Mark Harrison | On 20, Apr 2025



This review contains no spoilers for this week’s episode of Doctor Who. Already seen it? Read our Doctor’s notes at the end for additional spoilery observations. For more on Doctor Who, see our Whoniverse channel.


“I’m a two-dimensional character, you can’t expect backstory!” Every couple of years, Doctor Who hits a story idea you can’t believe it’s never done before. Granted, the expanded universe of spin-off media has covered just about everything, but you have to go back to 1965’s The Rescue for anything as meta as Lux, in which an animated character in the show is actually an animated character in the story.



In 1950s Miami, 15 patrons of the Palazzo cinema have disappeared during the pre-show cartoon at a screening of the Rock Hudson movie The Harvest Bringer. With no clues to go on, police have chained up the cinema with its faithful projectionist Reginald Pye (Linus Roache) still inside. The Doctor and Belinda are just passing by, but can’t resist investigating, which brings them into conflict with wrathful Looney Tune Mr Ring-a-Ding (voiced by Alan Cumming), a walking, talking, singing, sometimes-tap-dancing 2D cartoon character.



”Bonkers” is the watchword in a lot of reviews of this one, much as it was for last year’s The Devil’s Chord. Indeed, some of the choices in this year’s Episode 2 seem like writer and showrunner Russell T Davies distinguishing it from last year’s, even as it repeats certain beats – like the Doctor and companion changing outfits – shot for shot. 

By the end, there’s very little chance you’re going to mistake it for any other episode of Doctor Who, but it gets away with more for its high concept than its execution. The big production triumphs of this episode are transforming 2024 Penarth Pier into 1952 Miami and, much more obviously, its cartoon antagonist, first seen putting The Ring in Mr Ring-a-Ding as he crawls out of the big screen.
 
The Unleashed episode for this story shows how the character was animated using traditional handdrawn techniques rather than CG-assisted, a painstaking and expensive effort that pays off beautifully. Further animated by Cumming’s vocal performance, the character is superbly rendered in all senses of the word.
 
The other big guest-star turn this week is a less showy performance by Linus Roache as poor old Reginald Pye, who’s emotionally bound up by celluloid dreams and nostalgia. The cinema is a whites-only space, which brings further drama for a version of the show led by Ncuti Gatwa and Varada Sethu, both brilliant in this. Together with last week’s 50s-inspired robot society, Davies retorts to that old right-wing meme “this is the future that liberals want”, in the way that Season 2 so far has portrayed and lampooned the history that fascists want back.



It’s interesting stuff on paper but, in practice, Lux plays a little Doctor Who by numbers, warming over a familiar structure and reviving some bad old tropes. Early in the episode, Belinda compares the Doctor’s enthusiasm for checking out “an old caretaker in a haunted cinema” to Scooby-Doo and it’s only a shame they don’t commit to it. Like last year’s Rogue, Lux tries to vest Doctor Who’s most generic conventions in an affectionate spoof of something else. It comes off less as a celebration of that style than a centring of its own. 

This is a trend in New Who going at least as far back as 2008’s The Unicorn and the Wasp, the Agatha Christie episode that isn’t anything like as complex or rewarding as one of her mysteries but has the front to lump them together in reductive terms.

Davies’ medium is television drama and he excels in it but, when it comes to other genres and styles, he seems increasingly inclined towards parody than pastiche, the latter of which has always fuelled the show’s genre-hopping. 

If Doctor Who is the show that can go anywhere and do anything, then it’s not always interested in doing so. A year after The Devil’s Chord, “the musical Doctor Who”, didn’t have many musical numbers in it, you may find yourself wishing “the animated Doctor Who” was a bit more cartoony. The action is largely confined to one or two sets, which director Amanda Brotchie makes the most of, but it all comes off more static than anarchic.
 
Even the section of the episode that’s explicitly referencing Looney Tunes (“Doc amuck”, if you like) is more about Doctor Who than it is animation. That doesn’t always manifest in lore-dumping or returning monsters, but it’s one of those outings where its ties to a larger season arc strangle the potential for fun, self-contained stuff with a Doctor Who-brand bonkers idea.
 
Believe us, there’s no episode we’d rather be able to take our fan hats (and scarves) off and praise unconditionally – Lux is bright, funny, emotional fare with two or three set-pieces unlike anything else on television. If the bits in between those moments feel a little sticky and pedestrian, it’s still fun to watch Doctor Who push against its institutional limitations the way this does.
 

 

 

Doctor’s notes – contains spoilers

– “Don’t make me laugh!” Mr Ring-a-Ding’s catchphrase references the Giggle and reveals the cartoon as a harbinger of the Pantheon of Discord, whose members include previous baddies like the Toymaker (god of games), Maestro (god of music), and Sutekh (god of death). Named for the Latin for light, Lux Imperator is the god of light, literally animating Mr Ring-a-Ding after entering the cinema on a moonbeam. On the marquee outside, “The Harvest Bringer” becomes “Harbinger”.
 
– In another callback to The Giggle, the Doctor’s bigeneration enables him to store a bit of that golden teakettle energy to heal a burnt hand, which is a late lightbulb moment for Lux. In an unexpected redux of the 1996 TV Movie, the Doctor is suspended over the projector light to harvest his regeneration powers to give the baddy a permanent physical form (with brilliantly horrific CGI). The resolution, where Lux outgrows his bounds when exposed to sunlight, has more in common with Davies’ 2006 episode Tooth And Claw, including a reused line: “You’re 60% water, you can still drown.”
 
– More annoyingly, the episode revives an overused Chris Chibnall-era trope where the Doctor or companion is saved from blowing themselves up by them abandoning a selfless one-off character to do it for them instead. It’s carried off well with a very dark and emotional final scene between Mr Pye and the cinematic spectre of his late wife (Jane Hancock), but it is what it is.
 
– At the very least, Davies takes a harder stance on segregation in 1950s America than the last time the show came here in 2018’s Rosa. We know the Doctor can’t fix historical atrocities, but with its Black Doctor and British-Indian companion, this episode is not the least bit interested in playing along with it. There are great moments for Gatwa to play an openly defiant side of the Doctor throughout the story and with the final burning of the cinema, this has more of Inglourious Basterds than of Roger Rabbit…
 
– Ironically, the Pantheon business flattens down the animated references into a more two-dimensional format. Budgetary constraints might have been an issue, but the all-too-brief sequence in which Gatwa and Sethu are animated goes nowhere but reciting plot points and trivia. Furthermore, the big visual homage to the classic 1953 Daffy Duck cartoon Duck Amuck plants them on a white background, battling the format in which they’re trapped, but spills over into…
 
– “Oh, this is so Galaxy Quest.” With our hats and scarves back on, we think fandom got off pretty lightly in the fourth-wall-smashing entry into a world where Doctor Who is just a TV show, enjoyed and snarked over by superfans Lizzie (Bronte Barbe), Hassan (Samir Arrian), and Robyn (Steph Lacey). The gag about Blink being better than any of the RTD-penned episodes the Doctor suggests is funny, especially with a punchline that fits with how distinctly unimpressed Belinda is to be in Doctor Who.
 
– Speaking of Belinda, the quest to get her home is guided by a new bit of TARDIS kit, a vortex indicator or “vindicator”, casting a line to 2025 wherever they land. Travelling through time and space is no bar to Mrs Flood (Anita Dobson), mind, as she appears outside the cinema in the closing moments of the episode to once again portend that the show will not go on for much longer…

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