seriously check out as Betty Boop cartoon sometime: she gets away with things they couldn’t do now). Just check out Mr Ring’s catchphrase of ‘Don’t make me laugh!’ too (totally a 1920s style line) and his laugh that’s as close as they can get away to Woody Woodpecker as lawyers will allow. He doesn’t belong in this quickly changing more sophisticated world, seen in between Rock Hudson epics and newsreels about the atomic bomb (that’s a real one by the way, albeit cut up for broadcast, suggesting a dating of January 5^th). Now, amongst my other obsessions I happen to be a big connoisseur of old cartoons (I watched 991 of the 1000 Looney Tunes cartoons last year, all I could find) so it maybe stands out more to me than most, but Mr Ring-A-Ding belongs alongside the Boskos of the world (perhaps the greatest cartoon character of them all, forgotten as he is now) and Oswald The Lucky Rabbit (where Disney started, until he lost the franchise and cut off his bunny’s ears to turn him into the far safer Mickey Mouse). There is a ‘Tiny Toons Adventures’ where Steven Spielberg has an evil cartoon from the Looney Tunes vault that takes a similar path to this story too (Buddy, who came between Bosko and Porky Pig but didn’t last very long as audiences found him too creepy, even though he was meant to be cute). Changing the setting would have solved a few other issues too: there’s no way a Rock Hudson film would have such a juvenile cartoon attached to it (though I also know why he gets a namecheck from Russell, as one of the first actors to come out as gay and admit to an AIDS diagnosis, at a time when he knew it would cost him work) and back in the early days of the talkies a lot of people considered the cinema ‘witchcraft’ as it was. Also, can you imagine The Doctor let loose in a Marx Brothers film? That could have been perfect!  

Still, we’re lumbered with the 1950s setting because Russell wants to make a point not just about segregation but how relatively close in time it was to now, until the 1960s revolution Who was a tiny part of changed things for the better (the credits even include a ‘South Asian history advisor’, to make sure the reaction to Belinda is accurate, not something you see every week). After all, it’s the age when the grandparents of many of the children watching now were born: recent history that you can point at. This is a story all about change and not getting stuck in one place and that’s so very true of our morals too. That’s why Russell has been throwing stories making the show a safe place for the LGBTQ community and cast a dark-skinned actor in the lead role, which causes so many Lux type critics to come out the woodwork: because he knows how important television is to people at home feeling seen and how we are all made up of the same atoms of light. If the world had been left the way it was then we’d still be living in segregated world, where we wouldn’t have met many of our friends because we’d be living either side of a fictitious curtain. The world is better when we mix and know each other: it’s notable how much prejudice people have when just listen to ‘Lux’ style critics and use their nonsense to base their judgements on, instead of actually knowing people as people. It’s hard to be racist to someone you actually know is a decent person or still hate all gay, lesbian or trans people when the ones you know act just the way you do in every way but sexually. I said in my review for ‘The Giggle’ that I hoped Russell would be brave enough to use the Doctor’s new skin colour in an episode to make a point and while ‘Dot and Bubble’ got there first this  features racism that can’t just be dismissed by being set on another planet – this was the Earth and in our recent past. Though it ends up being a red herring you really feel it when the former nice lady looking for her son turns up with the policeman locking The Doctor and Belinda up for trying to help (Russell might have nixed this part as it’s too close to the best of the modern Twilight Zone episodes from the 2019 revival, ‘Replay’, about an African-American family taking their boy to college and proudly filming his journey who gets stopped by a white policeman and dies whatever he does: whether he’s nice and compliant, fights back, charms the pants off him, gets to know his family, all until the mum stops using the ‘rewind’ button to bring her boy back and presses ‘record’ so the world can see the policeman’s actions and collectively shame him instead). It’s a worthy statement, the ‘coffee bar’ recalling the similar one of Ace’s outrage when visiting 1963 Britain in ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’ (a scene beloved by many fans)  although they still don’t make enough of it and though it’s a great line the Doctor’s comments that ‘I’ve toppled worlds but sometimes I leave people to topple theirs’ makes no sense in context: he’s brought down empires for far less than inherent racism on Earth in the past. Why should we be so special? (I mean, in reality it’s because they can’t start wiping our real history but in the context of the show it’s   a no-brainer). 

One point that rather falls apart, too, is Belinda. Varadu Sethu gives her best performance of her three so far: she’s charming, resilient, independent and loyal. But she was none of those things in either ‘Boom!’ or last week in ‘The Robot Revolution’. We even start with a scene in the Tardis with some 5^th Doctor-Tegan style bickering about how he is failing on her promise to get him home again, then suddenly they’re best friends and she trusts him with her life? How? Because rather than being at home with her feet up she’s now being chased by a cartoon? I would be trusting The Doctor a little less right now. It’s almost as if she’s a two-dimensional character made to change her emotions on a whim – which would matter less if this wasn’t a story taking so much effort to show how three-dimensional she and the Doctor are. I do like her growing line in sarcastic quips through: her question if as a timelord The Doctor comes from ‘timelordia’, her comment as a nurse that ‘Doctors always make the worst patients’ though and the observation that the Doctor is ‘just like Scooby Doo’ though and the oh so true comment, even from this ‘coolest’ of Doctors that technically he’s ‘Wilma’, the brainy nerd with the glasses who sees through everything (interesting he calls her Fred, the muscly dumb one who thinks he’s in charge but blatantly isn’t).
Not to be all ‘Lux’ about it sitting in my basement (my curtains are open, honest!) but there are a few other issues this week. That opening scene also felt wrong for the episode: Belinda is the most guarded companion we’ve had in years (since Ace?) and yet suddenly she’s blubbing about her mum and dad and offering all sorts of details The Doctor never asked for. Russell’s written a better more believable set of characters than the supporting team this week too, who all feel sketched in and, well, one-dimensional (apart from the cartoon, ironically enough). We’re clearly not in sunny Miami but South Wales again,  no matter how many unconvincing arguments are around (the outside scenes when the Tardis have landed were filmed in some of the worst conditions of any story in fact, during the biggest UK storm of the decade so far). That’s one heck of a long ninety minute song and dance Mr Ring-A-Ding has been fooled into singing by the projectionist so The Doctor can learn his back story. Had this story been part of Russell’s first run I can’t help but feel that we’d get a tear in our eye and a lump in our throat at that unexpected reunion when everyone is let out of the cinema (I mean, I even felt it in ‘Fear Her’ for goodness sake and nothing else in that episode was three-dimensional). One extra thought by the way: is the gawky lad in glasses meant to be Tommy Lee Jones? They’d have been about the right age though we never get a surname in the story. Which, given the writing clue that Russell offers up in the middle meta section is significant (the ‘fans’ aren’t real ‘because they don’t have surnames’, although a pleasing mid-credit tag reveals that they do live and indeed are given surnames on the end credits: they’re Lizzie Abel, Robyn Gossage and Hassan Chowdry if you were wondering). I’m surprised, too, that there hasn’t been more fuss about a story featuring a self-proclaimed God made up of light who enslaved us all and then went up to meet its maker in the sky at the end going out on Easter weekend, of all times (no Dalek Easter egg from the church for you this year Russell!)

So, could ‘Lux’ have been better?  Undoubtedly. The opening needs tightening, the meta shock part drops the ball a little by giving away the ending (‘in the third act’) and won’t be such a surprise whenever we watch things back, while I think I’d still take ‘Love and Monsters’ which has more ‘heart’ than this somehow and while fans don’t like it much (mostly because of Peter Kay wandering around in a green fat suit) it feels much more confident and sure of what Dr Who is than this story does. Despite being a bright and colourful cartoon ‘Lux’ feels at times more like a dark night of the soul from Russell watching the reviews from the specials come in and worried that he’s losing the audience, even though he knows that the changes he’s putting the show through are the best way to safeguard it’s future and that it’s far more Dr Whoy to lose people by being brave than it is to treat it as just another series, repeat the same thing every week and watch it die. I for one am super pleased and proud that he’s taken such risks with this episode (after several that come close to breaking the fourth wall this one smashes it) and while it’s not quite as mind-bogglingly subversive as its postmodern precedents in Who nevertheless it’s a very worthy, colourful episode with lots to say and standout turns from everyone involved. Taking risks and having those ‘water-cooler’ moments when everyone is talking about it again is exactly what Dr Who needs to be doing right now, especially if it is in trouble and about to get cancelled after the last episode airs on May 24^th. It wasn’t the series but the critics that got small I tell you! Nice of you to rub that in Mrs Flood…Although who knows, maybe all this talk of cancellation and the fact we haven’t heard anything definite yet (very unlike Russell not to come out with the truth and confirm or deny rumours; ‘The Doctor lies’ is a Moffat catchphrase not a Russell one while Chibnall never told us anything but Russell’s usually straightforward unless it gives away a story’s plot) means that the rumour is all a hoax and Mrs Flood cancels the ‘fictional’ show which magically exists in our timeline when she’s defeated. There’s definitely something weird going on there after all: how come she turned up in Miami in 1952, just when we were getting used to her only hanging around Ruby Road? Is she an omnipresent Michael Grade? Does that mean she has another Tardis? Is she Romana (her dress sense at the end of ‘The Legend Of Ruby Sunday’ looked very familiar). Or is she another God? (Another possible clue: in last year’s Dr Who proms she said ‘don’t make me laugh!’ at one point. Although for all I know Russell was working on both scripts on his laptop at the same time and got them confused). I’m so looking forward to finding out…

Assuming of course that I’m real and not a meta fictional creation who’s only function is to comment on other fictional programmes, a non-playable character who only exists within the confines of these articles and these words and…hey, let me out, I want to live!!! No on second thoughts I’ve seen the news, I’m better off as a fictional construct of your over-worked imagination, dear reader. Or maybe you are a fictional construct of mine? Or maybe we are all stories told by the Doctor?…

POSITIVES + The animation is seriously good, whether The Doctor, Belinda or Mr Ring a Ding himself. Had the Who animations been done with a quadzillionth of the care and accuracy of this rather than the ‘shaky’ look of ‘Rhubarb and Custard’ with the likenesses of a mouldy Eagle comic then I’d be one happy fan. In case you’re wondering Ncuti and Varada performed the ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’ way, filmed first with a two-foot acrylic cutout standing in for where the animation would go.

NEGATIVES – A rock and roll soundtrack? Chuck Berry singing ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ in 1952? Six years before he wrote it? Don’t make me laugh!

BEST QUOTE: Lux: ‘I’m a two dimensional character – you can’t expect back story!’

 Previous ‘The Robot Revolution’ next ‘The Well’ might just have a new favourite episode…’