Lux bends every rule in the Doctor Who book for a wild ghost train ride that’s also a touching love letter to fans
Russell T Davies loves television. He loves watching it. Conveniently, he loves writing it too. As anyone who’s read his wonderfully brave and revealing book The Writer’s Tale will know, he’s in love with the entire writing process.The traumatic, frustrating, uplifting, transporting journey to bring a story to life. Some viewers will complain whenever they can see the mechanics of plot and character working away behind the image. But not Davies. When he’s watching someone else’s work, whether on TV or in the cinema, he delights in the cleverness of the strings being pulled to turn a mere collection of incidents and character traits into the most magical thing a story, like a puppet becoming a read boy. It’s this same love that animates the second episode of Doctor Who’s new season, Lux.
Lux simultaneously crafts its own tale of terror and adventure, while metaphorically pulling back the curtain to marvel at just what a strange business this whole creative lark is. It does with lightness and fun, too, in an episode that all too easily have lost its grip. This is thanks to a huge team effort, but with a large share of the praise awarded to Alan Cumming as the villainous Mr. Ring-a-Ding.
Mr. Ring-a-Ding is a wonderfully observed take on the ‘bendy’ characters of classic cartoons
Mr. Ring-a-Ding is a 1930s cartoon brought to life by moonbeams and magic and who’s established his own little kingdom of terror in the Palazzo movie theatre in 1952 Florida. He’s a marvellous creation, created with a loving attention to detail. His design perfectly encapsulates the ‘bendy’ style of character popular in the early days of cartoons. Like many character of the period, he’s delightfully, weirdly, ambiguous – Is he a pig? An ant? A man? And why is he blue?
Whatever he is, Mr. Ring-a-Ding also captures that edge of danger that cartoons of the era possessed. Agents of chaos, even the most supposedly heroic could be vindictive, ruthless, or just plain mean at the flick of a switch. It all came down to what was funniest at that precise moment. Ring-a-Ding, too, is a monster in every way that matters yet never hesitates to go for the gag. He kidnaps fifteen people and suspends them in time on film. He threatens to burn (sort of) alive the resurrected celluloid wife of projectionist Reginald Pye. If that wasn’t enough, he plots to set off the world’s atom bombs so he can bask in their lovely light and truly become a god.
Equally funny and terrifying, Alan Cumming hits the perfect tone for the animated menace
Yet he also makes wisecracks about ‘wishing he’d never learned about perspective,’ as he struggles to drag his diminutive form up the steps of the cinema. This despite flitting from place to place in an instant elsewhere in the episode. Why? Because, like a rabbit once said about slipping a pair of handcuffs, it was funny.
That Roger Rabbit connection extends behind the scenes, with a veteran of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? part of the Framestore team being Ring-a-Ding to life. The animation in Lux being hand drawn a frame at a time, old school style, albeit with stylus and pad rather than pen and paper, adds hugely to both the sense of authenticity and the strangeness. Nobody’s done it like this for a long time; indeed, many of the audience will have never seen anything like it before.
Alan Cumming hits the perfect note in his vocal performance too. He dances happily back and forth between menace and mirth, making Ring-a-Ding mercurial and unpredictable, but never dull.
The Doctor and Belinda transform into Velma and Fred for some witty winks at the need for ‘depth’ in even kids cartoons these days
This faithfulness to the form is present in the bravura sequence of the Doctor and Belinda becoming trapped in the cartoon. In one the episode’s sweetest little gags, their design is patterned on the style of the original Scooby-Doo, Where are You! cartoon of 1969. It follows on from the Doctor’s earlier declaration that he’s 100% that Velma, while dubbing Belinda “Fred.” (Romana would be proud.)
It also leads into some cute observations about how modern cartoons, including incarnations of the Scooby gang. No character can be the pure vehicle for laughs and adventure any more. Rightly or wrongly, they all need back stories, and hopes and dreams beyond the four corners of the screen bordering their chase up and down corridors. Tying this to the subjective improvement in the quality of TV animation over the decades give us a wonderful “we’ve got depth!” pun too. It’s perhaps a wry observation, too, on how even Davies himself reinvented Doctor Who for the 21st century. Giving the Time Lord a backstory of off-screen genocide and survivor’s guilt in place of the largely continuity free tangle of limbs and curls in a scarf which Davies himself had grown up loving.
Russell T Davies doesn’t forget where he came from as the Doctor crashes out of the TV in Doctor Who’s most meta scene ever
And Russell T Davies does love Doctor Who. It’s not just a job: that diamond logo is tattooed on his soul. After all this is the man whose most personal character in breakthrough drama Queer as Folk wasn’t the swaggering, confident Stuart. It was the nerdy, needy, Doctor Who obsessed Vince. A man as likely to end a date with an accidental Jon Pertwee marathon as with a night of passion.
It’s perhaps why that scene works so well. Having tried to make the film they’re in jump and failing to escape, the Doctor and Belinda decide the only way out is through. Through your television screen in-fact, tumbling into the living room of a trio of Doctor Who fans. It’s a magical sequence enlivened by the knowledge Davies doesn’t see Hassan, Lizzie, and Robyn as ‘them,’ but as ‘us.’ Davies has spent as many nights as any of us on a couch with his mates naming favourite stories and dissecting the plot flaws of the newest Doctor Who episode. He just did it at a time when all three would have been nodding in agreement that nothing will ever, ever, beat Genesis of the Daleks.
The Doctor’s fandom encounter reminds us just what the show has always brought out the best in us
The Doctor’s surreal encounter with his own fans works at a deeper level too. Yes, it’s a fun meta twist on the ‘what if none of it is real’ episode every show does sooner or later. And, true, it’s has lots of fun with its premise too. The Fifteenth Doctor being wounded by everybody’s favourite story being a Tenth Doctor episode rather than one of his is a lovely meta twist of multi-Doctor bickering, after all. But it’s also something a little deeper than that. “The man who makes people better,” was one of word sketches for the new 21st century Doctor. Someone who, as often as they save the day themselves, inspires others to be the hero of their own story.
That was never just about Cathica taking matters into her own hands in The Long Game, or the magnificent force of nature that Donna Noble became, or Yaz’ scribbed “WWDD?” on her wrist. Rose Tyler wasn’t the only one the Doctor was teaching “a different way of living your life… making a stand… doing what’s right.” When the Twelfth Doctor signs off with a speech to an empty TARDIS that hate is always foolish, love is always kind, and to “run fast, laugh hard, be kind,” he’s not talking to himself.
Hassan, Lizzie, and Robyn go beyond a quick metatextual joke to represent fandom at its best
Hassan, Lizzie, and Robyn know that “never be cruel, never be cowardly,” isn’t just a promise. It’s an instruction. So they work out the truth of their own fictional unreality because watching Doctor Who makes you smarter. They tell the Doctor and Belinda the truth because Doctor Who makes you kinder. And they sacrifice their own existence because Doctor Who has taught them that we’re all just stories in the end. The key is to make yours a good one.
They’re not a parody or a mockery. They’re the best of us. The trio may think they’re the sort of characters writers don’t bother giving names too. But Russell T Davies knows better, loves better, than that as the closing credits prove. Hassan Chowdry. Lizzie Abel. Robyn Gossage. Say their names.
Lux’s resolution combines some familiar cliches, but elevates them with unusual grace
Back in the real world, or what passes for it in Doctor Who, the third act unspools in pretty familiar fashion. A convenient secondary character sacrifices themselves to save the day so our heroes don’t have to. Meanwhile, the villain’s weakness turns out to be giving them exactly what they want: more of it that they can possibly handle.
But Lux provides a particularly lovely, even poetic variation. Reginald Pye dies by the side of his celluloid wife, blowing up his beloved collection of cinema history to save the future. “Find me,” she tells him at the end, just as Rogue did last season. (At this stage it’s difficult to see the breadcrumbs in Davies’ arc foreshadowing for the bakery.)
Meanwhile, Lux doesn’t scream a “NOoOoOoO” or a “YOU CAN’T DO THIS TO ME!” He smiles wide as a sunbeam as he grows and grows and grows, stretched thinner and thinner. “Everything, and nothing.” He gets his wish to be a true god. It’s an almost beautiful, touching moment, that skillfully succeeds despite, or perhaps because, of the cartoonish figure growing to envelop galaxies. But if gods are every atom in every thing, then they’re simply an expression of the laws of reality, incapable of action. It’s them, ironically, that have no free will, not us. Such is the trap that Ring-a-Ding happily finds himself in.
Connecting Lux to the pantheon of gods introduced in The Giggle seems unnecessary
The ending at least helps justify establishing Ring-a-Ding, or rather Lux, god of light, as one of the Pantheon introduced in The Giggle. Before that point, it allows for the exquisitely delivered rug pull of his “don’t make me laugh!” catchphrase. But it’s hard to believe that in any earlier season Ring-a-Ding wouldn’t simply have been some random inter-dimensional interloper. If made today, it feels like Tooth and Claw would be home to the God of the Moon, Flatline would have been about the God of Perspective, and The Idiot’s Lantern the God of… Fame, maybe?
But it’s hard to imagine that would add anything to those stories, and that’s mostly true of Lux too. Besides which, the Doctor is now taking these vast, reality shaking gods, and batting them aside with relative ease a couple of times a year. It’s a game of inevitably diminishing returns ever since the genuine thrill of the nigh omnipotent Toymaker’s return.
Twenty years on, Doctor Who is still toppling worlds and shining, and calling on viewers to do the same
Doctor Who has been back from the wilderness for 20 years now. The very fact that it can still astonish and surprise with episodes like Lux is possibly its greatest achievement. It continues to find new ways to explore that key message too. Today, a deepening shadow is falling across the world. And from segregated Miami in 1952, gives a thought on why he can’t save us. Except, perhaps, to show us the way.
“I’ve toppled worlds, sometimes I wait for people to topple theirs. Until then, I live in it, and I shine.”
Never give in. Never give up. Topple worlds. And shine.
Doctor Who continues with The Well at 7.20pm this Saturday on BBC One. Episodes drop on iPlayer in the UK and Disney+ everywhere else (except Ireland) at 8am GMT.
“Blink”