Review by Tim Robins

The Doctor’s quest to get Belinda home takes the TARDIS to Miami in 1952, where an abandoned cinema is hiding a terrifying secret. Can the Doctor uncover Lux’s power?

Once again, Doctor Who shoots for the moon even if, in this case, it has fallen to Earth at the entrance to the Pier Pavilion in Penarth, the Cardiff-adjacent seaside resort that has previously provided locations for Doctor Who and its spin-offs Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. Here the pier-front is masquerading as a cinema exterior in 1950’s Miami.

Doctor Who hasn’t become an end-of-the pier show – at least not yet. In fact, I am going to front-load this review with candyfloss positivity. “Lux” obviously required an extraordinary creative effort to bring to life a wholly animated cartoon villain hell bent on… er… doing something to some people for some reason. The episode was also a critical success – it certainly was for me – but there are some pink elephants in the room that need discussing.

The star of “Lux” was undoubtedly Mr Ring-a-Ding, aka “Lux Imperium”, a cartoon character brought to life by the light of the silvery moon because that’s just the kind of thing that happens in the new series of Doctor Who. Ring-a-Ding was voiced by Alan (don’t make me laugh..no, seriously, don’t) Cumming, and designed and animated in the style of a Max Fleischer cartoon.

It’s not easy to pastiche a style from an earlier age. Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, was a wonderful film and a success on many levels, but critics still felt Roger himself didn’t really capture the spirit of such Warner Brothers’ characters as Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig.

There’s no one Fleischer style except, maybe, a certain rubbery quality to character movement. This was the studio that brought you the animated adventures of Popeye, Superman and Betty Boop. Mr Ring-a-Ding played on the slightly alarming design of other characters, who explored the so-called “uncanny valley” between humans, animals and things in-between.

Famously, Betty Boop started life as a French Poodle but then became a flapper, her poodle ears becoming earrings in the process. This rampant anthropomorphism was applied to everything from trees to houses, although the style was more 1930s than 1950s. It was a time when cartoon characters inhabited a world where anything that could be drawn could also come to life.

Stepping off the big-screen, Mr Ring-a-Ding becomes a seemingly unstoppable foe who stalks the cinema like a serial killer. Meanwhile, The Doctor and reluctant new companion Belinda discovered missing members of the cinema audience were now doomed to live out their lives captured on celluloid.

The emotional heart of the story was a doomed love between the cinema’s projectionist – played by Linus Roache – and his deceased wife, Helen Pye (played by Jane Hancock), tragically killed in a car accident. Roache and Hancock’s performances were charming and heartfelt. In the end, an angelic Helen became a literal Deus ex Match-ina. The other cast members managed to evoke 1950’s Americana, including an usherette, played by Juliet Rimel, one of the wonderful and essential Supporting Artists.

As the story progressed, everything became terribly meta. The Doctor and Belinda became cartoons for a few seconds or so. I hadn’t been looking forward to that aspect of the story because it has been done before – such as in the animated sequences in Fringe’s season three episode, “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide”. Thankfully for all concerned, including the animators, The Doctor and Belinda’s cartoon crisis proved short-lived.

Watching their moment on screen, I smiled and recalled a time when I contacted the Newport Film School to ask an animator to bring dinosaurs to life in my student-made educational video. “How much time do you want to be animated?” a school tutor asked.

“Erm, a minute?” I cautiously replied.

After the tutor stopped laughing, he explained that I was asking for the moon on a stick. He then helpfully suggested methods that wouldn’t require animation, including glass shots and the creative use of mixing. So I appreciated the work that went into Lux, including a scene where he menacingly inched his way up the steps of the cinema aisle.

After trying to escape the frames of a film, The Doctor and Belinda stepped out of a TV set and met a trio of Doctor Who fans – ho,ho. The bad news was that their favourite episode was the modern series’ season three episode “Blink” by Steven Moffat. Of course it was during David Tennant’s time as The Doctor and worse for the current Doctor, “Blink” was Doctor “light”. Little were we to know back then what a blight on Doctor Who Moffat would become, allegedly leading the show down the path to cancellation.

“Lux” was another cleverly written episode by showrunner RTD. I enjoy his word play, his weaving together “wokeness” (if you will) and wild adventure and here, continuity with the events of Season One. He also brings a soap opera quality to the show that allows him to quickly create characters I actually care for.

But hark! Here come the Pink Elephants on Parade! And, like Heffalumps and Woozles, they come in onezles and twozles!

The first is the way aliens with fantasy/reality changing powers takes Doctor Who further along the fairytale path laid by Steven Moffat and, among other things, it leads to an unhappy land where nothing is particularly explained or explanations are pulled out of thin air one line of dialogue before they are needed to solve situations.

I honestly couldn’t tell you what was going on in the end. How did the cinema audience and the Doctor Who fans become real? The threat to The Doctor reminded me of the made-up-as-filming-went-along confrontation between The Doctor and The Master in the 1996 TV movie, i.e. all talk and energy beams. There’s no need for The Doctor to use his ‘sonic’ compact anymore. He just says stuff and it happens.

Now we turn to the twozle – the ratings, or at least the stuff going on around them. I mention them because they made news as the worst in Doctor Who’s history. The trouble is that this leads to judgements about the story itself. In the words of a friend of mine, “it must have been terrible!” And that was someone who had “Lux”on his ‘to watch list’ for later on in the week.

“Lux” wasn’t terrible, but it’s an understandable reaction to a low rating, much as the way bad box office reflected negatively on Disney’s recent reworking of Snow White. But, as a point of reasoning, if audiences didn’t turn out to watch Snow White they can hardly have a basis for criticism. In the non-event, an opinion poll suggested audiences just weren’t interested in seeing yet another Disney remake. The box office for Lilo and Stitch may prove instructive.

For Doctor Who, the Radio Times declared, accurately, “overnight ratings for ‘Lux’ – lowest in series history… overnights (measuring the audience for Doctor Who on Saturday evening) dropped below two million. And yet, “Lux” was still “the fourth most watched programme on BBC One on Saturday, behind News at Ten, Casualty and Blankety Blank”. That seems pretty good to me, but Doctor Who is vastly more expensive than Blankety Blank.

Although TV sets are still watched in the great majority of households, SMART TVs give access to less traditional entertainment such as YouTube and streaming services. Even the linear content of BBC One’s Saturday schedule is watched, via iPlayer, in a non-linear way, at days and times of the audience choice.

The ratings, whatever figure you want to argue about, are only part of the story. The show is struggling to stay afloat in a sea of negative reporting and public indifference. Doctor Who 2023 to now isn’t the “event” that the BBC, Bad Wolf and Disney+ hoped for. And, while I am sure younger children are watching, there’s still no sign of shelves of toys and other merchandise.

Maybe the BBC should have courted YouTube channels such as The Weekly Planet, Chris Stuckmann or even the likes of Pyrocynical and Memeulous beyond the enthusiastic young Whoozles like The Confused Adipose.

There’s just no buzz around Doctor Who. At the moment, even children’s chit chat is more about A Minecraft Movie, Generation Alpha’s Rocky Horror moment. It’s a model of audience engagement, all generated by posting, and engaging with, movie-mocking Reddit memes.

As I sit at my laptop, I don’t get a sense of being connected to a national, let alone worldwide, Doctor Who community. I’d probably be better off on an open top bus tour of London for a shared experience.

I may be crying me a moon river over the fate of Doctor Who, but it’s not that I can’t accept the realities of today’s audience for television. it’s just that I don’t understand what those realities are, particularly if I set aside the technological determinism behind statements like social media is “driving” (sic) changes to viewing habits. It really isn’t.

What drives change is people, their everyday lives, the way their time is organised and the social structures in which entertainment takes place and is made meaningful to people. And, for me, Doctor Who still carries enough meaning to tune in for the next episode. I’ll not be watching it on Saturday night. I’ll be watching it walk off into the sunset.

Tim Robbins

Doctor Who in all its many iterations is available on BBC iPlayer in the UK. The Robot Revolution and other recent stories stream on Disney+ internationally 

Dear reader, a review is an opinion. Other opinions are available, including yours

Further Reading…

The latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine – Issue 616 – includes several features on the making of “Lux”

• Check out some amazing “Season Two” inspired art by Rafe Wallbank

Further Viewing…

• Watch: Dumbo – Pink Elephants on Parade

• Watch: Winnie the Pooh – Heffalumps and Woozles Song

• About the Author
• Latest Posts

John Freeman

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.

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Tags: Doctor Who, Fraser Geesin, Lux, Ncuti Gatwa, Russell T Davies, Tim Robins, Varada Sethu