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Doctor Who: Lucky Day (Review)

Posted on May 3, 2025 by Darren

“At least your special effects are improving.”

To be fair, a pretty solid run had to end at some point, and a Pete McTighe script is as good a place as any.

Lucky Day is an interesting episode. It solidifies the sense of this second Davies era as its own distinct object with its own distinct rhythms and structures. Just as one might pair Space Babies and The Robot Revolution, The Devil’s Chord and Lux, or Boom and The Well, Lucky Day is very obviously designed for the same slot as 73 Yards. This is another Doctor-lite episode built around Ruby Sunday, featuring U.N.I.T., set on contemporary Earth. It even brushes against rural folk horror, invoking The Wicker Man in its discussion of English villages.

Food for thought.

However, the episode takes a sharp and ambitious turn in its second half. As with a lot of recent Doctor Who, Lucky Day is an episode engaged with the larger context of the show and its place in the popular discourse. It is obviously structured around things that matter to both Davies and McTighe. It is commendably self-aware and playful. There is, on paper, a lot to appreciate about Lucky Day.

The problem is the execution, as the episode’s themes break like waves against the actual narrative itself. Lucky Day only really makes sense as metatext, but cannot support the weight of its big ideas whether inside or outside the fictional universe. It’s an unlucky break.

Absolutely floored.

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: alt-right, conspiracy theories, doctor who, fandom, media, metaphor, Online, paranoia, peter mctighe, ruby sunday, russell t. davies, skepticism, u.n.i.t., youtube | 4 Comments »

Doctor Who: Praxeus (Review)

Posted on February 2, 2020 by Darren

Praxeus is business as usual for Chris Chibnall’s era of Doctor Who.

It’s always slightly fun when a showrunner takes a co-writing credit on an episode, because it implies heavy involvement in a particular aspect of the story. It’s always fun to speculate what that aspect might be. When Russell T. Davies took a rare co-writing credit on Waters of Mars, it seemed reasonable to suggest that he was (at least) heavily involved in the “Time Lord Victorious” stuff. When Steven Moffat took a co-writing credit on The Girl Who Died, it seemed likely that he worked on the Twelfth Doctor’s explanation of his choice of face.

Beach’s own.

Normally, it’s fairly easy to see what hand a showrunner took in a given script. Fugitive of the Judoon brought back Vinay Patel, who wrote one of the best-received episodes of the previous season in Demons of the Punjab, but paired him with Chris Chibnall. There were any number of elements in Fugitive of the Judoon that might have merited the heavy hand of the showrunner. The most obvious stuff is the subplot involving Jack Harkness, which is both isolated from the story and heavy on foreshadowing. That said, the Ruth!Doctor stuff was also a big deal.

This makes Chibnall’s credit on Praxeus seem very strange. On the surface, and even with the direct cliffhanger feeding in from Fugitive of the Judoon,there is nothing in the story that would seem to merit or necessitate the showrunner stepping in to work with writer Peter McTighe on the episode.