Spoilers ahead for Doctor Who: “Lucky Day.”
This season of Doctor Whoย has been an extremely bumpy ride so far, and today we’re going to alien autopsy one of the most interesting episodes the show has done in the Disney era. It’s going to involve a lot of spoilers, so if you want to avoid that, here’s your weekly bit of Whoย trivia so you didn’t waste the click.
A Texas writer was once interrogated by the FBI for potentially selling government secrets to the Daleks. I wrote a long article about it for the Dallas Observer, but the tl:dr is that former Texas Triffid Ranch owner Paul Riddell once worked Texas Instruments when they helped handle guided missile systems in the 1980s. A dedicated fan of Doctor Who, he sometimes made references to the show after it aired at midnight on KERA. His boss, a Mormon with very little pop culture knowledge, turned Riddell in when he made a joke about being a Dalek spy. The FBI gentle questioned Riddell, but no further action was taken, and the U.S. government has never detained any citizen for stupid reasons during a national hysteria again. Huzzah!
Now, onto the episode.
Ever since Doctor Whoย softly rebooted with Disney’s money, it has been asking the question “what is reality?” From the machinations of the Toymaker to a living cartoon to magic goblins, this incarnation of the series is obsessed with what is, what isn’t, and how those two lines gets blurred. My personal theory is that this will all end with a return to the Land of Fiction from “The Mind Robbers” when the season finale, “The Reality War” drops on the last day of May.
“Lucky Day” is probably the first major battle of that war. A young man named Conrad (Jonah Hauer-King) has a minor, but positive encounter with The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Belinda (Varada Sethu) in 2007. This inspires him to go in search of the truth about aliens, leading to a popular podcast and a budding romance with former companion Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson). In the season’s second red flag boyfriend episode, he forms an immediate bond with Ruby, who is still dealing with the trauma of her adventures.
All this leads to a startling twist where he stages a livestreamed fake alien attack with Ruby and UNIT so that he can “prove” to the world that aliens aren’t real and that UNIT is using advanced technology to fool people and forward its military agenda. This escalates into a raid on UNIT headquarters where Conrad continues to insist that everything is “special effects” right up until an actual monster bites his arm off.
The references to QAnon and Texas’s own Alex Jones are about as subtle as a punch in the noots. Conrad storming UNIT headquarters with a gun demanding they bring out evidence was obviously inspired byย Edgar Maddison Welch waltzing into Cosmic Ping Pong with an AR-15 and trying to find the Satanic pedophile tunnels. Once poor Ruby’s heart is broken and the story is all about a dipshit’s quest for what he wants to be the truth, every second drips with the poison we’ve all been swimming in since at least birthersim.
However, “Lucky Day” doesn’t take the satisfying way out. Even when Conrad feels alien teeth in his flesh and The Doctor himself shows up to give him an epic scolding, Conrad is able to maintain his own manufactured reality. There is simply no amount of evidence that will convince him he isn’t a brave liberator of minds from deep state lies.
I was watching with my family, and the episode greatly disturbed my wife. She kept saying things like, “but he saw the monsters! It left slime on him! He is literally in the Tardis!” Underneath all those statements was the question: when does this madness stop?
I don’t know, and neither does Doctor Who. We know vaccines work and don’t cause autism. We know there are no Satanic pedophile tunnels under a D.C. pizza joint. We know that children died at Sandy Hook because a mass shooter killed them.
None of that matters to people who let lies become their gods. For all that The Doctor’s speech at the end of the episode is the best one since “The Zygon Inversion,” it does nothing. The Fifteenth Doctor keeps running headfirst into this problem. In “Dot and Bubble,” he had to just accept that people would rather continue being racist than be saved by him. Some people, when touched by the real, shrink away and grow cancerous. Maybe it’s because of broken hearts, or maybe evil is an actual force.
Regardless, “Lucky Day” is one of the rawest and best episodes ever. I’m starting to think that if we’d ever gotten a second and third season with Christopher Eccleston, this is what they might have looked like. Even when the show is momentarily ridiculous or mediocre, it’s daring. At least, until the whole thing falls apart at the end of the season.
That’s the reality to face, but maybe the lessons of “Lucky Day” don’t have to be all bad. Despite how ineptly executed last season’s ending was, this one could be better. The ability of people to imagine new realities in the face of evidence to the contrary is killing us, but it’s also what sends us to the stars and conquers disease and even why we have stories at all.
I pray to The Doctor that we win the Reality War on all fronts, including the imaginary ones.
Doctor Who airs Saturdays on Disney+.
