DOCTOR WHO: Lucky Day

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We know we should try to be Mr. and Mr. Professional Critic and offer a more articulate and considered assessment of “Lucky Day,” which marked the return of Millie Gibson’s Ruby Sunday to Doctor Who, but we’re afraid we can only be as God made us: bluntly opinionated. So, here it is.

Meh.

It just didn’t grab us as an episode. First, while it was nice to check in on Ruby again, it was frustrating getting another more or less Doctor-free episode. We don’t know what sort of scheduling difficulties kept Ncuti Gatwa from doing more than a cameo in three episodes over one and a half seasons, but we sure wish they’d ironed them out ahead of time. He’s the draw here, and when you settle into a pattern where the viewer doesn’t find out that it’s a Doctor-free episode until they’ve tuned in (and sometimes not until it’s half over), it leaves those viewers who tune in to see Ncuti Gatwa somewhat reluctant to keep tuning in, which is a problem when the show isn’t exactly wowing its corporate overlords with viewership numbers.

Because here’s the thing: while she was very charming, Ruby is probably the least interesting Companion the Doctor’s had in at least a decade. We spent her tenure on the TARDIS being told two things about her over and over again: that she was the Doctor’s very best friend and that she was extremely important to the fate of the universe. The latter point turned out to be an irritating lie, but the former one suffered from that hoary old storytelling mistake of telling without showing. If she was so deeply important to the Doctor, it was a development in their relationship that happened off camera. It’s impossible for any Doctor or Companion to step into the role without being compared to sixty years of predecessors so we don’t think we’re being unfair when we note that, in this century alone, the Doctor has had at least a half-dozen relationships (Rose, Amy, River, Yaz, Donna, Clara) with far higher emotional stakes than Ruby’s brief time with him. So what we have here is an episode that’s entirely about an uninteresting character in the absence of the only character who makes her interesting.

Granted, they managed to make a setup nearly identical to this one work fairly well with last season’s “73 Yards.” We say “fairly well,” because, like so much of last season, it didn’t really make much sense in the wake of the finale’s revelations (or lack of them). Still, it was a Ruby-centric episode that we counted as one of the best episodes of the modern era, so we can understand why they’d want to return to that well. But “73 Yards” was a genuinely interesting if not downright engrossing hour of television and this episode simply… wasn’t.

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We’ll admit that the setup was very good and we didn’t see the twist coming at all. Jonah Hauer-King cleverly played on his own Disney Prince persona to make a believable “good guy” boyfriend. Millie Gibson may not have been granted the most interesting character to play, but she’s charming and easy to watch. It was fun to check back in on her life and her family (including a passing but extremely intriguing reference to a Dad). The setup in the first half of the story was interesting and we’ll admit that if the payoff had been well-handled, we probably wouldn’t have complained so much about the Doctor missing. Unfortunately, once that twist came, everything after it got extremely preachy in ways that felt way out of character for several people and the internal logic of the story failed to hold up.

The Doctor seemed to dislike that kid at first glance, which may have been a point about him being a good judge of character, but it was deeply odd seeing him act like he hated a ten-year-old. Ruby just goes completely public with her time with the Doctor, without ever contacting him for permission to do so and without any blowback from UNIT for having done so. Kate orders the release of a deadly alien into London’s open air because she was pissed off at having the memory of her father insulted, endangering not just her entire staff, but the entire city. She had to be talked down from allowing a man to be killed for making her angry. And then The Doctor showed up to tell a man exactly how he’s going to die – again, because that man was just so annoying. Yes, we get that he was mad that Ruby got hurt, but he’s faced down beings that committed genocide and he wasn’t that nasty to them. Everyone was acting strangely and their characterizations were sacrificed because this Very Important Episode had a Message it needed to deliver, and when you start with The Message and try to reverse-engineer an actual story in order to get to The Message, the story is inevitably weaker for it.

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The problem here wasn’t so much that the story directly and overtly tackled the disinformation crisis and the so-called “masculinity crisis” in the modern world. The problem was that it addressed those specific issues literally. In other words, there was no metaphor here. We traced the arc of an angry young man with mommy issues who became an influencer and podcaster who made himself rich by trading in conspiracy theories to a massive, cult-like audience. The familiarity was the point, and it’s why the episode didn’t work for us. You can’t map, for instance, anti-vaxxer skepticism on someone who had an alien encounter and watched a police box disappear into thin air. Mistrust in science is a modern problem of great import, but having someone stand in the middle of the TARDIS and roll his eyes at its very existence just doesn’t make any sense.

Executive Producer Russell T. Davies has openly courted controversy by imbuing this latest version of the show with more social and political commentary than the fans might be used to seeing and we have to assume that the script by long-time Who scribe Pete McTighe appealed for that very reason. Like almost all fantasy or science fiction, Doctor Who is and can be inherently political. Tolkien wrote of a very English war between the noble west and the darkened hordes of the far east. Roddenberry imagined a future where war, money and prejudice had been eliminated through science and diplomacy. Lucas mapped Samurai films and Saturday morning adventure serials onto a story about resisting fascism. Siegel and Schuster expressed their immigrant dreams and outsider status as American Jews by creating Superman. If you’re imagining a world or a hero better than anything we can realize, you’re making commentary about the limitations of ourselves or the world in which we live. As we noted a few weeks back, with a Black, gay man playing a time traveler, you have a responsibility to acknowledge that the character would face difficulties unique to those identities any time he traveled to a previous century. So, yes; Doctor Who can be political and should embrace that idea. What the show can’t be is topical. It’s not built for it.

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The Doctor can tackle broad political and social topics like racism, prejudice, sexism, the horrors of war and the pointlessness of violence. The Doctor can make bitterly accurate observations about capitalism and fascism and corporatism. The Doctor can explore poverty and terrorism and political radicalism. What The Doctor can’t do is get into an argument with Joe Rogan. He’s not built for those conversations and he looks dumb wallowing in them.

[Photo Credit: James Pardon/BBC Studios/Bad Wolf/Disney]

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