What’s The Episode? “Lucky Day”
What’s It All About, JG? The Doctor and Belinda land on Earth in 2007 to try and get another Vindicator reading and encounter Conrad Clark, a small boy the Doctor gives 50p to. An adult Conrad (Jonah Haeur-King) has another chance encounter with the Doctor and Ruby as they hunt down a Shreek, which he’s marked by as prey. We then move forward to reacquaint ourselves with Ruby Sunday as she is now. She’s decided to appear on a Doctor-related podcast hosted by Conrad and they start dating. Going to a village in the countryside for a romantic date, it seems like the Shreeks are attacking. Rubby calls in Kate Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) and UNIT but in fact, it’s all just actors in costume. Conrad thinks aliens, the Doctor, and UNIT are all fake because he’s a conspiracy nut and he’s trying to out them. This results in a scandal as he tries to discredit UNIT so UNIT are on the back foot. Conrad breaks into that flippin’ great UNIT HQ in London with the help of an inside man and tries to livestream the event and get Kate to admit it’s all fake. Instead, Kate sics an actual Shreek on him and he ends up with his arm bitten off (and reattached) before getting sent to jail. Where the jailer is Mrs Floor (of course). The Doctor bothers to turn up at the end to give a speech about how awful Conrad is and Conrad basically tells him to fuck off, then Mrs Flood apparently lets him out. The end.
Is It Any Good? Well, it’s not a patch on last week’s episode, that’s for sure. And while that doesn’t mean it’s all bad, there’s certainly plenty of areas it is and one of them is focussing on Ruby. Because Ruby has really cemented her position as the blandest companion of the New Who era (quite some achievement when Ryan is sitting right there) and it’s just hard to be that invested in her or what’s going on in her left. We have the unwelcome return of the trope that travelling with the Doctor must, by default, be damaging and that those who travel with him must be hurt by the experience. After companion after companion who gets abused left, right, and centre, climaxing with Clara’s appointment with the raven and Bill’s Cyber death/conversion, it was quite refreshing to have the Whittaker-era companions not be put through the same by-now-predictable wringer. But here we are, back at it again.
When Ruby and Conrad are in the country pub and a power cut has Ruby confess to Conrad that she might have PTSD, the whole thing is woefully unconvincing at least in part because Ruby, in fact, seems to have it fairly together. Her family life is happy, she’s apparently resolved the situation with her two mums, she’s tentatively starting to date again and on the whole, seems… fine. It’s also fairly unconvincing because Millie Gibson just isn’t a strong enough actor to convey the idea that Ruby might suffer from PTSD. Just saying the line isn’t enough. The writing doesn’t help her, to be strictly fair, but she can’t make Ruby look any more than mildly perturbed which isn’t conveying much of anything. And I guess she’s never heard of Graham’s little companion meet-up group that we see at the end of “The Power of the Doctor” if she needs help coping (a shame, that might have been a nice reference and, as Mel is part of that group, it’s easy enough to link Ruby to it. Ah well, another missed chanced).
And it’s a real shame because everything leading up to the pub and the reveal that Conrad has been using her is pretty good. It’s classic Doctor Who in the countryside – “73 Yards” is an obvious antecedent but so is everything from “Amy’s Choice” to ” Terror of the Zygons”. But it’s intriguing and engaging and it’s not at all clear how Ruby is supposed to cope with actual Shreeks when the Doctor isn’t around. Her calling in UNIT is consistent and works well and the reveal – that Conrad’s been faking it to discredit UNIT – is a good reveal. If Millie Gibson isn’t turning Ruby into a classic companion (and she definitely isn’t) then she’s not stinking up the joint either and Jonah Haeur-King as Conrad is terrific, delivering a great heal-turn as he goes from vaguely likeable normie to vicious conspiracy theorist and grifter.
Then the episode kind of falls apart. It’s both weirdly specific and strangely general in its approach and it’s to the episode’s detriment that it can’t quite pick one thing to focus on and do that. It wants to be about conspiracy theories. It wants to be about social media manipulating how people see the world. It wants to be about grifters saying anything to get support. It wants to be about radicalisation (though it’s not great timing to have Trinity Wells crop up and say, “fascism on the streets of Britain” given what’s going on contemporaneously in America right now). It wants to be about toxic masculinity. But all this stuff is forced into half an episode and there isn’t room for any of it to breathe. Conrad’s a great villain and an absolute piece of shit but by having him represent absolutely all of those aspects he also becomes a bit of a comedy over-the-top bad guy and it undermines some of the great work Jonah Haeur-King is doing in the role. “The Happiness Patrol” managed to get this balance right and it had people being executed by fondant surprise! (Strawberry of course – it is pink, after all.)
UNIT too are made to look pretty pathetic. Is this scandal really going to bring down an organisation like UNIT? Really? They’ve stood up to multiple alien invasions but some bloke with an iPhone can bring them to their knees? And one guy, one podcaster, manages to break into this hyper-secure location with a single insider helping him just so we can get to our Big Set Piece. Sure, Kate eventually lets him in to just get the whole thing over with (know how she feels…) but it’s weak sauce. I know their effectiveness has been variable over the years but this is just ridiculous. The actual set-piece is great and some of the best material Jemma Redgrave has been given but also do we have to go the “her father” well every time she’s on screen? We get it, she’s the Brigadier’s daughter – you don’t have to keep hitting the same note all that time! Still, Redgrave’s utterly furious delivery of, “Don’t you dare point a gun at her” is a brilliant moment and Kate’s decision to release the Shreek to take down and discredit Conrad as he livestreams is brutally effective.
But there’s also something vaguely unsatisfying about this. By the time we get to this point, Conrad’s become a cartoon bad guy who can only really get his comeuppance. The shots of scrolling hearts and emojis as the world watches is just a cliché by this point, has been done before (not least in “Dot and Bubble“, to say nothing of Black Mirror), and he’s made to be so obviously villainous – he’s a tax avoider, thinks someone in a wheelchair is a benefits scrounge etc – that it undermines what the episode is attempting to do with him.
The episode also doesn’t seem to consider that it might actually be valid to criticise UNIT in any way. I mean, what Conrad essentially does in the village isn’t much more than a You’ve Been Framed practical joke and as a result, a paramilitary organisation with little-to-no oversight (they’re not “United Nations” in the new series, no matter how often they mention Geneva) turns up, arrests them, throws them in unmarked vans and essentially would have disappeared them had there not been a public backlash. But it’s OK because it’s UNIT and the Brigadier etcetera. We know it’s alright because the author’s hand is glibly obvious and going for nostalgia but the episode can’t (or doesn’t) deal in shades of grey when it comes to UNIT so they are unquestionably the good guys, even when they’re visibly not.
(And just to be clear, “Kate going too far” does not amount to a meaningful criticism of UNIT. It’s a character moment for her, not an attempt to suggest that there might be a valid, systemic criticism of UNIT to be had. Indeed, UNIT has got to the point where they are practically incoherent – at this point, Torchwood makes more sense than this lot and they were a “secret” organisation that drove around Cardiff in an SUV with their name stamped prominently on it.)
So if the first half of this episode is a reasonable, if relatively unremarkable attempt at doing the whole companion-back-on-Earth thing, the second half tilts fully into politics it neither has the time nor the ability to deal with. It’s good to see the show trying to do something meaningful but “good to try” and “did it successfully” are not the same thing.
Would You Recommend It? Well, that’s the thing. This is a pretty entertaining episode. Not fantastic, or coherent in any meaningful sense but it does, at least in its first half, develop a sense of momentum. All the political stuff in the second half doesn’t really land but it’s not really dull, nobody’s bad on screen, and it is, with a squint and a soupçon of forgiveness, possible to see what it’s aiming for. So, recommendation isn’t straightforward.
One of the reasons for that hesitation is because of the absence of the Doctor. It’s bad enough having Doctor-light episodes in 12-episode seasons but this is only an eight-episode season, like the previous one, and we are again given an episode where the Doctor’s entire on-screen time barely makes it to 120 seconds. After Gatwa’s greatly improved performance last week, he struggles a bit with the speech at the end of the episode, which, given it’s his Big Moment in the episode, is unfortunate. It’s a very direct speech (to put it mildly – “Orphan 55” might find it a bit on the nose and it had the Doctor lecturing us down the camera lens) and Gatwa isn’t quite up to it. Not bad but not quite nailing it either. That’s intensely frustrating, and the fact that he’s replaced for the episode’s run-time with who-cares Ruby just rubs salt in the wound.
Because the other thing with Ruby here is that she has no arc. This is meant, at least in part, to be an episode about her and what happens to her after her time with the Doctor. But what happens is, “a few shenanigans she mostly appears to shrug off without that much bother”. It’s not that nothing here has no impact, it’s that it doesn’t have any impact on her. Ruby also has no real agency here either, which is equally frustrating. For the first half of the episode, she mostly gets manipulated by Conrad and in the second half, she mostly stands around while Kate gets on with the meat of the episode. She eventually steps in and tries to save Conrad, despite her better instincts, but it’s not much. There’s a nice moment where Kate gets referred to as her third Mum (the, “Are you collecting them?” is a great line) and certainly Kate’s defensiveness and strength put her in that role but it doesn’t amount to much. Ruby doesn’t really hold Kate to account, other than a few half-hearted, “No, don’t!” protestations and there’s a noticeable lack of conviction about Ruby as a character. For someone who’s meant to be at the centre of the episode… she isn’t really.
But again, she’s not bad. Millie Gibson gives the same performance she always does, which is thoroughly unremarkable but OK. Kate’s great. The rest of the UNIT gang are set-dressing at best. Though the little moment between Kate and Colonel Ibrahim where it’s implied she’s working late because she fancies him, is a nice beat and gives Kate some desperately needed depth beyond her job. There’s a few of those moments throughout the episode which, if not greatly significant in and of themselves, still manage to sweeten the whole thing. There’s also mention of Mel being unavailable because she’s heading to Australia (something to do with Between The Land And The Sea?) which isn’t expanded on but at least they bothered to remember that she’s part of this whole setup (and, it must be said, rather missed this time out).
I’m not really getting anywhere with whether I’d recommend it, am I? Oh look, to be honest, you can do a lot worse than “Lucky Day” in this era, and it’s a perfectly middling episode of Doctor Who. The good bits are fun, the bad bits don’t work in the slightest, and there’s an incoherence about it that stops it from congealing into anything particularly remarkable, or even good. But in the end, it’s difficult to be that harsh on it. It’s a glass-half-full/empty situation. If you’re inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt (because it’s trying to do well, even if it doesn’t land) then yes, take that as a recommendation. If you’re not inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt because this era sags badly and one not-bad episode doesn’t make up for lots of actually-bad ones, then don’t. In this case, I shall leave that judgment in your hands. Good luck.
Scores on the Doors? 6.5/10
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