New Doctor Who Season 2 First Impressions: Episode 4 (Lucky Day)

Well, I'll say this: It was better than I was expecting.

Conrad Clark does not get a screencap on my blog.

Lucky Day sees the return of Pete McTighe to televised Doctor Who, which is a bit of cursed knowledge that gave me pause. McTighe, of course, debuted during the Chibnall era with Kerblam, an episode which took me on a bit of a critical roller coaster ride in the fall of 2017. I remember watching it with the friend I was visiting, and enjoying it quite a bit. It had an energy and a drive to it that the Chibnall episodes up to that point had been lacking. It really felt like some solid Doctor Who. It really didn't sink in, what it was doing (and I confess to a naivety on my part back then, but I was on vacation and riding on high vibes then, give me a bit of a pass) until I read some more critical reviews and gave it a think myself. Ah. Oh dear. It completely upended itself into centrist neoliberal horseshit in the last ten minutes, famously stating that the problems with its world weren't the rampant unchecked excesses of hypercapitalism and space Amazon, but the revolutionary leftist trying to Do A Bad To Change The Status Quo. Bad. Very bad, but we will circle back to this unfortunate sentiment when we get to the climax of Lucky Day, and see just what's changed. This is an improvement from McTighe, but in some ways it's much of the same. For better or worse, McTighe has his distinct style and vision, and it bristles against my tastes somewhat.

Let's talk about one of those McTighe signifiers right away: his love of the twist villain. All three of his stories have had some sympathetic person reveal their true selves, and the latter two improve things by having it happen at the halfway point. Conrad Clark, then, fooled me. He seemed like a genuine fella, a nice new friend for the returning Ruby Sunday to have. Bringing Ruby back, then, fits in with another of McTighe's passions: he is a die-hard Classic Doctor Who fan. Though he only has three televised episodes to his name, he's also been responsible for producing the trailers for the Blu-Ray collection sets of Classic Who. He gets to absolutely marinate in the theme of bringing back old companions for a bit to have them wax wistfully about their days of adventure. Having just done a Google, McTighe is also listed as cowriter for Tales Of The TARDIS, which does the same thing except adding on showing a Classic Who rerun in between the old actors waxing wistfully. With Ruby in this episode, though, we get an in-between. She's only just quit, and so it's not become a nostalgia yet. It's become a trauma, something which dwells in her mind and still causes a pain. Ruby Sunday has not fully healed from the Empire Of Death. She's vulnerable, she's lonely, and she just needs a friend.

And then the dagger in between her shoulder blades. All of this was an evil scheme by a total shithead. I want to pause here, and linger on this moment with a bit of a tangent to other happenings that synchronize and resonate with this. Ruby's pain deserves her due, and so I grant it that. Last weekend, while we were all enjoying The Well, the Virtual Youtube community was hit with scandal and shock. A series of Google Docs about a popular VTuber named Sinder were dropped, accusing her of duplicitous and selfish behavior done in the name of undercutting her competition, the people she publically called her friends. Spreading lies and gossip about these other VTubers, manipulating and gaslighting a VTuber artist and modeler to cut their business deals with them in order to exclusively work with Sinder, in some misguided belief that said artist helping her friends lessened Sinder's value. I mention this because of the tearful statement read out by the VTuber most affected by this betrayal, Bao The Whale. Hearing her break down and wonder why it had to be her, how she wondered what she had done wrong for the person she thought was her friend to be nice to others and distant to her, what she had done to deserve such a fundamental and horrible betrayal... it broke my heart. You can think it through and try to understand the thought process of backstabbers like Sinder or Conrad Clark, but at the end of the way you can't. You can't because to even start you have to fundamentally toss aside your empathy. You have to think of it in terms of "just business". My heart goes out to Bao, to all affected by this VTuber's misdeeds... as it does to poor Ruby Sunday. Ruby, who has been dealing with so much and just wanted a break in her life, a fella she could trust... and who had her heart ripped to shreds while the sadistic fuck laughs about doing it. While he reveals his true self.

Said true self being a shitty fucking right-wing grifter. It's here that things get a little bit troublesome for me in my critique of the episode. Conrad and the shitty little social media movement he starts here is a bit broad when it comes to its allegory. Over all the discussion of this episode, there have been so many readings of what it's tackling here. Antivaxxers? (I DON'T NEED THE DOCTOR'S PHONY ALIEN ANTIDOTE) Disgruntled Doctor Who fans who are all DOCTOR WHO DEAD FOREVER? (Recall that we open with Conrad as a kid encountering the Doctor in 2007, and the ways this allegory can make the story into a fucked-up dark mirror of Love And Monsters.) General right-wing fake news bullshit, using the Doctor Who world and UNIT and alien invasions as the reality being flatly rejected? It can be any, it can be all, it's some in parts and others in others. It muddles things a little for me. Ambiguity in storytelling can be one thing, but with allegory like this I would prefer something stronger and more defined. A strong definition of what the evil of this episode is, what the thing behind the misinformation and vitriol is so that we know what terrible thing from the corner of the universe must be fought against. There is something to the idea of Conrad being so devoted to his lies, rejecting reality to support his one and denying all facts against it for his own benefit. Look at the darkly comedic but realistic way this ends, where he goes from pissing his pants begging for Mommy Kate to save him from the scary alien to going right back to being a big dick alpha male saying HA HA HA IT'S ALL MADE UP I'M STILL RIGHT. There is an ambiguity over whether Conrad really believes his anti-UNIT crusade, or if he's just saying what the angry mobs want to hear so he gets lauded with praise, a platform, and lots and lots of money. This is a man who has his mother well-off in a villa in France and tens of thousands of pounds to his name, a tax evader going on camera and yelling about how a girl in a wheelchair is WHERE OUR PRECIOUS TAX DOLLARS GO when he doesn't even pay those fucking taxes.

All of this is to say that, unfortunately, the climax of the episode is only a moderate improvement over Kerblam. Instead of a radical leftist raging against the established status quo, we have a right-wing shithead. That is an improvement for me, being left-leaning myself and thus having a bias towards seeing right-wing shitheads getting clowned on in media, but there are still problems with this approach. You veer into a dangerous trap with these sort of politics, a trap similar to the one that so many MCU movies have fallen into. Conrad's unhinged action against UNIT in this episode can be seen as the actions of a shit fascist, but the dangerous counter-read is that he's wrong simply for challenging UNIT. This is where McTighe's infinite wellspring of love for Classic Who can become a problem. Where Conrad is wrong not for what he is, but what he challenges. How dare he come in here and imply UNIT and the old Brigadier are malicious liars? UNIT, who are a cornerstone of Classic Doctor Who in the 1970s! (Indeed, the name of Conrad's counter-group is even a goddamn deep cut to UNIT's adversary from Tom Baker's very first story.) In this reading, UNIT are a lot like SHIELD in the MCU: yes, they hold dangerous alien technology that could crack the planet in half like an egg, but it's okay and they can have it because We Say They're The Goodies. Raising the question is, in itself, an inescapable trap. Marvel is never going to say that SHIELD is bad, and neither is Doctor Who, so raising the possibility forces you to make the antagonist force saying it into a dumbass strawman. That it's a right-winger this time makes the pill easier to swallow for me, but that is a bias. In the end, is it really that far removed from Kerblam's message that the system isn't the problem, but the radical revolutionaries trying to change it for their own agenda are?

On a positive note, at least, the ending. It reminds me, in a bizarre way, of Orphan 55. Of Doctor Who piercing the veil of the fourth wall (which under RTD2 has become more of a suggestion lately) and addressing the real world. Specifically those angry young men, those grifters, those peddlers and profiteers of hate. The show looks out to them, directly, and tells them to fuck off. That hate is always foolish and love is always kind, and in this world people are just trying to get by, and why are you adding more hate to the world, you pathetic little man? It reminds me of a tweet I saw, a decade ago, during of all things Gamergate. A (former) acquaintance of an acquaintance going all-in on how social justice and women were ruining the computer video games, and ending with the entitled battle cry of "Get out of my hobby.". The sheer hubris and arrogance of that stuck with me, and has for all this time. Here, then, is Doctor Who firing back at them. Doctor Who, who was besties with Ruby Sunday. Who was hurting, anguished, and lonely. Who let one lonely boy in and found herself betrayed again by that cruelty. The cruelty which lurks not just within Conrad Clark, but within every bigoted shithead who got all up in arms when Alan turned out to be a shithead three weeks ago and they felt called out. You were. You are. You suck... and maybe they were like Conrad Clark, growing up with the show and massively missing the memo. Let's end with a definitive statement, and put an end to this messy spiky unstable alchemical concoction of an episode (which is still getting a "it was good, for McTighe" from me, by the way) with a zinger.

If you think like that, Doctor Who was never for you. If you think like that, Doctor Who says to get the fuck out of his show.