Doctor Who: Lucky Day

When the breakdown of this current season was first announced, this was the episode that I was the most concerned about. Given the premise of the season, this was definitely going to be a “Doctor-lite” episode, one focused on what had been happening in the life of former companion Ruby Sunday since last we saw her. As I said last time, I don’t know that I quite see the need to do Doctor-lite episodes given the current series was filmed over a year ago–if there was a scheduling conflict, surely there was enough tie to navigate around it. But I can tell that the production team simply liked actress Millie Gibson and wanted to build a vehicle by which she could still be a part of this second season. Plus, having built out a cast of supporting players for UNIT, this was a good place for them as well. The Doctor-lite episodes tend to be some of the most polarizing among fans–they either end up as stone cold classics like “Blink” or are endlessly decried in the manner of “Love and Monsters”. And I’m afraid this outing has more than a little bit in common with the latter.

Before this episode even begins, it’s got a pretty central problem: Ruby Sunday is one of the thinnest characters the show has ever fielded. She doesn’t have a personality so much as a list of facts about her past, and despite Gibson being game in the role, she never came together as a relatable and believable human being in the first season. She seemed to be more a plot device than anything else. So I wasn’t especially looking forward to her return, but my hope was that needing to focus on her for a more concentrated period of time would inspire Russell T. Davies and company to drill down to who she actually is. But that isn’t really what happened.

The episode starts off well enough, if a hair predictably, with Ruby going onto the podcast of Conrad, her soon-to-be new boyfriend who had a chance encounter with the Doctor back in 2007 and who has been obsessed with him ever since. Their relationship develops, and Ruby is finally beginning to move on from her time in the TARDIS and to re-engage with regular life. But all is not as it seems, and once the story turn comes around halfway through the episode, Ruby is left with no agency and no active participation in the rest of the story. She stands around slack-jawed and gets to react to the fact that the spotlight has shifted away from her and over to UNIT honcho Kate Stewart. Seriously, you could cut Ruby out of this episode in the back half, and pretty much nothing would change (apart from you needing somebody else to taser the Shreek at the end.) It’s a really strange choice.

But then, not so strange, as it repeats a move that the show has been making all season, and that’s sacrificing storytelling for point-making. Clearly, there’s something about the weaponization of information for personal gain that the production team wants to say something about here, but they way they go about it is incredibly heavy-handed and blunt. There isn’t a bit of subtlety to any of it, or even a whole lot of plot sense. So all of the characters start making choices that are, frankly, baffling. (What is Conrad’s endgame for his invasion into UNIT HQ? For that matter, how is it that one can sneak through the most secure alien-fighting facility in the world, bottom to top, just by having somebody let you in the emergency door? And given how dangerous it is, hwo is it in any way plausible for Kate to release the Shreek so that it will attack Conrad on camera, thus revealing the fact that he’s been lying. Even if it does that, how many lives, including her own, is she putting at risk by doing this? The creature isn’t simply going to humbly go back to its prison cell.) The script is at this point more interested in delivering its message than it is in maintaining any sort of coherent story logic. And maybe that would have worked–except that the script doesn’t even quite seem to know what message it wants to deliver, and so it wobbles all over the place, simultaneously too broad and too narrow in what it’s saying. So none of the climax works.

And the final scene, in which the Doctor shows up out of nowhere and takes Conrad into the TARDIS (in order to, what, admonish him?) is similarly nonsensical. Nonsensical and wrong-footed, as the character accomplished literally nothing, apart from delivering the end-of-G.I.Joe-moral to the story directly to the villain and to the audience. Ncuti Gatwa is good as usual, but it’s a painful sequence, because it’s written so poorly and makes no sense. It seems to only be there because somebody was concerned that maybe members of the audience wouldn’t get the point unless they were struck over the head with it.

I don’t know. I love this show, have done for decades now, and I’ve stuck with it even in the darkest of times, when it was a shell of itself and any hope of it recentering itself seemed like a longshot at best. But somehow, even in the hands of a showrunner who should have a much better grasp on what he’s doing, none of this is working for me. The deep heart of the series is missing, replaced by a series of poorly-constructed polemics that make me feel stupid even as I’m watching them. I’m a big believer in the idea that DOCTOR WHO is a show that can change to become whatever it needs to be at any given time, and that this sometimes means that the current iteration isn’t for a specific viewer. But I’ve never felt quite so much like that specific viewer was me. I don’t fundamentally disagree with any of the positions that the series is taking, what I object to is the fumble-fingered manner in which they’re being put across. DOCTOR WHO at its best is a smart show as well as a heartfelt show, and the current iteration is misfiring at both aspects. I don’t quite understand where the disconnect is, and so I can only conclude that this is the kind of DOCTOR WHO that Russell wants to be making in 2025. And that’s okay, that’s his right. But it is killing me by inches week after week.

And don’t even get me started on Mrs. Flood, who is repeating the Susan Twist beats from last season move-for-move. It feels so creatively bankrupt.

So, yeah. Not a fan of this one.