Doctor Who hits strong form with Lux, a clever, witty outing for Ncuti Gatwa and Varada Sethu, from the pen of Russell T Davies. Review here.
This review contains spoilers. Our review of the previous episode is here.
I’m still trying to go into as many Doctor Who episodes as blind as I can at the moment, knowing the episode title at most, and trying to avoid next time trailers, or reading synopses. I did, however, know that Lux was to feature an animated character, and my head was mildly torn. Was this the money poured into the show since Disney popped along unlocking an idea that’s been bubbling around? Or did the money come first, and the idea second?
45 minutes later, I’m firmly voting for the former.
Lux comes from the pen of Russell T Davies, and I’ve heard him at Doctor Who launches talking about ideas he’s had for episodes before, that he didn’t have the resources to realise. This may well have been one of them.
In the case of Lux, it hinges on an animated character, Mr Ring-A-Ding. Voiced by Alan Cumming, Davies then throws in a bit of movies such as The Purple Rose Of Cairo, Last Action Hero and The Ring, as things go awry in 1952 Miami.
The Doctor and Bel arrive at a cinema this time, but not before highlighting the importance of 24th May 2025. Coincidentally, the day this season of Doctor Who comes to an end, but also a day that the TARDIS can’t access. The long journey to get Bel home thus involves what I think was called a vortex vindicator (only watched this once, should have written that down), and it basically sounds as though the pair are having to get to a point in time via the back door.
The stop off in 1952 also involves a quick change in the extensive TARDIS wardrobe, but after the hugely enjoyable Scooby Doo references (and, to a degree, structure), it’s off for a coffee at an American diner. And then a trip to a gorgeous-looking cinema, complete with curtains and a well-behaved audience. Science fiction, eh?
This is where Mr Ring-A-Ding comes in, complete with an earworm of a jingle, and this is also where the episode accelerated.
Russell T Davies’ imagination gets crossed with a ripping up of the rulebook, as the animated Lux crawls out of a cinema screen, in a genuinely superb and quite spooky moment. It leaves Ncuti Gatwa and Varada Sethu left staring at a screen with shock in their eyes, and that’s a box the pair of them happily tick. Not too long later, they’re both animated characters themselves, and while cinema has done this before (I keep thinking of a not very loved film called Monkeybone), Doctor Who hasn’t. There are so many ideas swirling here, and really well executed ones too. Love to see it.
Behind the headline grabbing of Mr Ring-A-Ding, pull the covers back a little and what also aids Lux enormously I think is it’s quite a contained episode. Primarily centred around a single location – apart from the bit I’m coming to in a minute – there’s a puzzle to solve, a threat to face, and a whole bunch of people locked away in celluloid. They’d have stayed there too if it hadn’t been for the pesky meddling time travellers.
Just when I began to think the plot was coming to the end of its road, though, a rug pull.
I’m not quite sure whether you can call the appearance of Steph Lacey, Bronte Barbe and Samir Arrian as a trio of Doctor Who fans a mere breaking of the fourth wall (it feels like an absolute trashing of it!), but again, it doesn’t really matter. Seeing the Doctor and Bel confront three fans who are, well, waiting to watch Doctor Who was and is tremendous fun. You’re also getting Davies talking to some of Doctor Who's critics and fans as well, and, well, it’s nerd gold.
And yeah, I love Blink as well.
This whole sequence reminded me a tiny bit of Remembrance Of The Daleks from the 1980s, where a television is just about to start showing the first episode of Doctor Who. In that instance, the camera cut away just as the continuity announcer was about to voice the name of the show, the production team presumably thinking that was about as far as they could push it. No such shackles this time, though. Here, we get the logo and everything. And! A mid-credits bonus as well!
It takes something to steal the limelight from an animated character in a Doctor Who episode, but this trio may have managed it. Davies to gets to have his metaphorical cake and eat it, by at one stage effectively deconstructing the plot of his own episode. What other show could do something like that, with such confidence?
It’s worth too acknowledging the broader glue to the rest of the series, and the season before too. I did wonder when Mr Ring-A-Ding appeared if we were a little back in the territory of The Toymaker after a while, and then he gets a namecheck and appearance, as do Maestro and Sutekh.
Then, of course, the Harbinger name returns again, with a bonus appearance – in a different outfit and piece of time – from Anita Dobson’s Mrs Flood. My recent attempts to thread some of this stuff together haven’t gone amazingly well, but there’s a jumble of ideas and plot threads in there.
One side note too: the bit where we get the line ‘hashtag RIP Doctor Who’ must have been written some time ago, but arrives at a point where speculation about the show’s future is pretty rampant. Accidental, or have we got a bit Inside Number 9 here, and the speculation about the programme’s next steps is actually a plot device? A long shot, but after this episode, I’m ruling nothing out.
But back to what we got. I had a blast with Lux, one of the most downright enjoyable episodes of Doctor Who under the new Russell T Davies era. There’s still steel to it – segregation in cinemas absolutely doesn’t get a pass – and a lot of fun (the Galaxy Quest namecheck absolutely on point). Also, a really good central idea, realised really well. People are talking down this current era of Doctor Who as if it’s not an eruption of ideas, and as if a lot of impressive ideas haven’t happened. I think you can talk things into oblivion sometimes, and I do wonder if as fans, we need to hoist stuff like this on our shoulders instead. Funny, a bit scary, and utterly rewatchable, if Doctor Who does go into storage after this series, I for one am going to miss it.
I didn’t know what I was getting when the episode started. When it finished? I wanted to watch it again straight away. Looking forward to next week already. But closed my eyes for the preview…
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