Spoilers ahead!
Mirroring the previous season, episode 4, Lucky Day is another “Doctor-lite” episode that almost entirely revolves around the previous season’s companion Ruby Sunday. While previous companions have returned as guests for episodes in the past, an episode focusing entirely on a companion after they have left the TARDIS is a first for the show.
Last week’s episode, The Well, was a creepy horror episode, but perhaps the ideas in this episode were more frightening. Lucky Day follows Ruby back in her normal life after her travels with The Doctor last year. After being invited on to a podcast episode all about The Doctor, she meets host Conrad and strikes up a relationship.
Companion home life
Conrad has previously met The Doctor as a child in the episode’s cold open, and this interaction has been the spark in his interest in technology and the unknown. While for most, meeting The Doctor often inspires people to achieve great things, Conrads interaction fuels an obsession that threatens to tear UNIT, Doctor Who’s friendly sci-fi military organisation apart.
In the episode, Ruby’s story deals with how a companion’s travels with The Doctor takes a toll on them and the struggles of readjusting to normal life. As Ruby describes it, she has seen some wonderful things but equally experienced a large amount of trauma, from being eaten by a cello to watching the world turn to dust before her eyes.
It not something the show has really touched on before, though The Power of the Doctor introduced the companion support group made up of companions from throughout the show’s history, the show has never fully explored the effect of traveling on companions, and certainly not once they have left the show.
While on a trip with Conrad, Ruby starts to experience various electrical anomalies and sees glimpses of creatures she has previously faced with The Doctor. The things that she experiences are deeply troubling for Ruby, who acknowledges that her travels with The Doctor have left her with some form of PTSD.
There are a lot of good ideas in Lucky Day, and following the episode’s twist it introduces more excellent ideas on false truths, the effect of social media, and how bad faith actors and influencers manipulate the truth and exploit people’s fears for their own gain, even if to do so is to the detriment of the people they claim to be helping.
There’s always a twist…
I didn’t see the twist coming at all, and though it was a good twist, it very quickly went a little over the top, with the moment itself feeling very on the nose and a little bit cheesy. It’s clear that while the episode has a lot to say about the current social media culture surrounding conspiracies and anti-truth movements, it quickly used the tone of the reveal and what followed, to establish the satire present, perhaps to avoid offence.
Though Lucky Day does have these great elements for the show to explore, it’s ultimately let down by its lack of runtime and forward planning. Lucky Day introduces a lot of concepts in a really short amount of time and relatively late into the runtime, so the episode doesn’t have enough time to do them justice, instead rushing through to the conclusion — something that has been a common throughline for the season so far.
While the episode would have benefited from a larger run time, it equally could have boosted the impact it has by seeding the elements of the twist and its themes through previous episodes. If Conrad had been mentioned in passing previously, or we had heard about Think Tank as an alien/UNIT conspiracy activist group prior to them showing up, the reveal would have had far greater impact.
As it stands, though it’s clear there may be some kind of ulterior motive with Conrad presenting as wanting to meet The Doctor, the second half of the episodes basically comes out of nowhere, after having struggled to create the emotional investment in the characters involved, other than Ruby.
Equally then, while a commentary on how quickly public opinion can shift despite factual evidence to the contrary, the effect that the reveal has on UNIT, causing widespread distrust and outrage after a single instance of them arresting someone despite the show clearly establishing that their activity and the existence of extraterrestrial threats they protect the earth from is well known and public at this point, felt like an extreme overreaction, particularly in becoming so widespread so quickly.
Final Verdict
The episode was made well, and the acting from Millie Gibson (Ruby Sunday), Gemma Redgrave (Kate Lethbridge-Stewart) and Jonah Hauer-King (Conrad Clark) all being superb. Though Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor only showed up briefly to bookend the episode, his closing confrontation with Conrad was excellently done if a little on the nose, and perhaps would have gone down as one of the show’s great speeches if The Doctor had been more present throughout.
Ultimately, though the episode isn’t a bad one, it does boil down to being a filler episode. Being a filler episode wouldn’t normally be a bad thing, not every episode has to be a hit that builds and moves the plot forward. However, with an eight episode season, Doctor Who no longer has the room for filler episodes, but here’s the solution — bring back 13 episode seasons!
The Review
Fair
