In last week’s Season 2 Premiere, Doctor Who hit us with a campy romp and a barrage of echoes from the past. This week, despite the fact that ‘Lux’ also cracked its Easter eggs with a sledgehammer, the metanarrative worked in service of a fresh and original story that established some of the most instant Doctor/Companion chemistry we’ve experienced in the New Who era. While the beautiful animation of cartoon-come-to-life, Mr. Ring-A-Ding (Alan Cumming, X2: X-Men United), offers a rotating door of set pieces, the true heart of this episode exists in the honesty and understanding that The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa, Sex Education) and his latest companion find together on screen (quite literally).
Last week, our introduction to Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu, Andor) felt a bit derivative of the the introduction to former companion Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman, New Amsterdam); it was alo easy to draw parallels to the mystery that surrounded The Doctor and Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson, Coronation Street) last season. This week, on the other hand, Belinda resuscitates the show with a breath of fresh air.
This isn’t a total surprise. While ‘The Robot Revolution’ didn’t quite land with this reviewer, Belinda was already a bright spot. She projected an easy air of confidence, and it was refreshing to see a companion so resistant to The Doctor’s charms and so ready to fight for agency and control. Every iteration of The Doctor deserves to be on the receiving end of a heavy eye-roll once in a while, but it would have been tough to sustain an entire season on sarcasm and pushback alone. ‘Lux’ threads the needle and provides the solid foundation of a companionship rooted in hope and mutual respect. Let’s see how they got there.
We pick up where we left off. Belinda is very insistent that this madman in a box figure out how to work his time machine properly so he can make good on his promise to return her home right away; it’s almost painful to watch The Doctor spin his wheels in a desperate attempt to work his charms on Belinda. His cheery insistence that everything is fine is not enough to soothe the sharp and savvy Belinda. It gets even more painful when he dodges Belinda’s very practical suggestion that they take the time machine to some sort of “garage” back on The Doctor’s home planet. He immediately falls back on lies and misdirection.
For a moment, this reviewer feared we were setting off on another round of empty repetitions of beats from the past: The Doctor lies, the companion slowly reminds The Doctor they have lost touch with humanity and emotion, The Doctor eventually opens up after making the companion work for it. New package. Same story.
Fortunately, this episode leans into its own self-awareness in a constructive way. First, The Doctor constructs a flashy sci-fi tripod which he calls a “vindicator.” Not only does it look snazzy slung over The Doctor’s shoulder with ’50s-rocker flare, but it establishes a solid justification for keeping the resistant Belinda on board the TARDIS. You see, the vindicator will send out a signal from a different point in time in order to eventually reel the TARDIS back to that pesky May 2025 date that keeps bouncing them away. Of course, they will have to make a few more stops in time (a few television episodes, if you will) in order to “triangulate” the signal.
Since she has to wait anyway, Belinda lets the Doctor rope her into another fun, high-octane costume change sequence reminiscent (nearly shot-for-shot) of a fun moment in Season 1’s ‘The Devil’s Chord.’ Once again, the costumes and makeup are on point. However you feel about the Disney era of Doctor Who, you have to admit that every look is a slay. As Fifteen puts it, “This is the fun bit, honey! The clothes!”
Meanwhile, 1952 Miami is under attack from an old-timey cartoon (Man? Pig? Man-pig?) named Mr. Ring-A-Ding. Of course, by the end of act one, we learn that he is actually a manifestation of Lux, the God of Light at the center of The Pantheon – “the glint in the eyes of the mad,” as he puts it. If you want to know more about The Pantheon, just check out the time this Pop Break reviewer made Bill Bodkin and Amanda Rivas of the Socially Distanced podcast sit through a full theory session on Doctor Who’s Pantheon of Discord:
Luckily for The Doctor and Belinda, their trip to 1952 Miami lands them in the middle of the night, where they benefit from the kindness of strangers and avoid the heaviest scrutiny they might have received in a heavily-segregated city. The Doctor is drawn to a cinema under heavy lockdown and immediately feels the need to investigate. Belinda is disturbed when she sees how eagerly Fifteen walks toward danger and she accuses him of being a real-life Scooby-Doo. Of course, he quickly sets the record straight: “Honey, I’m Velma.”
Nevertheless, when they learn that fifteen patrons went missing from the cinema and the mysterious projectionist has been playing film reels to an empty house for a few months, it sparks even Belinda’s curiosity. Of course, Belinda is a selfless helper, a nurse by trade. Curiosity alone is not enough to send her into the belly of the beast. Instead, a heart-to-heart with the desperate mother of one of the missing persons is what pulls Belinda on board. She can do without The Doctor’s showboating, but when The Doctor tells this mother that “hope can change the world,” Belinda is in.
While the call of mystery is a reasonable explanation for this adventure, Ncuti Gatwa offered an additional layer of analysis in the Doctor Who Unleashed behind-the-scenes featurette. As two people of color reduced to one dehumanized “other” in this setting, Gatwa suggests that the pair of time travelers, “would rather be in a dark cinema than outside facing the reality of 1952.” It’s a heavy point, and a reminder of The Doctor’s most compelling Season 1 moment: when the folks he saves in ‘Dot and Bubble’ reject him for the color of his skin. It will be exciting to see The Doctor continue to grapple with the influence of this new body on his ability to project power and privilege in his adventures on planet Earth.
Back inside the cinema, things get very weird, very quickly. After hearing some mysterious echoey clicking, Belinda asks if someone is “tap-dancing” at them. She is exactly right, it’s Mr. Ring-A-Ding!
I’m Mister Ring-A-Ding, I make your heart bells sing! Please don’t make me laugh, just take my autograph. Now take my jokes, my lovely folks, ‘cause I know just one thing! For I am he, oh yes! I’m Mr. Ring-A-Ding! ::jazz hands::
After The Doctor unlocks the hidden “harbinger” message in the cinema marquee, he realizes that this diminutive cartoon character is actually the manifestation of Lux, an all-powerful, reality-altering god who feeds off of light: “that beam of moonlight feeds my soul!” A series of flashbacks remind us of this entity’s connection to The Toymaker, Maestro, and Sutekh. The Doctor even reminds (new) viewers of the power of this evil superteam: “When these vast creatures deign to look down on us, our entire reality is in danger.”
Lux pays off this threatening introduction by promptly trapping Team TARDIS inside of a metaphysical nightmare prison. The Doctor and Belinda are reduced to two-dimensional cartoons: “Gosh, I’m all flat! And this waistline is impossible!” quips Belinda. The duo pay off an earlier gag from Mr. Ring-A-Ding about not expecting a backstory from a two-dimensional character when they realize that sharing their sadness and vulnerability loosens the hold of Lux’s spell. The Doctor admits that he is scared and shares the true story of his home planet. It’s refreshing to see him hit fast-forward on the process of honesty with his companion, and even more refreshing to watch Belinda take the lead in this process of mutual empathy. It endows her with greater depth and nuance than the kindly nurse persona she had been given up to this point.
The Doctor and Belinda fight to escape the film reel through a series of mind-bending metafictional trials culminating in a heavy-handed face-to-face meeting with metafictional fans of the BBC series Doctor Who. While it’s hard to knock the creativity of this decision within a reality-bending episode of television, the gag takes some light shots at obsessive fandom and needlessly fires up the rumor mill surrounding the future of Doctor Who at the conclusion of the second season of the Disney era. Nevertheless, Gatwa and Sethu look so effortless and cool posing in their 1950s regalia and sipping tea on a fan’s couch that this big swing helps solidify the swirling chemistry of our latest Doctor/Companion combination.
In the final act, the team manages to burn up the film and escape their alternate-reality celluloid prison. Lux attempts to steal The Doctor’s regeneration energy to build a physical body he can use to wreak havoc on Planet Earth. Luckily, in another metafictional nod, the solution to the problem has been written into the script from the start: they need to set the film ablaze to blow a hole in the wall and expose Lux to daylight. In theory, this sensory overload will be too much for even a god of light to control and manipulate.
After Belinda convinces the projectionist to help end this this little charade (Lux has been keeping him in line by manifesting a facsimile of his dead girlfriend), he blows himself to smithereens and blasts a hole in the cinema wall (à la the conclusion of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?). It turns out the metaphysical Doctor Who fan projections were right! Lux quickly gets high on his own sunlight supply and drifts off into the cosmos spouting some Nisargadatta Maharaj-inspired spiritual nondualism: I am nothing and I am everything.
With the immediate threat extinguished and the missing persons returned to reality, The Doctor and Belinda take to the TARDIS, but not before that pesky Mrs. Flood (Anita Dobson, EastEnders) shows up with a shit-eating smile to remind us (once again) that she seems to exist across all of time and space. We can pretty much expect to get these scenes every week until they finally reveal which lore they’ve cherry-picked to justify this enigma of a character in the Season 2 finale, so we’ll avoid getting tied up in theory corner for now.
Instead, let’s wrap this review with an exploration of The Doctor’s description of his own existence from early in the episode:”I have toppled worlds. Sometimes I wait for people to topple the world. Until then, I live in it and I shine.” This fascinating statement not-so-subtly ties our Doctor back to the baddie of the week, Lux. Similarly, last week, we saw The Doctor showcase some of the same controlling tendencies of the robo-incel monster that pestered Belinda through a wibbly-wobbly time fracture. While Whovians know how brightly The Doctor can shine, the show has always been just as fascinated with his capacity for darkness. This emotional pivot point continues to offer the possibility of a compelling thematic backbone for Season 2. Whatever lore-baiting explanation we ultimately get for Mrs. Flood, let’s hope that they use it to cash in on the rich thematic ground they’ve introduced in the first two episodes of the season.
Next week, ‘The Well’ looks like a spooky deep-space mystery episode, so be sure to freshen up those space suits before we hit up a creepy, abandoned space colony. We’ll see you then!
