Doctor Who is not the only television programme that could have an episode revolving around a cartoon character being brought to life and escaping the screen, while also hitting beats about the loss of a spouse, the loss of a child and racial segregation laws in 1950s America, plus mind-bendingly meta fourth-wall breaks about the impact and future of the show itself, but there aren’t that many of them.
This was an adventure where Ncuti Gatwa and Varada Sethu spent nearly all of their on-screen time together, as Belinda got to grips with accompanying the Doctor on his travels. The highs – getting to dress up in a posh frock – were levelled by the lows: being on the receiving end of racist police treatment for entering a segregated theatre.
Linus Roache put in an affecting bit-part turn as Reginald Pye, the man who, exposed to the power of Mr Ring-a-Ding, trapped himself in the cinema as the only means of reliving precious moments with his late wife. His zeal for setting fire to old film canisters at the end might have been quite stressful for veteran Doctor Who fans who still lament the BBC’s failure to preserve similar cans containing nearly 100 missing episodes from the 1960s.
The show has tacitly acknowledged its own fandom before, by effectively putting Ingrid Oliver’s Osgood character on screen in Doctor Who cosplay, but the extended fourth-wall break in Lux took it to another level. It was a scene that managed to move the plot on, and act as showrunner Russell T Davies’ love letter to what Doctor Who has meant to so many people over so many decades.
If there were any weaknesses, then Belinda could surely have run up those cinema steps faster when the Doctor was seemingly being dragged to his doom, and the resolution, as is often the case in this era, was a little hand-wavey. However, in its own way that was also quite moving, as Mr Ring-a-Ding grew into an “Ugly Sonic” version of the character, and then transcended space and time in a setup reminiscent of the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey
Sum it up in one sentence?
What if Doctor Who was like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, with the audience also in it …
Life aboard the Tardis
Maybe we overestimated the idea that the relationship between Belinda and the Doctor was going to be spikier than last year’s instant friendship between Gatwa and Millie Gibson’s Ruby Sunday. By the time they’d escaped being trapped as animations, these two were firmly in best buddy territory. This may be a factor of only having eight episodes a season instead of 13. The show doesn’t seem to have the space for a slow-burn build of trust these days.
Fear factor
Don’t make him laugh. Frankly, there may have been slightly too much revealed about Mr-Ring-A-Ding in the advance publicity, but him suddenly reprising the vocal motif of the Stooky Bill doll from 60th anniversary special The Giggle had at least been held back, and it was a genuinely jaw-dropping moment. Alan Cumming’s voice work trod a fine line between him being a malevolent godlike antagonist, and simply a fun-loving cartoon guy that had come alive by chance and just wanted to see the wider world beyond the auditorium, even if it did mean trapping people on celluloid along the way.
Mysteries and questions
We can be in no doubt that the show has veered far away from hard sci-fi and into the broadest of fantasy territories, as the Doctor faces a pantheon of gods that transcend the universe. Which god will he face next? And, right on cue, there was dear old Anita Dobson as Mrs Flood again, who had somehow also got herself to 1950s Miami in time for the denouement of the episode. We can expect to see a lot more of her …
Deeper into the vortex
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During the final season of classic Doctor Who, 1989’s flawed, baffling but brilliant Ghost Light featured a character who was also an eternal godlike being called Light. Played by John Hallam, he was attempting to catalogue all life on Earth, and getting incredibly frustrated about it selfishly insisting on evolving
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In extended media the Doctor has visited an entire cartoon world. Steve Lyon’s 2002 novel The Crooked World featured a cartoon Eighth Doctor on the cover and parodies of properties including Scooby Doo, Tom and Jerry and the Road Runner
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The Doctor calls Belinda Fred, and she calls him Velma, after the characters in Scooby Doo. Fred was also what the fourth Doctor threatened to call Romana when he deemed her full name – Romanadvoratrelundar – was too unwieldy to use in 1978’s The Ribos Operation
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When the fans were telling the Doctor that the sound of the Tardis brings hope, they were echoing the words Billie Piper said to John Hurt’s War Doctor in the 50th anniversary special, when as The Moment she told him: “You know that sound the Tardis makes? That wheezing groaning? That sound brings hope. Wherever it goes. To anyone who hears it, Doctor, anyone, however lost”
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Glass half-full ratings person? Last week’s The Robot Revolution was the second-most watched show on BBC One on Saturday. Glass half-empty? The overnight 2m viewing figure was lower than any episode in the previous season
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Questioned after the premiere screening for the season, Sethu said Lux was the episode she was most looking forward to people seeing, endearingly describing it as her “yellow dress moment”
Next time
Rose Ayling-Ellis! Ncuti Gatwa doing British Sign Language! In an episode that Russell T Davies has described as terrifying! We’ll see you next week down The Well.
