TV Review: ‘Doctor Who’ Episode “Lucky Day” is an Emotional Gut-Punch

In Doctor Who, we periodically have these things called “Doctor-lite” episodes where the Doctor is a minor character in an episode of his own show, only appearing for a few moments. Doctor-lite episodes are entirely an invention of the revived series that began in 2005. The Classic Series has no Doctor-lite episodes. They’re usually done for scheduling and budgetary purposes because they can save time and money by filming the Doctor in one episode and the companion in another.

That’s assuming that the companion even has a major role in the Doctor-lite episode, which isn’t always a given. If there’s one entire episode that the production team can work on while another team is working on an episode at the same time, that’s just economical. Some of the worst episodes of the series are Doctor-lite episodes, most notably “Love and Monsters,” but the episode of the series which is almost universally accepted as the series’ best (“Blink”) is a Doctor-lite episode. Often you get some really interesting concepts out of Doctor-lite episodes because you have to find creative ways around the episode’s limitations.

Last season, I reviewed a Doctor-lite episode called “73 Yards” which was actually made because Ncuti Gatwa, who plays the 15th Doctor, was still working on filming his previous series, Sex Education, and they needed an episode they could largely shoot without him when Millie Gibson—who played the Doctor’s companion Ruby Sunday—was available and Gatwa was not. This year’s Doctor-lite episode is “Lucky Day,” and it actually doesn’t feature the current companion very much either. Last season’s companion, Ruby, takes the center-stage once again.

While I had problems with “73 Yards,” I will say that Millie Gibson’s performance was not one of my complaints about it. She did an outstanding job carrying that episode herself and became the emotional powerhouse of the episode while the Doctor is absent. So I was more than happy to hear that she hadn’t actually left the series, and we would get a Doctor-lite episode focusing on her. What I didn’t expect was the emotional gut-punch that “Lucky Day” really is, and one that was delivered to me at an emotionally sensitive time when I wasn’t really ready for it.

But that’s as far as I’m willing to go now without issuing a spoiler warning, so beware of spoilers from here on out.

In this episode, the 15th Doctor and his new companion, Belinda (Varada Sethu), are still trying their hardest to reach 2025 but can’t quite seem to get there. This time they get closer than they’ve been in previous episodes, on New Year’s Eve 2007, and they run into a young child named Conrad (Benjamin Chivers as young Conrad, Jonah Hauer-King as adult Conrad) who becomes fascinated with the TARDIS and the Doctor and seeks to learn more about it. This leads him to discovering one of the Doctor’s companions, Ruby, 18 years later and inviting her on his podcast about the mysterious blue box, but also inviting Ruby out for dinner afterwards. With Ruby and Conrad slowly falling into a real relationship, it seems like Ruby may have finally found happiness for once.

Then comes the big, previously mentioned gut punch in act two when it’s revealed that Conrad  has been using Ruby as part of his plan to expose UNIT (United Intelligence Taskforce) as frauds who are supposedly wasting the taxpayer’s money. UNIT, for those who don’t remember, is a military organization that the Doctor has partnered with since the third Doctor era in the early ‘70s. UNIT, founded by the Doctor’s dear old friend, Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney), is now run by the Brigadier’s daughter Kate (Jemma Redgrave), who seeks to preserve her father’s legacy of protecting the Earth from alien threats.

Conrad films him and his friends tricking UNIT into responding to a fake alien attack and starts spreading misinformation online about how aliens aren’t real, and UNIT has been defrauding the people in an attempt to collect government funding. He starts a viral video campaign online that turns the public against UNIT which leads to the U.K. reconsidering their funding of UNIT. So it’s up to Ruby and Kate to find a way to restore UNIT’s reputation. Luckily for them, Conrad is a fanatic, and it’s not hard to get him to make a mistake. But will Kate and Ruby go too far to prove Conrad wrong?

In some ways, this episode is about how easily you can mislead the public in the information age. But the episode has to be very careful not to tread into authoritarian territory. If there really were an organization like UNIT in my country, I might not trust it. Of course, on Doctor Who, I can see behind the scenes and know that UNIT is run by people with a lot of integrity. The episode manages to skirt any sort of message supporting hyper-militarization and the surveillance state because Doctor Who operates in a fictional world where UNIT is probably more virtuous than its real-world equivalent would ever be.

Another reason the show can get away with this story without coming off with a right-wing bent is the fact that the Doctor has a very long history of disdain towards the military and has even had a complicated relationship with UNIT and his mixed feelings on how much he approves of their actions. But, at the same time, Conrad and his friends seem to be painted more as the right-wing radicals, and the episode seems to be trying to draw more parallels between him and QAnon or InfoWars than between him and, say, Wikileaks.

Millie Gibson has to carry the emotion of a really emotionally devastating episode where her character feels as betrayed and violated as the audience does. It’s hard not to feel your heart break for Ruby in this episode, and Millie Gibson does an outstanding job selling that heartbreak, frustration, and anger. It makes it all the more satisfying at the end when Conrad gets his comeuppance.

The episode ends with the ongoing tease of Mrs. Flood, who remains the greatest mystery of this season. After Conrad is jailed for breaking into a government institution, Mrs. Flood, his jailer, chooses to let him out for whatever nefarious purpose she’s planning. Like I said, she seems likely to be a TIme Lord, but the question remains: Which Time Lord? I recently saw a theory that suggested that she might be Rassilon, which would make sense, as Time Lord’s can change genders when they regenerate. But she’s definitely orchestrating events carefully, and her attitude feels more like Missy or the Rani. Regardless, I’d be pretty satisfied if it was any of those three.

While the Doctor doesn’t spend a lot of time in this episode, Ncuti Gatwa’s speech at the very end of the episode is the most stirring speech that the 15th Doctor has gotten to give thus far in his tenure. Gatwa hasn’t really gotten a chance to demonstrate the Doctor’s righteous anger against those who have wronged his friends, and in this episode, it’s on full display, with Gatwa hitting the performance out of the park. And the speech manages to tie the episode into the misinformation campaigns of the radical right, with the Doctor speaking the anger that’s been boiling up for all of us the past few months.

Ultimately, this was a fantastic Doctor-lite episode, and it had a much more satisfying ending than “73 Yards.” In fact, I haven’t really seen the show take a misstep yet this season, which seems surprising since it took a few last year. If ever there was going to be a season that was going to be good enough to save the series from its impending doom, this would be it. Sadly, the ratings figures seem to suggest that not enough people are watching these great episodes and the show is likely to take that pause that showrunner Russell T. Davies alluded to a few weeks back. But if this is how the show heads into its second major hiatus, then it’s going out with one hell of a bang.

Rating: 96/100

Doctor Who is streaming now on Disney Plus.

Featured photo courtesy of James Pardon/BBC Studios/Disney/Bad Wolf