Doctor Who Reviews: "Lux"

“Lux” is an episode very much intended to be a counterpart to “The Devil’s Chord” from last series. It is structured very similarly, acting as the first time travel adventure for a new companion, involves art in some way as a central tenet, a broad comic villain (and in this case both are brazenly connected), and endeavours to be experimental in form to the point of breaking the show’s conventional reality logic. And I suspect like the former episode, this too will go over contentiously with the fandom.

Really though it is an episode that gets by on its technical impressiveness more than its storytelling or themes, both of which are fairly mild and boilerplate for Doctor Who. Nothing terrifically surprising happens in terms of the Doctor and Belinda’s story, even the more serialized components to the episode  connecting with shows from last series don’t carry much severe or lasting drama. Russell T. Davies’ script has its notable blemishes too, as it zeroes in emphatically on a gimmick of deconstruction to a fault. And yet the episode is an exercise in fun visual experiments, and on that level it is quite intriguing and successful.

The principal effect of the hour is its villain, Mr. Ring-a-Ding, who happens to be a cartoon character. Voiced by Alan Cumming, he is introduced at the top of the show as a figure in a Fleischer-style short playing at a movie house in 1952 Miami, who suddenly is able to talk to the people in the audience before stepping through the screen himself and terrorizing the moviegoers. He’s a pretty fun design, a bug-like figure with a pig’s nose, lanky limbs, and those classic cartoon eyes of early Mickey Mouse shorts. Though he appears to be inspired more by the derivative Cuphead video game, which uses a cleaner aspect of that old-fashioned style.

We don’t know exactly what went down when the Doctor and Belinda arrive. Picking up for them right where the last episode ended, the Doctor and Belinda are still unable to get back to May 24th 2025 and so the Doctor fashions together a Vortex indicator (or “Vindicator”) which can possibly hook onto that point in time and space from another -he compares it to fishing, and it appears that this is going to be the device used to keep them travelling to new places while searching for a way to get Belinda home. And so they land in 1952, which Belinda is curious about in spite of herself and they undergo a fashion makeover (in exactly the same framing the Doctor and Ruby did in “The Devil’s Chord”) before stepping out and finding themselves confronted with this mystery. The theatre has been shut down for weeks and the Doctor is of course driven by the reported disappearance of fifteen people within it.

A visit to a nearby diner -segregated, as a reminder to the audience of the time and place, though an exception is made- yields some of the information we already know while subtly conveying through Belinda’s eyes the Doctor’s earnest character. There are some tender moments, especially in the talk with the mother of one the missing, and how seeing the police box gave her hope. It’s a brief but important beat for Belinda later in the episode with regards to her changing feelings about the Doctor. Begging to be allowed to stay and look into things even as they don’t have to, the Doctor takes a relenting Belinda with him to break in, where the projectionist Reggie Pie (Linus Roache) is still inside rolling film continuously.

Here they meet Mr. Ring-a-Ding, and are naturally compelled by his being a living cartoon. And it is quite neat to us as well, as you can feel the Who Framed Roger Rabbit techniques being applied in how Ncuti Gatwa and Varada Sethu interact with this character, who evokes that film likewise in just his old-school personality and the boisterous energy of Cumming’s performance. The animation is just as lively as well, with some really sharp little touches of classic cartoon tendencies that demonstrates both the detail and love for the format expressed here by the animators. In speculating on the tangibility of Mr. Ring-a-Ding, the Doctor concludes he is made of light itself,  and the figure then promptly reveals himself to be Lux Imperator, the God of Light and part of the same family as the Toymaker, Maestro, and Sutekh.

The Doctor and Belinda manage to escape into the projection room where they meet Reggie, who has become a servant to Lux due to the God having preserved his late wife on celluloid -when he plays that film she is alive again, at least for a while; and this is exactly what Lux did to those theatre patrons, now trapped as mere images of light on a film reel. Reggie’s tragic backstory and reasoning for being a minion isn’t very interesting, but it makes for an excuse at another compelling visual, as he in flashback watches the black and white image of his wife step out of the screen and dance with him, turning to colour as the camera moves. She gains physical dimension, though the Doctor and Belinda soon lose it when Lux catches them and, turning the camera of his animated short on them, reduces the two to mere images on a film reel.

Animated images on a film reel, which is quite fun. If you ever wondered what a 1970s Doctor Who animated series might look like, “Lux” provides the answer. Set up cutely enough by Belinda’s earlier comparison of the Doctor to Scooby-Doo (he insists he’s Velma, he’s actually Fred), it’s a charming sequence of self-commentary -which the episode will wring more of for the next twenty or so minutes. Indeed, the plotting and momentum slows here (it’s a while before we see Lux again) as Davies and director Amanda Brotchie just prod at the context  and push the show’s structural limitations. The Doctor and Belinda realize that opening up gives them more dimension, makes them “well-rounded” -a fair enough nonsense excuse I suppose. As the Doctor tells her the truth about Gallifrey, he morphs into a steadily broader 3D approximation. While obviously I take issue with the underlying conceit that 3D animation being “closer” to reality makes it richer in substance, the rendering here isn’t bad, the style actually quite sharp; and eventually of course live-action Doctor and Belinda pop out of their animated shackles, albeit still against a cartoon backdrop. It would have been nice to see them actually interact with that world (Mr. Ring-a-Ding had a lady friend who could have made an appearance), but I imagine that would have stretched thin an already ambitious budget. Instead, they pull themselves creatively out of the reel, standing in a blank space and attempting to pierce through the screen just as Mr. Ring-a-Ding had done. But of course this screen happens to be the one you are watching on.

One of the strange markers of this new Doctor Who era has been Davies’ gleeful teasing of meta references and breaking the fourth wall, something typically uncommon of the show up to this point. In this episode, he literally tears it down, the Doctor and Belinda approaching the screen directly looking right at you as they push on it before bringing down the film and crawling out of a television set (amusingly composed to look like they might actually be doing it), and then finding themselves in the living room… of a trio of Doctor Who fans.

This bit of the episode is the most conceptually extreme, making the Doctor and Belinda fictional characters in the context of their own show for the sake of a short though not inconspicuous self-referential love-fest. These fans decked out in a fez, a scarf, shirts sporting images of a Cyberman and the Meep (shrewd product placement that might not otherwise be allowed from the BBC), and a sonic screwdriver. They are of course immediately all over the Doctor and Belinda as their favourite characters come to life. It is awkward, there’s no way around it -as Davies concocts avatars of Doctor Who fans as he both interprets and would like to see them. They are gawky and geeky, educated in the series’ lore and overly eager to talk about it -clearly drawn as mild social outcasts who have found family with each other through the show. I’m sure that this comes from real sentiments Davies has heard from fans, but it is still in its way a stereotypical image of what Whovians are in the modern age -especially in the small ways it centres merchandise as a hallmark of fandom, which in this context feels a bit icky.  They’re eager to talk about the show with the Doctor, and there is an amusing bit where they all agree their favourite episode is “Blink” in spite of the suggestions the Doctor puts forward of more recent episodes that feels like Davies airing a perhaps tongue-in-cheek frustration that so many fans’ favourite episode of Doctor Who is one he didn’t write. But the whole sequence can’t escape its self-congratulatory tone, even as Davies includes apparent critiques of his own writing -it is the fans who reveal how the Doctor must resolve this based on “obvious” foreshadowing earlier in the episode. For the sake of the show’s own coherence, it’s good that this is walked back by the fans revealing themselves to be fictional -a trap by Lux- and the Doctor and Belinda real. They free them from their reality, apparently ‘dying’ in the process, prompting the first real emotional reaction from this Doctor (and Belinda) to feel entirely cynical; before he and Belinda realize they must let the reel burn as a way of escaping it.

Catching up with the narrative again, they confront Lux who reveals his desire to exist in the real world multi-dimensionally, not confined by the light of the theatre, and decides to use the Doctor as a conduit of energy. His film strips bind the Doctor in front of the projector, which harnesses his powerful regeneration energy into Lux, who grows bigger and uglier off of it. He turns 3D, a dimmer iteration of his former self, and from that mutates into a real monster of freakish CGI. It is grotesque and kind of cool in a way that will horrify some of the show’s younger viewers and adds a little level of menace to the episode’s climax. Belinda, knowing they have to burn the film stock, goes to Reggie, who in a heel-turn of character growth is convinced to do just that by the image of his wife -sacrificing himself in the process. The explosion bursts a hole in the building as daylight shines through and in the light Lux keeps growing ever larger on an infinite scale, transcending the Earth out into space and just vanishing. That’s all it took.

The Doctor explains that Lux, in achieving exactly what he wanted became “light without end” -essentially an actual god, though perhaps not corporeal in any sense. It’s not very dramatically satisfying an end for this master villain -a touch unclear if he is truly defeated or if there will be any consequence on the wider universe. The way it comes out gives the impression of being an afterthought, as the actual plot elements of this episode most likely were. The missing people, released from the burning film stock are freed to return to their families. Belinda, having in the heat of the moment of the Doctor’s capture, found and declared her trust in him, seems by episode’s end to have put her reservations and suspicions of him from last episode to a rest -which is nice I suppose for their relationship, but a touch disappointing on a thematic level. That promised conflict in their personalities was very striking, and I think it would be a shame if it has dissipated so soon. Belinda is a stronger character for being wary of this mysterious time traveller. As they leave, Davies hits at that fourth wall one more time, as in the crowd of freed Floridians, there once again is Mrs. Flood, directing attention to the vanishing TARDIS.

Even aside from that clumsy sledgehammer to the fourth wall, “Lux” is a messy episode, though an engaging one. Its visual and formal experiments are charming and a real step above what could have been done on the show even just ten years ago. And the fun that went into making it from the actors and the other creative artisans radiates well through those sequences. The storytelling around it is mediocre and what character development there is is uninspiring -and the fan sequence may well override the show’s other flares. This episode demonstrates both the potential and pitfalls of structural experimentation in Doctor Who, and I hope if Davies maintains that drive it is in service of more bold stylistic devices and less well-meaning but winking gimmicks.

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