"Lucky Day” (15th
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 15th 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 4th
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.
Previous
‘The
Well’
next ‘The
Story and The Engine’
No comments:
Post a Comment