The Cutprice Guignol

After last week’s slightly-wobbly sequel, Doctor Who is once again reaching back into its past – though this time, no further than Sunday. Ruby Sunday, that is.

Lucky Day takes us back to check in with Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson, with a haircut that’s a truly spectacular improvement), who has two major problems: a boyfriend who has a podcast, Conrad (Jonah Hauer-King) and a bizarre supernatural threat in the form of the Shreek.

I have to admit, when I first saw the premise for this episode being so heavily focused on Ruby Sunday, I was a bit…unsure, to say the least. Ruby herself isn’t a dreadful character, but the writing for last season rendered her a bit toothless – no disrespect to Millie Gibson, who truly did the best with what she had, but her arc as a whole was one I found quite dull and muddled. But, more than that, with a season as short as this one…we’re really going to take a break from the companion who’s only been here for three episodes to check back in with a different one? Previous companions have returned before, of course, and it’s not that these stories can’t be interesting or clever or fun – but I feel as though I only just escaped the collapsing building of that storyline, and I’m far more interested in Belinda’s dynamic with the Doctor.

But this episode isn’t really about that at all – no, it’s about Conrad’s relationship with the Doctor, and, by extension, Ruby. After running into Belinda and the Doctor on New Year’s Eve 2007, he spends his life obsessing over the Doctor and the mystery of the blue box he saw nearly two decades before. And I can kind of see how this storyline fits with the rest of the season thus far – if Lux was an episode that explored fans of the Doctor outside of the show, it makes sense to give us an episode about an in-universe obsessive with the Doctor and all of his comrades. But what I actually found pretty interesting about the episode is that what the Doctor represents to Conrad, which is not the usual wide-eyed, starry sense of wonder that we normally see the show focus on. No, for Conrad, the Doctor is part of a wide-ranging conspiracy executed by UNIT in the UK to try and terrify the population into submission – a conspiracy that he and his followers are going to bring to an end, one way or another.

While the episode starts off as a pretty ho-hum romance plot, the twist that reveals Conrad’s true intentions really caught me off-guard in a great way. There are those in the fandom – bafflingly – who seem to despise the show’s embrace of political stories, and frankly, I think that’s kind of ridiculous. We can argue all we want about the quality of certain episodes that deal with real-life political and social issues, but Doctor Who is a political show – in the same way so many science-fiction, fantasy, and horror stories reflect some real-life menace, its grounding in the real world is inescapable, and I never want that to change.

Of course, I’ve had some issues with how Doctor Who has tried to cash in on certain social movements in the last few years (Orphan-55 is just…not a good episode), but this episode stands out for me as one of the better integrations of the show’s world and the real one in recent memory. As the world of the Doctor expands and the supernatural threats grow more and more prominent in the world of the show, it makes sense that there would be some kind of reaction to it. The rampant misinformation about the safety of the nation being spread by a podcast bro, exploding on social media and traditional media alike, and leading to this catastrophic finale where he’s faced with the veracity of what he has tried to deny in the form of a great big alien taking a chomp out of his arm – it’s not subtle, but it works. One of the major problems I’ve had with these episodes in the past is too much of the real-life language about this discourse leaking into the episode and dating it painfully as a result, but writer Peter McTighe does a decent job dodging that and giving us something that feels true to the show and to the message at once.

Central to this episode, of course, is UNIT – and a not-entirely-sympathetic UNIT at that. Kate Stewart (who is somehow not canonically a lesbian in this version of the show, a revelation I was once again jumpscared by when she shared a meaningful glance with her love interest. And so close to Pride Month? For shame!) so often finds herself pie dough under the rolling pin of plot requirements, smushed into a certain shape to fit whatever the story needs from her. But Jenna Redgrave is a genuinely brilliant actor, and this episode finally gives her a chance to get her teeth into something juicy – Kate is willing to let Conrad die on livestream to make her point here, as punishment for his criticism of UNIT and the risk that she believed would follow. I really love seeing her take it to this level, serving not just as one of the Doctor’s emissaries on Earth intent on upholding his values, but as her own person, retaliatory, angry, and unforgiving.

As for the Doctor, we do get a brief appearance from him at the close of the episode to confront Conrad about everything he’s done. While I know that Ncuti Gatwa’s emotional performance doesn’t land for everyone, he delivered this monologue with real impact – through a smile, sure, but the anger and fury was bubbling beneath the surface in a palpable way. I’m not entirely convinced the episode needed a pin put in the themes and storytelling so bluntly, but, you know, this is his show after all, and it would be strange to have yet another episode that he’s barely in.

This is, ironically, one of my favourite Ruby Sunday episodes – it’s more an epilogue to her story with the Doctor than anything else, but it’s one where she feels more like an actual character than she ever has before to me. Perhaps because the conflict at the heart of her character is stronger and better-defined here than the cloak-wearing, dramatic-pointing, God-of-Death nonsense – no, this is a post-Doctor Ruby, one who is trying to find her feet as she returns to real life and make sense of the enormity of everything that she has been through. She feels adrift here, even her family (the welcome return of Carla and Cherry Sunday, hurrah!) unable to fully connect with her after the life-changing experiences she shared with the Doctor. I thought Millie Gibson did a great job here (that little throwaway comment she makes to a bar patron about heading out to contend with the aliens himself made me laugh out loud), selling the hell out of her heartbreak at realizing that the one person she had really been able to connect with on all of this.

Lucky Day is, despite my reservations, actually a really solid and quite interesting episode of the show – and finally finds a way to make Ruby Sunday the compelling character she always deserved to be. What did you think of Lucky Day? Where does it rank amongst other Doctor-lite episodes for you? Let me know in the comments below!

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(header image via Blogtor Who)