Doctor Who goes angry in Lucky Day. Here, with a lot of spoilers, is our review of season 2 episode 4. Buckle up…
This review contains spoilers (last warning!) Our review of last week’s episode is here.
Blimey.
Given that at heart the Doctor as a character is supposed to be something of a pacificist (not a very successful one given the bodycount of 60+ years, but still), when it comes to do the more violent stuff, it’s traditionally left to companions and other organisations to come in. Torchwood and UNIT, therefore, get to do the dirty work, the Doctor tells them off for doing it. Rarely, though, have we seen it done quite like this.
Let’s set thing up before we get into it, then.
In the case of Lucky Day, what we have is a Doctor-lite episode where the absence of the Time Lord absolutely works in its favour. Gatwa’s Doctor is as alien to this episode as Batman was to the movie The Dark Knight Rises, in this case not even popping up in the middle to jolly things along. Bluntly, he’s not needed here.
Furthermore, there’s been a simmering anger bubbling away in the writing of this season run of the show, with showrunner Russell T Davies using a programme ostensibly aimed at children to punch upwards. But that proves to be the appetiser to what Pete McTighe has penned.
Continuing my policy of not reading synopses and avoiding next time trailers, I was nonetheless vaguely aware that Millie Gibson’s Ruby Sunday was back this time. I absolutely wasn’t expecting – for the second week running – what I got, though. Especially when in the early stages, there’s Ncuti Gatwa’s high energy Doctor playing with his vortex doo-dah, and Verada Sethu’s impressive Bel still wondering how the hell she’s going to get home.
But they’re not the focus. Instead, it’s a podcaster (whose podcast is listening to in UNIT, no less), someone tracking the Doctor, someone who met the Time Lord. And someone who, since his first encounter, has become radicalised.
This shift in perspective allows the steely tone of this current run to move firmly to the foreground, with 25 minutes or so at the centre of Lucky Day showing us a true modern-day monster as one of its foes.
Oh sure, there’s the traditional monster, the Shreek, but they don’t really exist, do they? They’re in the shadows, just special effects, fake news, woke nonsense.
More deadly is Conrad, the kind of antagonist who stalks online discourse, who preaches that black is white and white is black, that two plus two might not equal four after all. Clocking up the followers as he presents bile with a happy, smiling, friendly face, he’s as terrifying a monster I’ve seen in Doctor Who for a long time. Appreciating that Doctor Who is currently funded by a union between the BBC and Disney, I do wonder if the Beeb might throw it a few quid from its education budget as well. How many other family shows are willing to stare such toxicity face on?
Conrad is, after all, that person on the internet. The one who tells people what they want to hear, irrespective of truth, and it’s a terrific performance from Jonah Hauer-King that brings him to life. The sheer reasonableness of him. The true enemies don’t shriek at you, they appear measured and rational instead, and as soon as I saw where the episode was going (and it took a little bit of time to get there), I was gripped.
In terms of how Lucky Day is put together, it’s interesting that this wasn’t just Doctor-lite, it was Belinda-lite as well. Instead, exploring Ruby in the immediate aftermath of the Doctor leaving her life felt unusual and effective. We know the drill when we re-meet companions, that life after the Doctor is never quite the same. But Ruby feels particularly vulnerable, keen to talk, and willing to trust.
Fair does to Millie Gibson here, conveying a mix of loneliness, hope and ultimate heartbreak, and the pacing from McTighe’s script and Peter Hoar’s direction balanced momentum with a slow build well. Bonus points too for capturing a little bit of An American Werewolf In London in the pub scene, too (and let’s not overlook the nod to The Wicker Man.)
I do think the other standout though is Jemma Stewart’s Kate Lethbridge-Stewart.
Even before Conrad had the nerve to insult her late father, Kate’s tempered rage seems on the edge of bursting out of control. The peak of Lucky Day I’d suggest was when she appeared willing to let the Shreek be properly unleashed on Conrad, as his camera continued to blink at her. Had the Doctor been doing that, we know he’d had pulled back (and she acknowledges as such). What raised the dramatic stakes is that UNIT has a brutal side, and there was less certainty. Right to the point where one monster attacks the arm of the other.
Pete McTighe is overseeing the spin-off series The War Between The Land And The Sea that arrives later this year, and is widely assumed to be the last Doctor Who material in the Disney+ era of the show. On the evidence here, taking the Doctor out of the limelight and going for a series more focused on UNIT, we’ve got a treat ahead of us.
Lucky Day wraps up with the Doctor giving Conrad the moral of the story, which has all the appearance of going in one ear and out of the other. It appears to be at a point where Belinda isn’t in the TARDIS, too, and Conrad seems to have more knowledge than the Doctor on this matter. Add that to the mysteries list. Conrad doesn’t just have years of research about the Time Lord, he knows things in advance. Why? What’s going on there.
Also: the two possible sources of a leak into UNIT. We’re led to the character of Jordan, but I do wonder if there’s a little door left open regarding Ruby there too. Furthermore, what’s Mel doing in Sydney? A throwaway line that she’s dealing with something there, but lines like that have a habit of returning in the land of Doctor Who.
Tying up Lucky Day, it seemed inevitable in the end that Mrs Flood would basically recruit Conrad to her team. Not that there’s anything wrong with that as a dramatic choice of anything, but more because it took me a little bit away from what had been, into something more traditionally Doctor Who. I love traditional Doctor Who, but I also really loved the segue into an episode of concentrated rage.
Bottom line: I thought Lucky Day though was great. Bold, a resistance movement in its own way against the vileness online, and enhanced by both who was in it, and who wasn’t.
We’re half way through season two (grrrr, will always mumble about calling it that), and this run feels far more in its groove than the last. There’s no show doing what this is doing, for the audience that it’s doing it for. Let’s not talk it into oblivion, just because people like Conrad tell us to.
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