Review by Tim Robins
SPOILERS AHEAD
I found “Lucky Day” hard to enjoy. I do not mean the story was a bad piece of television drama, far from it. It escalated events by beginning with a sweet story of Ruby Sunday finding love after leaving the Doctor, then moving on to a spooky village pub under siege and finally culminating with a Die Hard-style assault on the UNI Tower by Ruby’s new beaux – who turns out to be a right wrong ‘un.
The audacious script wrong-footed me at every turn, and not always for the best. “Lucky Day” turned out to be Doctor and companion “light”. Having only just got onboard with The Doctor’s new companion, I was frustrated to only catch a glimpse or two of them, before the pair disappeared off on a different adventure. (The real world explanation for Ncuti Gatwa and Varada Sethu’s near absence from “Lucky Day” was that the episode was being recorded at the same time as “The Robot Revolution”. “Lucky Day” was being shot on location while “The Robot Revolution” was largely shot in studio.
Long-time viewers have come to expect “Doctor-lite” stories to be among the best the show has to offer and, in many ways, that was true here.
It was heart-warming to meet Ruby’s adoptive family again, and to watch Ruby entering a new relationship with the podcaster Conrad played with conviction by Jonah Hauer-King.
I was fully on-board with Ruby’s struggle to overcome Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Trauma seems to be a hot button topic at the moment – Marvel’s Thunderbolts* (2025) a good example. In the context of Doctor Who, it made sense that Ruby would suffer from a lack of trust and be hyper-vigilant for signs of danger. Millie Gibson gave us a companion who was strong, and yet vulnerable.
“Lucky Day” introduced the possibility that Conrad is being hunted by a blood-thirsty creature known only as the Shreek. Conrad had crossed paths with The Doctor before, as a child and then as an adult. On one occasion, Conrad had been marked as prey by the Shreek. Events culminate in a weekend in Conrad’s home village. Signs of imminent Shreek attack begin to mount.
Director Peter Hoar delivered chilling and creepy scenes of the village in the dead of night, worthy of a Hammer horror movie. Tension mounts, as Ruby goes looking for Conrad’s friend who seems to have been attacked by the Shreek, although it is clear a lot of what’s going on doesn’t make sense to Ruby – especially when UNIT confirms that the Shreek is still safely locked up in their Avengers-style tower.
It was then that the script delivered a rug-pull. It turned out that Ruby and we had been thoroughly misled. Conrad had set the whole scenario up to expose UNIT as fake. The monsters in the village were just his mates in costume and, more importantly, he had never had any romantic feelings for Ruby. We had all been played. It was at this point that I stopped enjoying the episode.
Doctor Who has often exploited the companion-as-victim card, but rarely as cruelly as here. It is a tribute to Gibson’s nuanced performance that I really felt her embarrassment, humiliation but also her defiance and anger. My problem was that, despite powerful performances, excellent direction and an undoubtedly dramatic moment that made sense in terms of the plot, Ruby’s betrayal repulsed me in a way that surely exceeded the production’s intent.
The best analogy I can draw is from audiences’ reaction to a dramatic moment in the 1975 film The Great Waldo Pepper about a World War One air force coach now performing stunts in a flying circus. In one scene, Pepper (Robert Redford), must perform a daring, wing-to-wing, mid-air transfer from one plane to another, in order to rescue a young performer who has become too afraid to walk back from her plane’s wing.
Pepper reaches out to grab the girl, but the young woman slips and falls to her death. Writing in Writing in Adventures in the Screen Trade, the film’s script writer, William Goldman, recalls that, at that moment, the audience he was with just turned against the film itself. And Ruby’s betrayal, for me, turned against “Lucky Day”. What is dramatically necessary isn’t always what the audience wants to see.
I have felt insecure about writer Pete McTighe’s take on Doctor Who since “Kerblam!”. In that story Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor ‘inadvertently’ (according to Den of Geek) celebrates the work of a kind of Space Amazon over the interests of its workers.
As The Movie Blog pointed out, The Doctor declares at the end of “Kerblam!”, “The systems aren’t the problem!” It was as if the Third Doctor had concluded that the BOSS computer in “The Green Death” had made some useful points on the environment and would get better over time at its job over time; or that, after leaving Skaro following events in the story known generally as “The Daleks”, the First Doctor had turned to Ian and Barbara and told them that there had been good mutants on both sides.
Similarly, I thought the Doctor ranting at Conrad at the end of the episode was a bit off beam. Tighe has said that he wanted the story to explore how hate spreads online, but his conclusion was a rather reductive “bad people do bad things”. The story did nothing to explore ways in which so-called “conspiracy theories” can be reasonable let alone that hate on-line can have numerous causes.
Fan reaction to The Doctor’s speech has already been framed as one of the great moments in the series history. Worse, over the week since “Lucky Day” was first transmitted, the idea that there may be “Conrads” among us has taken hold. The character has become so abject that there have even been discussions about whether or not fans could cosplay as Conrad.
For me, “Lucky Day” was mean-spirited in the way the Doctor rarely is – the Sixth Doctor’s stories being an exception, particularly in The Doctor’s treatment of Peri. (Back then, entire stories were unpleasant to watch – “Mindwarp” being a case in point).
The Doctor seems particularly mean spirited in “Lucky Day” because we had seen an excited young Conrad (played by Benjamin Chivers) tell his mother about seeing The Doctor and Chandra, for which his mother slaps him across the head and tells him to stop lying. At this point, the script leads us to be sympathetic towards Conrad, and provides the motivation for Conrad in later life. Conrad’s older self reproduces his mother’s behaviour. Deception should be punished. Today, we would see Conrad as subject to parental abuse.
Conrad’s conspiratorial thinking was misguided, but not entirely unreasonable. After all, we know UNIT is “real” in the “Whoinverse”. We have seen its various confrontations with aliens, including Yeti in the London Underground, as mentioned in the story. But, if we entered Doctor Who’s diegetic world, we would probably not know this. UNIT might well seem part of a governmental conspiracy.
I am particularly concerned by the message that hateful people do hateful things (as an explanation this is a tautology). We may imagine that we would never behave as Conrad does, but research in Social Psychology suggests otherwise.
In 1961, Stanley Milgram demonstrated that behaviour is not simply a matter of personality but is, instead, produced by the situations that we find ourselves in. The most controversial example of this was Milgram’s (1961) demonstration that under the ‘right’ conditions, people were prepared to deliver what they thought were electric shocks to other people, even at levels that would, if real, prove lethal.
Social media such as X or online fan fora are situations that are conducive to bullying behaviour. One reason is the lack of other social cues. We don’t see the reaction of people with whom we are arguing, and this can lead to a lack of ‘empathy’. Particular set-ups – including unhelpful moderation, and the ability of people to ‘talk’, via Personal Messaging, behind a person’s back, can facilitate an on-line version of playground bullying.
Fans have been quick to develop an “us vs them” understanding of hateful behaviour and point to unpleasant YouTube channels. But Situational Social Psychology suggests we are all Conrads in waiting. This is demonstrated by Kate Lethbridge-Stewart who under the pressure of the situation and the absence of a higher moral authority in the room unleashes the Shreek on Conrad.
Conrad’s scepticism reminded me of Flat Earthers’ on YouTube. Recently, key proponents of the idea that the Earth is flat were given an open invitation to test their claims. They were offered a free trip to the Antarctic, where they could, contrary to their Flat Earth models, observe the fact that there are times at which the sun doesn’t set. Interestingly, many refused the trip and started claiming that those who went had been fooled by special effects, or were now part of the “globalist conspiracy”.
Our belief in conspiracy theories may even have an evolutionary function. They are a way we try to make sense of information resulting from the complex information we encounter simply by being alive.
The Covid pandemic was a good example of the way conspiracy theories can develop. When the pandemic began, the lack of research into how the Covid virus might spread created a lot of uncertainty and a real difficulty in giving practical advice. At the same time, in the UK, listening to the blustering, incoherent bombast of Prime Minister Boris Johnson just made matters worse. Frankly, anything seemed more credible than the words coming out his mouth.
So, despite its many positive qualities, “Lucky Day” did a poor job of dramatizing the online. world It reduced online hate to the function of individual personalities, and made The Doctor seem less wise than I have come to expect. After all, he met Conrad as a child and, it has been pointed out, at a time in Conrad’s and The Doctor’s lives when The Doctor could have been aware of how Conrad would turn out.
I felt The Doctor missed a chance to put Conrad on a new path. The script’s exploitation of people who are only human, and its limited understanding of the motives and practice of on-line hate, just felt mean. I hope fans take away nothing from this story other than it was a powerful drama.
Tim Robins
Doctor Who in all its many iterations is available on BBC iPlayer in the UK. Lucky Day and other recent stories stream on Disney+ internationally
Dear reader, a review is an opinion. Other opinions are available, including yours
This review was revised and republished on Tuesday 13th May 2025
Further Reading…
• Doctor Who TV: ‘Lucky Day’ writer reveals Fourth Doctor call-back and teases the future of UNIT
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John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.
Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.
He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.
Categories: Doctor Who, Features, Other Worlds, Reviews, Science Fiction, Television
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I have to agree, Doctor-lite stories are the fill-in issues, no matter how great Millie Gibson is (and she is!). The Doctor threatening someone weaker than himself feels out of character.
UNIT’s security could use some attention, too.
The first half of this story was good, could have taken us in a more interesting direction.