New Doctor Who Season 2 First Impressions: Episode 2 (Lux)

(With thanks to Lena Mactíre for some magical consultations)

I got you, moonlight, you're my starlight...

I'll echo what I said a year and a half ago, in a brief 5-star review of Wild Blue Yonder: RTD, holy fuck. With Lux, we have something we've not had in a long time: an episode I really love which other people actually agree with me on. It was a harsh period there where I thought the pervasive toxic stink of fandom was poisoning this show to death in the public opinion. I almost wrote a hit piece about how the true Empire Of Death were the fans who were convinced this shit was going away forever. I did not do that, but I have a very different piece simmering in my mind. A piece about the new RTD era, and about how its more magical elements let not just gods and goblins into the world of Doctor Who, but open holes in the fourth wall for our own perceptions and assumptions to seep in and affect the program. Boy howdy am I glad I waited until this season concluded to write that, because RTD just fucking goes for it here. Let me gush about Lux for an amount of words, and give my praises as the magic returns to Doctor Who (not that it left, but it did for a lot of nerds!). 

Even that cold open manages to be the most Freznocore shit imaginable. Reflected from moonlight onto a silver spoon, a cartoon is imbued with the essence of the God Of Light. It's the biggest mirror alert yet, and it being the moon not just makes me think of Sailor Moon and my own transformations in light of it,  but of Kill The Moon. This is not the last invocation of the Capaldi era in the episode, as we'll get to when we get to the big thing. For now, Lux Imperator themselves, inhabiting the form of a Cuphead-ass motherfucker named Mr. Ring-A-Ding. Everything about this is a fun technical triumph, from how effortlessly they mix live-action with animation to how goddamn nightmarish it is when Lux briefly goes 3D and gets depth in the climax. We are, of course, dealing with the Pantheon again, and some comparison can be made to The Devil's Chord from last year. If I may be flippant in said comparison: If I had a nickel for every second episode of Gatwa's Doctor Who seasons which featured a trip to the past and a godlike being fucking around with a human artistic medium, I'd have two nickels which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice. I liked The Devil's Chord well enough, but Lux manages to have a little more staying power for me because the medium it's playing with is my medium of choice. I can't do musical theory to save my life, but the power of visual entertainment? I can do that in my sleep, and I am literally doing it right the fuck now, so let's do some of that shit.

Film critic Roger Ebert, in an 80's news segment defending Return Of The Jedi, said that motion pictures are themselves a special effect; that film goes through a camera, the projector shows light on the screen, and that in itself is a special effect. This is the power Lux holds, a god of light let loose in a cinema: the power to make dream into reality. To reunite a sad and lonely projectionist with a lost wife, to blur the line between live-action and animation, between reality and fantasy. To make the unreal real, and to imbue it with aura and energy. That's not just a power of Lux: that's the power of visual media itself. Doctor Who may currently be projected via ones and zeroes going from a Disney+ server to my laptop, but it's the same magic trick deep down. Lux is so much about the power of stories and the blurred line between the real and the fictional that you'd swear Steven Moffat ghostwrote it. The episode gets to play with this in the brilliant bit where Doctor Who and Belinda become cartoons and have to gain three dimensions by having interiority and depth, both literal and figurative. They get to fuck around with the film, burn it away to escape the confines of the film strip... and yes, break the fourth wall. No, not just break it. Shatter it into a million fucking pieces in the living room of a couple of average Doctor Who nerds.

This is so fucking brazen and glorious, and I honestly expected more people to be mad about it. The worst I saw was a review which said the scene went on a little too long, but the reviewer was still on board with the sentiment. Having made the fourth wall so opaque in his era, RTD finally shatters it and has Doctor Who the character interact with Doctor Who the fandom. They even get to reference the goddamn hashtag about Doctor Who being dead forever! We really are playing with fire here, and we will be playing with fire in the climax. There is so goddamn much to love about this. THe way the fans gush about Blink, despite Gatwa sticking up for the goblins or the landmine episode. The way Doctor Who just rolls with being a fictional character. There is a level of "safety" at play here that I think helps insulate this from making Wider Fandom At Large horrified. It's not really Doctor Who stepping out of the TV and into reality, it's still a construct created by Lux, a charged vacuum emboitment of narrative and image to maintain Doctor Who within a fiction. What if the softening of the fourth wall goes both ways? What if this, then, is Doctor Who meeting Doctor Who fans at a halfway point? The Doctor and Belinda cross through from their land of fiction, and the fans cross over from reality into this liminal space. Neither are strictly real, nor are neither strictly imaginary (and indeed, the fans get to exist after this scene thanks to the post-credits, and being credited with last names.)

What if we go further? What if we invoke parts of my beloved Peter Capaldi years? The fans here are taking and learning from the image of Doctor Who, and using that in the best ways possible: to enlighten themselves, and to offer help and support to the show they love so much. Consider, in the first case, Extremis. The weirdo simulation episode where the entire point was that the idea of the Doctor was as real a Doctor as the genuine article, and that simulating him created enough of a Doctorlike figure to reach out through the fiction and help the "real" Doctor. In the same way, the fans aren't strictly "real" and are just side characters in a Doctor Who story, and yet they're Doctor Who fans who probably rate Extremis very highly. They're constructs, but they become real and viable and take on a life of their own thanks to The Magic Of Doctor Who. In turn, they can influence the narrative of their favorite show thanks to this brush with magic. 

My second example of this is Before The Flood, an episode I don't particularly like but serves my purposes here. That episode opened with a fourth wall break where Peter Capaldi's Doctor Who explained to us what a bootstrap paradox was, therefore priming us for understanding the Doctor's plan in that episode. The whole point of a bootstrap paradox is "well, where did the idea start?". Now think of the resolution to this episode. The key to stopping Lux is that cellulose nitrate is extremely flammable, and lighting all the film on fire blows open the cinema and saves the day. This idea is neatly placed on the mantle by Lux in their introduction... but it isn't ignored until the end when Doctor Who goes "of course!". It's brought up by that girl in the Meep shirt who calls it out as a pretty obvious Chekov's Gun. She's a Doctor Who fan, she knows how this shit works, she cottoned on to it immediately. Or maybe that also got leaked, who fucking knows? The point is, the situation changes. Doctor Who's eureka moment about how to stop Lux comes from a Doctor Who fan saying "Well it's a bit of an obvious Chekov's Gun, isn't it, Doctor?". The resolution of the episode comes from outside the episode, but also from inside. The lines are blurred, and we exist in a liminal space. The real world and its clever analysis of Doctor Who tropes is directly influencing the resolution of the episode.

And what a beautiful resolution. Whereas every other Pantheon being has been defeated by getting hoisted by their own foibles and yelling NOOOOOO I'LL GET YOU NEXT TIME DOCTOR WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, look at what happens to Lux. Yes, by this point Lux is being very bad. There's not just the attempt to steal the Doctor's regeneration energy (literally draining the light from our hero!), but the whole thing about wanting to unleash nukes upon the world that feels a little bit like a perfunctory "oh a Pantheon being has to be a world-ending calamity". Lux does not end up foiled while cursing out the Doctor. Lux gets to ascend to light itself, spreading out into the universe in a moment of cosmic wonder and euphoria. The being born of moonlight ascends into sunlight, and then into starlight, tapping directly into the creative energy of the cosmos. It's pure beauty. It inspires me. So much of this episode is a beauty. I haven't even touched on the way the show touches on elements like Rock Hudson, or how it deals with the material reality of the past being a hostile country to people of color like the current Doctor and Belinda (in a much more down-to-earth way than fucking Rosa, I might add), but they make it sing. This is a celebration of the magic of media, of the power that the moving image holds (it's fitting that the fan's favorite episode is Blink, an episode about a Doctor Who monster that would grow to be all about the alchemical power of an image), of the way that fiction and reality can blur together such that each can influence the other in their own magical ways. It's a tour de force and a wonder, and it pleases me that other people can see it?

What has happened to the magic of Doctor Who? It's right here.