When the writers for this season of Doctor Who<\/em> were announced, one name in the roster put me instantly on edge. Pete McTighe may have a distinguished filmography but, in this house, he\u2019s known as the person who wrote \u201cKerblam.\u201d That\u2019s the Chibnall-era episode summed up as \u201cSpace Amazon is great and the people protesting poor working conditions and mass-layoffs are the real villains.\u201d Imagine then, my delighted surprise when \u201cLucky Day\u201d doesn\u2019t just get its politics right, but it does so with molotov cocktails in hand.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s 2007 and the Doctor and Belinda land in London as the clock strikes midnight on New Year\u2019s Day. The Doctor, Vindicator in hand, gets another set of coordinates before realizing a small boy, Conrad Clack, saw the TARDIS land. He hands Conrad a 50 pence piece and tells him it\u2019s his \u201clucky day,\u201d before the boy sprints back to his mother. But she\u2019s not interested in his story about a magical blue box, striking the boy and saying she\u2019s had enough of his lies.<\/p>\n Conrad next encounters the TARDIS 17 years later when he spots it parked down a dark alley. There's a nearby door with a broken lock and he ventures inside to a closed down department store, where he\u2019s stalked by an unseen monster. After a few seconds, the monster brushes past Conrad, leaving green slime on his neck \u2014 which is how it marks its prey. When the creature, the Shreek, emerges into the open ready to strike, it\u2019s zapped away by the Doctor and Ruby.<\/p>\n From the shadows, Conrad watches the Doctor hand Ruby a vial of antidote as she, too, was marked as prey. He stalks them back to the TARDIS and overhears their conversation \u2014 half an hour prior, she was hanging out with the Beatles, putting this just after \u201cThe Devil\u2019s Chord<\/a>.\u201d He snaps a picture of Ruby and puts it online, asking the internet if anyone has seen this woman.<\/p>\n He tracks down Ruby at some point after she stops traveling in the TARDIS, and invites her onto his podcast. Conrad tries to flirt with his guest, and a quick montage shows them date and start to get serious about each other. He even confesses he was present during that first encounter with the Shreek, and Ruby hands him a vial of antidote. She says the Shreek, which had tagged him with green slime, was preparing to return to this dimension to hunt him again. But UNIT<\/a> \u2014 the Doctor\u2019s military allies here on Earth \u2014 captured it (off-screen).<\/p>\n The pair go to a countryside village where Conrad introduces her to his friends in a quiet pub. But, as night draws in, the lights begin to flicker, and the blink-and-you-miss-it blurs of scary monsters appear outside. One of Conrad\u2019s friends, Sparky, goes missing, and Ruby calls UNIT who leap into action despite no signs of a Shreek incursion. Conrad confesses to Ruby he didn\u2019t take the antidote, wanting to prove to her he was as brave as the Doctor to win her heart.<\/p>\n When UNIT arrives, soldiers face off with a pair of Shreek monsters until they reveal they\u2019re just Conrad\u2019s stooges in rubber suits. Conrad isn\u2019t an innocent caught up in a crisis he can\u2019t comprehend, he\u2019s a conspiracy theorist streamer claiming UNIT is a sham organization. He\u2019s the type to engineer stunts and deceptively edit the resulting footage to smear his targets. I won\u2019t name the real world figures Conrad is inspired by as we\u2019d get angry emails from their lawyers, but I\u2019m sure you can work out who they are.<\/p>\n Conrad\u2019s encounter with UNIT was livestreamed, and there\u2019s another montage of people talking to their generic social media followers decrying the organization. He\u2019s arrested, but quickly released, and given a welcome press tour by the British media, including a favorable BBC News<\/em> report and a joke on the UK version of The Masked Singer<\/em>. Conrad even gets consoled during an interview on The One Show<\/em> \u2014 a prime time talk \/ magazine show \u2014 by its real presenter Alex Jones<\/a> (not that one).<\/p>\n UNIT\u2019s overseers in the UK government and Geneva buckle to public pressure to put UNIT under close scrutiny. As its head, Kate Lethbridge-Stewart<\/a> says, imagine the fate of the world if any dictator got their hands on UNIT\u2019s arsenal of captured alien technology. Someone senior at UNIT demands the caged (and real<\/em>) Shreek captured off-screen be removed from London and brought up to the helipad ready for transit. Meanwhile, Conrad has a man on the inside, who has been radicalized into believing his own employers are a sham, who helps him break into UNIT HQ.<\/p>\n Kate refuses to lock the building down, insisting that it\u2019s time the issue was solved once and for all. Conrad, with a stolen UNIT rifle in hand, tries to bait Kate into attacking her on camera with some vicious slander about her father, the legendary Brigadier<\/a>. Kate is happy the Doctor isn\u2019t here, since he won\u2019t stop her from doing what the audience has been demanding she do for the last few minutes. She opens the cage holding the Shreek and lets it go for Conrad.<\/p>\n Like all two-bit bullies, Conrad crumbles in the face of real danger and starts begging for mercy but Kate refuses. Sadly, Shirley<\/a> hands Ruby a taser, which she uses to knock out the Shreek before it can bite Conrad\u2019s head off. Now that his life has been saved, Conrad goes back to playing up for the livestream, boasting that UNIT\u2019s \u201cspecial effects\u201d have gotten better. At which point the Shreek wakes up and bites his arm off.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a sharp cut, and next we see Conrad waking up in a prison cell with a contraption around his arm, presumably keeping it joined to his elbow. Suddenly, he hears the TARDIS noise and is brought aboard for the Doctor to tell him that he\u2019s a bitter, sad person who will die in prison. But Conrad is unrepentant and says he \u201crejects\u201d the Doctor\u2019s \u201creality.\u201d After he\u2019s returned to the cell, he\u2019s visited by Mrs. Flood, who confirms what he saw was real, and that she\u2019s letting him free as it\u2019s his \u201clucky day.\u201d<\/p>\n It does appear as if I owe Pete McTighe a fulsome apology and must assume he isn\u2019t at fault for all of the reactionary politics of \u201cKerblam.\u201d \u201cLucky Day\u201d is both a worthy sequel to \u201c73 Yards<\/a>\u201d and a sign that, if Doctor Who<\/em> is just weeks from an enforced hiatus, then it\u2019s going out swinging. It\u2019s got a lot of targets, including the BBC\u2019s habitual reputation-laundering of unsavory characters. The notion of who is in \u201cthe wrong\u201d is made explicitly clear here, too, and Conrad occupies the same political (and narrative) circles as Roger ap Gwillam (Albion TV gets a reference).<\/p>\n Like a lot of this year\u2019s run, the episode feels like an overstuffed script which was then cut down to fit a specific runtime. But the structural work underpinning things feel more solid here, so while a lot of the connective tissue is absent, it\u2019s not to the detriment of the story. Kate\u2019s decision to unleash the Shreek may have been well-telegraphed but it\u2019s better than the solution appearing out of nowhere because there\u2019s five minutes left to run.<\/p>\n There\u2019s an element of the show playing to its strengths, and the genre savviness of its audience here as well. If you know the beats of a girl-meets-boy romance movie, then you\u2019ll spot this is a cracked-ish mirror version of that. And we don\u2019t need much evidence of Conrad\u2019s villainy \u2014 calling the Doctor, UNIT and Kate a bunch of frauds to make money from his online audience \u2014 since we know they are our heroes<\/em>. Plus, anyone who slanders Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, after all, deserves to get what\u2019s coming to them.<\/p>\n \u201cLucky Day\u201d is smart about how it introduces us to Conrad, too, giving us obvious red flags from the get-go. Adult Conrad has no reservations about taking a picture of a stranger and sharing it online for the internet to identify on his behalf. There\u2019s a hint of judgment in how he asks about her relationship to and with the Doctor, mirroring the way Alan Budd flirted with Belinda in \u201cThe Robot Revolution<\/a>.\u201d In fact, it\u2019s an interesting counterpoint to that episode, since we get enough time with Conrad early on to learn to at least be wary of him, rather than it being a fairly unsupported third-act twist.<\/p>\n If there\u2019s one downside, it\u2019s that the episode leans on the trope that survivors of abuse perpetuate that cycle of abuse. Conrad gets hit in the head by his mother and while it\u2019s hard to assume a pattern of behavior from one scene, it didn\u2019t seem like it was the first time. Much as we saw in \u201cLux<\/a>,\u201d there are limits to the storytelling possibilities inherent in a series about an immortal science clown traveling anywhere in time and space in a blue box.<\/p>\n This episode is also focused on Ruby\u2019s post-TARDIS life, which has left her in a vulnerable position. As she admits at the end of the episode, her time with the Doctor was spent in a constant state of panic and peril. She\u2019s tired, she\u2019s alone and the first man she tried to form a relationship with turned out to be using her. That\u2019s bound to leave a scar, but the after effects of a trip in the TARDIS is rarely discussed in the context of the series itself. The majority of the classic series' companions lacked detailed interior lives, while modern day ones often move on to other \u201cexciting\u201d things rather than back to a normal life.<\/p>\n It does appear as if the structure of the series isn\u2019t just Russell T. Davies relying on a familiar rhythm but something more deliberate. \u201cLucky Day\u201d is the fourth in a row that shares themes and elements with the same numbered episode in last year\u2019s lineup. It\u2019ll be interesting to see how much of next week\u2019s \u201cThe Story and the Engine,\u201d and the following week\u2019s \u201cThe Interstellar Song Contest\u201d shares with their counterparts from the first series.<\/p>\n It\u2019s plausible that the time fracture that was featured in \u201cThe Robot Revolution\u201d has, somehow, knocked the series off its previously-planned course. That either within the show\u2019s fiction or in its metafiction, we\u2019re explicitly seeing parallel versions of those previous episodes. If you recall from that episode, too, the Doctor says he was told to meet Belinda by an unknown person. What if he was chasing down Conrad\u2019s lead, and if so, would that be enough to create a paradox (even if the TARDIS can avoid such obstacles)?<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s the fact Conrad says he explicitly rejects the Doctor\u2019s \u201creality,\u201d which feels like a telling way of wording things. Especially as this season\u2019s two-part finale is titled \u201cWish World\u201d and \u201cThe Reality War,\u201d although that title is hardly a massive clue. After all, last season\u2019s finale was \u201cEmpire of Death<\/a>,\u201d as opposed to \u201cThe one in which it turns out Stuekh has been clinging to the TARDIS roof for God knows however long.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019m not sure I want to read too much into Mrs. Flood releasing Conrad since that, like last week, could simply be a topper to the story. It may be that she\u2019s simply letting him out to wreak more havoc and undermine UNIT and the Doctor\u2019s goals rather than anything specific. Not to mention that if Mrs. Flood is a dimension-surfing entity hell-bent on destroying the Doctor, she\u2019s hardly going to have much use for a schmucky YouTuber.<\/p>\n This week, the BBC announced that \u201cThe Reality War\u201d would not be getting its customary early in the day stream online. Instead, it\u2019ll hit the iPlayer and Disney+ at the same time as the UK broadcast, and both episodes are being lined up for a small cinema release<\/a>. That\u2019s reserved for big event episodes, and it adds more weight to the rumor Gatwa has already left the show. Not to mention he\u2019s starring in the play Born With Teeth<\/em><\/a> from August 13 through November 11 \u2014 which would prevent him from shooting a season for 2026.<\/p>\n Outside the mystery box elements of the show, this season feels as if it\u2019s having a meta conversation with itself. \u201cLucky Day,\u201d for instance, takes a similar premise as \u201cLove and Monsters,\u201d a Doctor-lite episode focusing on one of the so-called ordinary people who are peripherally involved in the Doctor\u2019s adventures. Conrad is initially presented as one of the lost souls who are drawn to the Doctor \u2014 you could almost describe them as fans<\/em> \u2014 but who don\u2019t shine brightly enough to get the Time Lord\u2019s special attention.<\/p>\n Oh, and I can\u2019t think of any reason beyond silly fan service that Conrad\u2019s streaming outfit is called \u201cThink Tank\u201d beyond a deep cut nod to 1974\u2019s \u201cRobot.\u201d After all, there\u2019s almost nothing in common between the two entities and their goals are ostensibly in conflict.<\/p>\nMrs. Flood Corner <\/h2>\n