Lucky Day Review
Looking at the episodes this season and what we knew about them, this one was very much the one you least knew quite what was going to be. Big dumb robot premiere was dumb, Lux always had promise, and the Midnight sequel always sounded desperate. If you’re wondering, next week should be absolutely great, the one after that has promise, and then it’s all just Russell T Davies narrative collapse finale unknowns where the joke is that the series really does go on hiatus after. But this one, this one was enough question marks to make a sweater vest. Doctor lite, clearly going to set up the finale somehow, by Pete McTighe. That’s what what we had. And now, having watched it, it turns out I still don’t know what the fuck it’s gonna be.
For the most part, over its forty-five minutes, that works to its advantage. It’s a marvelously off-kilter thing, never settling on a single coherent tone or identity. It comes in on a Love and Monsters thing, does a quick bit of folk horror, and then just runs around breaking things for the latter half of the episode before just ending in a cliffhanger. It has the kind of manic energy of a Baker/Martin script—a kind of underlit Claws of Axos.
The glue that holds it together is Conrad, who is both written and played with a kind of magnificent heel energy. The initial relationship with Ruby is just sort of a pile of red flags on every side—he’s coming on too strong, whereas she’s got the fucky power dynamic of having all the secrets about the weird thing he’s clearly obsessed over. By the time he doesn’t take the antidote because he “wanted to be brave like the Doctor” we desperately want to yeet him into the sun, and once he goes full supervillain he’s just absolutely awful every time he’s on the screen. He’s abrasive to every status quo the episode alights on, which drives a lot of the episodes forward-toppling momentum. It pays real dividends for Kate’s “going too far” bit, because honestly you’re kind of on team “eat the bastard” until Kate goes properly unhinged with her taunting of him. And just when the episode seems to have resolved into something you get that properly odd coda of him mocking the special effects and getting his arm bitten off. By the time the Doctor reappears for the final confrontation in the TARDIS it’s not even clear whether this is supposed to be a “gone too far” beat the Doctor gets punished for. It’s heady, thrilling stuff.
I suspect, however, that I’ll never enjoy it quite as much again. Once its Mrs. Flood jailbreak resolves itself into the thematically similarly named Wish World and the nature of this mishmash does, in fact, have to resolve, this is going to get stuck as a collection of scenes and rising action with no self-contained payoff. There’s a faint absurdity to the inevitable question of deciding if it’s better or worse than Tooth and Claw or Planet of Evil in that vast shrugging middle of a Doctor Who ranking.
But this is not the time for such bitterness. As a week’s episode, it was exciting, and has largely done the job of getting me to excitement about the series, especially with a fairly concrete “something to look forward to” for each of the next four weeks. I’ve no faith I’ll be happy with how it resolves, especially on the season cliffhanger level. But this, at least, was quite fun. And hey, next week looks great.
- If Conrad is the glue that holds the episode together, its big weakness turns out to be Ruby. The flashback scene to her right after The Devil’s Chord is downright jarring from the show’s current status quo—Ruby feels downright childish compared to Belinda. But worse, Belinda just feels more coherent as a character. The return to the “companions enjoy their adventures but also desperately want to go home” structure of old with her makes her feel understandable, whereas Ruby’s “I need to get over fighting gods and just get back to dating” ambivalence is difficult to compare to any actual human emotion. (It’s notable that the show has never really tried to do this stage of a companion’s life—when we return to old companions they’ve usually fully graduated into being mini-Doctors.)
- I’m amused that this episode ends up splitting the difference between the two episodes whose premise it reiterates: Love and Monsters and The Magician’s Apprentice.
- There’s some incredibly weird choices through this. Hoar’s decision to shoot Ruby and Conrad’s date as a shot reverse shot scene with them staring directly into camera is particularly bizarre. Similarly odd is the non-diagetic monster attack as Ruby explains the Shreek to Conrad. On the other hand, I have to compliment the series of subtle design and framing decisions that led to Penn exclaiming “that’s so cute” shortly before the Shreek were revealed to be men in rubber suits.
- Speaking of which, we’ve done Mind Robber revivalism, Kabbalah references, and now “the man in a rubber suit is secretly a man in a rubber suit.” Come on Russell, leave a comment already.
- Kudos to Doctor Who Unleashed way back in Empire of Death for dropping a clip of this from Ruby in the pub, which ends up hanging over the first fifteen minutes of the episode making the whole thing feel even more off-kilter.
- I did smile at Kate being domestic at UNIT. Just a really lovely beat.
- I’m largely just completely past knowing what to make of UNIT. They’re cartoon characters, understandable purely through genre tropes, and yet full of vestigial character arcs. I’m genuinely curious what tone The War Between the Land and Sea is going to end up taking with them and how the concept can be successfully stretched.
- Delighted both by the return of Trinity Wells and of evil conspiracy Trinity Wells. Somehow never get tired of a Trinity Wells appearance. They should have a future version of her at Space Eurovision.
- Man, all their lines about having a way to fold the Doctor in so he’s in it more than you expect were just flat-out lies, weren’t they? Which is kind of a pity—eighteen Gatwa episodes and three of them are Doctor lite.
- So, Pete McTighe then. There’s something vaguely funny about using the one Chibnall holdover to write the story that doesn’t resolve—the one structure the Chibnall era ever showed any affinity for. You can make some comments about the “military police vs alt-right” dynamic and the ongoing oddities of his politics. And, frankly, you can probably observe that even after three stories, countless DVD trailers, and a couple of Tales from the TARDIS it’s still astonishingly hard to articulate a single coherent element of his style. But on the whole, who knew he had something this good in him?
Ranking
- Lux
- Joy to the World
- Lucky Day
- The Well
- Robot Revolution
May 3, 2025 @ 8:23 pm
“We live in a society” — Pete McTighe, probably.
May 3, 2025 @ 8:29 pm
I wish this era worked better for me. So many great ideas lovingly told, but cursed with clunky pacing or missing The Idea that ties it all together. I can appreciate that Doctor Who is taking swings at the big issues of the day, but this and Robot Revolution both feel too on-the-nose yet too out-of-touch to really land. Maybe this concept would work better for me before the second Trump term and the UK trans court ruling; hearing the word ‘fascism’ expressed at armed government agents insisting something ridiculous is a clear and present threat has too much of a negative tinge for me right now. I think this one could’ve benefited from a more developed exploration of the UNIT culture war and a longer, darker climax. I like this era, I want so badly to love it.
May 3, 2025 @ 8:40 pm
Mostly enjoyed this, although it is extremely weird. I love how Conrad is just a complete scumbag with no redeeming features whatsoever, no trauma, no sympathetic backstory, no reasonable motives, just someone who is entirely ego driven and narcissistic. The mid-point twist is excellent – a reverse Love and Monsters where someone was made into a worse person by a brief encounter with the Doctor as a child. I think that’s what makes the whole UNIT stuff land better for me, because they’re against someone who’s so blatantly unlikeable and motivated by spite, it makes the whole “secret paramilitary” go down a lot better. Enjoyed seeing the Sunday’s again! Feels like a more successful spin on 73 Yards, with the folk horror making way for political commentary – in fact every episode this season feels like a bizarre attempt to redo last year.
May 4, 2025 @ 1:39 am
I wouldn’t say NO trauma. His mother is clearly at the very least neglectful and arguably properly abusive, which might chime with his need for attention.
May 3, 2025 @ 8:42 pm
I think I’m left much more uncomfortable by this episode’s loud-yet-muddled politics (the principal McTighe tell, at this point) than you, which I didn’t anticipate. As with Kerblam!‘s episode-killing inability to decide if it’s about racism or automation, it’s an infuriating juxtaposition. In one corner we have an episode that feels shockingly on-the-pulse in its depiction of a cap-wearing heel trying to smear a benevolent government-backed organisation as a fraudulent scam — what must have started as a poke in the eye to anti-vaxxers has turned into a surprisingly timely polemic about DOGE.
But in the other, we also have a story where the gun-toting, nakedly nepotist paramilitary operation that grabs journalists off the streets and hauls them into unmarked vans is honestly trying to do its best; where the youth movement demanding accountability from them via bodycam footage is an evil plot. This extends into Ncuti Gatwa’s monologue at the end, which is stylistically striking, marvelously acted, and also kind of viscerally repulsive. “How dare you ask questions and demand accountability from me, the self-appointed Thin Line Between Humanity And Armageddon, when Honest Simple People are simply trying to get through their day?” There is a jarring undercurrent of fascism to that framing — I don’t use the word lightly — and it is multiplied a hundredfold by the climax of the confrontation being a triumphant assertion that Conrad is going to die in prison. Who is this man wearing Ncuti Gatwa’s skin who spouts copaganda and exults in the existence of the carceral system? Seriously, what the Hell?!
(It’s almost an afterthought in the script, and as such a much lesser issue, but one must also raise an eyebrow at Conrad’s origin story being “his mum was abusive”. Especially contrasted with the continuing worship of Saint Brigadier the Paternal, it’s a profoundly awkward beat at best.)
With all this said, I actually strongly disagree with you about the Ruby material being a weak link. It really did surprise me that Pete McTighe (he of all the saccharine reunion minisodes where everyone from Mel to Ace has transformed into a perfectly self-actualised girlboss) would team up with Russell T. Davies (who started the trend by turning School Reunion‘s melancholy grown-up-Wendy-Darling into the Most Amazing Woman In The World who headlined the Sarah Jane Adventures) to give us such a beautifully jarring deconstruction of the idea that travelling with the Doctor and returning to Earth would result in a perfect Campbellian resolution where the character is made wiser and better-adjusted to the everyday world by it all. It’s a gamble when the traumatising events include Christmas goblins and Maestro, but I think the gamble paid off; to me, Millie Gibson fully sells the visceral nature of Ruby’s trauma and alienation, forcing us to sit and realise that yeah, many of us would be left precisely this screwed-up if all these campy yet life-threatening adventures *really did happen to us. As someone else observed on the EP Discord, it is a beautifully twisted beat that Ruby’s band friends from Church on Ruby Road are casually established to have cut her off due to thinking she’s literally lost her mind.
May 3, 2025 @ 9:15 pm
Honestly, I think this episode finally explains what the fuck happened with Kerblam; as everyone’s saying, McTighe seems to be fascinated with entitled young white men breaking shit out of spite and to feel important (which he does well in fairness), but then so he has a story he ties it to another hot-button issue, and because said issue isn’t really the point he just walks into so many accidental implications, like the “the fascists are the good guys” as you point out, or the “Amazon are the good guys” of Kerblam.
I’m glad you mentioned the Doctor’s speech too, because after that episode the whole “there are people working so you never have to think or worry” felt so reminiscent of all the “the grownups are back in charge so we don’t have to think about politics anymore” from Sensible Pundits when Starmer won the election. If anyone from across the pond is curious how that’s going, look at, uh, any headline since.
May 3, 2025 @ 9:27 pm
I had a real “oh, that’s what McTighe was trying to do in Kerblam!” moment watching this yeah; it works better here, not sure if that’s Davies’ influence or what.
May 3, 2025 @ 9:44 pm
I didn’t get what you’re getting out of that speech (mostly because the Doctor only directly makes it about the deliberate spreading of misinformation rather than demanding accountability) but I can 100% understand how the episode gives of that undertone.
On the other hand, though, you’re kinda acting like it’s out-of-character for the Doctor to “triumphantly assert” Conrad will die in prison? Which I feel it really isn’t. The Doctor is pretty consistently a vindictive asshole, particularly when his companions are hurt, and it leads him to say or do fucked up things at times. This is simply a negative character trait the character has long possessed.
May 4, 2025 @ 6:57 am
It was a very Seventh Doctor sort of a speech, which fit the very Andrew Cartmel level of the polemic. It is a little more incongruous with this Doctor, but that’s actually fine by me – I like it when a Doctor reminds us that traces of their last selves still linger in them occasionally, and “if you provoke the Doctor enough he’ll go all Seventh on you” is a good use of that.
Remember that 15 is the same Doctor that, after venting his feelings, allowed the Finetimers to float down the river to their deaths because he realised he couldn’t reach them and even if he did work out a way to force them to accept his help (materialise the TARDIS around them so they’re stuck in a locked room and then deposit them somewhere safe) all he’d be doing is saving a Nazi colony.
May 4, 2025 @ 7:49 am
Someone levied the same defence on the Discord, but I’m not convinced. Yes, the Doctor has form on locking villains away in forever-prisons in a morally-questionable manner — but the scene doesn’t seem to code the speech that way, as The Doctor Going Too Far. (There is no beat to that effect, that I can see, which makes a stark contrast with the way the script addresses Kate‘s excessive actions with the Shreek confrontation. Pete McTighe knows writers who use subtext and they’re all cowards.)
IMO, it’s such a heavy-handed political allegory of a confrontation that I find it difficult to regard as anything else but the Authorial Voice talking vicariously to The Bad People; not as a character beat for the Doctor where he and the narrative are at odds. “Never fear,” McTighe is telling us with the omniscient authority of the Lord of Time, “the awful right-wing grifters will get their just desserts in good time, and be left as so much dust on the wrong side of history.” Which is genuinely comforting in some ways, if you can buy its hard-edged optimism, but bringing actual-real-world-prison into it just gives it unnecessarily grim and authoritarian overtones.
May 3, 2025 @ 9:51 pm
Agreed, I found this a profoundly pointless piece of television except for the clear and repeated message that we should continue to lavish funding on the secretive defence establishment and if you disagree you are a mean, cowardly conspiracy grifter who is endangering national security. The overload of negative qualities piled on Conrad – he’s a gaslighter, accuses Shirley of claiming benefits (presumably solely because she’s disabled), shoots Jordan without a second thought and is even a tax-dodger lmao – is very deliberately making it impossible to side with his point of view at all. Hideous.
May 3, 2025 @ 10:49 pm
Are you saying that Tommy Robinson is a victim, with whom we should sympathise?
May 4, 2025 @ 4:05 am
Oh jog on, your adolescent and illiterate attempts at “gotchas” aren’t welcome here
May 4, 2025 @ 3:09 am
Is this maybe a bit of a US/UK translation issue? Conrad is a very clear portrait of a Tommy Robinson type (and perhaps Laurence Fox too). I don’t think a DOGE reading really makes sense: it’s not about the establishment being infiltrated by wreckers and looters, it’s about a particular type of bullying citizen journalist.
Tommy Robinson (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) in the UK has made many critical comments about the police and the courts – not because he opposed the carceral state, but because he thinks they let Muslims and immigrants off lightly for sex crimes. He parallels Conrad with his livestreaming approach, his leveraging activism to bully and harass, and his troubles with the tax authorities.
To talk about Tommy Robinson negatively is not to say those institutions are unquestionable. To celebrate his imprisonment is not to wholeheartedly endorse prison. It’s to say that he is an absolutely heinous piece of shit and deserves every consequence he could possibly experience.
May 4, 2025 @ 7:55 am
“I don’t think a DOGE reading really makes sense: it’s not about the establishment being infiltrated by wreckers and looters, it’s about a particular type of bullying citizen journalist”
Well yes, but the current bastardry is only a case of living out the fantasies that the Right has been nurturing for years now. I didn’t mean that Conrad was precisely Musk, but he’s the kind of guy who’s spread the kind of ideas that Musk is taking to their logical conclusions — of whom Robinson is very much the British equivalent. Those all seem like aspects of the same phenomenon. (Incidentally, I’m neither British nor American, though it is a fact that numerically, a bit more American politics tends to filter through.)
Either way, noting Conrad as an embodiment of that phenomenon is actually one of my compliments! It’s not a problem either way! The problem is that the episode jumps from “Conrad is vile” to “therefore the targets of his criticism are blameless in every way and all protest against them is needless rabble-rousing that Disturbs The Peace”. I really don’t think it’s too much to ask that a story with this focus should find some way to acknowledge that just maybe protests and demands for accountability are good sometimes even if Think_Tank really isn’t it.
May 4, 2025 @ 4:06 am
I agree, Aristide. This episode made me incredibly uncomfortable, which you probably wouldn’t be surprised by.
The thing is that while Conrad is obviously an awful person, his motivations are not actually political and every suggestion they are is a surface signifier. His motivation is that he enjoys lying for power, and this is something any actually powerful entity can say about its enemies.
“Look at this nasty person who looks like real nasty people on the surface” becomes dangerous if their actions resemble something a worthwhile person would do. I don’t think it matters that he seems like Tommy Robinson or Joe Rogan on the surface, and I do live in the UK. What matters is the subtext of what good people do— the implication that militarised powers shouldn’t have their funding scrutinised and should keep all their tech secret, that it’s automatically horrifying to challenge the people who keep us safe. Note that these lines don’t come from Kate but from Ruby and Shirley; they’re portrayed fairly uncomplicatedly as the voices of heroic and normal people.
It matters because of what happens when the radical right gets control of the real militarised power of the state, as I expect they will here— this episode airing after Nigel Farage’s party massively overperformed in our local elections. The general idea – militarised state power should be beyond scrutiny, the people who question it are insane and beneath the Doctor’s contempt – is entirely amenable to the alt-right. You could broadcast something like this in an authoritarian state with very minimal changes, and if you did it would be us who the episode came for. I do not think it’s worth cheering on.
May 3, 2025 @ 8:48 pm
Unfortunate that an ep clearly desperate to engage with the current moment ends up saying that gun-toting government forces have their hearts in the right place and can do a little extrajudicial execution as a treat. Well, not unfortunate, more a failure to resolve the basic contradiction that the character who starts revolutions on other planets is on the government payroll on Earth (the show has obviously bumped against this in various eps). It’s understandable the show and the fandom can’t let go of the basically cuddly vision of UNIT but given how long Redgrave’s been in the role it does seem a shame they didn’t do something more ambiguous with her character which might have gone some way to exploring this problem.
May 4, 2025 @ 2:12 am
This strikes me as by a long way the most ambiguous Kate has been in at least ten years, if not the full thirteen since her first appearance, aside from the Zygon two parter. McTighe pretty clearly outdoes Moffat, Chibnall and RTD on this front, if not Harness. She’s colder than she’s ever been in the moment where she releases the Shreek and ignores how everyone else is freaked and scared the thing is going to eat them, let alone Conrad. It’s very clearly a “wow she’s gone way over the line” moment, as is also discussed in BTS material the start of an intended trajectory for Kate that will carry on into next year’s spinoff. The keeping creatures in jail cells in the first place is the most they’ve done UNIT: Guantanamo Bay since that one Torchwood episode with Tosh. “Like I said, he’ll live” is full on “fuck accountability”.
May 4, 2025 @ 4:50 am
I will say she is very close to destroying all of London in Day of the Doctor. As a matter of harm reduction, but still.
May 4, 2025 @ 3:13 am
I’m curious about what they could do to make the character more ambiguous without having the Monty Python Colonel character come in to end a scene shouting “I’m sorry, this is too ambiguous”. She unleashed an alien hunter to menace an enemy because he badmouthed her dad. She rejected calls to heighten security and de-escalate the situation before it could reach a crisis. But she’s also cuddly sweet Kate Stewart flirting with Colonel Forearms. That is precisely ambiguity.
May 4, 2025 @ 5:30 am
Yeah the ep clearly marks her going too far, but I guess what I mean is that the cuddly version still wins out: IIRC the “Geneva will want a word” scene here is immediately overwritten by her kind words to Ruby. There’s no coda where the Doctor himself reprimands Kate the way he reprimanded Harriet Jones, say. Probably next time she appears we’ll be in no doubt that she’s one of the Doc’s best pals rather than someone he has a more complex relationship with.
May 4, 2025 @ 5:50 am
For what it’s worth, both RTD and McTighe are explicit in the BTS that this idea of “Kate goes too far” is setting up key material for the spinoff.
May 4, 2025 @ 5:55 am
I think you’re maybe not asking for ambiguity then. At the end we’re asked to sit with Cuddly Kate and Gone too Far Kate.
What you seem to want is the show to explicitly condemn her.
The Doctor popping up at the end to reprimand her would in fact not be ambiguous at all.
May 3, 2025 @ 8:48 pm
As a sometime nonsense enjoyer, the vague nature of both Conrad’s podcast and the intended purpose of the fake alien stunt proved too confusing even for me.
May 3, 2025 @ 8:54 pm
The last time we saw ‘Think Tank’ was in ‘Robot’, and I was expecting some revelation that Conrad’s home life had been bitter due to reduced circumstances after his grandmother’s failed coup in the 70s (or 80s?) which would have made a little more sense than him pulling it seemingly out of the air.
May 3, 2025 @ 9:26 pm
I thought this was way more down on alt-right grifters than up on gun-carrying government agencies. The Doctor’s speech was and the “get off my planet” moment were powerful. If UNIT are problematic in any way, surely they’ve been stably so since 1968? Thought about as timely and targeted as Doctor Who gets, though happy to hear otherwise.
May 3, 2025 @ 10:35 pm
I wondered for a second when the Doctor started talking about the “noise” if Ncuti was about to start knocking four times on the TARDIS console.
Conrad secretly wants to be the Doctor, right? That’s why he responds to the Doctor with a “get off my world” speech, isn’t it? The real conflict is between who is right about whose world it is.
May 3, 2025 @ 9:31 pm
Loved the call back to Robot’s “Think Tank,” I think RTD pulling this out right now was pretty appropriate, and this line from the fan wiki (I know, I know) summed it up well:
…the Brigadier has discovered that many Think Tank scientists, including Winters and Jellicoe, belong to the Scientific Reform Society, a fringe group advocating a society ruled by a scientific elite that would basically issue orders and restrictions on what everyone is allowed to do.
May 3, 2025 @ 9:32 pm
The men in rubber suits secretly turning out to be men in rubber suits brings to mind an episode of Big Finish’s Tomorrow People revival where Earth is menaced by aliens who look like men in cheap costumes, who feed on fear and just want to harmlessly scare some humans for a snack, but can’t because 21st century humans find their 70s British TV appearance too goofy to fear.
May 3, 2025 @ 9:44 pm
Yeah, I’ll be honest, I thought this was completely incoherent, although maybe I’m just upset Ruby didn’t look down the camera and say she was the exact same sort of communist I am. The entitled white guy stuff was fantastic, and Conrad was a wonderfully repugnant character; at first I thought he was just an idiot using Ruby so he could larp as the Doctor, but then he went Dot and Bubble levels of awful. I was surprised that they showed his mum hit him and didn’t use it to humanise him whatsoever, kind of a bold decision, and I REALLY admired that even after he had his actual arm bitten off he was still smugly backing himself.
The only problem I really had was, uh, the rest. This actually did the same weird second-half acceleration that 73 Yards did, but there it accentuated the dream feel and sense of wrongness, here it felt like they’d just tried to pack too much in. Plus it kinda made no sense? I mean, how does UNIT responding to a fake alien incursion prove aliens aren’t real? I saw someone compare it to calling the fire brigade pretending your house is on fire and using them showing up to prove housefires aren’t real.
And I don’t begrudge a story not completely hanging together if the stuff under the surface is tight enough, but… I mean, what is UNIT actually supposed to represent here? Cops? Because grifters really hate cops. I think the most reasonable suggestion I’ve seen is that Think Tank are covid-denialists, but if that’s the intent then using a military organisation to represent doctors is a frankly baffling choice, especially in Doctor bloody Who.
Other people have and will articulated most of my issues better than I can, so I won’t go on, but I do wanna say: Kate is frightened of UNIT being taken down because its technology will get into government hands. The one example of UNIT tech we see in the episode is a thingy that literally lets you graft somebody’s severed arm back on. And the good guys are the ones keeping it away from the public.
May 3, 2025 @ 10:45 pm
” I mean, how does UNIT responding to a fake alien incursion prove aliens aren’t real? I saw someone compare it to calling the fire brigade pretending your house is on fire and using them showing up to prove housefires aren’t real.”
I talked with someone who was in a hospital with someone dying of COVID who insisted they weren’t dying of COVID. This kind of BS illogic is part and parcel of the whole thing. The scenario fails well before that point of logic: if UNIT is faking the whole thing, how can trying to convince UNIT there’s a real alien incursion possibly be expected to get a response from them? They’d know they didn’t have their crisis actors on site already and just not show up.
Actual, real politicians responding to school shootings by claiming they never happened and the bereaved classmates are all actors hired by leftists in an attempt to force gun control legislation? Yes, that’s happened, along with the Alex Joneses of the world who took such things multiple steps farther. Why the local police would cooperate, and how everyone in an established community can somehow also be paid performers, isn’t even left as an exercise to the listener: that it is absurd does not mean that you cannot convince people it is true.
And yes, this episode is a mess that’s also arguing “the CIA and FBI are good, actually, because these people are slandering them with claims they’re the corrupt Deep State,” although in point of fact, it’s possible that UNIT can both be genuinely fighting off alien threats AND be insufficiently accountable or tend to abuse its power. What Kate does in this very episode is unquestionably an abuse of power. “We protect humanity from alien threats, unless we really don’t like you personally” is not a good look.
Then again, the series is historically a bit wobbly on this point. That moment in The Face of Evil where the Doctor knocks a horder onto the shoulder of a tribesman who was rude to Leela never felt out of character to me, and of course, there’s what happens to the Family of Blood.
May 3, 2025 @ 11:15 pm
Yeah, I have to concede to you that with this subject reality is very frequently harder to believe than fiction. Not easy to satirise.
Obviously Kate’s actions were morally not great (it’s kind of weird that it was what saved the day, wonder if we’ll come back to that), but it was also really satisfying, so yknow, swings and roundabouts.
May 4, 2025 @ 2:53 am
I don’t think it’s “using UNIT to represent doctors”. It’s using UNIT to represent publicly funded agencies whose work the Conrads of the world don’t understand, care about or believe in.
There are many different kinds of his kind of activism, focussed on different bodies. Sometimes political parties, sometimes medical issues, sometimes international aid bodies, sometimes the police. That we can identify a specific set of detractors who are specious and engaged in a grift doesn’t mean those organisations are beyond question – I’d argue Kate Stewart’s actions are shown as questionable by the episode itself. But this episode is doing Doctor Who Vs Tommy Robinson/Laurence Fox and that’s no bad thing.
May 3, 2025 @ 10:03 pm
I feel like I engaged in a curious sort of double-think when watching this episode. As in, I could see that UNIT was being used to represent the sort of benevolent or useful organisation/institution that generally exists in the real world for the public good, but was also fully aware that in the history of Doctor Who, UNIT has many similarities to other more secretive and/or authoritarian agencies Conrad was awful, but in some ways the script didn’t allow him to raise legitimate questions/objections (similar to Bonnie in the Zygon Inversion).
To be honest, I don’t know much about the finale, but I am hoping UNIT don’t show up (although I suspect they will). I’m also not excited about the “The War between…”.
As a side question, @Elizabeth Sandifer, are you planning on writing about ‘Redacted’ in the Whittaker era book? (If there is going to be one). From what I recall, UNIT were basically portrayed as villains, or at least not to be trusted. I thought it was an interesting take.
Anyway, I actually really liked this episode. I sometimes prefer flawed episodes that give me something to talk and think about, rather than something more straightforward.
May 3, 2025 @ 10:12 pm
I really want to like this one more than I do. I love that it’s not unafraid to be ugly and uncomfortable. Unfortunately there were too many things I couldn’t buy.
1) I couldn’t believe Conrad, having seen one Shreek briefly at a distance, was then able to fashion two costumes of them at a standard high enough to fool UNIT.
2) Ruby is supposedly suffering from PTSD and paranoia – so then she answers a random social media post with no more info other than her photograph, doesn’t get UNIT to check the guy out first and then is happy to talk about her experiences with the Doctor on this same random guy’s podcast? Maybe if they had had Ruby operating undercover for UNIT, but that was never suggested.
3) I’m struggling to believe a UK podcaster, even a successful one, would be able to finance his mother’s house in the south of France.
4) The Doctor makes no attempt to appeal to Conrad’s better nature or even ask how he went so badly wrong. Maybe the point is meant to be that Conrad doesn’t have a better nature, but it hasn’t stopping the Doctor trying in the past with even the Daleks and the Master, FGS. I’m genuinely surprised to see people praising this speech, because it reminded me grimly of similar scenes featuring the kind of preachy impotence that often hobbled Jodie’s Doctor. It didn’t even feel like it added anything to the overall plot at all.
5) Finally, the script couldn’t seem to decide what Conrad was really about. I mean yeah I’ve met some pretty fucking unpleasant and borderline psychopathic conspiracy nuts and “truthers” in real life, but what was actually driving him – the con, the agitating, did he genuinely see himself as a freedom fighter? – the script seemed to want him to be all these things but with precious little believable motivation behind them, which made Conrad feel more of a cypher than a genuine (if repellent) human being.
Don’t get me wrong, I think DW should be tackling issues like this. Many strands of conspiracy behaviour have metastasised far beyond harmless online nuttery. But i was struck by how much more believable Conrad came across to me while he was pretending to be nice than once he was revealed as a pretty one-dimensional pantomime villain.
I think this era frustrates me even more than the Chibnall omnishambles. The latter was just consistently, unrelentingly dreadful, whereas RTD2 keeps being naggingly close to really good. With the show itself being in peril, being “better than Chibnall” is too low a bar to be aiming for.
May 3, 2025 @ 10:14 pm
I found this episode a chore to watch. The whole time I kept thinking to myself “I don’t care about any of these people,” which is sad, because I did like Ruby last season, but even here, I find myself uninterested in her life post-Doctor. Which I guess makes me a bit of a jerk? McTighe did nail writing Conrad as someone to hate the whole way through, making me hate him for a whole range of reasons leading up to his reveal. And while I like the idea that the show has to contend with misinfo merchants… in practice, it left me slightly annoyed throughout.
Our rankings are wildly different, oddly, other than first place:
Lux
The Well
The Robot Revolution
Lucky Day
Joy to the World
May 3, 2025 @ 10:59 pm
This was an enjoyable episode…but I worry that it won’t stand up to scrutiny and…and it…well. Cheated.
Knowing her name and with the full power of the internet at his disposal did Conrad never once look up Belinda Chandra?
Was his podcast just, what? Bait in the supremely off-chance hope that he could hook up with a former companion to unmask UNIT? Like why would you be part of Think Tank that wanted to uncover the lies but only no you really just seemed like an alien-curious podcaster?
Right after the “you said relationship, am I your boyfriend” scene how did Conrad make the lights on the sign go wonky? It made the audience think the Shreek were afoot but really it was just a disingenuous misdirect.
The heavy-handed lecture the Doctor gave Conrad was before he met him in 2007 so why didn’t he recognize him as a kid and intervene to stop him from growing up to be a complete twat?
There is probably more I just can’t bring myself to watch Dr Who after Capaldi more than once out of morbid curiosity.
May 3, 2025 @ 11:01 pm
Yeah I really don’t know. I guess this is what Pete McTighe is.
Something odd to me about the twist being, “the guy who was a pushy insecure klutz with lots of red flags, was only PRETENDING to be that kind of jerk, because he’s actually a different kind of jerk!”. Like, he was already bad, but for reasons that were all deliberate acting on his part? I already didn’t like him! Not the most efficient use of PUA I think.
Agreed with the comment up there that the Doctor’s speech was extremely Jodie. I know there are tons of people like this in real life who extending sympathy to will drive you mad – but a big self-satisfying liberal speech about how right-wing trolls are just big loser doodoo heads who will die in jail one day for being meanies does nothing for me, nor does it effect anything in the world, really.
May 3, 2025 @ 11:30 pm
I could enjoy the muddled politics, but the terrible pacing of the climax is what spoils the episode for me. Kate opens the monster cage and says “the truth, as requested,” we the viewers realise that she’s put Conrad in a position where he has to either get mauled by a predator or ask for help live on camera, we think “ha ha very crafty” and then the scene spins its wheels for (I went back and counted) THREE MINUTES of nothing much happening before Conrad FINALLY admits that he lied and asks for help. And this moment that should be a triumphant punchline to the whole scene just falls flat, because all I’m thinking is “finally”
May 3, 2025 @ 11:30 pm
Between “72 Yards”, “The Legend of Ruby Sunday” and now this, the show has had a dismayingly consistent record of ostensibly Ruby-focused stories that end up being not about Ruby after all–as in, who she is as a person has little to no bearing on the resolution of the story, and the story of disinformation influencers has little to actually say about Ruby. This episode probably comes closest, at least until Conrad outs himself–this is an interesting take on the post-Doctor life–but even then, I can’t come close to being able to describe what Ruby’s core trait is, and the episode doesn’t seem all that interested in trying to create one.
May 4, 2025 @ 1:47 am
I guess RTD has been wanting to give his take on Billie Piper’s ex for a while. (He pointedly refers to not going to their wedding as far back as the Writer’s Tale.) There are too many similarities for it not to be a coincidence. Piper’s ex has (or had?) his own silly video casts, filmed his own stunts, got arrested at one point, and has made more than a few tweets about how dumb Doctor Who is. And his preferred thing was taking on ‘the establishment’, – the NHS and Boris Johnson’s government in particular, but he started his grift by complaining about DEI in Christopher Nolan films.
I don’t know if he’s known much outside the UK, or even to many British people any more, now that his natural habitat of Twitter has collapsed. But this episode seemed very UK-centric, and not just because of ‘real-life’ things like presented Alex Jones and the One Show popping up. We’re led to assume that UNIT is basically a fragile British institution. It might make references to Geneva and Sydney, but it’s kept alive by funding from the UK government.
May 4, 2025 @ 1:51 am
I think there’s two kinds of incoherence in this episode and it’s worth delineating them.
Conrad’s beliefs and actions don’t make a great deal of sense: and that’s fine. It’s a pretty good depiction of the live stream activist alt-right, the Tommy Robinson, Laurence Fox, Alex Jones type who subsist on two things: money from their followers and the sense of getting one over on the normies and the establishment. And cocaine.
Luring UNIT out with a fake alien invasion you’ve staged and then saying “hah, we’ve proved aliens aren’t real” doesn’t make logical sense. But it does allow a group of conspiracy nuts to get a rise out of some Official People, and therefore it all makes as much sense as it needs to. The thing that really stuck with me from this scene was one of Conrad’s followers lunging at Ruby and laughing when she jumped. That’s the whole thing in a nutshell.
Conrad’s polymorphous beliefs and confidence that reassert themselves as soon as any trauma or surprise is finished, and are consistent only in that he knows the truth and everything is a lie are perfect.
But the second kind of incoherence is maybe a bit more of a flaw. I’m not a stickler for continuity. I’d much rather a writer go with a strong story than worry about the details of whether it contradicts Sergeant Benton’s trip to Magaluf in 1994. Broad strokes are fine. But I feel like there’s confusion about even the broad strokes here: UNIT are a covert organisation right? They’re keeping aliens secret as well as fighting them. The Zygons don’t live openly as refugees, they’re in disguise. Derren Brown is regularly used to explain away weird public events.
So why is Conrad even a problem for them? Surely the response is to say “lol you got us” then go back to your tower and tip the police off to search his hard drive because he’s an obvious sex case. Is it not more a problem that you’ve got friend of UNIT and potential employee Ruby going on podcasts saying “aliens are real and UNIT fight them”
It’s kind of fitting that Conrad is able to stymie UNIT in the face of all sense though. That’s the trick pulled by the far Right at every level from Trump to low grade COVID deniers. They’re somehow not susceptible to being told “fuck off that’s obviously stupid”. Either it doesn’t work or organisations don’t even bother. People blink first in the face of madness.
I’m not especially at home to complaints that UNIT deserve to be challenged and the episode sold Conrad short by not letting him ask legitimate questions. There are people with legitimate questions about police using violence and profiling. And there are people who are consumed by conspiracies about woke infested forces using two tier policing to let Muslims get away with rape and murder while locking up white boys. This episode was about the second type of person. It’s maybe more a UK phenomenon, which is perhaps why it makes less sense to people trying to read it as being about the CIA.
I think the episode is guided by a very fractured sense of logic, where the next thing happens because the narrative demands rather than out of an internal logic derived from things it establishes about its characters and world. Is Conrad’s Love & Monsters style nice podcast faked just for Ruby or is it his public face and only an inner group of supporters are aware of ‘the truth’. Neither makes a huge amount of sense, either for how the characters behave or as a source of his apparently huge wealth. It makes sense for a right wing grifter with a big following to have a house in France but that person would be visible to Ruby and UNIT. And what exactly does his UNIT insider friend think is happening?
I’m not sure about the idea of portraying him as an abused child and then never addressing that again. On the one hand it feels cruel for the show to never acknowledge that this is someone the Doctor never even realises he left behind and failed to save. On the other, it’s paradox of tolerance stuff and I like it. Childhood trauma doesn’t mean you are doomed to grow into an abuser as an adult, and if you’ve curdled so deeply into a personally abusive and socially corrosive hate preacher, the visceral shitness of that is not blunted by a sad past. I think ultimately it comes down to McTighe’s established trait of being willing to put in a twist regardless of the implications. “Aha, I set this character up to be sympathetic but WHAT A TWIST he’s actually an arsehole. Let’s not think about any more!”
I fully enjoyed watching it as it played out and it’s a very timely portrait of a specific kind of alt-right horror, with some very well observed stuff about how they never seem to take a loss and the void at the heart of their beliefs (and heart). It was thrilling and funny and romantic and weird. I think the logic of it falls apart if you think about it even slightly but…how great a flaw is that? I truly don’t know
May 4, 2025 @ 5:24 am
“It was thrilling and funny and romantic and weird. I think the logic of it falls apart if you think about it even slightly but…how great a flaw is that? I truly don’t know”
I feel much the same.
In a the real world, just days after Francis is buried, the White House actually shares an AI image of The Orange One as the Pope, we soberly discuss the motivations: to own the libs, to play for leadership of Evangelical Christianity, a deliberate flooding the zone with shit, a symbol of the cognitive decline of the Tangerine Tyrant… and virtually none of these would stand up in fiction. Stories are absolved from incoherence because the world no longer makes sense.
May 4, 2025 @ 5:57 am
I think Mark Twain’s comment on the lack of consistency in reality predates Trump by a year or two!
May 4, 2025 @ 7:43 am
I absolutely agree that Conrad’s plan doesn’t have to make sense. It’s about sowing doubt and creating noise.
@Cyrano
“There are people with legitimate questions about police using violence and profiling. And there are people who are consumed by conspiracies about woke infested forces using two tier policing to let Muslims get away with rape and murder while locking up white boys. This episode was about the second type of person.”
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head here, and this has helped me clarify my thoughts. The episode was a story about the second type of person, and a lot of people are wishing it was about the first type of person, along with a deeper examination of UNIT. I would like to see that latter type of story, but it might break UNIT and/or the show (which I think someone said up thread) I think RTD and McTighe are smart enough to know there are places this episode can’t/won’t go – so there are little glimpses of that other type of story, but that’s all they are. This creates that feeling of double-think that I mentioned above. I admit double-think may not be exactly the right term, but I’m trying to capture the feeling that the episode seems to be saying “UNIT is a bit scary if you think about it, but also this guy trying to hurt UNIT is scary too”. Those two messages might appear inconsistent at first, but on deeper reflection they can and do coexist.
May 4, 2025 @ 6:58 am
It’s already been established in this era that UNIT is no longer covert, that’s why they have the tower
May 4, 2025 @ 2:12 am
As others have said The politics in this episode are really badly skewed, Conrad aside Not being allowed to question the dangerous looking paramilitary organisation which once committed genocide against the Silurians for the good of humanity seems like a bad message to take away and yet it’s what the episode wants us to think.
I don’t like how unit have unequivocally become the good guys, the previous spinoffs Davies wrote like the Sarah Jane adventures and torchwood at least kept them at a distance.
And I’m wary of the political messaging that says a youth movement which wants accountability is wrong or shouldn’t be taken seriously, young people are the most informed about what’s going on in the world in my experience.
May 4, 2025 @ 2:29 am
There are multiple real youth movements that want accountability over things that don’t happen. It’s one of the ways the alt-right has succeeded: by learning to ape the language of social justice but for horrible things. Qanon/Pizzagate conspiracy is a dumb, horrible demand for accountability over politicians on the wrong team eating babies. It’s not good just because it’s challenging power.
This doesn’t exonerate those organisations – the democratic party, UNIT, whatever. It’s a pretty well targeted story I think
May 4, 2025 @ 5:02 am
“It’s notable that the show has never really tried to do this stage of a companion’s life—when we return to old companions they’ve usually fully graduated into being mini-Doctors.)”
Mawdryn Undead and the Brig? If you’re really going to push this, Mike Yates in Invasion of the Dinosaurs and Planet of the Spiders. I concede ahead of time that these are the slenderest of straws at which to clutch.
May 4, 2025 @ 6:30 am
That’s the third episode in a row that’s made me leap up from my sofa and bellow, ‘WHAT THE FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK?’
But I’ve come here to say – did anyone else notice that the pub landlord was played by Paul ‘No, not the mind probe!’ Jerricho?