Tripwire’s Man In Los Angeles Reviews Doctor Who Season Two: Episode Four Lucky Day

A Lucky Day For Ruby Sunday?

Tripwire’s man in Los Angeles Robert Cave takes a look at Doctor Who Season Two’s fourth episode Lucky Day…

Season 2 Episode 4
Lucky Day
Writer: Pete McTigh
Director: Peter Hoar

Hmmm. I didn’t enjoy that episode. I didn’t hate it, either; in fact there was lots of really good and interesting stuff all the way through, and some significant reveals, too. But in terms of enjoyment, this one didn’t do it for me. That is not necessarily as bad thing. I’m not under any illusion that every single Doctor Who story ever made needs to be enjoyable to me. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Doctor Who, especially under Russell T Davies, is a more interesting show because it is so willing to occasionally eschew facile crowd-pleasing.

This week’s was Doctor-lite story, which typically gives the show licence and latitude to do something a little different in terms of story. In RTD’s first term as showrunner, such tales got a reputation for being a way of giving actors a break without damaging shooting schedules and budgets. However, they also made a space for innovative storytelling that breaks with expectations of what a Doctor Who story can be. This ain’t your average Doctor Who adventure.

There’s tons going on here, and tons to like, not least the return of Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday. It’s great to have her back; not just because when she left at the end of last season, it felt too soon, but also because it’s great to have the opportunity to follow Ruby’s story after her adventures with the Doctor in a way that we don’t usually see.

The story starts with The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu) hitting Earth on New Year’s day in 2007. They’re there to take another reading on their Vindicator widget to help them navigate back to Belinda’s home on 25th May 2025. The TARDIS twosome then meet a young kid called Conrad, who is given a 50p found by the Doctor as it is apparently the kid’s “lucky day.” Young Conrad then runs back to his seemingly abusive mother, which seems somewhat less than lucky.

TITLE:Doctor Who S2,EP NUMBER:4 – Lucky Day,TX DATE:03-05-2025,TX WEEK:18,EMBARGOED UNTIL:28-04-2025 20:00,PEOPLE:Conrad (JONAH HAUER-KING) & Ruby Sunday (MILLIE GIBSON),DESCRIPTION:*NOT FOR PUBLICATION UNTIL 20:00HRS, MONDAY 28TH APRIL, 2025*,COPYRIGHT:BBC Studios,CREDIT LINE:BBC Studios/Bad Wolf/Lara Cornell

Flash forward 17 years, Conrad, now played by Jonah Hauer-King, chances upon the TARDIS, and the Doctor from a time when he was traveling with Ruby. Conrad gets gunked by a hostile alien Shreek and takes a surreptitious snap of Rubes, which he uses to track her down, a year later, to appear on his podcast.

Before long Conrad has revealed himself to be a self-absorbed conspiracy theorist arsehole in the Alex Jones mould. He pretends to romance Ruby as part of a ploy to spread his poisonous theories about UNIT, the Unified Intelligence Taskforce, who apparently once turned him down for a job. This all makes Conrad possibly the most banal baddie in Who history. But he’s also probably the most relevant to our disinformed times.

Which is all well and good; who doesn’t like timely concerns to be addressed in their favourite time travel adventure series? Except, it made the whole episode less enjoyable for me. I live in a world full of bastards, like Conrad, getting richer and doing serious damage to the society around him with their corrosive lies. I don’t enjoy spending time anywhere near them or listening to their bilge.

Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate that this is a very well-written episode by Pete McTighe, who has co-created the upcoming Doctor Who spin-off series, The War Between the Land and the Sea. It may well be that many of this episode’s themes, and perhaps some of its characters will reappear in that series. It just didn’t spark joy for me overall.

There were still a fair few elements that I like a lot. It is always great to see all the little cameos of various BBC presenters made on the show, but I particularly loved the return of Lachele Carl as newcaster-turned-presenter/pundit Trinity Wells. Appearing in brief cameos throughout RTD’s original run on Doctor Who, Trinity mainly served as a vehicle for exposition, but since her reappearance in the 60^th anniversary, The Giggle, she appears to have developed something of a character arc, moving from straight news into right-wing conspiracy infotainment.

I also liked that we are starting to get some answers to ongoing questions this season has been posing. It turns out the mysterious man that first told the Doctor about Belinda “like [she] would be important,” as referenced in the Robot Revolution, was Conrad. That just leaves the question of why the Doctor landed the TARDIS around Conrad in the first place. Was he monitoring Ruby/UNIT, or did they contact him? The Doctor certainly seems to know who Conrad is, what he’s done and what he will do (die in prison at the age of 49, apparently.)

Monitoring UNIT more might not actually be such a bad idea, since it seems they are operating black site prisons for detaining sundry alien threats, including a Shreek, on their premises. This seems somewhat of a contrast to the Doctor apparently transporting captured Shreek back to their hives. Indeed, there are a lot of questions about how UNIT operates that require further in-universe exploration.

Back when they were introduced, UNIT was presented as a branch of the UN called the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. By the time the revived series started, the UN was apparently no longer quite so keen on the association, and UNIT became the Unified Intelligence Taskforce. Although its international nature and governance structure remains opaque, this episode implied a heavy relience on funding from the UK Government. Could these concerns end up as plot points in the spin-off?

Still on the subject of UNIT, Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) certainly appears to be getting both more to do and a more complex character than she possessed when first introduced. The subtly implied relationship that appears to have developed between her and Col. Ibrahim, seems suggestive of a personal life that was entirely absent in her portrayal prior to RTD’s return to the Whoniverse. But wouldn’t such a relationship between a senior manager and one of her direct reports be considered at-best ill-advised? How about her willingness to extract confessions under threat of being devoured by an alien? Col. Ibrahim certainly thought it “went way too far.” That seems far to ominous a statement not to pay off in the near future…

Then we have Mrs Flood (Anita Dobson), arriving to break Conrad out of jail. Apparently this is what really constitutes Conrad’s lucky day. I can’t have been the only one to note that Mrs Flood referred to herself as “The Governor” here. This is, of course, the correct title for a person in charge of a prison, but it is also a synonym for “the boss” — a character that has been referred to, but never seen, since they were first mentioned by the Meep in The Star Beast, back in 2023. So that’s us one step closer to knowing Mrs Flood’s secret. I wonder what else we will find out next week? I can’t wait to find out.

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