Doctor Who: Lux

All in all, this was a pretty enjoyable outing for DOCTOR WHO–not quite a return to form per se but at the very least a step in the right direction. I find that the few complaints that I can muster boil down to some dodgy story beats and some thin characters. As a technical achievement, though, Lux is certainly the product of the series’ new inflated Disney+-backed budget, which it uses to good effect here. The effect works for the most part, outside of a few places where the animation is just a bit choppy (in particular when the Doctor and Belinda have become cartoons themselves).

For those strange people who may be reading this reaction before having seen the episode, a quick summary: continuing in his efforts to get new companion Belinda Chandra back home, the Doctor lands in Miami 1952, where fifteen people have mysteriously vanished inside a haunted moviehouse, one that’s been inhabited by a 1930s cartoon character come to three-dimensional life: Mr. Ring-A-Ding. That simple premise gets pushed to metatextual extremes as the Time Lord and his inadvertent companion cross swords with Ring-A-Ding, who turns out to actually be Lux Imperator, one of the mystical gods from beyond our universe that the Doctor accidentally invited into our reality back in the Specials.

Lux/Mr. Ring-A-Ding himself is wonderfully voiced by Alan Cummings, who is equally adept at humor and menace, and who modulates his performance so as to not veer into full-on scenery chewing. He’s an effective creation, one that must have required a considerable amount of extra effort as he was animated by hand throughout the episode. Less successful are pretty much everybody else in the guest cast: a heartbroken film projectionist, the counterboy at a neighborhood diner, and the mother of one of the missing film-patrons, all of whom are sketched quickly and performed a bit too broadly in an evocation of film performances of the era. This is a shame, because it’s the element that impacts on the believability of the enterprise the most–these characters all being so flat means that the stakes and danger veer in that direction, too.

The leads, though, are in fine form and seemed to be having a great time messing around both in the worlds of animation and in an evocation of the 1950s. Certainly, the wardrobe this time out is really great. And I thought it was appropriate that the show acknowledged the racism of the period (a time when spaces such as the Diner and the Projection House were segregated and not readily available to patrons of color) without it becoming a huge message in and of itself. The current WHO has sometimes struggled with letting the story lead viewers to a conclusion, feeling the need to hammer the point home a bit too much for my liking. Here, though, the balance is well maintained.

The big fourth wall break that happens halfway through was surprising and effective as well, though Lizzie, Hasan and Robyn are similarly characterized in the sketchiest of ways. I feel as though Russell had been better at doing this sort of thing in the past. In the case of this trio, however, that was part of the point. And the final callback to them at the episode’s end was another fun surprise.

It does feel, however, that we’re still very much in a John Nathan-Turner 1980s period for DOCTOR WHO, in that past a certain point, the drama and especially the sense of disquiet or menace is swept away by broad camp. That’s the tone of the series right now, so there isn’t any getting around it, and it’s a valid enough choice to make. But speaking for myself, I tend to prefer it when the show makes something ordinary into something creepy and disturbing, as it often used to do, and the characters all reacted to the situations with appropriate levels of seriousness. You need that verisimilitude to take the drama seriously. The bits that are meant to be sad or depressing somehow aren’t quite landing with effectiveness–chief among them in this episode being the longing of the projectionist for his dead wife. The whole of the climax turns on this emotion, and yet the character has been played so broadly that the moment feels like schmaltz rather than carrying the necessary emotion. It doesn’t sink the moment, but it does damage it a little bit.

But all that said, I enjoyed it well enough. Both Ncuti Gatwa and Varada Sethu were in fine form, and the relationship between their characters is growing quite nicely. From the jump, I’ve been more taken with Varada’s Belinda as she seemed a bit more lived-in as a character than previous puzzle box girl Ruby Sunday. She’s again used very well here, both as somebody who doesn’t really want to be a participant on this big time travel adventure and as someone who simultaneously can’t resist the wonder of finding themself decades in the past. And Ncuti is the Doctor at this point. I still wish he would hit the moments of darkness peeking through his character with a bit more intensity, but I’m not sure how much of his restraint on that front is a deliberate choice on the part of the production. It certainly feels like, since the Disney+ acquisition, the series has been reluctant to go as intense or as dark as it often used to. Most episodes, and this goes for this one as well, feel more like play than like drama. And that’s all right, if that’s what DOCTOR WHO needs to be at this moment in time, it’s completely within bounds. But I can’t help but feel that the intermix is yet a bit off.