“Lux” is the episode where Doctor Who steps off the screen and into the screen within the screen, and I’m a fan of it, even with an ending I thought was kind of cheap and a stretch in the middle that came really close to losing me.
It’s Season 2, Episode 2. The Doctor and Belinda find themselves trapped in a cinematic nightmare in 1950s Miami, a place I’m familiar with (Miami, not the 1950s, being from Florida), and the show blends live action with animation in a way it’s never really done before in the Whoniverse.
1952, Miami, and a Diner They Aren’t Allowed In
The TARDIS lands in 1952 Miami while they’re aiming to return Belinda to her own time, and they discover a mysterious cinema. A movie theater. Cinema. I love that. Fifteen people have vanished there, and we actually get to see it in the very, very beginning.
What you end up seeing is this really crazy jiggery-pokery having to do with the light. Moonlight comes down and reflects off a thing, which reflects off a thing, which hits a spoon, which reflects off something else, and eventually the light inhabits a cartoon character. Back in the day they’d run these animated shorts in theaters. I think for the time period it was actually a little bit dated by then, but that’s where we get a lot of those old Looney Tunes kind of things. They ran between reels. It’s what they put on while they were switching out the reels for a movie.
Right off the gate we’re introduced to the idea of segregation, and I didn’t mind this. I didn’t mind it at all. They don’t spend a whole lot of time on it. It’s more of a passing thing, because they arrive in the middle of the night, there’s a diner that’s open, and they go in and talk to the young man who’s working there and a woman who’s grieving because her son is one of the people who disappeared in the cold open. She’s absolutely desperate to find her son, and I kind of dug that.
Belinda even calls the Doctor out on it. Wait a minute, hold on, what’s going on? He has to tell her that it’s illegal for the two of them to even be in this diner. She wants to know what they’re going to do about that. And he tells her, look, I’ve walked around, I’ve been through time and space, planets and stars, I’ve seen suns and moons die, I’ve seen the whole bit. I’m just going to be myself and keep on keeping on.
There’s no more Doctor Who sentiment than that. I loved that this is the way they handled the whole thing.
Mr. Ring-a-Ding, God of Light
The antagonist is Mr. Ring-a-Ding, otherwise known as Lux Imperator, the god of light. So yes, we’re being introduced to another of the Pantheon of Chaos. I’m not a huge fan of the Pantheon of Chaos and that whole storyline, but I am a fan of this episode.
Lux is voiced by Alan Cumming, and I thought he did a bang-up job for sure. Essentially, Lux traps his victims within the film reels. The Doctor and Belinda learn it, they see what’s going on, and the whole thing blurs the lines between reality and fiction in a way I don’t know that Doctor Who has often done.
I know the old Doctor Who serials from back in the day dabbled in stories. Oh, we went into a story, and so on. I feel like those were part and parcel with the development and growth of the series, because remember, it began as an educational children’s program that eventually built into being more. So that works in that context. But this is the first time, I think, in this iteration that we’ve done something along these lines, and I dug it for the most part.
The whole idea behind Lux is that he has a desire to become real, and that’s ultimately what leads to the confrontation with the Doctor.
Roger Rabbit, With One Cheat
I do love the fact that it really is a marriage of animation meeting live action. There’s behind-the-scenes stuff from Doctor Who: Unleashed where you get to see Ncuti Gatwa and Varada Sethu approaching the classic tennis ball and green screen setup. It harkens back to things like Roger Rabbit, where you get to see real life meet animation, in a way that I thought really worked.
They didn’t really interact much with him, though, and I felt like that was the only cheat. Especially in today’s world, that’s the hole I was able to see through. I get it. At the end of the day it still worked.
And it worked especially when the Doctor and Belinda are transformed into animated characters themselves and have to navigate these surreal scenarios. I don’t want to say Pleasantville, but it’s very much a meta commentary.
Through the Fourth Wall
They even go so far as to meet a kind of meta reality. They break the fourth wall and push the glass out of the TV to step out into our world, I guess. You got to see fans, and I actually really dug what this moment was doing.
I felt like it bordered on being too much. We definitely spent too much time there, for sure. But what I mean by too much is that it bordered on unraveling my suspension of disbelief. Watching Doctor Who, watching any TV show, on some fundamental level we all have one. The minute something like this begins to unravel it, everything falls apart.
It’s similar to what Supernatural did, and sometimes you can use it to your benefit and it works. Deadpool is a great example. I feel like She-Hulk, to some limited degree, was a success at the fourth wall breaking. Ally McBeal and other shows have done it in the past, things that weren’t quote unquote comedies, or superpower things, or fantasy sci-fi, and they’ve worked in context. Because of the nature of what this was, with fans wearing the scarves and talking about their favorite episodes and the whole nine yards, it was really close to walking that razor’s edge, for me at least.
The episode overall does a really good job of paying homage to classic cartoons, and it explores the boundaries of storytelling, which I like. At one point they’re in a film strip copy of the real world, and a police officer comes in telling them they’re breaking the law, and the Doctor’s got to point out, hey, wait a minute, you’re wearing a New York City police uniform.
I dug what they were doing, because I thought it pushed the boundaries of storytelling. It reminded me of Rick and Morty, the episode where they go on the story train. It was one of the first episodes back during the pandemic, and it was meta on a level I don’t think people would normally expect. Same thing here.
Reginald Pye and a Dated Trope Done New
There were some emotional beats that really worked for me. Reginald Pye, the projectionist, is being manipulated by Lux through the recreation, or reanimation if you will, of his late wife through the film.
That was a clever twist on a dated trope. I say dated because we’ve seen the guy who’s going to betray humanity and everything else to be part of the bad guy’s plan. So for this to be a unique and more interesting way of doing that, I liked it. I thought it was very creative.
Then there’s Pye’s sacrifice. He burns the reels, the sunlight comes in, the whole thing explodes, the missing people are freed, and the Doctor and Belinda’s journey can continue. It all felt really neat.
The episode dabbled in some really creative ideas. I mean really creative ideas. As a writer, someone who’s worked in television and also written screenplays for film, I liked where they were going. It had a very Last Action Hero-esque feel to it, fiction meeting reality and the two worlds colliding. There was an opportunity here, and I don’t know that they fully utilized it, but I’m okay with how they did utilize it, if that makes sense.
Belinda Rolls With the Punches
I felt like Belinda bounced back really easy, considering just last episode she was all, no, you’re going to take me home. She had a spine, if you will, and was a unique kind of character in all of this.
I really did like the fact that she could roll with the punches. The minute she realized they can’t actually just leave yet, she was quick to say, okay, then let’s go with this. And they did this really fun thing with the costumes, where she’s asking if she’s going to dress like this, and he tells her they have a dressing room, and they go do the whole thing. It’s wonderful. Very fun.
The Fans Who Didn’t Disappear, and an Ending That Bails Out
The episode digs into grief, in terms of Pye and what he’s dealing with. It gets into reality versus illusion, or delusion, and ultimately the power of storytelling. I liked those themes. It challenges us to consider the impact of media and the nature of existence.
I’m not getting into all that existentialism where people say we live in an artificial construct and ask if this is really a program. Bro, I’m not even remotely going down that road. But it made you question, especially when those Doctor Who fans tell us that when this is all done, they know they’re going to disappear, because their story is over. And then the post-credits scene comes, they’re actually still there, and I’m like, yay!
There’s a whole bunch of people online who want to say one way or another who those people are. I’m not getting into all that speculation. I just love the idea that reality gets altered by what we do and by our perceptions. You look at Star Trek, which inspired modern science. Science fiction inspired modern science, which in turn inspires the fiction later on. It’s an ouroboros of events that eats its own tail. I love that notion that we’re so much closer to these things.
I feel like I’m giving the episode way more meaning than it needed, though, because at the end of the day the ending was kind of cheap and happened really quickly. The idea that he grows into the universe and becomes everything and nothing felt really over the top and a little bit easy. Part of me is asking, Russell, did you write yourself into a corner and just have to bail out quick? Because everything resolves really quickly.
RIP Doctor Who, Out Loud
One of the fan characters says, cynically, the hashtag RIP Doctor Who. One of the other reviewers I watch pointed out that it was done in post, and upon rewatching, I have to agree. You don’t see the character say it.
I remember thinking that’s an interesting approach to take, in terms of trying to own that. It definitely takes a lot of the teeth out of some of the critics out there.
Funny enough, a lot of critics praised the episode’s creativity and its boldness in blending mediums, but it received the lowest overnight ratings in the show’s history, with 1.58 million viewers. Despite this, the episode has sparked discussion about the future direction of the series, everything from whether Ncuti’s going to stay or not, and there’s all kinds of information out there. I feel like that’s what this is supposed to do, which is get us talking.
This is only two episodes in, and the season feels very classic. There are those of you in the audience asking, classic? You mean Tom Baker? No. For me classic is 2005, everything from David Tennant. It’s RTD one, his first run through. And I like it. This feels like the Doctor Who that I’ve been missing for a minute.
The Verdict
Doctor Who’s “Lux” earns itself a really solid 8.5 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
Its innovative approach and emotional depth make it really memorable as far as I’m concerned, even if it doesn’t exactly resonate with every single viewer. I feel like this is an episode people are going to talk about.
Last week could’ve been a fluke. This was solid, and it’s on solid ground. I can’t wait to see what the next episode does. I’m excited for what the show is doing right now, and I kind of hope it keeps on doing it.
What are your thoughts on “Lux”? Did the animated elements enhance your viewing experience, or did they distract from the overall story? The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
