Lux Review

Well it’s nice that Gatwa gets a perfect episode. He’d not really had one yet, save perhaps Dot and Bubble. But here we’ve got one that it’s legitimately hard to see getting unseated as my season favorite. More to the point, we’ve got one you can just unapologetically hand to your lapsed fan friend and go “look, it’s good again.” It’s probably even worth doing—boosting the Disney+ numbers can’t hurt lolsob. Just a stone cold classic, everything you want from Doctor Who episode. I’m still grinning. Best episode since Hell Bent.
In terms of actually reviewing it, let me take a moment from my notes document and unpack it for you. I’ve just transcribed the we just end/but that is death deadline, which I followed with, and I quote, “RUSSELL WHAT ARE YOU DOING.” I stress that this is entirely affectionate—a fannish love of the writer of It’s a Sin and Cucumber taking his stock imagery of death and doing a speed run remake of Love and Monsters with it. On the television, the tempo kicks up a bit for our promised third act change, and I’m all but liveblogging: “The Doctor crying, Murray Gold having a nervous breakdown, Penn cackling on the sofa.” It’s absolutely ecstatically good—the triumphant capstone to a fifteen minute showpiece of ostentatiously clever bullshit reaching back to a Scooby-Doo pastiche animated Ncuti Gatwa fretting that he has a two-dimensional brain. Technically, if I wanted to be a complete hardass, I could complain that I have, in fact, seen this before, but come the fuck on. I’m not going to complain about burning up another pile of Disney money on a Mind Robber remake. I’m going to cackle with my husband.
Literally everything about this episode is great. Mr. Ring-a-Ding is simply one of the greatest visuals in the history of the series, and I cannot wait to get to Doctor Who Confidential and watch Russell use a bunch of superlatives about how they did it. From his opening appearance, casually rendered in pitch perfect Ub Iwerks loops to him facing off with the Doctor in the lush art deco cinema to his ascension into the realms above Kether he simply always looks good. The script dances through its set pieces with a nimbleness not seen since at least The Giggle, if not World Enough and Time. Gatwa and Sethu absolutely kill it in every scene. It does not remotely make it look easy, but it oozes with casual confidence at every turn.
It is in fact four perfectly executed acts. A cold open establishing the villain in the bonkers poetry of moonlight reflecting off a silver spoon, a tight investigation of, as Gatwa delightfully summarizes it, “literally an old caretaker in a haunted cinema,” the metafictional ecstasy of the middle, and then an nicely paced denouement in which the guns on the mantlepiece go off in well-structured sequence. Each one could be unpacked at length, and I look forward to going back and doing so in the context of Gatwa Eruditorum, whenever that may be.…