What’s The Episode? “Lux”
What’s It All About, JG? The Doctor and Belinda arrive in 1950s Florida, where people have gone missing at the local cinema. They investigate and discover that the projectionist, Reginald Pye (Linus Roache) is still inside, playing movies to an empty theatre. Inside the theatre, they are terrorised (allegedly) by Mr Ring-a-Ding (Alan Cumming), an old-timey cartoon who is actually Lux Imperator, the god of Light. After faffing about in an animated section and a metatexual section, they escape back into the real work. They manage to defeat Lux by having Reginald Pye use a bunch of celluloid to blow a hole in the back of the cinema, let in lots of sunlight, and then Mr Ring-a-Ding just sort of drifts away (rather like the point of this episode) and the missing people are all restored.
Is It Any Good? As with “The Devil’s Chord” being better than “Space Babies“, without necessarily being good in its own right, it’s certainly better than “The Robot Revolution“. Damning with faint praise? Well maybe, though this is also better than “The Devil’s Chord”, even if that’s not saying an awful lot.
One thing which this episode isn’t short of – and which makes it a welcome step up from the season opener – is ideas. They’re absolutely all over the place and it’s good to see that there’s some kind of thought gone into including as many ideas as is possible. But, also as with the season opener, they’re deployed at such speed, and with such little care, that there’s very little time to consider them or have any real attention paid to them within the episode and as a result, many of them simply don’t land.
Take the “cartoon section”, where the Doctor and Belinda are turned into (somewhat ahistorical-looking) Hannah-Barbera cartoons. That’s a cute conceit that… well, in the end, conveys nothing. It’s a fairly short section and there’s something all-too-appropriate, if a clearly unintentional self-critique, that the only way the Doctor can obtain “depth” is by being a bit sad. Kind of says it all. It doesn’t really tell us anything new about the situation – we know they’re trapped in Mr Ring-a-Ding’s world – and it doesn’t tell us anything new about the characters, other than the way they rather shallowly equate “depth” with a bit of angst. It fills a few minutes of screen time and it’s certainly not quite anything we’ve ever seen on Doctor Who before but it mostly seems to exist to shout, “See what we can do now?” There’s an interesting idea here but it rushes past and ends up being so lost in trying to be “clever” it never actually manages to be, you know, clever.
The “meta” section, where the Doctor meets the Doctor Who fans is very similar. You need some really clever writing to pull this off and, sadly, that’s not what we get. Presumably, this is meant to be a warm and loving tribute to the fans but in fact comes across as rather unpleasant – spiteful, even. This section essentially tells us that Doctor Who fans only exist when they are either watching Doctor Who or talking about it – when they aren’t, they literally don’t exist. If they don’t have Doctor Who in their lives, they’re nothing. And of course, they’re dressed in merch and look a bit geeky and sad. My, how terribly affectionate. The whole sequence is ghastly and then, just when you think that’s it, Murray Gold parps up some “heroic” music while they tell the Doctor to get on with it. Was this meant to be sarcastic? If so, it doesn’t work. I’m not the biggest fan of “Love and Monsters” but at least that is genuine and warm and ditto the clichéd but also generally affectionate Osgood. The whole section desperately needs more time to breathe and more thought put into it – I’m sure RTD didn’t mean to be spiteful to fans (well, maybe after the reaction to Sutekh’s disastrous return….) but it still came across that way anyway.
Still, one thing that’s genuinely impressive is Mr Ring-a-Ding himself. The character might not (quite) be of the right animated era but the technical achievement in bringing him to life is genuinely impressive. He looks appropriate when on the screen but once he leaves the screen and is interacting with the Doctor and Belinda in the real, 3D universe, it’s quite remarkable. The show makes it look entirely effortless too – he simply exists in the same space as the Doctor and Belinda and you don’t think twice about it when watching it, which is a real achievement. And the way he becomes more and more sold, and more and more grotesque while absorbing the Doctor’s energy, is equally as impressive. All their interactions with him are perfect and the whole production at that point is simply amazing.
As a character, and as one of the so-called “Pantheon”, he’s less impressive though. The idea of a creature made of light is a fascinating one but the episode doesn’t really do much with it, as such. Yes, he can trap people in celluloid but hey, even a Torchwood villain could do that, you don’t need to be a god for that to be impressive (though fair enough, the Torchwood episode – by TV God himself PJ Hammond, was about as good as that series ever got and is well worth a watch). We get a brief flashback to the Toymaker, Maestro, Sutekh and the previous gods we’ve met (ill-advised, perhaps, since none of them are knock-outs or worth being reminded of) but we learn next to nothing about Lux nor his motivation. We find out he’s bound by rules the same way the other gods are (he has to complete his ring-a-ding song if started, giving the Doctor and Belinda a chance to leg it) but in the end, he’s a god of light defeated by… more light? The whole solution is to just bathe him in sunlight until he expands so much he apparently vanishes. That’s the same way Badgey was “defeated” on Star Trek: Lower Decks! At least there they were taking the piss…
So once again, we’re left with the conclusion that “good” is stretching it. As always, too many ideas are preferable to too few but at this stage, and in common with the bulk of the Chibnall era, the real thing that’s missing from the episodes is someone to act as a script editor for the showrunner.
Would You Recommend It? Not personally, though it seems to have been well-received outwith this reviewer’s opinion, which is nice. And a bit surprising. Like I mentioned, this isn’t terrible while still not being all that enjoyable or good but the sense that it should just be better still lingers over this whole era and “Lux” is just another entry into that column.
You’ll have noticed that I’ve not said much about the Doctor or Belinda so far. That’s because there’s not a lot to say here. Gatwa is fine and though the vocal tic of “babes” or “honey” is becoming tiresome, he’s presumably saying what’s on the page so can’t entirely carry the can for that one. We get another reference to him being the last of the Time Lords during the animated section of the episode, which is dull (and I feel the need to stress again, simply because it’s now very funny, that the Doctor is, in fact, the first of the Time Lords) but apparently adds depth to him because he’s sad thinking about that. Good to know all that “free of angst” stuff stuck then… But otherwise, he gets a couple of great moments – identifying the cop as from NYC and so realising he and Belinda are still in Mr Ring-a-Ding’s reality is an excellent moment from him, and he gets a couple of nice beats in the diner too.
One of the criticisms of diverse casting in the pre-Jodie era from idiots and/or bigots was always, “Well how are they going to deal with the Doctor being non-white/a woman if they travel back in history, eh?” as if this was some kind of amazing gotcha. And of course, the answer always was, and continues to be, “Well, just fine actually.” Jodie dealt with it well in episodes like “The Witchfinders” and now Ncuti gets to deal with it just fine in an episode like this. And thankfully, it’s not too heavy-handed. The Doctor acknowledges that he and Belinda are in a period of American history where segregation is still in force and it’s touched upon often enough to be a meaningful part of the episode but not so often as to become overbearing or hectoring. Just as Yaz was misidentified as “Mexican” by a racist cop in “Rosa”, so Belinda is identified as “Caribbean” in the same way. It’s a great little beat and a nice underscoring of the racist attitudes of the time without laying it on too thick.
But then again, that’s what makes “Lux” such a frustrating experience to watch and ultimately difficult to recommend. Because there definitely are moments here that are good. It’s just that they get swamped out by so much of what surrounds them. I mean, realistically there are almost no other characters in this other than Mr Ring-a-Ding and he’s, you know, a god whose motivation is sketchy at best. The boy who works behind the counter is a boy who works behind a counter, the mom whose son is missing in the cinema is a mom whose boy is missing in the cinema. That’s pretty much it.
The closest we get to an Actual Character is Reginald Pye, the projectionist who is manipulated by Mr Ring-a-Ding by having his dead wife appear from celluloid. He’s not bad, and Linus Roache is fine in the role, given a relatively limited amount of backstory. But even then, we spend so little time with him it’s difficult to be all that invested. His missus tells him to help the Doctor in the end because it’s the Right Thing To Do, and he does, and that’s that. The most striking part about that section is the burning of the celluloid to cause an explosion, an image that has a lot of resonance for those of us who still mourn missing episodes from the archives.
So Lux floats off to commune with Badgey or something at the end, the people in the cinema are restored for reasons (best not to ask) and of the Doctor and Belinda fly, with just enough time for Mrs Flood to turn up for yet another nudge-nudge cameo. So that’s all nice. It’s just also all fairly unsatisfying. All of the “clever” bits of the episode have been done by other shows and, damningly, done better by other shows. This is an episode that desperately wants to be clever, whether it’s the fans in the meta-section telling the Doctor that everyone’s favourite episode is “Blink” or the “clever” defeat of Lux or whatever but it’s just not clever enough to pull that off and that leaves the whole thing rather unenjoyable and one gets the feeling the writer had a lot more time creating this that the audience get to have watching it. And as for the animated section, Supernatural did it better, more convincingly, in a more sustained fashion, with more emotional resonance, and likely for about a quarter of what this episode cost. Which isn’t a great recommendation for the Disney era, really.
Scores on the Doors? 6.5/10
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