Doctor Who‘s had a bigger budget in the last few years than it’s arguably ever had thanks to the BBC’s team-up with Disney, and with that has come the capacity for some really big ideas delivered with a glitz and glam the show could only otherwise have dreamed of. This week, “Lux” sees an incredible Doctor Who idea that could arguably only be best executed with this kind of financial backing… so it’s unfortunate that that idea is heaped under a wild tonal mess.
“Lux” is largely set in 1952 Miami, where the Doctor and his reluctant companion Belinda find themselves shunted to when the Doctor tries to find a way around the TARDIS’ unwillingness to return to contemporary Earth. Of course, as with any good Doctor Who story, their arrival is conveniently timed: they land right on the doorstep of a locked up cinema, a location where a group of moviegoers mysteriously vanished months prior, amid claims that the cinema is now haunted as its caretaker still plays the movies every night.
Before the Doctor and Belinda get their own investigation underway—with a little fun push and pull between the duo as Belinda, eager to get home, relents to the Doctor’s usual curiosity—we’ve already learned that the reason for the disappearance. It’s the star of “Lux,” the mysterious Mr. Ring-a-Ding (played by the delightful as ever Alan Cumming, in a very different tone from his turn as King James in “The Witchfinders”). A classic cartoon character from the movie pre-show reels magically brought to life by the light of the moon, Mr. Ring-a-Ding hasn’t just gained awareness of his animated existence, but been suffused with the power of the mysterious pantheon that has been haunting the Doctor ever since the 60th anniversary specials: and also, the power of a fully-armed-and-operational Disney-backed budget.
© BBC/DisneyMr. Ring-a-Ding looks incredible. Who makes full use of just how much it wants to show that it can pull off this 2D character in a real space with plenty of panning and tracking shots that are lots of fun. It only gets better when the Doctor and Belinda encounter him up close, whipping around so we can see just how good, and intentionally discordant he looks in the real world. He is more than just razzle and dazzle too—Cumming embodies Ring-a-Ding with a delectable menace, a creepy, vindictive grotesquery that immediately begins using his godlike powers to play with the fabric of the world, and the episode itself. It is such a shame then that once he really begins doing so is when “Lux” goes a little bit too wild for its own good.
Once Ring-a-Ding catches up with the Doctor and Belinda, and zaps them into his former home behind the screen, “Lux” just starts flinging idea after idea at you and never giving many of them time to sink in. First, the Doctor and Belinda find that they’ve been flattened into animated beings, and have to escape by admitting fears and insecurities that slowly give them literal and narrative depth until they return to normal (ironically, somehow, this process ends up looking worse than anything the episode does with Mr. Ring-a-Ding). Then, suddenly, they’re physically yanking themselves through strips of film reel to try and break through the screen. Then they think they’ve made it out, only to be confronted by a faux-reality that comes with a side-order of the specter of Temporal Racism that’s brushed over as quickly as it is brought up.
© BBC/DisneyAnd then, just as suddenly, they find themselves falling out of the TV of a group of Doctor Who fans, realizing that they themselves, despite protestations, are characters in an episode of a TV show. This one is admittedly brilliant—it could sustain a whole episode in and of itself, and Russell T Davies is clearly having a hoot writing one meta gag about Whovians after the other. But then it has to become an overwrought emotional existential crisis when the Who fans realize they’re going to pop out of meta-narrative existence almost as soon as they arrive on screen, just in time for the Doctor and Belinda to get back, get captured by Ring-a-Ding again, and then defeat him by basically suffusing him with so much light (via the impending sunrise and some explosive celluloid) he transcends into nothingness. Episode over, people saved, everyone’s happy! Phew.
It’s hard to state just how quickly all of this happens, and that rush to bounce between all these ideas—and the tonal whiplash that comes with that rush—means that none of them actually get to sit within the story for long enough actually feel like you’re engaging with anything at all. It immediately becomes narrative noise, things flying by you incoherently, until it’s suddenly time for the grand finale and you’ve lost track of half the episode. It feels especially egregious since not sitting with some of these ideas leaves what should be serious, dramatic moments utterly weightless.
© BBC/DisneyDoctor Who has done both companions and its protagonist experiencing racial discrimination before, but the way “Lux” treats it so half-heartedly by having it raised in a brief scene (one that’s ultimately a gotcha to key the Doctor and Belinda that they’ve not escaped Ring-a-Ding’s world yet) here feels like it was on a checklist to tick-off on the Big List of Things to Do with Doctor Who‘s first entirely non-white TARDIS team. The meta-idea of the Doctor getting to learn Doctor Who is a TV show could, as we said, sustain a whole episode with its juiciness, but here it becomes a rapid-fire set of gags turned into an immediate faux-poignant existential crisis for a group of characters we met a minute ago and are suddenly expected to be teary-eyed about moving on from (a hesitancy the story itself does not share, considering how quickly it peels off anyway).
But most disappointingly is that this messy rush through so many different beats and ideas also means that “Lux” effectively speedruns its way to a conclusion for one of the best new elements this season of Who introduced: Belinda’s reticence to be the Doctor’s willing companion. “Lux” clumsily and messily treats this arc pushing Belinda to a place of trust with the Doctor as poorly as it does the myriad other ideas it rushes through. It tries to lay the groundwork with a bit more deft than other elements of the episode, certainly—the aforementioned animated scene of the Doctor and Belinda that requires them to give themselves depth sees them admit to each other that they do have common ground.
© BBC/DisneyThe Doctor can never return to Gallifrey (again, for now, et cetera) because his world and people were destroyed, Belinda can’t return to Earth because some dire incident is preventing the TARDIS from doing so, and they’re both scared and upset by this. But even beyond that because the episode is so tonally scattered, by the time that Belinda is crying out that she completely and utterly trusts the Doctor by the climax of the episode you don’t really feel like there’s been time for that to have been an arc for her to go on. And, in the process, you’ve completely got rid of a really fascinating point of tension that the show, and Ncuti Gatwa and Varada Sethu themselves, were mining for all its worth in the premiere.
Of course, with a show that is meant to be as joyous as Doctor Who is beneath the monsters and the screaming, it would be pretty difficult, and possibly pretty miserable, to ask us to tune in every week and watch someone who doesn’t want to be here, well, be here. Belinda being at peace with adventuring in Time and Space at some point was going to be an inevitability. But not only is it worth asking if it had to come this soon: it’s worth asking if “Lux” was the kind of episode that felt even capable of giving that beat the time it deserved.
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