DOCTOR WHO: Lux

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“Really? Just ‘The Doctor?’ Always?”
“Yeah.”
“Ridiculous.”

And with that hilarious exchange, we bid a sad goodbye to salty Belinda, who started this episode snorting and rolling her eyes because she was entirely unsure of The Doctor’s intentions and competence (for good reason) and ended it weeping about how much she trusted him and how sorry she was to have ever doubted him. What a shame that we’re already at this point with this character. Her inability to be impressed by The Doctor was her best quality and now she sounds like… well, just like the previous wide-eyed Companion — and about a dozen others. We won’t claim the moment was unearned, however. The episode cleverly forced both characters to become much more truthful with each other than people generally are when they don’t know each other well. It was an appropriate emotional beat. It just came too early in the season.

That’s probably our only real complaint about “Lux,” which was a pretty fun romp in the Disney mode. Much has been made of the show’s more luxe (pun intended) aesthetic ever since Disney started co-producing with the BBC, but we doubt the fans could have predicted that Doctor Who would be making use of Disney’s animators. Granted, the style of animation for the Doctor and Belinda sequence was originally very much in the Hanna-Barbera mode, a nod to the character references to Scooby Doo, but Mr. Ring-a-Ding felt like an homage to ’30s Disney cartoons.

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It’s funny. The “science” on Doctor Who has always been so far removed from the actual physical laws of the universe that it never even occurred to us that the clearly impossible Mr. Ring-a-Ding was essentially a creation of magic until he did the Toymaker laugh, revealing himself to be part of the pantheon of gods that have been tormenting the Doctor since last season. We think it says something about the debate surrounding showrunner Russell T. Davies’ introduction of magic to this science fiction franchise that it really only becomes obvious as magic if someone explicitly states it as such. Otherwise, it’s all working in the same continuum of high fantasy crossed with science fiction tropes. Until he revealed himself as yet another of Davies’ queer gods (voiced by bi Alan Cumming, just as the Toymaker was portrayed by gay Neil Patrick Harris and the Maestro by nonbinary Jinkx Monsoon — can’t wait for the lesbian gods to show up!), we just assumed he was some sort of alien creation — and that interpretation would have worked just as well and required exactly as little explanation. Virtually none of the developments in this episode made physical or logical sense, but that’s not exactly new with this show. To be fair, it would have been a lot harder to wave away all of the literal fourth-wall-breaking stuff, or to explain it with science, but at its heart, Doctor Who has always traded in magic.

And in the modern Davies era, Doctor Who also trades in casual social commentary in pretty much every episode. In a way, you can’t put a queer Black man in the Doctor’s shoes and not have it inspire issue-oriented commentary, if only because the character’s a time traveler and literally any period prior to this century would be considered extremely dangerous for either aspect of his current incarnation. It’s not likely that the show is ever really going to do much about homophobia (although the reference to Rock Hudson’s death from AIDS complications was surprising and poignant), but we appreciated how well it integrated the racial reality of the American south in the 1950s without hampering the story it was trying to tell. Among the many disappointments of the Jodie Whittaker era was the show’s bizarre refusal to unpack what it’s like to become a woman after living millennia as a man, or what it would have been like for the supremely cocky Doctor to be dismissed for the first time because of her gender. We like that Gatwa’s Doctor routinely stops to acknowledge the fact of his race. There’s a bit more nuance to it when he’s traveling with another person of color, who is shocked to discover that in this time and place, she’s Black. One thing we’d love to see from this Doctor while he’s traveling with this Companion is the admission that unlike hers, his race is temporary. He gave a lovely speech to Belinda about how he just tries to live in the world even when it’s terrible, but it felt condescending coming from someone who’s probably not going to be Black for much longer.

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Speaking of condescending, we go back and forth on the scene with the Doctor Who superfans. It felt a weensy bit disdainful of fan culture, but at the same time, it showed tremendous affection for the show’s fandom. It was hilarious that all of them thought “Blink” was the greatest episode. It’s more than a little notable that Davies populated his fandom polycule without white men, since he’s been tweaking the noses of the more conservative aspects of fandom for a good while now. To Davies, the best fans are women, people of color, and the differently abled. If asked, we’d bet he’d confirm that at least one of them was queer. He was making a statement here about the kind of show he’s trying to do and the kinds of fans he’s trying to reach. Their “death” scene was legitimately heartstring-tugging, which is where Davies tends to shine. One thing’s for sure: if Steven Moffat had written that scene it would have been positively dripping in disdain. It was cute that all three characters got last names in the end credits.

And finally, Mrs. Flood showed up once again, all but confirming that she’s, if not a time traveler, then someone who lives outside the bounds of time. The show waved off the idea that the Doctor was a fictional character almost as soon as it introduced the idea to him, but then it went and made the so-called fictional fans real at the end. With Mrs. Flood’s constant asides to the camera, we’re starting to think this pantheon of gods is going to force the Doctor to realize that he’s not actually real. Meta-fictional narratives are extremely tough to pull off and we’re afraid we don’t yet have the confidence that Davies will manage it without lapsing into total nonsense. But this was a legitimately fun episode, so we’re willing to wait around to see where things go.

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