"Lux” (15th
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 2nd
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 10th 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 5th). 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 5th 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 24th. 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!’
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