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. But because the transmission times on this season are determined to make me pay for my Series 8 and 9 sins I have about an hour to finish this due to having, of all things, Metallica tickets tonight. So I’m going to switch to bullet points, gush about some highlights out of sequence, and get dinner together.
Love you all, and love this show.
- First off, and this is something I forgot to say last time when I was rushing through a review because of terrible scheduling, I should thank, or really you should thank my Patreon supporters, who are why this review is up publicly for you fine people. I’ll be taking my massively re-engaged excitement about this season, watching both Doctor Who Confidentials, and writing a quick postscript to these first two reviews for them later this week.
- Had a chuckle right at the start with the British newsreel playing. Ah, the compromises of coproduction.
- A part I liked disproportionately this episode was the handling of racism in the setting during the first act. There’s a damn near direct rebuke of Chibnall in Rosa as Davies makes explicit that Belinda, as a South Asian woman, would be subject to segregation laws in this historical setting. And then Gatwa gets that absolutely beautiful “I live in it and I shine” monologue—which is both thematically used and a satisfyingly poetic response to living in a world that’s hostile to your very existence in public spaces—an uncomfortably ironic theme of writing about episodes intersecting with this period in American history . Obviously you should read a Black critic or two on Gatwa’s cold contempt for the cliched spectre of a racist cop instead of a self-righteous transsexual like myself, but it certainly landed better than “planet of the incels.”
- The caretaker’s arc comes together surprisingly nicely—there’s an understated horror to his dead wife telling him to join her in order to save the day, and one that matches the gothic melancholy of a sad old man ensnared by faded memories preserved on film.
- Scrolling through my bulletpoints more, I’m amused to see that I had a note about how “the god of light has trapped them as an image” evoked the Weeping Angels, several minutes before Davies does the “everyone’s favorite episode is Blink” joke.
- My notes for that middle act really are just line after line of ecstatic “oh my god this is great” moments. The “meet the fans” section has the most, but the initial confrontation in the theater, the running through the mandatory “what if I never get home”/”I’m the last of the Time Lords” beats in a show-off sequence of morphing animation styles, and both the screen exit and the burning filmstock sequences all have plenty of exclamation points to them.
- A tiny framing detail I like is the triptych of a quietly kind 1952—the all-night diner with the quietly gay waiter and the grieving mother—an ugly fictional one with the racist cop, and a final beat of the Doctor slipping away with the dawn, a magical blessing that drifts through in the moonlight of that initial liminal space.
- Remarkably high context joke with the “we’re the kind of characters who don’t have last names” bit, a cheeky riff on Davies’ habit of giving all of his characters last names in the end credits so they look like bigger roles on the actors’ resumes.
- I’m intrigued by the way in which Mrs. Flood’s appearance in the coda ends up pointedly framing her as a god. Sága I hope that plot resolves satisfyingly.
- The cosmic pessimism flirted with in Empire of Death and done with some effectiveness in Wild Blue Yonder makes a reappearance here; the god of light as a glint of madness you see before death, and the larger sense of a malevolently joking cosmos in which the only gods are ones who play malevolent games with the ants below. Antiracist children’s panto Ligotti. That’ll do for something I haven’t seen before.
- Tremendously sweet that the fans get saved in the end though. Complete with last names in the credits.
Ranking
- Lux
- Joy to the World
- The Robot Revolution
April 19, 2025 @ 4:27 pm
Finally, RTD2 coheres.
This episode is everything I dreamed Davies picking the show up from Moffat with a stack of things he learned from him ever could be. Glorious, batshit, effervescent stuff.
April 20, 2025 @ 11:20 am
Right? About halfway through I legitimately wasn’t sure whether it was RTD writing an impression of Moffat or Moffat surprise guest-writing an impression of RTD . Grinning from ear to ear.
April 19, 2025 @ 4:30 pm
since you mentioned Kether…
i had this thought a few years ago that we’ve become unstuck and drifted to Yesod, which maybe explains all the post-truth stuff we experience. and how the solution is to take Tiphereth and the sun as a guidepost, to float past all the fantasy and onwards towards our higher selves and God.
and well, this episode plays with all that very nicely
April 19, 2025 @ 4:36 pm
Utterly bonkers – the metatextuality of the whole mid-episode sequence was sublime, gorgeous animation, handles the segregation of the American south very well for such a barmy story, Gatwa and Sethu are just stunning; some of the best acting in trying to make storm-battered Wales seem like a balmy climate – and then that ending in which things get existential. This season looks like it’s shaping up to be the most ambitious in years.
April 19, 2025 @ 4:42 pm
I really, really wanted to like Lux but for some reason it just didn’t work for me at all. The pacing felt all over the place, the acting from the non-regulars was shockingly bad in places, and it just felt kind of a mess? Considering everyone seems to be loving it, I guess I’m in the minority. Much like 73 Yards, this episode is doing things that on paper I should love (magical realism, fourth wall breaking, some affectionate parody of fandom) but on execution just felt hollow. I’m hoping to like it more on a rewatch, and am genuinely glad other people are enjoying it, but I am honestly a bit baffled what people are seeing in it that I’m not.
The handling of racism being a massive step up from Rosa was nice to see, don’t get me wrong. And the animation work on Mr Ring-A-Ding is undoubtedly technically impressive. But that feels very much like damning with faint praise.
April 23, 2025 @ 4:39 am
The Doctor and Belinda meeting Doctor Who fans was the high-point of the episode for me in an episode that otherwise didn’t really do much, as otherwise the Doctor didn’t so much solve the problem as, through his unique biology, allowed others to get past their various impasses.
And is it really a good idea, after a season of Susan Triad, to do exactly the same thing with Mrs Flood and Anita Dobson gurning at the camera?
April 19, 2025 @ 4:45 pm
The obvious joke to make about an episode involving malevolent cartoon characters from the fifties coming to life and wanting to seize the power of the atomic bomb is to sing a hymn from the Coyote Gospel.
Delightful episode, all around.
April 19, 2025 @ 4:51 pm
This was bloody brilliant ! If I have a small quibble, it’s maybe just that the answer to « what does he never do ? » felt a bit unsatisfactory, but it was worth it for that gorgeous death /ascension scene, which is definitely something new for such a villain’s end in this show. Also, Mr and Mrs Pye dancing is a simple, beautiful little moment with the detail of her slowly transitioning into colour.
Also, kudos to the pacing: this goes by at breakneck speed and yet still finds room to breathe.
I LOVE IT ! I LOVE THIS SHOW ! HAHA !
April 19, 2025 @ 4:56 pm
When an episode manages to make me thoroughly enjoy possibly my least favorite trope of all time (the “we’re characters in a tv show!” bit, which always comes off as self-indulgent), you know you have an excellent episode. And the animation on Lux being so unexpectedly luscious… I didn’t think he’d be on screen very much considering he looked so good in the trailers, but he was all over the episode.
It weirdly made me think of Inglorius Basterds, mainly because of the setting and how they ended up beating Lux (without the insane over the top violence and, well, the nazis).
Those “fans” not asking for the Doctor to save the missing episodes, though, was a missed joke, imo. Would have been hard to sell to the not-We, but it was really all that was “missing” from that sequence, if you’ll pardon the crappy pun.
April 20, 2025 @ 12:23 am
I definitely had a thought for the missing episodes when Belinda starts ripping out film strips from their canisters to set ablaze! Something metatextual to Who history in that, if we didn’t have enough in this episode already.
April 25, 2025 @ 12:32 pm
Maybe just change “We’ve seen every episode” to “We’ve seen every episode. I mean except the ones from the sixties that got destroyed”
April 19, 2025 @ 4:57 pm
If I had tried to imagine what RTD’s answer to Twin Peaks: The Return was going to be, I would never have come up with this. Beautiful.
Got a light?
April 19, 2025 @ 6:12 pm
That makes you the third person (counting myself) whom I’ve seen making this connection! I’m calling that one peer-reviewed.
(Can’t decide if “Don’t make me laugh… because it sounds like THIS” is an echo of “I am the Arm, and I sound… like… THIS!” or of Roger Rabbit with “When I killed your brother, I talked JUST! LIKE! THIS!”. Perhaps it’s both and that’s why Davies decided to put those two sources in a blender?)
April 21, 2025 @ 9:59 pm
Well, he did write, “We’ve been framed!” when our heroes found themselves in Toontown.
April 19, 2025 @ 6:18 pm
I was expecting this to be a Marmite episode like Love & Monsters with the portrayal of fandom, but fortunately most people seem to have liked it. It’s really a mix of ideas from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Ring, and Moonlighting/Community/She-Hulk (depending how far back your references go) but feels fresh within a Doctor Who context, and it all looks stunning. Bit early to call it a classic, but it’s certainly one of the strongest of this era.
April 23, 2025 @ 4:45 am
If Moffat had written this episode I think he wouldn’t have been able to avoid making the fans scene meaner but Davies could resist the urge, it made me think of Lynda-With-a-Y from the first season.
April 19, 2025 @ 7:07 pm
Can you elaborate on the bullet point about the compromises of co-production?
April 19, 2025 @ 8:45 pm
I think maybe it’s the reference to Queen Elizabeth in the newsreel?
April 20, 2025 @ 4:30 am
I’m taking it as a joke about how the newsreel mostly gives a temporal frame of reference relevant to and highly praising Americans (the bomb tests etc) and then quickly sneaks in the temporal reference for Brits only at the end
April 20, 2025 @ 5:05 am
I did find myself wondering why a small cinema in Florida was showing a Pathe newsreel narrated in an American voice. Slightly jarring, but a very minor gripe.
April 20, 2025 @ 3:15 pm
This, as well as having an Usherette selling ice cream. Definitely not something you’d see in an American movie theater.
(In this original production of The Rocky Horror Show, “Science Fiction Double Feature” was sung by an ice-cream vending Usherette, played by Patricia Quinn.)
April 19, 2025 @ 7:28 pm
It is very interesting in retrospective, that last week your review of The Robot Revolution started with “Here we head towards the great unknown, perhaps even the wilderness. It’s faintly unsettling—I’ve not written about Doctor Who in a moment where it might not come back before. What’s interesting, of course, is that this was all shot and prepared with no knowledge of that—this entire season was in the can before 73 Yards aired, and so is not in a position to respond to the anxieties about its own performance.”
And here, Lux, deals with that in a spooky degree. From acknowledging the leaks in its meta middle act, to the #RIPDoctorWho bit that feels a bit too ADR’d, to Mrs Flood calling May 24th the end of the show…
I have to be honest, the prospect of another wilderness years coming up made me sour on this season before it even began, it’s the great terror that hung above my head. As if there is no point to it, and I felt almost angry at the show for it’s going to end, because what’s the point in watching and being happy now if I’m going to be sad later? This episode singlehandedly turned it around. I thought it is all too aware of our anxieties and the incoming troubled times ahead, and it has mustered enough creative force to at least make bitter fans like me find some whimsy in figuring it all out. So I have come to the conclusion that this episode is the point, it is why I must watch this show with all the joy I can find now. Because, after all, I am going to be sad later.
April 19, 2025 @ 8:14 pm
Well guess what other character doesn’t have a last name.
April 19, 2025 @ 8:34 pm
Just. Goddamn. Glorious.
April 23, 2025 @ 3:40 am
I found myself, after watching this episode, wondering if the hiatus panic is just another layer of metafiction that RTD planned all along? If his variation on the narrative collapse finale this time is to open the metafictional prospect of cancellation, only to snatch renewal from the jaws of oblivion?
Mrs Flood is certainly being set up as a fourth wall breaking, narratively aware pantheon member–the God of Stories, perhaps?
April 19, 2025 @ 9:20 pm
If I have one complain, it’s that RTD named it “Lux” when “Doc Amuck” was RIGHT. THERE.
April 19, 2025 @ 9:27 pm
You brilliant bastard. If this blog had upvotes, I would give you one.
April 19, 2025 @ 9:32 pm
When the Disney deal became public and we all started idly wondering what “Doctor Who, but with a Disney budget” might look like… I won’t say that this was clearly it, because at no point did I ever think “the Doctor should face off against an evil cartoon character” but hot damn this is certainly the type of thing I wanted.
The RTD2 era up until this moment really has to some extent felt like even RTD wasn’t sure what to do with the new resources and the new audience, and all too regularly seems to have fallen back on “we’ll play the hits: but louder!” Hopefully this is a sign that the corner was turned and they figured out what they actually wanted to do with the show. And hopefully, maybe, fingers crossed, we’ll get a little more of it.
April 19, 2025 @ 9:34 pm
Postscript:
I’m calling it now. If RTD is reaching for this level of meta-textuality, then Mrs. Flood clearly is Angie Watts.
April 19, 2025 @ 10:48 pm
I am well aware this is mad conspiracy-theory-level stuff, but is it possible this episode and Mrs. Flood’s comment in particular are pointing us to the biggest, most improbable of RTD trolls? Nobody has said anything about the show being picked up; nobody seems to know what’s going on; RTD has starting hinting maybe the show is going to need another rest. What if RTD and Disney worked something out in the initial deal? What if the plan all along was that this season of the show would have the cancellation of Doctor Who as the big climax? You wouldn’t even have to make Disney agree to pick up the show again; you could just ask that they delay the announcement as a part of what you’re doing with the script.
Then maybe you conclude with the Doctor getting Belinda home and saving the planet at the cost of being, himself, trapped in the Land of Fiction. Picked up for another season? Resolve that cliffhanger. Cancelled? Of course we get books about Fifteen and they can both be canonical and not canonical (because he’s trapped in the Land of Fiction!). And it would leave the War Between the Land and the Sea as something more than a lame-duck appendage to a canceled show.
April 21, 2025 @ 2:43 am
Your lips to Sutek’s ear…
April 20, 2025 @ 12:31 am
My one quibble is that the script seemed to be calling Lux both a harbinger and a god, unless I missed something. But that aside, this was perfect. So many great parts to highlight, but what really struck me was the Doctor’s line in the diner that sometimes he waits for people to topple unjust systems themselves. That’s a response to Let’s Kill Hitler of all things, but really it’s the answer to a question this show has been dancing around practically from the start.
April 20, 2025 @ 1:20 am
The harbinger was the movie itself that the theater was advertising. No reason a harbinger has to be a person, I suppose.
April 20, 2025 @ 12:59 am
So Ring-a-Ding threatened to burn the negatives as that would destroy anyone who was trapped inside them. That threat/danger was the stakes.
Then Belinda burns the place down, destroying the negatives … and everyone in them survives?
A promising first act was undone by an incomprehensible last act, I’m afraid. But if you didn’t notice its destabilizing plot holes then that’s good, I guess.
April 20, 2025 @ 2:36 am
The way I understood this point:
Lux was threatening to destroy a film he had brought to life, not a film with real people trapped inside. So the rule is anything not originally film can escape it when it burns, like the Doctor and Belinda did.
The Doctor and Belinda still experienced something very different when inside the film though, there’s no sense that “the fifteen” ever experienced being animated for example.
April 20, 2025 @ 2:39 am
You beat the god, you reverse the damage they’ve done. That’s been the rule every time Davies has used one of his pantheon. Besides, we saw that burning the film can free people trapped within them when the Doctor and Belinda escaped their film.
Mr. Ring-a-Ding never actually threatens to burn the trapped moviegoers, if you watch it again – he threatens Pye’s wife, but the implication is that she’s wholly derived from the film, not a normal person trapped there.
April 23, 2025 @ 4:51 am
There was already too much going on in the episode but in two cases, creations of Lux, the fans and the projectionist’s wife, seemed to exhibit free will and aid the Doctor and the projectionist to Lux and their detriment. I would have preferred cutting out some of the other stuff to allow us to sit in those moments a bit more.
April 20, 2025 @ 2:41 am
I liked that the 2D versions of Belinda and the Doctor looked more like Hanna-Barbera than Disney.
April 20, 2025 @ 3:42 am
I like the little meta nod that when the fans gush over ‘Blink’, Fifteen instantly knows what they’re talking about…
April 20, 2025 @ 3:53 am
One more “harbinger”: there was, of course, no 1952 movie called Harvest Bringer starring Rock Hudson. But the following year (1953) he starred in “Sea Devils”. Oh, Russell, you naughty, naughty showrunner.
April 20, 2025 @ 6:38 pm
There is no way to upvote on here, so take the reply as positive reinforcement for that really cool discovery you made !
April 20, 2025 @ 4:19 am
And one more observation: given her penchant for cosplaying past companions, Mrs. Flood was cosplaying Sarah Jane from The Five Doctors
April 20, 2025 @ 4:25 am
I adored 95% of this, for reasons which have been well expressed by El and previous commenters. The sour note was Belinda’s quick shift to willing companion, which seemed very much at odds with what we saw of her last time – it felt like it weakened one of the best aspects of the opener while reducing her uniqueness. If anyone can put a better spin on it, I’d be grateful.
April 20, 2025 @ 5:45 am
It is a bit of a wobble on that front & I think there’s a genuine cause for concern that the prickliness might flatten out to best friends too quickly. My good faith sense of what they’re doing is that they needed to show fairly quickly why she might love TARDIS travel on Trip 1 (hence all the enjoying getting dressed up, omg it’s 1952 malarkey), otherwise there’d never be any reason for her to want to step outside. She’s cautious, more than most companions, she’s keen to get back to the TARDIS and go – but she’s also not insane, she will take the opportunity for a bit of fun and adventure if the Doctor twists her arm and wiggles his Companion Seduction eyebrows enough. The bonding scene where they gain extra depth to escape animation, the general higher stakes of the Doctor nearly dying on her watch, seeing even more evidence that he’s a good man who brings hope to others and fights to get everyone home safe, that all feels reasonably commonsensical in terms of getting her to the point of trusting him by the time of the denouement. If the promo about Episode 3 is correct, it is going to be a much more intense and emotionally draining thing, so I can see that being one where the cracks from Ep 1 might be wedged back open, in which case playing things a bit more gently/wholesomely here would make sense to give a bit of a push-and-pull effect (as opposed to her just hating every minute of TARDIS life like she’s, idk, Tegan or something).
April 21, 2025 @ 8:48 am
It’s a bit of a careful dance with a “reluctant companion”. If she’s consistently portrayed as being grumpy and unwilling while being shown the wonders of the universe, that becomes offputting VERY fast. Star Trek tends to fall into a similar trap a lot where characters are confronted with reality-disrupting events and react with mild annoyance that this interferes with them doing their boring day job. I think Doctor Who did a great job with it back at the beginning with Ian and Barbara, but the show was paced much differently then.
(Disclosure: my tolerance for “Companion just whines about wanting to go home instead of enjoying the wonders before them” may be affected by being the father of a teenage boy who just spent a week listening to how boring theme parks are and how much he wanted us to just go home so he could lock himself in the office and play video games 18 hours a day)
April 25, 2025 @ 7:24 pm
I’m guessing you were never a big fan of Tegan.
April 25, 2025 @ 10:11 pm
Funny thing; the Early Five companion lineup is, mostly due to just a quirk of personal history, the “Now MY Doctor…” era for me. But as I’ve grown older, yes. Tegan was – thanks mostly to JNT’s limitations I think – basically a parody a Hartnell companion. JNT wanted to revisit the the dynamic of a Doctor who’d kidnapped a couple of schoolteachers and was now having trouble getting them home again, but it came off very “Wonders of the universe? UGH. I just want to get back to having my labor exploited by capitalism thanks.”
April 20, 2025 @ 10:00 am
We don’t know yet if it’s a shift or a one-time thing. I bet it’s the second one. We’re in Chapter 2; there’s way more story to come. Right now we’re switching gears, showcasing range, and that includes the complexity of Belinda’s emotions about travelling with the Doctor. She might enjoy one adventure despite herself and hate the next one. It’s fine.
April 20, 2025 @ 4:48 am
I’ll leave story and writing comments for others to instead focus on the area I know anything about and an finding fun that doctor who stumbled on- animation
Giving some allowance for production limits (mr ring-a-ding moves great for modern standards but for the ones of the rubber hose era it wanted to call to it felt a bit too symbol animated, tweened) and necessities (a real cartoon of his time would have a lot more spot black in the design but that would just not work well with the light effect), they did a surprisingly great job. I’ll even forgive the temporal mismatch- a lot of people have pointed out the design is going for 30s cartoon, not 50s, but you can just assume the theatre was running an older reel. I think the horrible translation of the design into “real” is great too, especially liked the detail of his hairs becoming a halfway between a macro photo of follicles and bug antennae
With that in mind I WILL hem and haw a bit about the doctor and Belinda becoming Scooby-Doo characters because if mr ring-a-ding on One hand is designed for an older era, Scooby-Doo would be for a younger one. Scooby-Doo came out by the mid to end 60s, and on TV. If the aesthetic gag to that point was that everything looked like a cartoon of the time until they start to break from it, they should’ve looked more like the newspaper style flat caricatures of something like pink panther or something kinda like early Osamu tezuka art, maybe Popeye.
(Of course sadly the actual actual historically accurate choice would have been black face and some other dumb stereotype for Belinda but I think we can stop a bit before that point for the sake of pleasantness and the rest of the writing already did a decent to Good job of wrestling with the racial angle in such a way it’s acknowledged and even a bit of the point without impossibilitating the plot from still happening)
Anyway yeah those are my nitpicks. Still felt great watching an episode and not feeling the feeling of needing to compromise, to adjust around – “well this and that was eh but I liked this and that aspect”. Was just fun, simple
April 20, 2025 @ 10:03 am
Well, Mr. Ring-A-Ding wasn’t a cartoon from the 50s – he was a god. I think his powers of animations extend well beyond the 50s so I don’t have a problem with him evoking earlier or later styles of animation.
April 20, 2025 @ 10:35 am
No, Mr. Ring-A-Ding WAS a cartoon from the 50s – Lux was a god who entered into the pre-existing character.
April 20, 2025 @ 1:24 pm
Right, right. But my point still stands.
April 22, 2025 @ 8:18 am
Sure, but there’s a clear aesthetic intent of the episode that feels a bit broken there in an unintentional way- the background in the scene, for instance, looks fairly accurate to the 50s. Came across a bit more as an accidental “someone in production didn’t realise cartoons wouldn’t look like this at this time”, which to be fair, I imagine most of the audience didn’t either
April 20, 2025 @ 10:51 am
I believe the synopsis specified that the Palazzo was running “an old cartoon” that night, so, yes, it being a 30s design makes perfect sense.
April 20, 2025 @ 5:31 am
You’re making me feel like the one who has a “fun problem” this time haha! Thank you so much for doing these reviews. I love them.
I enjoyed this. It was good. Technically impressive. A really solid first and final act. But… I really didn’t buy into the sentimentality of the fan portion, with the overbearing series 5 music? (And Blink? Are we still in Tumblr-era fandom? Surely, Heaven Sent would be the go-to contemporary fan response.) The #RIPDoctorWho woman who still watches the show anyway is spot on though, and getting in some Moffat-digs from RTD is fun.
A few nitpicks shouldn’t hold me up from enjoying the episode, but I really felt the episode drop momentum when we went into our world. There should have been more dimension hopping, or some palpable threat posed by the Doctor’s existence being questioned. Instead, I felt like we were just using up running time to do some (literal) fan-service because animation is super expensive.
I think I prefer my metatextual Who to do something with the meta element. To highlight something about the characters (‘Amy’s Choice’, ‘The One Doctor’, ) or about fandom (‘The Big Bang’, ‘Love & Monsters’, ‘VoV’, ‘TGSITG’) or to push Doctor Who into new forms (‘Dr Who and the Pirates’, ‘The Mind Robber’, ‘Legend of the Cybermen’). Here I just felt we were in a discrete chunk of the episode, unrelated to the rest of the story or the Doctor and Belinda.
That said, maybe I just had too high expectations and need to rewatch with some non-Doctor Who friends. So far two solid episodes and I’m enjoying the Doctor and Belinda a lot!
April 20, 2025 @ 5:40 am
The Series 5 music is quite thematically relevant, because Amy is the OG ‘girl who grows up loving Doctor Who’ fan child and because the climax of that season from which the music is most notably drawn is her making the fictional real because the stories that have helped make her who she is are that powerful. That’s not to say that the music isn’t mixed a little loud, etc, but it feels an appropriate thematic choice – especially given that’s what the episode seems to be about: the power fictional narratives have over us, how they consume us and how we consume them, as in poor old Reginald Pye the projectionist but also of course the fans feeding off Doctor Who and Doctor Who feeding off them right back. And there’s something appropriately Extremis about what the sequence with the fans is doing – ‘that which is not real or corporeal still affects the real or corporeal’. We-as-viewers-and-fans are as much the constructs of fictional narratives as Ring-a-Ding or the Doctor are.
April 20, 2025 @ 6:58 am
Adding to this, Series 5 in subtext dealt with the pain and sadness that came with the wilderness years, and what Doctor Who meant for children who “lost the stars” one day, until they grew up and brought it back into existence. This episode implicitly deals with the anxiety that the same is about to happen again, very soon. It is reasonable to imagine that by the time Murray Gold scored this episode, those anxieties were actively affecting the production. So while the power of fictional narratives is undeniably the most explicit connection, we can read more into the Series 5 connections here.
April 20, 2025 @ 7:09 am
Interesting. It’s weird to think of the production being so aware of cancellation when this was filmed/written. It’s a good point, I hadn’t considered how late music was in the process.
I think when something is repeated verbatim, it just makes you want to watch that better thing. Like don’t copy and paste something from the Big Bang, arguably the best Doctor Who story cuz it just makes me want to rewatch that instead.
That Series 5 finale covered cancellation so well. If it can be remembered then it can come back.
April 20, 2025 @ 6:59 am
Yeah I love that music in its original context. But, I found it jarring here and kind of patronising. I get why it’s relevant, yet I still find it jumping the shark a little. That music is so indelibly linked to Amy Pond and 11. This isn’t 2010. It just didn’t feel right to me.
Usually when Murray brings back echoes and motifs, they are combined with new elements to form reprises. E.g. in the 60th, snippets of ‘The Shepherd’s Boy’ in the Doctor’s hero music remind us of who the Doctor is now, everything he’s gone through. Maybe if he had used bits of that fairytale music to draw parallels to the meta commentary in the series 5 finale it would have been fine. But, this felt like a copy and paste rather than a flourish. I’d rather find these motifs myself. That’s the joy of watching media. To find your own readings. Not to be told them. Here, I felt like I was being condescended to.
I see your point with “the power fictional narratives have over us”, but also I didn’t really see it in the episode itself. (At least on a first watch! I will give it another go in a few days with this reading in mind.)
My reading of the episode was much the same as last year’s equivalent. As RTD himself said about the episode in the second BTS video, “it’s about images”. I think this is pure spectacle like The Devil’s Chord or The Web Planet. It has these heightened performances from every cast member, big budget effects, and some neat tricks. This is Doctor Who does a big cartoon episode. And I hope this is an amazing episode for the new generation of children watching Doctor Who. I hope this episode dazzles them and turns them into fans! If we remember childhood in images, I hope in years to come we will hear fans describe their nightmares of Mr Ring-a-Ding.
And I’m going to say I found it completely superficial. I think it has these lovely character notes for Belinda and the Doctor, I think it tackles the danger of the time period pretty well. Sometimes 5 minutes of an episode really nags you when you know it probably shouldn’t. I just really did not care for those fans. Compare this to the heartwrenching scenes of Donna and her fake children. God, that’s terrifying. Here, I felt nothing for this sorry lot.
April 20, 2025 @ 7:13 am
*And I’m NOT going to say
April 21, 2025 @ 6:31 am
UPDATE: after a rewatch, this did indeed go up in my estimation. Just like a Moffat story, it does take a wild sentimental leap which just flops (i.e. the whole dad power dialogue in Boom or Joy sacrificing herself in the xmas special) and puts you off on first viewing, but when you are prepared for it on rewatch, the whole thing coheres somehow.
April 20, 2025 @ 6:28 am
Random thoughts
The three fans section didn’t outstay its welcome, but it was a touch-and-go moment for me. If they’d gone one step further, saying “you’re an actor called Ncuti Gatwa” or some such, it would have been too much. And to be fair, having them saved and interrupting the credits was sweet. What worries me a little is a sense that the show is anchoring itself to the “fanbase”. The geeks and the nerds and the oddballs. The “we”. It would be silly to suggest that the die-hard fans are the only people who watch, but writing for the fanbase didn’t work well in the mid 1980s. Even as I write this I’m probably overstating my point but it was faintly disquieting.
What are the signifiers for the quietly /gay/ waiter? I missed that reading.
The phrase “I am He” in Mr. Ring-a-Ding’s ditty seems like a conscious choice over and above a more naturalistic phrase like “Yes that’s me”. Just a tad portentious?
The day of transmission was as close as possible to Easter. Does that connect to “The Greatest Story Ever Told” remark as Gatwa is dragged and pulled up to his Crucifixion, where he exposes his own Sacred Heart?(OK, Hearts). And the Christian or Christian-adjacent symbolism of Fiat Lux, John 1 … this thought fades away but I offer it if anyone wants to run away with it.
April 20, 2025 @ 6:29 am
Ugh formatting. Sorry
April 20, 2025 @ 7:31 am
Yes I thought it was a brilliant bit of cheek to have Dr Who declared the greatest story ever told over the Easter weekend. So it works just as a bit of trolling – but also ties in to RTD’s longrunning ambivalence around Christianity and it’s iconicty and faith (e.g Gridlock, Sound of Drums) which I’ve always found more compelling that Moffat’s the Church as Soldiers, which is sometimes a bit pat. RTD’s approach to that stuff doesn’t always work, but I tend to find it a more jaggy and provoking (and gay) attempt to figure out what to do with those experiences, and images. So I was glad that in this story about gods and stories and how we relate to doctor who that wrinkle was there again.
April 20, 2025 @ 7:49 am
Mr. Ring-a-Ding is Faction Paradox.
April 20, 2025 @ 11:52 am
You are Lawrence Miles and I claim my prize.😐
April 20, 2025 @ 9:03 am
About halfway through the episode I’ve found myself thinking: “well, for an episode that promised me a cartoon Doctor and wild metafictional games it is surely taking its sweet time getting there”. But the thing is… I didn’t mind. All the standard Doctor Who plot beats were so well done, so engaging, so pitch-perfect. It was like every single scene had this depth and richness to it. So much more thoughtful and engaging than it first seemed. And this, in a nutshell, is “Lux” for me: an episode that just keeps getting better the more I think about it.
I don’t feel like trying to rival this post in lenght (it’s Easter, after all) so just some choice highlights from me:
– the beauty of sunlight both defeating the villain and banishing the hero;
– the joy of the most stock and boring character beats (“I’m the last of the Time Lords”) get relegated to a literal two-dimensional cartoon (and you can totally interpret that scene not as “performing those obligatory beats gives the characters more depth” but as “performing those obligatory beats gets them out of the way, thus allowing the characters to move on to more interesting stuff and that’s what gives them depth”);
– the way racism was handled here – a definitive proof that you can absolutely visit historical settings with a non-white TARDIS crew without either outright ignoring racism or making it the focus of the episode, you just have to rise up to the challenge and actually be good at your job (I’m looking at you, Chris);
– I love how Doctor Who can just subsume its own fictionality and make it a part of itself – the metafictional twist didn’t make the Doctor come out of our television screens, but instead it made us, the fans, into fictional characters. We’re all stories in the end, eh?
Oh, and it’s so, so lovely to see you this happy with DW, El.
April 20, 2025 @ 12:00 pm
I’ll just add that I love that period appropriate wardrobe reveals are apparently the Fifteenth Doctor’s thing and I am hoping for an average of 1.4 per episode going forward.
April 20, 2025 @ 5:08 pm
I don’t love, but I do mildly like, that by deduction El and I have the exact same three favourite episodes of the Gatwa era so far (thought a lot of that comes down to going against what I remember to be the audience consensus on Dot & Bubble.) Don’t foresee that being a thing with this episode. And I just like the number three I guess.
April 20, 2025 @ 5:11 pm
No matter how far we zoom out on reality, the origin story of the Doctor will always be that he’s the Master of the Land of Fiction on the lam from his duty, right?
April 20, 2025 @ 5:11 pm
*Or they’re the Master on the lam from their duty, I guess.
April 21, 2025 @ 2:17 am
WE’RE ALL STORIES IN THE END
Doctor Who, the show and the character (Yes, sigh his name is Doctor Who. Prove me wrong!) has finally come out as fictional. I mean we’ve always known it but it sometimes takes a while for the truth to out, for the subject itself to realise. Some never do.
THE DOCTOR LIES
Fiction, the art of telling stories, is unique to humanity. No other animal is aware of itself having either a past or a potential future. No other animal tells stories about itself, let alone other animals, aliens or mythical archetypes. This unique trait has aided our survival. But all stories are elaborate lies and all storytellers are liars. Except in fiction. There, stories are truth. Storytellers are Truthsayers.
I WAS AIMING FOR MINIMAL BUT I THINK I ENDED UP WITH MAGICIAN
Artists on the other hand…artists are magicians. Art is the Magic leaking out of Fiction. Stories are Art. Art isn’t a puzzle box to be solved. Like a magic trick, if you pull Art apart to see how it works you destroy it forever. So it is with Doctor Who.
I AM BECOME DEATH THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS
We begin with an atomic explosion. Doctor Who, like most Science Fiction is a child of the Atomic Age. Or rather, like the show itself in 1963 we begin in monochrome – a black and white newsreel of an atomic explosion. (This won’t be the last time the spectre of Twin Peaks is conjured). The newsreel is watched by a slightly distracted audience of popcorn munching, heavy petting, mid-century Americans. Nuclear destruction as diverting entertainment just like the first popular story in Doctor Who’s fictional world showed us, where the Dalek planet Skaro was ravaged and irradiated by nuclear war.
LOVE AND MONSTERS
The remaining adventure requires an animated suspension of disbelief. Not least the fourth wall breaking second act where the Doctor and Belinda smash their way out of our screens and gate crash a geeky Doctor Who watch party. The cosplaying fans, in their Doctor Who merch crammed living room, take it all in their stride, as must we. The Doctor also accepts the situation to be both fictional and real as he engages his viewers in casual bants.
The Doctor – “Go on then, what’s your favourite adventure?!”
Lizzie – “Blink!”
…
Belinda – “What happens in Blink?”
Hassan – “It’s the story where you’re not allowed to blink.”
Belinda – “Well that sounds like an absolute epic.”
RTD here is of course having fun at the expense of his show-running mate Moffatt but also himself with this remake of the fan despised ‘Love and Monsters’.
THE IMAGE OF AN ANGEL
“The image of an angel is itself an angel”. In Art, that which is not real can still affect reality. We, as viewers and fans represented by these three characters are now as much the constructs of a fictional narrative as Ring-a-Ding or the Doctor are. Whether we like it or not.
In the end, as Mr. Ring a Ding the cartoon avatar of a harbinger ascends into the light, burning the reels of film frees the people trapped within, letting Doctor Who move forward. (the “# RIP Doctor Who” woman still watches the show anyway). There’s a metaphor here but there’s no time to unpack it because it’s time for the regular appearance of Mrs Flood. She’s almost certainly one of the Pantheon, maybe the god of stories, fictions and lies. Her final comment trolls the fans with the threat of an end to the entire 60-year story of Doctor Who on May 24th. Will the Doctor end the series on the ultimate cliffhanger, trapped in the land of fiction?
WHO KNOWS?
April 21, 2025 @ 2:54 am
Just wanted to mention I love what you did with the embedded image for the main page vs. this page.
Well, that and… we don’t seem to be discussion the heavy notes of “the show’s about to go away” too much.
April 21, 2025 @ 3:07 am
Two thoughts: 1. This is the best, in its 62 years, that Doctor Who has ever handled racism, and in a way that instantly demonstrates the fresh perspective that a fully POC TARDIS team brings to the table if done well, and 2. As a “2D” animation fan whose taste for “realistic” 3D character animation has dissipated into near-outright hostility over the last several years, the depiction of the 3D evolution of Mr. Ring-A-Ding as hideously over-detailed to the point of grotesquerie got a big laugh out of me. The choice to have him return to his 2D form as he transcended into pure light, disrupting his transformation, felt like a nice rejection of the pop culture notion that the telos of animation is looking realistic realism. The classic cartoon character goes out as himself, needing no upgrade.
Also: my word, the animation quality exceeded my rather demanding expectations. Bravo.
April 21, 2025 @ 3:55 am
I can’t believe all these positive reviews are real. This was by far the 2nd worst episode, only to be eclipsed by Sleep No More. Unfortunately a bigger budget and being in bed with Disney has cheapened the writing. Gone are the days where a shoe-string budget and a limited pool of people to cast from gave Doctor Who that roughness and edge that made it Doctor Who. This is Disney-Channel Who; chewed up, spit out, and packaged in the standard Disney-esque mindless gloss-over. RIP Doctor Who indeed.
April 21, 2025 @ 7:46 am
The bit where my mind broke was when the Dr Who logo appeared on the screen.
I had to pause it and shriek, gibber, caper and croon.
The utter audacity of this, the sheer insanity, sod breaking the fourth wall, this was kicking it down and scattering it to the four winds!
Utterly wonderful. I hope this season can maintain this momentum after last week’s wobbly start.
Nick W
April 23, 2025 @ 10:02 am
Same, only the thing that broke my mind was the fact that the logo went as far as to include the BBC logo above it. No idea why but actually seeing the BBC logo as a diegetic piece of the Doctor Who world was bizarre to me.
April 22, 2025 @ 8:25 am
Random other bits and bobs I noted since, that I don’t have much point to, just thought maybe someone might have something more interesting to work with it-
Things don’t exist in a vacuum and I feel in a modern context, the use of rubberhose in a “horror” context for children probably indicates the episode was influenced by the indie horror “Bendy” games. And in game connections, of course, there’s also Cuphead, which has brought rubberhose to the focus for a lot of modern audiences. Normally I’d be warier to assume connections here since it can feel very “it’s the thing I know” but considering last episode had a gamer character with mention of “incels” and a point made of how characters in the modern day are aware of pop culture (with Belinda knowing sci-fi time travel expectations) and the fan scene in this episode, Rusty is indicating an attempt and awareness of modern pop culture, internet, etc.
In a similar context, I also feel it’s likely not a coincidence to do a Scooby-Doo joke where the Doctor even says he’s Velma just a year or two after a controversial animated Scooby-Doo show where Velma was recast as a non-white character (just like this Doctor is now), and at that, overall the same ethnicity as the current companion, too.
April 23, 2025 @ 10:08 am
“Bendy” and “Cuphead” can also been seen as part of the same historic trend that gave us “Five Nights at Freddy’s” – all outdated things associated with childhood that have aged into items of horror, pushing them into the hauntological. Really interesting to see these types of texts spring up as a popular flipside to the current age of nostalgia we’re living in.
The bit where Mr Ring-a-Ding absorbs the Doctor’s regeneration energy and starts going 3D also seems to have a large debt to internet videos/memes of people making deliberately creepy “realistic” versions of cartoon character by ramping up the detail to an uncomfortable degree. Even though it’s about a 1950s cinema, this is perhaps the Doctor Who episode that’s most indebted to internet culture.
April 23, 2025 @ 2:25 pm
Oh wow, good point! Gatwa’s “I’m totally Velma” almost instantly became my favourite line read of him as the Doctor, and that’s probably part of the reason why. I didn’t see last year’s Velma, but I was certainly aware of the controversy since I’d already enjoyed about six or seven iterations of that franchise fromthe time I was a little kid.
April 23, 2025 @ 10:22 am
Disappointed by the lack of cartoon violence. I’d hoped that since Gatwa was introduced taking a hammer to the Tardis, that we might get a bit of graphic Looney Tunes slapstick, but hey ho.
April 24, 2025 @ 10:07 pm
Yeah, that’s a fair point – shame, the animators seem like they could have gotten some fun poses out of that.
April 24, 2025 @ 9:06 pm
They say that Doctor Who can do any kind of story, and now it has done Duck Amuck.
April 25, 2025 @ 12:44 pm
My wife bounced hard off of the introductory scene – the contrivance of moonlight bouncing off a spoon onto the film felt like too harsh of an entrypoint for her, but she came around. Though she’s very much on the side of “We need more stories that operate by ‘the rules’ in order to give the rule-breaking nature of the Pantheon its proper weight,” which is reasonable. I lean that way a little myself, though not as much since I’ve got so much more of the sixty years of mostly-rules-following content in my head to counterbalance.
Something I’be been thinking that was made explict in act 2: RTD is good at making the AUDIENCE feel clever. Both of these episodes did a really good job of telegraphing the resolution in a way that doesn’t spoon feed it to you, but allows you to feel good about yourself for working out the broad strokes of it ahead of time. To contrast with writers who craft intricate puzzle boxes designed to ensure the audience is surprised at the end, whatever the cost. (The fact that the fans complain about the ending being telegraphed, in this sense, ties in with the fact that they all identified a Moffat-written episode as their favorite, Moffat being the king of the puzzle box episode.)
April 26, 2025 @ 6:41 pm
I suppose aptly enough for an episode with the biggest ever fourth-wall-break of the series, I winced hard at “And I’m scared in case that means something really bad has happened in 2025.”