My BRUTALLY HONEST REVIEW of DOCTOR WHO: LUX (Season 2 Episode 2)

Lux is the first episode of Season 2… or, perhaps Series 15 or Series 45.

The episode opens in a 1952 cinema, long before the days of IMAX 1.43:1 films (the aspect ratio for Sinners, and most Christopher Nolan films), with a Cuphead-inspired Mr Ring-A-Ding (Alan Cumming), who doesn’t want anyone to make him laugh. Well, watch any recent BBC sitcom and you’ll be fine with that, Austin being a case in point.

Improbable circumstances lead to him turning evil, and coming to life, like a nasty Roger Rabbit.

This Doctor also says the year as “Two-thousand-and-twenty-five“. It’s just “Twenty-twenty-five“. Stop with the unnecessary additional syllables…, although he says it again later, using the latter vernacular.

The woke starts early, when he asks Belinda if she has a “Boyfriend? Girlfriend? Otherfriend?” – What’s an otherfriend?

And when Belinda exclaims, about him wanting to investigate why the cinema is chained up, “You’re Scooby Doo!”, he replies, Doctor: “Honey, I’m Velma”.

Well, last we saw, Velma was an Indian lesbian, straying a country mile from the source material. Whoever keeps giving Mindy Kaling work really should have a word with themselves.

uh oh #DoctorWho pic.twitter.com/ZA95TfhOBB

— The Post Monument™ (@thepostmonument) April 10, 2025

Ncuti Gatwa and Russell T Davies accept inevitable about Doctor Who…

For the woman whose son has gone missing, would you trust a man to save him if he told you that his name was simply, “The Doctor”?

Russell T Davies also proves he can’t write sci-fi to save his life, as not only does he try to cram in social issues of the time, they’re quickly brought up and then ignored again, in this case about how black people aren’t allowed in the cafe due to segregation – something that is also completely ignored for any further encounters with evil white people.

For how Lux has been structured, it’s not exactly a big deal that they’re talking to a cartoon. As well as having seen this many times before, including in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, it’s no different from the actors usually talking to CGI monsters, because they’re also not there.

There’s the usual old trope of ‘fridging’ a character, the cartoonifying you can see in the above image, and although we get Batman’s Dad as the projectionist, we still have to suffer Anita Harris as Mrs Flood, yet again, as if this is actually leading to something when the series is clearly going to be knocked into hiatus again at the end of this run. Plus, six more episodes would take us until May 31st, not May 24th. Some scheduling change between when this was filmed (while the last series was being broadcast) and now?

Overall, Lux all ends up in an episode that could’ve had some decent promise, but just steals ideas from a zillion things we’ve seen before and does nothing new with them.

Plus, while this was yet another episode where everyone dilled-and-dallied until the last five minutes when it was instantly resolved, some thoughts about the show which I’ll consider spoilery, so they’re behind a spoiler-header for anyone who hasn’t yet watching it:

Spoiler Inside	Select Show
That part about trapping cinemagoers within a piece of film…, although that was done off-screen, for Disney, it’s clear not much money has been spent on this episode. There’s also a real world scene thrown in, all of this in lieu of a plot. And when they push the ‘TV screen’, I was watching on a projector, anyway, so no actual screen involved… Plus, for the lady in a wheelchair, I’m quite sure if she was visiting the couple watching the TV – who, in 2025, must be a mixed-race couple – she would move to a normal chair. Wheelchair-bound people don’t always sit in their wheelchair, RTD. He’s also trying to be clever by ‘acknowledging’ that people in the real world also use the hashtag #RIPDoctorWho And the answer to solving all the problems is a mass-murder/suicide bid? And how does one escape from being burnt alive? Plus, how does it work that Ring-a-Ding goes from cartoon, to more realistic, and then back to cartoon? How many drugs was RTD sniffing?

Spoiler Inside

Select Show

For The Robot Revolution, it was confirmed the overnight ratings were 2.0m. Still iPlayer to add at the time of posting this, but they’re the worst ever overnights, and that’s for the opener. Oopsy…

At a guess, I’d say that one will end up with 2.6m in total, perhaps 2.7m on the optimistic side, and this one will get 1.5m overnights. I’ll update once the figures are known.

Lux on the BBC iPlayer, and on BBC1 at 7.15pm tonight.

Season 2 is available to pre-order on Blu-ray and DVD.

You can also buy Season 1 on Limited Blu-ray Steelbook, Blu-ray and DVD.

Doctor Who Season 2: Lux – BBC

Score: Ring-A-Dung!/10

Director: Amanda Brotchie
Producer: Chris May
Writer: Russell T Davies
Music: Murray Gold

Cast:
The Doctor: Ncuti Gatwa
Belinda Chandra: Varada Sethu
Reginald Pye: Linus Roache
Mr Ring-a-Ding: Alan Cumming
Newsreader: Ian Shaw
Tommy Lee: Cassius Hackforth
Husband: Ryan Speakman
Sunshine Sally: Millie O’Connell
Logan Cheever: Lewis Cornay
Renée Lowenstein: Lucy Thackeray
Helen Pye: Jane Hancock
Policeman: William Meredith
Hassan: Samir Arrian
Lizzie: Bronte Barbe
Robyn: Steph Lacey
Mrs Flood: Anita Dobson

Dom Robinson

Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.

DVDfever.co.uk

Related posts:

Follow DVDfever.co.uk