Lucky Day

Chapter the 332nd, which features UNIT and dating.

Plot:

[A recent story of the streaming era, so beware of spoilers ahead.] Conrad Clark met the Doctor and Belinda Chandra when he was eight years old, and saw their magic blue box disappear into thin air. He then spotted the box again, years later, spying the Doctor and Ruby Sunday as they dealt with the Shreek, an alien hunting animal. Conrad is accidentally marked as its prey. A year later he has tracked Ruby down and interviews her for his blog on aliens and unexplained phenomena. After the recording, he asks her out for coffee. She explains about the Shreek, which returned to Earth the previous day but was captured by UNIT. She gives him an antidote, so he is no longer at risk of being hunted. Ruby and Conrad go out on a few dates, much to the keen interest of Carla, Cherry and Louise. Ruby has been finding it hard to adjust to life after travelling with the Doctor, and dating Conrad is just what they think she needs. Conrad invites Ruby to visit some of his friends in a village in England. It appears that the Shreek has come there to kill Conrad, who admits to Ruby that he never took the antidote. Ruby calls UNIT in, but it turns out to be a hoax: Conrad and his friends have deliberately - and elaborately - staged an alien attack so they could film UNIT and make them look stupid (or something). This creates a negative reaction against UNIT on new and old media. Conrad's organisation Think Tank publishes the details of all UNIT's employees, and - with the help of an inside contact within the organisation - infiltrates the UNIT tower. Kate Lethbridge-Stewart releases the real Shreek, which hunts a terrified Conrad until Ruby tasers it. Conrad is imprisoned. He is briefly transported from his cell to the TARDIS where the Doctor gives him a ticking off, before returning him. Mrs. Flood turns out to be the governor of the prison, and releases Conrad for her own mysterious purposes...

Context:

The random number generator has picked another story from the most recent run at time of writing, Ncuti Gatwa's second season from 2025. It was nearly two months on from when I first watched Lucky Day, and a good month on from the end of the season; nonetheless, it felt like I'd only just been watching that set of stories (probably because, in the interim, online 'news' hasn't ceased covering it - see Deeper Thoughts from the previous blog post for more details). As such, I chose to watch on my own, from the BBC iplayer, on an evening towards the end of June 2025. The eldest child (young man of 19) popped in to the living room and watched for a few minutes, but didn't stick around.

 

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up: with this post, the tally stands at 11 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 7-9 and 11-14), and 37 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, 15 now remain to be blogged.

First Time Round:

I first watched this story on the day it landed on the BBC iplayer, 3rd May 2025. As the season had progressed, I was watching the episodes earlier and earlier on each Saturday, but I never watched one as early as 8am (the time that episodes first became available this season). Lucky Day was watched just after lunch, around 1pm. As with most of the season, I was accompanied by middle child (boy of 15). A week or two later, the eldest caught up when back home from university. Finally, on the 1st of June 2025, the youngest (girl of 13) binged this amongst other selected episodes she hadn't yet watched from Joy to the World through to The Reality War. This was because we'd advised her to catch up before she got spoilered about the various revelations in the season finale, which were all over the internet a day after its broadcast).

Reaction:

I've never thought about the phrase 'more than the sum of its parts' quite as deeply as I have after this rewatch of Lucky Day. There's many a Doctor Who where things take a turn at the half-way point or thereabouts, sometimes for the worse, sometimes the better, sometimes just the different. Lucky Day certainly does that. These two halves, though are completely incompatible in terms of plot believability and character motivation. It's like the sum of Lucky Day's parts is adding b squared to c to a fridge freezer. And yet... The resulting story works as the sad but ultimately fierce tale of Ruby, who thinks she's found a way to move on after her travels with the Doctor, but is betrayed by a person she thought she could trust. She then finds her inner strength at the side of UNIT, fighting against the negative forces that want to destroy it. Through that, she inches a little closer to a way of living beyond the Doctor. A lot of why it works is Millie Gibson; the episode is presented as her nightmare, and she makes you feel every moment of that. Nightmares don't need to completely add up, of course, which also might explain why the story gets away with it. Or maybe Lucky Day is just having a lucky day. The twist when it comes is satisfying on first watch, but the slightest thought highlights that a massive, rickety scaffold of contrivance is required to hold it up. In the first part of the story, Ruby starts going out with the clumsy, lovable doe-eyed version of Conrad (an invention, we later find out). This version - very like the characters in Redacted, and others like the members of LINDA in Love & Monsters - is desperately seeking the Doctor and his blue box. He has this yearning because he had an encounter with the Doctor when a child that left him pondering mysteries (again exactly like the characters in those earlier stories).

Writer Pete McTighe is cleverly using these previously adopted tropes of Doctor Who as misdirection, so we don't see coming the twist that Conrad is a much nastier and more calculating character than his doe-eyed persona would indicate. But he's not an unreliable narrator: he did meet the Doctor in his childhood and then spot him again in 2024; he did see the TARDIS appear and disappear, and he did see evidence of an extra-terrestrial predator as an adult. Does he believe all of that was faked by UNIT (the theory he consistently espouses once he's shrugged off the doe-eyed persona)? UNIT weren't present at any of these events. Indeed, nobody else was; so, if it was faked, does he think it was faked just for him? Does he genuinely believe that theory or is he pretending just to incriminate UNIT? It doesn't seem like the latter. The events we see happen to Conrad in the first part don't align with his attitudes in the second. Perhaps the intervening rejection from UNIT is what caused the change. Let's play that out so I can get my head round it: Conrad becomes obsessed with the Doctor after a chance encounter; he starts a podcast to try to find out more, and at some point finds out about UNIT. He applies to UNIT and is rejected and this starts him thinking negatively about the organisation. Despite the evidence of his own experience, he starts to believe UNIT are faking aliens just to waste taxpayer money. Okay, that's plausible so far just about. He forms a group of like-minded conspiracy theorists, Think Tank, to bring UNIT down. Again, a little bit OTT, but still plausible. During all this time, he continues his more idealistic podcast because, erm ... I'm struggling. Perhaps he does it deliberately as a way of snagging someone like Ruby who can help him get closer to UNIT? It seems like a lot of effort, though (particularly as it's revealed later than he already has another insider in his pocket).

If Conrad's public media persona is the doe-eyed one, how is he covertly interacting with followers of Think Tank? Just on Whatsapp? Think Tank seem to have ready-made channels with many viewers when they are filming their UNIT gotcha, but perhaps other members of Think Tank maintained those and Conrad kept himself secret until his Shreek stunt had played out. A much more truthful narrative, of course, would be Conrad continuing with just one online media presence (without the second secret one) but gradually getting more and more radicalised. That, though, wouldn't give him any opportunity to fool Ruby. And he needs to fool Ruby, doesn't he? Doesn't he? For the emotional arc, yes, but for the logical plot arc it's again an excessive amount of effort. Why create this weird tableau in a rural village when he already has the means to doxx everyone in UNIT's employ and infiltrate their building? Why the theatrics? Also, isn't there an inherent flaw in his plan to show that UNIT are a waste of money by getting them to respond to what looks like a credible threat? Isn't them showing up in the village to capture the Shreek them behaving exactly as their remit dictates? Therefore, hasn't Conrad proved that the only one faking events and wasting taxpayers' money is he himself? Maybe the script is trying to say something about the credulity of online audiences, their stubborn belief over facts meaning they see UNIT as bad even though that's the opposite of what's being presented. Maybe. Giving Gemma Redgrave as Kate Lethbridge-Stewart something a little different to do, all simmering anger and crossing the line, is at least a plus (and according to comments from McTighe will be something picked up again in this year's UNIT spin-off The War Between the Land and the Sea).

I know I'm probably expected to just see Conrad's weird, disconnected and contradictory social media exploits as a high-level metaphor, and therefore not worry about the detail; there ought to be some internal logic, though. I'm not convinced that an online youth movement would come together over the taxpayer cost (a preoccupation of an older demographic) of an organisation that fights aliens (a nerdy niche interest); but, if it did, I can't see how the public mood would be suddenly changed just by footage of Conrad being mauled. The likely reality would be that people would grimly stick to their belief that it was all faked. This doesn't, though, stop the climactic scenes of the UNIT Conrad confrontation, and the released Shreek stalking its prey, being exciting. Jonah Hauer-King is great as Conrad despite the contradictions on the page. There's also a nice couple of quieter scenes of Redgrave and Gibson together. The sequence where Conrad is brought into the TARDIS control room is a bit odd; the thought that instantly popped into my head was that being allowed inside the TARDIS should be the privilege of a special few, and shouldn't be bestowed on the unrepentant Conrad. The Doctor then says as much, almost word for word; so, why is he indulging him? The Doctor's subsequent speech is a little too preachy, but is saved a little by the continuity link: Conrad mentions Belinda Chandra's name, meaning this scene is the lead in to the Doctor's initial appearance at the beginning of the season, tracking Belinda in The Robot Revolution. The final curve ball moment is Mrs. Flood turning up and releasing Conrad so he can feature in the series again. That later appearance doesn't really answer any of the questions raised above, but again it doesn't seem to matter.

Connectivity:

Both Lucky Day and Redacted prominently feature characters who have their own podcast show. Both stories include moments where UNIT are a bit heavy handed. Towards the end, both include a bit of preachy editorialising about online misinformation.

Alex Jones in The One Show in Doctor Who

Deeper Thoughts:

As Themselves. Lucky Day features quite a few cameos from people playing themselves. As part of the satirical montage of various news sources entertaining Conrad Clark's wild theories, newsreader Reeta Chakrabarti, presenter Alex Jones, and comedian Joel Dommett appear for short set-ups in amongst fictional media / social media stars. This emulation of a media round covering a topic within the Doctor Who universe is long-established. Showrunner of Lucky Day Russell T Davies particularly likes it. The first example from the new series era is in the fourth 2005 episode Aliens of London. During that episode, the Doctor - stuck outside the area where the action is happening - is reduced to following events on the television like everyone else. He channel hops between various news programmes where anchors and reporters (played by actors) cover the story of a spaceship that's seemingly crash landed in London. At one point, Matt Baker - then a children's TV presenter - is shown in the Blue Peter studio making a cake shaped like the spaceship. Baker was the first person to appear as himself in the new series, but he most certainly wasn't the last: indeed, later in the same episode political journalist Andrew Marr is seen reporting on the UK government reaction to the crisis. It's easy to see why such a thing would be done: it adds real world verisimilitude to the action, it provides fun moments for people who like celebrity spotting, and it gives lots of no doubt lovely non-actors (and Ann Widdecombe) the opportunity to brag to their sons, daughters, nieces or nephews that they've been in Doctor Who.

Andrew Marr in Aliens of London

Like most innovations in Doctor Who, this was first trialled in the laboratory conditions of the William Hartnell era. In 1966 story The War Machines, newsreader Kenneth Kendall is shown on a TV in a bar commenting on the sci-fi action in the capital. The scene and the person provide verisimilitude in exactly the same way as the scenes in Aliens of London would many years later. The 1972 story Day of The Daleks had reporter Alex MacIntosh reporting about the peace conference in Auderly House; it's probable that those making the 1970s story didn't remember The War Machines playing the same trick years before, and were experimenting anew. The approach didn't take hold: contemporary alien invasion stories fell out of favour, so the opportunities for such cameos were limited. There were only a couple more real life cameos, not connected with news broadcasting, in the remainder of the classic series. Near the start of the 1980s, Concorde - a slightly faded but nonetheless still pretty big star at the time - played itself in Time Flight. Later in the decade, Courtney Pine and his band appeared as themselves in Silver Nemesis. That was it until the show returned in 2005, when the approach took hold big time. After Aliens of London, memorable appearances were made by news presenter Jason Mohammad, who made a record-breaking six appearances in the Whoniverse (four in the main show, two in The Sarah Jane Adventures), TV medium Derek Acorah bemoaning his redundant status now that ghosts have become real in Army of Ghosts, daytime TV mainstay Trisha Goddard interviewing someone in a relationship with a ghost in the same story, and the aforementioned Ann Widdecombe endorsing politician Harold Saxon in The Sound of Drums. She certainly knows how to pick 'em (did the programme makers maybe not tell her that Saxon was evil personified?).

(L to R) Widdecombe, Saxon

In the remainder of Russell T Davies's first period as showrunner there were further appearances by people such as Richard Dawkins, Paul O'Grady, and Nicholas Witchell. Usually included in any montage was fictional US news anchor Trinity Wells. She proved so popular it was almost as if she became a real person. Up to 2010, the character appeared in two episodes apiece of spin-offs Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, and nine times in the main show. After Davies, the other two new series showrunners also used the real life cameo approach, but less frequently, with scientist Brian Cox, game show host Alan Sugar and journalist Emily Maitlis making appearances. When Davies returned as showrunner, Trinity Wells came back too, first making an appearance in The Giggle, then Lucky Day. Alas, she is now an alt-right conspiracy theorist, but that must be more interesting for Lachele Carl to play (Carl, by the way, played an investigative journalist in 1987 BBC sci-fi series Star Cops, set in the futuristic year 2027, and I like to think her character there is a relative of Ms. Wells). It's only with Lucky Day that the cameo montage returned in full. It sounds like these segments are an odd thing to shoot, disjointed from the narrative. Alex Jones - the one from Wales, not the far-right American broadcaster who would probably have been a much more plausible interviewer of Conrad -  talked in an interview about a scene where she had to "interview a guy", which is all the context she would likely get. Mind you, even Jonah Hauer-King playing Conrad, who would have had a whole script, found it difficult to explain exactly what was going on (as mentioned in this video). Will this be the last instance of real world cameos appearing in Doctor Who? Well, first off Doctor Who itself has to endure in the real world, and nobody knows when - or if - any media round will confirm that.

In Summary:

Lucky Day is very lucky (blessed as it is with Millie Gibson's performance bringing it all together) and - like Conrad -  gets away with it in the end. 

Dot and Bubble

Chapter the 309th, while democracy is losing its way, and greed is getting greedier, console yourself with a selfie or two, and post them on social media...

Plot:

[A recent story of the streaming era, so be warned there are spoilers ahead.] Lindy Pepper-Bean lives in Finetime, with lots of other rich kids aged between 17 and 27, sent there from the home world. She does two hours work a day and moans about it to her online friends, but the rest of the day is for partying. Remotely, though - every interaction Lindy has with her friends or workmates is on a hemisphere of screens (the bubble) projected around her head by a floating light bee (the dot); she never meets anyone IRL. She notices there are less people online than there once were, but doesn't let it worry her when she can instead be watching online heartthrob Ricky September's latest video where he lip-syncs to a song handsomely. On one screen in her bubble, the Doctor appears warning her she's in danger, but she blocks his unsolicited contact request. After a while, Ruby tries and has more luck. Lindy engages with her and discovers there are giant slug-like creatures eating people in Finetime. Weirdly, though, they ignore some people and eat others, with no easily definable pattern. Ruby invites the Doctor to their group chat, and at first Lindy doesn't recognise him as the same person as earlier; she also seems shocked that the Doctor and Ruby are communicating with her from the same room. They are stuck outside Finetime and can't get past the security to get in. They persuade her to escape through some conduits that will lead her to the wilderness outside. Between her and escape, though, are many of the giant slug-like creatures. Luckily, Ricky is there - IRL and everything - and he helps her escape them.

En route to the conduit, Ricky discovers on a video link that the home world's population has all been eaten by the slug monsters. Once Lindy and Ricky are there, the Doctor provides them a set of codes to unlock the exit. Meanwhile, the Doctor is musing on the mysteries of Finetime's situation and realises that Finetime residents are being eaten in alphabetical order; the dot system has somehow become sentient and turned on its masters. Lindy tries to turn her dot off, but it starts whizzing around, swooping at her. When it is just about to kill her, she evades it by telling it Ricky's real surname is Coombes; C comes before P, so Lindy escapes and the dot kills Ricky. Once through the conduit, Lindy finds a handful of Finetime survivors who plan to go out into the wilderness of the planet as pioneers. The Doctor and Ruby are also there; the Doctor tells Lindy and the others that he can take them to safety in the TARDIS, as they'll never survive otherwise. They turn down his help as they are a racist society, and believe that the purity of their community will be contaminated by his presence. The Doctor tries to persuade them, telling them that he doesn't care about their views, he will save them anyway. They will not be persuaded and travel off to their certain doom. He leaves in the TARDIS with Ruby, quite upset by this turn of events.  

Context:

Another Ncuti episode. This wasn't intended to be the next story covered by the blog, but the blog post for another story (not a Ncuti episode) has had to be delayed, even though I'd almost finished writing it. All will become clear in a few weeks' time. In another first for the blog, I did this rewatch of the story (from the BBC iplayer in early September 2024, after only just having watched the story when it came out on Blu-ray) while running on a treadmill - I'm trying to get a bit fitter. Being in motion while watching something on a screen is rather apt for this story, now I come to think of it. I was doing Couch to 5K using an app, so like Lindy Pepper-Bean I had a recorded voice from a personal device telling me when to move and when to stop too.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. A big chunk of serial broadcasting was Ncuti Gatwa's first season, which was shown in May and June 2024. This is the fifth of those seven stories to be covered for the blog. Beyond that, I have completed 27 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10-12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-25, and new series 2, 4, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

As with all the stories of this run, I watched Dot and Bubble just after midnight, seconds after it landed on BBC iplayer, on the 1st June 2024. Just this once, I was on my own. My usual viewing partner, the middle child (boy, aged 14 at the time) decided to go to bed and watched it separately from me the following day. I will admit now that on that first watch I was a little slow on the uptake. I was thinking all the way through that Lindy was elitist, and that that elitism was built into the insular society of Finetime. At the end of the story, I watched and saw that elitist society reject someone that it perceived as a member of an underclass, even when that someone represented their only hope of survival, meaning their certain death, but I thought I saw it reject Ruby too. It was only just before the credits rolled that the penny dropped: oh, they're racists as well. I then had to rewind Ncuti's performance of frustration and revulsion and watch it again in its proper context. It was early in the morning after a week of work and I was tired, if I can offer that as some defence. Also, I think the story itself is pulling some punches in those final moments. There's a time for subtlety and this wasn't it. I think it would have been fine to have one of the citizens of Finetime explicitly mention the colour of the Doctor's skin, or mention the word 'race', or be excessively accommodating to Ruby and offer her a way to rid herself of the Doctor's company - it wouldn't have the burst the bubble (ahem) in that moment.

Reaction:

Coming immediately after 73 Yards, my favourite story of the year, it was almost certain that Dot and Bubble would be something of a comedown, and then... it wasn't. It was just as good in a different way, and just as haunting in a different way. So, as it turned out, my favourite two stories of the year were the two containing less Ncuti Gatwa than the others. I don't think that's a factor, though: I've enjoyed his performances in all the other episodes, and stories that revolve around his character more (Boom and Rogue, as two examples) are very strong too. Perhaps it's instead because the restrictions of Ncuti's limited availability for filming early on (as he was still working on the fourth series of Sex Education) encouraged the writer of both stories, Russell T Davies, to produce more innovative and interesting narratives. Whatever, the reason - in the opinion of this viewer at least - Davies delivers the goods. He's a writer with a reputation for sometimes not plotting as tightly as he should, but he proves that wrong in Dot and Bubble; it is a masterclass in the careful and gradual release of information. The world and its inhabitants' default behaviour is set up in the initial section, then there are reveals and reversals following one after another as the tension and pace ratchet up to the ending and the final twist (of the knife). Just look at the development of the Mantraps' relationship to the people of Finetime through the running time: there are monsters; the monsters are ignoring Lindy; not just Lindy, they're ignoring some people and not others; the monsters are killing in alphabetical order, so they're not unthinking monsters; Lindy is a monster; every person on Finetime is a monster. Then, after the credits toll, the lingering thought occurs that the Mantraps weren't monsters after all.

As mentioned above, I thought the ending could have been more emphatic. It's fine for the microaggressions thrown the Doctor's way to be subtle before that, that's the point, and I'm sure people of colour picked up on them long before those like me with white privilege. At the end, though, I think the realities of Finetime should have been hammered home  - it's a polemic, after all. We all watch with our own preoccupations, and it sometimes needs a jolt to dislodge them; as an ageing student leftie type, I was hung up on seeing the story as about class, so missed what were only a couple of lines of dialogue at the end that should have clued me in. It's probably a minor point now that Doctor Who is a streaming show first and foremost; the episode certainly rewards further rewatching. Perhaps another detail of the end that should have been beefed up is the danger that the Finetime residents are in, having refused the Doctor's offer of escape. As they travel off in the boat, it needs waves and storm clouds and crashes of thunder to show - rather than just tell - that they aren't going to survive. Such effects for a short sequence might have been budget breaking, but I think they would have helped. I'm also perplexed by the choice of name for the surviving Finetime resident that presents himself as self-styled leader at the end. It's Brewster Cavendish with a 'C', meaning he has managed to survive since almost the beginning of the purge; around a week, based on dialogue elsewhere. He must have found his way out through a conduit sometime before, or discovered some other way to evade the Mantraps. It had already been established that Ricky September was more resourceful than others, but he's a special case. To suggest that others could be too undermines the underlying theme that the lack of diversity in thought and action in this group will be its undoing (or maybe that's my student leftie reading again).

  

The other connection between my two most favoured stories of the year is that they have the same director, Dylan Holmes Williams. He does another sterling job with material very different to 73 Yards. Along with the full crew working at a high, high level, he creates a distinctive and interesting look for this story's world. The Mantraps, like a lot of the monsters of this era of Who, are CG-enhanced real builds, tangible creations worked by puppeteers. They are brilliantly effective. Dots, bubbles and screen after screen of rich kids in stylised clothing, all are effectively realised. What Holmes Williams achieves more than the visuals, though, are some cracking performances. Topmost of these is Callie Cooke's faultless turn as Lindy. It is a knife-edge difficult balance to play: she must seem somewhat sympathetic, but not too much, and Cooke finds that balance and milks every nuance out of the script. The moment where she turns on Ricky so she can save herself is one of those jaw-dropping, spine-tingling reveals; it feels both surprising and inevitable, and that's largely down to the actor and her director expertly realising the excellent script. Also selling it is the reaction from Tom Rhys-Harries as Ricky. He does some great work elsewhere too, peeling back the layers to show a bookish diffidence behind the hunky self confidence of his online persona. He doesn't stay alive for the next layer to be peeled, so we'll never know if he is in goose-step with the misguided ideology of Finetime. I'm sure many a fanboy or fangirl is in denial: if he reads history thoroughly, isn't distracted by screens and is still a racist, he's arguably even worse than Lindy.

The script is full of reversals, but it also acts as one great big bait and switch at the thematic level: it pretends to be a standard issue 'older writer bemoaning a younger generation's social mores' thing, but then reveals its true and much deeper intent. This climaxes in another great moment of performance, Ncuti Gatwa's burst of frustration at the stubborn senselessness of Finetime and its people. It's wonderfully scripted and performed as almost non-judgemental. The Doctor will save people, even if they're racists, and he's more sad than angry; the moment, though, is still imbued with the energy of a God who can't persuade a colony of ants to let themselves be saved. It is a hell of a scene to give an actor on his first day's filming, but Ncuti is nonetheless electrifying.

Connectivity:

There is very little in common between Dot and Bubble and The Curse of Fatal Death, which is a shame as there were numerous fun connections between the Comic Relief sketch and the story I intended to blog next (see Context section above). Never mind, it's all random, and that is the blog's raison d'etre. In both stories, the Doctor is first seen on a screen (as part of Lindy's bubble, and on the Master's TARDIS scanner) before later appearing fully - that's about it.

Deeper Thoughts:

It's a bit like Black Mirror (oh, I'm so clever). Ironically for a story warning of the dangers of social media, this story drove me back to my online feeds, unseen for many months. Except for blogger (I don't count blogger), I had given up the last one that I was still regularly reading - the platform formerly known as twitter - for lent in 2024 and hadn't gone back. The day after my first viewing of Dot and Bubble, still a bit unsure that I'd read the ending of this story correctly (see First Time Round section above), I took a look back into the abyss to check other people's reactions. They were pretty much uniformly positive, which surprised me as no topic on social media usually has such agreement. But people loved it. There was nobody I could see moaning about virtue signalling or woke-ism or whatever. The one thing I did see, though, and this was replicated in online reviews I read over the next few days, were lots of people saying the programme had echoes of Black Mirror, or was ripping off Black Mirror, or was very similar to a specific episode of Black Mirror (2016's Nosedive). Each time I saw the comparison made, it annoyed me for two reasons. First, it felt like each individual was celebrating their own cleverness in detection, as if - forensic scientist style - they had pored over every minute piece of evidence to find this debt to Charlie Brooker's dark TV anthology series. But the writer and executive producer Russell T Davies himself was the one who highlighted it. In an interview. Before Dot and Bubble's broadcast. He was quoted as saying the story was the "clearest step into Black Mirror territory" that Doctor Who had made. All those forensic scientists on the web were examining a 10-foot tall pulsating neon sign pointing in the direction of the murderer, but patting themselves on the back for it.

Maybe Davies was getting the word out early to head off any accusations of plagiarism. Maybe. Was he though? The second thing that annoyed me about the comparison, was that it was wrong. Dot and Bubble wasn't really anything like Black Mirror. What does it even mean to be like a varied anthology series? I haven't seen every episode of Black Mirror ever, but from what I know I'd say its common thread comes down to two things: a focus on the dangers of modern technology, and a dark ending. Doctor Who has done the former throughout its long history; it doesn't do the latter so often, but it still has some history going way back. It's very loose anyway (you can't have too restrictive a template for an anthology series if it's intended to run for a good few years as Black Mirror has). One might as well say that Dot and Bubble was like Inside No, 9 (samples comedy and horror and often has dark twist endings) or Severance (extrapolates the dangers of technological choices with stylised visuals) or many other shows one could list. Dot and Bubble had whopping great drooling slug monsters eating people; the show it was most like was Doctor Who. Anyway, Davies - in the same interview - has said that the original idea was pitched for the 2011 series of Doctor Who, before Black Mirror had ever been shown, but it was felt that the technology wasn't there to do the topic justice at that time. What about the specific episode of Black Mirror that was often mentioned, though? Nosedive was written by Michael Schur and Rashida Jones from a story by Brooker. It deals with a world where social media is voluntary but all pervasive, and features a female protagonist, so it is superficially similar to Dot and Bubble at a very high-level. The warnings that each give about the technology, though, are polar opposites.

Dot and Bubble warns of the dangers of the technology excluding people outside the bubble, and perhaps the warping effect of the echo chamber impacting those within the bubble. It's not clear what's cause or effect - do the citizens of Finetime all live in the same virtual place to keep outsiders out, or did living in the same virtual place lead to them excluding outsiders? Either way, though, those plugged into the technology are all in it together, one exclusive club. In Nosedive, the very point is how the individuals that are plugged in can turn against each other; Nosedive is about people rating one another (something like China's Social Credit System spliced with Uber rankings). The protagonist strives to improve her score out of five, but events conspire to mean it keeps taking a knock. An interesting point to note on similarities between stories is that Nosedive itself was compared in many reviews to an existing piece, an episode of the comedy Community from two years before called App Development and Condiments, which has exactly - and I mean exactly - the same base premise, and lots of other things in common too. It's just a coincidence, though: sometimes ideas have a life of their own and rise up in different places independent of one another. One of the only things that Dot and Bubble and Nosedive have in common is a penchant for pastels in the production design. Again, this is just a coincidence as the reason for it is different in each piece. In Nosedive (and, as it happens, in the Community episode) its about not wanting to give offence by being too bold or colourful: a world where everyone fears the ratings bestowed on them by everyone else bleaches out individuality. In Dot and Bubble, it connotes the pre-existing uniformity and homogeneity of the populace. The final irony of the comparison is that Nosedive ends with its character freed of the fear of being rated, and able to be be bold and colourful and rude. Although it is a dark story, it ends on a tiny moment of hope (so very unlike the usual for Black Mirror, but very like the usual for... Doctor Who). 

In Summary:

Bubblicious.

73 Yards

Chapter the 305th, where the Doctor puts his foot in it again.

Plot:

[A recent story of the streaming era, so be warned there are spoilers ahead.] The Doctor and Ruby park the TARDIS on some clifftops in Wales. The Doctor is too busy crowbarring in references to a dangerous Welsh politician Roger ap Gwilliam from Ruby's future to look where he's going. He breaks a faerie circle, a small pagan structure of thread and scrolls. Ruby reads some of the scrolls, then looks around to find the Doctor has disappeared; she can't get into the TARDIS, and is all alone... except for a mysterious old woman, a distance away from Ruby, gesturing at her. She goes off looking for help, and the woman always seems to be there, the same distance (which Ruby will later calculate to be 73 yards) away from her. She asks a hiker to speak to the woman on her way past, and she sees from far off that when the hiker hears the old woman speak she becomes terrified and runs away. At the nearest town, she stays in a pub. The regulars wind her up about her worries about druids and folklore and whatnot, but when one of them goes outside and talks to the woman, it terrifies him such that he won't come back to the pub while Ruby is there. Reluctantly leaving the TARDIS, Ruby goes home to London. On the journey home, she sees the woman in the fields and streets rushing past the train window. Her Mum speaks to the woman, and leaves home; only coming back when Ruby is out to change the locks of their flat. Rejected, Ruby turns to Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and UNIT, but their technology and knowledge of supernatural phenomena do not help; once they approach the woman, they too abandon Ruby.

Years go by, Ruby learns to live with her distant but ever present companion. Aged 40, she sees Roger ap Gwilliam, remembers the Doctor's warning about him bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war, and realises that maybe she has to save the world to return her timeline back to normal. She infiltrates ap Gwilliam's Albion party as a volunteer, and bides her time. The party wins a general election and a victory speech is planned at a Cardiff stadium where ap Gwilliam will announce that he's taken control of a nuclear arsenal (and may just launch). Ruby, with security officers yelling at her to stand down, positions herself exactly 73 yards away from ap Gwilliam. The old woman speaks to him, and he runs off terrified, and resigns as prime minister with immediate effect. Saving the world doesn't change anything for Ruby, though, and 40 years later she is still accompanied by the strange old woman 73 yards away. She visits the TARDIS once last time - it has become something of a shrine, overgrown and abandoned on the clifftop. On her deathbed, she is visited by the strange woman, suddenly much closer but facing away from her. Ruby reaches out to her happily... ...and finds herself observing her younger self and the Doctor as they approach the faerie circle. She wills them not to break the circle, and this time they do not. Young Ruby still seems to have vestigial memories of the aborted timeline.

Context:

As reported in the last blog post's First Time Round section, the Better Half is not getting on with Fifteen's vocal mannerisms because they remind her of an annoying colleague she once had; I thought therefore that when 73 Yards came up in the random selection to be blogged next, given Ncuti Gatwa only appears briefly at the beginning and end, it might be good for her to sample. She's only seen the Goblins and Space Babies episodes thus far, and its fair to say that the series does some different and interesting things in the episodes after those ones. She was not to be persuaded, though, so I watched it on my own one evening in late July 2024 from the BBC iplayer.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. The new Ncuti Gatwa series broadcast in May and June 2024 delivered seven new stories (six single-parters and one two-part finale) that would postpone the point of catching up a little. This is the third one of the series to be covered for the blog in random order, following The Devil's Chord and Space Babies.

First Time Round:

Watched from midnight on the 25th May 2024, seconds after it landed on BBC iplayer. I was accompanied as I was for most of the series by the middle child, a boy aged 14. My initial impression as the end credits rolled was that I'd watched the best Doctor Who episode I'd seen for some considerable time (I mean years); my son thought it was "weird and a bit crap".

Reaction:

There are clearly loads of influences on 73 Yards including folk horror, M.R. James ghost stories, horror comedy (the sequence in a rural pub has echoes of American Werewolf In London), It Follows, The Dead Zone, Turn Left and The Curse of Clyde Langer. There's also more than a pinch of David Lynch. Lynch's films and the TV series he co-created Twin Peaks often involve a dream or nightmare-like atmosphere and corresponding logic. His individual offerings tend to fall on a spectrum based on how much one is expected to understand what is going on. On the left-hand side is something like Mulholland Drive, which even had a set of clues that Lynch wrote and published accompanying its home media release, and has a single reasonably plausible reading that fans have worked up over the years; in the middle is something like Lost Highway where there are some tantalisingly plausible interpretations but not everything fits; at the right-hand side would be something like Inland Empire, where you haven't got a hope of getting a grip on it (unless you're David Lynch himself, perhaps). To me, 73 Yards is on the left-hand side of my imaginary Lynch-o-meter. There are mysteries, but enough clues to solve them (in this and in subsequent episodes). The old woman has a perception filter like the TARDIS, it later transpires that the range of the TARDIS perception filter is exactly 73 yards, Kate establishes (as seeded in previous episodes) that apparently supernatural phenomena are becoming increasingly common. Kate also speculates that landing a perception filter on top of the faerie circle may have caused some kind of reaction, and says that "this timeline might be suspended along your event". Put that together and its not hard to see at least one reasonably coherent reading.

Usually in Doctor Who's stories that sample ghost stories (and there have been quite a few over the years) the explanations for any supernatural shenanigans are much more prosaic - it's aliens, or it's time disturbance. As fans, we are perhaps hard-wired to expect this; if one can't switch off those expectations, then 73 Yards might be a frustrating experience: is the mysterious woman Ruby herself when old? If so, why is she played by a different person? And what exactly does she say to people to terrify them, and turn them against Ruby? Not only do we not need to be told these things, the drama would be significantly lesser if we were. The story is a space for our imaginations to work, and a beautifully made one at that. Director Dylan Holmes Williams and his crew achieve so many great shots, not just of the dramatic landscapes of Welsh cliffs, hills and shores, but urban scenarios too, each with this one constant presence - a woman just close enough to be emphatically there, but too far away to be seen in any detail. Some set-ups counterpoint the many long shots that the script requires with some expertly framed close work. There's the simple but effective pan left onto Ruby as she does the clearly foolish inciting act in a horror story, opening and reading the scrolls and thereby breaching the sanctity of the faerie circle, then a pan back to the right again in a continuous shot to where the Doctor was, to show that he's disappeared from the frame. Then, a cut back to the lonely wide shot of Ruby, abandoned. I also love the moment when Jemma Redgrave walks into a big close-up representing Ruby's POV and gets straight down to UNIT business. It raises hopes for Ruby and the audience that are then quickly dashed when even the professionals are shown not to be immune to the mysterious woman's powers.

That is just one moment indicative of what happens throughout where the narrative of 73 Yards stubbornly refuses to settle down to be an ordinary Doctor Who episode, or indeed any one particular thing. It restlessly moves from the folk horror of the scenes of Ruby in the isolated Welsh inn with creepy regulars (there's some genuinely funny material in there - "Of course you can pay with your phone" - but it does come at the expense of presenting the rural Welsh as very rude and hostile, which is an unfair generalisation) to the domestic anguish of her mother turning on her. Then there's the aforementioned tease that UNIT might arrive and things might settle down, but no. Suddenly we're jumping forward in time (with impeccably well chosen musical accompaniment in Labi Siffre's Watch Me). This montage is just one of three electrifying sequences that push this story high above any other broadcast this year or in the last few years of Doctor Who (I think it's probably the best single story since at least Heaven Sent, and there's some stiff competition in that time). The next moment of the three is the climax of the following section, where the narrative morphs into a political horror/thriller. Aneurin Barnard as Roger ap Gwilliam does a lot without seeming to do much in creating a chilling character. It's a great performance, and the scene where Ruby positions herself such that the mysterious woman brings all his destructive plans to an end is a tour de force. It's uplifting not just because of the defeat of evil, but because of what it represents for Ruby's character. She's not just learned to live with the limitations imposed on her life, she has turned them to her advantage. Her - our - challenges are also her - our - superpowers.

The story refuses to conform, though, and this act to save the world does not close the loop and bring things back to normal. We cut to 40 years on, and Ruby has lived a tough life of abandonments, but is unbowed ("At the end, I have hope... I dare to hope"), The final one of the three electrifying sequences is the pure horror of the mysterious woman, her back turned so she remains unknown and unknowable to the last, appearing by Ruby's futuristic hospital bed. The reaction of Ruby sidesteps our expectations yet again: there's no fear, just smiling and the outreached arms of acceptance. The ending going back to the beginning ties things up nicely. Long term readers of the blog will probably be thinking I'm a hypocrite. I've criticised other stories that have come up for the blog that take place in aborted timelines because nothing ultimately has any true meaning (a notable example of such criticism can be read in the post for The Wedding of River Song). It's a bit tricky to delineate why 73 Yards is different, but I think it is mainly because of the emotion involved. An alternate timeline which is just the setting for another action story is a wasted opportunity, but here we are able to see a companion's entire alt-life lived out. It's not a reset ending either; the entire aborted timeline powers a subliminal impression that averts the Doctor and Ruby breaking the faerie circle and sends time off in the right direction again, but Ruby is left with traces of memory of what happened that will be referred back to in future episodes.

Millie Gibson is phenomenal in this story, thrust early on into a full starring role (necessitated by Gatwa still filming Sex Education series 4 when production began). Her performance ties all the different phases of this story together, and makes every emotional beat count. I'm thinking that the Venn diagram of Doctor Who fans and David Lynch fans might show only a slender overlap. So, I'm not expecting this story to top any polls, even though I think it should. Intellectual meanings may remain tauntingly semper distans throughout, but the emotional meaning is right there, front and centre.

Connectivity:

Both 73 Yards and The Giggle are Russell T Davies penned episodes of 2020s Doctor Who featuring Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and UNIT, and a brief appearance from Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor; they both also feature a politician making a speech on TV, and someone with (seemingly) supernatural powers.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Continuing Story of Narcissus. Inevitably over nearly ten years of Deeper Thoughts sections on the blog, I have given away some of my preoccupations beyond Doctor Who. Amongst other things, I've regularly discussed my affinity with left-leaning progressive politics and my love for UK pop duo Pet Shop Boys. July 2024 and the months leading up to it were good times for someone with these particular persuasions. The UK voted in the Labour party at a general election in a landslide, removing a Conservative party that in its 14 years in power showed more and more extreme populist tendencies, and did much damage with its policies. Overnight, the heightened drama of UK politics disappeared. Adults appeared to now be in charge. To give him some credit, this also included the former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who seemed much more calm and sensible as Leader of the Opposition when he didn't have such urgent need to try to please the wildly different factions of his party to get any work done. Shortly after the UK election, the second round of the French National Assembly elections decisively rejected extreme right-wing populists, leaving left-leaning and centrist politicians in power. This rejection of a couple of examples of similar political groups, those that angrily express supposedly easy answers to difficult questions (as fictionally personified in 73 Yards by Roger ap Gwilliam) - was a positive for Europe, and for the world. It was also positive, though I don't agree with them, that the UK's Reform party (the epitome of this kind of populist politics) got some representation in the UK parliament. Clearly there are people out there that want to vote for them, and some of those people will have their own local representative, as well as having the leader and mouthpiece of the party as part of national opposition; they can judge them on how they perform: democracy in action.

The build up to the UK election was accompanied by a great new series of Doctor Who, and the release of a new Pet Shop Boys album Nonetheless, plus a few singles from said album (the latest of which had a physical release the day after the election on the 5th July). All told, it felt like everything was aligning specifically for me, which is always a nice feeling. The album is - and I know every aged superfan says this about the latest album by their enduring faves that everyone else thinks peaked decades before - simply one of the best things they've ever made. In the mold of their most classic releases (1990's Behaviour, or 1987's Actually as just two examples) it is ten tracks, all perfect songs and perfect productions, almost all of which could be singles. There's another thing in common with the album Actually from their "Imperial Phase" in the 1980s too. One of the songs has become inadvertently and eerily prescient of a shocking contemporary event. In 1987, the song was King's Cross, the final number on the second side (this was a time when albums had sides) of Actually. It is a song that uses the at-the-time run down area of London as an example of Thatcherite urban deprivation. Metaphorically, it talks about the song's narrator finding themselves "lost by the station called King's Cross" with "dead and wounded on either side", adding that it's "only a matter of time". Lyricist of the band Neil Tennant was, just for that moment and probably to his immense sadness, exactly right. A couple of months after the album's release, there was a fire in the King's Cross St. Pancras underground station that caused 31 fatalities. It took until 2024 for him to repeat this freak occurrence of second sight. If I had a nickel for every time Pet Shop Boys lyrics were inadvertently and eerily prescient, I'd have two nickels, which admittedly isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.

The track in question on Nonetheless is the penultimate one, Bullet for Narcissus. It tells the tale of an agent on a security detail who despises the politician he's protecting, but nonetheless (see what I did there?) might have to take a bullet for him in the line of duty. The song is completely from the point of view of the agent, and is not inciting anything so let's not even think of going down that line of enquiry. The lyrics tease the possible identity of the politician (to the agent, he's self-serving and his politics are "mean", he wears make-up that runs, he faces accusations that he denies, and gives speeches to large, devoted crowds). It's generic enough to be any populist politician, to be honest; ignoring the make-up reference, it would describe Roger ap Gwilliam, a fictional composite of many real life figures, and for all we know Roger might put on a bit of slap to look his best for the cameras). Anyone listening to the song probably would guess the same frontrunner candidate, though, and it wouldn't be Roger. So, that second nickel was earned when on the 13th July, some idiot managed to get on a roof with an assault rifle and take shots at the Republican candidate for US President in the November 2024 election. Did his security detail let him down? Do they secretly despise him? At the time of writing, investigations are still ongoing, but it does seem unfathomable that anyone could be allowed to get that close. Given it's such early days, I'm trying not to worry about the subsequent commentary that seems almost unanimous in the opinion that surviving this attempt means he is certain to win. In my opinion, that would be bad for the world; maybe not quite as bad as Gwilliam trying to nuke everyone, but bad. It shouldn't need saying, but I will: this doesn't mean I want this person to be shot.

Murdering anyone is morally wrong, of course; more dispassionately, though, it is also bad politically. Creating a martyr creates too many unknowns, and probably would have the opposite effect than that which the assassin intended (if they were thinking coherently at all). Besides, any individual populist is just one person representing a larger movement. If, like I do, you believe that movement is in the wrong direction, then the way to stop or change it is by voting not shooting. 73 Yards is a story about one person making a difference to the actions of a populist who threatens the world. It's done non-violently, though the sequence where Ruby paces back with her phone trained on Roger ap Gwilliam uses the visual syntax of movie scenes of political assassination to such an extent that the episode might even have got pulled had the shooting happened around when it was planned for broadcast. Will it also prove that one person can make a difference to the fortunes of a populist in the real world, but this time ultimately being responsible for putting him into power? As I say, I'm trying not to worry about it. My period of undiluted good feeling, though, didn't even last two weeks. The new dawn lasted from the early hours of the 5th to the 13th July, and the extreme right-wing populists might already be on their way back. There's a glimmer of hope in that a new opponent on the Democrat side might make a difference, and I dare to hope. I also have a Labour UK government (and MP, the first ever in my constituency to wear a red rosette), and I can still console myself by watching Doctor Who and listening to the music of the Pet Shop Boys...

In Summary:

By some distance (ho ho) the best recent Doctor Who story.

Love & Monsters

Chapter The 162nd, which details how Blue Peter delivered a green Victor.

Plot:

Elton Pope narrates his home-made video journal about the Doctor. He was haunted by seeing the skinny, spiky-haired tennis shoe-wearing version of the Doctor visit his house years before, when he was a young child. More recently, he has experienced weird goings on (show window dummies coming to life, spaceships roaring overhead and crashing into Big Ben, even bigger spaceships hovering over London on Christmas Day). Online searching brings him to Ursula Blake's blog, where he sees a photo of the man he remembers seeing as a child; Ursula introduces him to a small group of like-minded enthusiasts all searching for the Doctor too. They become LINDA (the London Investigation n' Detective Agency) and meet regularly to compare theories about the mysterious figure. After a while they are having fun as friends without it needing it to be about the Doctor any longer. This lasts for a while, but then a new member - Victor Kennedy - joins the group, providing information to help LINDA track down their elusive prey, getting them back to their original focus, but sucking out all the fun in the process. Then, members of LINDA stop turning up one by one.

The group's attempts at searching lead Elton to Rose's mum, Jackie Tyler and the Powell Estate. His mission from Victor is to seduce Jackie to get information on the Doctor, but he can't bring himself to do it, as he realises he's in love with Ursula. He instead tries to cheer Jackie up; she's sad at being left on her own with Rose off travelling. Unfortunately, Jackie finds a photo of Rose in Elton's pocket, realises his ulterior motive, and chucks him out of her flat. Elton confronts Victor, leaves the group, and boldly asks Ursula on a date. Alas, all this is cut short when Victor reveals himself to be a green monster from the planet Clom (or possibly Klom) who absorbs people, including all the missing members of LINDA who are semi-digested, sticking out of his globby torso. He absorbs Ursula as Elton watches in horror. Running to escape the same fate, Elton runs into the Doctor and Rose (the latter has come to tell him off for upsetting her Mum). The Doctor encourages the semi-absorbed members of LINDA to pull in different directions; they pull Victor apart, and he explodes, dribbling down into the pavement. The Doctor reminds Elton of the day in his childhood when they met - it was the day his mother died; the Doctor wasn't able to save her from some invading monster or other. The Doctor also manages to partially resurrect Ursula, as a paving stone face. She and Elton now live together, and even have something of a love life.

Context:

Watched from the DVD by the whole family (me, the Better Half, boys of 14 and 10, girl of 8) one day when we were all enjoying a week's holiday at home (no air corridors or 14 days quarantine for us this Summer). This story has a bad reputation, which I'll talk about more below, but everyone loved it. The Better Half didn't even intend to watch it all, but sat down after watching the pre-credits sequence and stayed for the duration. Apart from a bit of scoffing at the idea that anyone would approach a mysterious police box ("You'd run away!"), there was nary a criticism voiced by any of them. 

First time round:

Watched live as it went out on its first BBC1 broadcast, Saturday 17th June 2006, accompanied by my heavily pregnant Better Half, who was expecting our first child (boy, of minus 2 weeks old at the time). This marked the end of a particular tradition of watching Doctor Who that I had indulged in for nearly 20 years: fumbling around with video recorders and tapes in anticipation of the show starting. Ever since 1986 and episode 1 of The Trial of a Time Lord, I had been attempting to record Doctor Who episodes, and Doctor Who themed programmes, as they went out. And missing the very beginnings of episodes, and taping over the ends, and causing all sorts of other accidental injuries to my home made and felt-tip labelled collection. From the next story after Love & Monsters and onwards to this day, I have used a PVR to capture the broadcast video onto a hard drive, and - despite the fact that the technology was in its relative infancy then - the automaton instantly managed to record each episode better than I ever could manually.

Reaction:

Peter Kay overplays it; not by that wide a margin compared to the tone of the work of the rest of the cast and crew around him, but he overplays it. I'm saying this up front as this is probably the only aspect of Love & Monsters I don't wholly adore, or at very least wholly admire. Curiously, when comparing notes with the Better Half afterwards, she thought that he was fine once he was revealed as the Abzorbaloff, but overplaying it when doing the Victor Kennedy persona; I thought it was the other way round. So, maybe both aspects are not a problem for some. That tone that I mentioned before is certainly heightened, though this is explained away by the script. We see the flat boring scenes of Elton's video diary, but much else is a depiction of his recall and - perhaps - his imagination. The script leaves us guessing as to how reliable a narrator Elton is, but hints very strongly up front - when Elton admits that he's packaging things up to be as exciting as possible - that we're not getting 100% verity of reportage. The script is even coy about how much of what we're seeing is actual footage - the cutaway to Elton John is something real Elton could have sourced online, but the pre-credits chase with the Hoix monster is unlikely to be. There was nobody making cine camera recordings during Elton's childhood, but what we see is presented in that format. Most likely, we're seeing the standard TV convention - illustrations of what is being narrated, as it runs through Elton's head, interspersed with shots of him at his desk.

Things move so fast that probably none of this occurs consciously to the audience on first watch. The cast would presumably have needed some direction though, on how to pitch it. This is where it's a shame that modern Doctor Who doesn't get extensive pre-shoot rehearsal as used to be the standard. The line between comedy and drama is a narrow one here, difficult to discern, but it's got to be walked with precision. Kay is just a tiny bit outclassed by the rest of the cast, who deftly balance things, at least to my mind. As an actor, Kay is obviously a little bit less experienced than the rest of them, and rehearsal would have ironed this out. One could watch the story and miss all of its subtlety and depth, just see a comedian in a silly green outfit who appears to be mugging for the camera, and write the whole thing off instantly. I think that's indeed what has happened with a lot of people who rate this show very poorly (more on that anon). But it's fantastic! Honestly it is. Clever and original, and plumbing emotions that Doctor Who normally never touches, and few other dramas that I can think of do either. Writer and showrunner Russell T. Davies uses the constraint of the 'Doctor lite' format to showcase an ordinary person, a little bit socially awkward, who finds a nice group of mates - that's the light side of it - and then loses them all as the group is torn apart - because there's a seam of darkness, chaos and melancholy too. (Side note: even without rehearsal, the five members of LINDA do come across as if they're a gang who've know each other for a while; it's lovely and seemingly effortless - particularly when they're all performing ELO songs.) 

Davies has to incorporate the ultimate in plot shopping list items, as he has to make room for a Blue Peter competition-winning monster, designed by a 9-year old. William Grantham's creation, the Abzorbaloff, is a fun villain with an original hook, and the costume and effects work to realise the creature efficiently delivers what was on the page. It's just that what was on the page was a bright green blob thing drawn by a primary school kid. If you don't know this - or if you do, and have an uncharitable stony heart - it might again cause you an instant knee-jerk reflex of distaste. Davies uses this, consciously or not, as a metaphor for that person that takes over, thinking he's making things more efficient, and absorbs all the joy out of any endeavour. This could be taken as just an extended in-joke about Doctor Who fans: Elton is hooked on the Doctor from when young, and then when older joins a fan group. The members of LINDA reflect different types of fans too: Ursula is the investigator (one can imagine her trying to track down missing episodes or production paperwork), Bliss is the younger fan who uses the show as a spur to her creativity, Mr. Skinner is the intellectual, coming up with theories, and Bridget is the sort of fan that likes the escapism, as it helps her deal with the sadness elsewhere in her life. To be honest, though, LINDA could be any kind of group. We've all known a Victor Kennedy at some point from childhood onwards; the guy who doesn't get it, and ruins the group dynamic. I've just never seen this put on screen before - or since. As the first, best and final words on a subject, it is refreshing and interesting.

Rumours have abounded about whether Davies had a specific real world model in mind for the Doctor Who fandom equivalent of Victor - the big guy who doesn't really get it, and stops things being fun - but it's neither here nor there. The parable applies universally. This is probably why it doesn't matter too much how the interloper is played. It was crucial, though, for the everyman central character to be cast and performed right. Marc Warren is a revelation; cast against type, as Elton is far away from the wide boys he tended to be playing at this point in his career, he shines in every scene. The love story with Shirley Henderson's Ursula is beautifully done too. I don't know to this day whether Ursula's resurrection at the end is a bum note or a stroke of genius. Either way, it's very dark, and the script doesn't shy away from that. The best performance though is from Camille Coduri as Jackie Tyler. Every scene she's in is a gift to her, as she gets to play sweetly conniving, faux naif, sultry seducer, mother dealing with an empty nest, and then finally to do the anger of the betrayed as she realises Elton's been using her all this time. I think this is her best story, and the performance she gives one of the best in the show's 50+ year history.

People who hate Love & Monsters, and there are many, will probably think I'm mad to give it this much due. It is undeniably experimental, though: whatever you think of it, you can't deny it blazes a trail for a new style of story that would later bring Blink and Turn Left to the screen amongst others. It is also something of a nexus point for these early years of the relaunched show in that it is the only one that contains a reference to Bad Wolf (the name of the virus that has supposedly removed references from the Doctor from databases), Torchwood (the source of the files of intel that Victor brings to LINDA) and Harold Saxon (who's mentioned on the newspaper that the Abzorbaloff hides behind).

Connectivity: 

Another Doctor Lite episode with very little material featuring the Doctor (or companion either, in this case), so the story could be 'double-banked'. i.e. filmed by another crew simultaneously with work proceeding elsewhere on another one (in this instance the Ood / Black Hole 2-parter). Both this story and The Girl Who Waited also both contain references to the planet Clom (the Abzorbaloff's home planet, and the site of a Disneyland which could be virtually experienced by patients stuck on Apalapucia).

Deeper Thoughts:

Polls and punctuation. I've mentioned before that the so called 'Marmite' Doctor Who story - one you either love or hate - is a mythical beast up there with dragons, bandersnatches, slithy toves and the crowned Saxe-Coburg. Despite the advertising, some people are indifferent to Marmite, and there's no such thing as a Doctor Who story that splits the audience evenly along a love/hate fault-line. A gut feel interpretation would point to Love & Monsters being the most likely candidate if such a thing were possible, but the numbers don't back this up. The appreciation index, a metric collected by the Beeb soon after broadcast, which gauges how much the people who are watching like what they see, was at a historic low of 76 for this story. Since the show's return in 2005, no episode has ever received a score so low (the appreciation index methodology for 20th Century Who was different so can't be directly compared). In the two official Doctor Who Magazine polls held since the story's 2006 broadcast, the "Mighty 200" in 2009, and the "First 50 years" poll in 2014, the story languished in the lower section - it also dropped significantly in the five years between these polls, only just avoiding a place in the bottom 20 in the more recent one. Obviously, some people adore it (it's not just me, there are glowing reviews from the time of its broadcast and since that you can find with a quick google), but it seems clear that a larger majority of people feel the opposite.

If there was a story that divided the lovers and the haters evenly, it would make mathematical sense for it to be midway down those poll results tables. But a quick look at the ten or so stories either side of the midway point in either poll shows no stories with particularly bad reputations, nor gives any hint of any discernible connecting logic between the stories at all; none of the middle stories is the same between the two polls. One can see a pattern looking at the bottom of the polls; there's usually something embarrassingly naff about them. Not necessarily a big thing, but if the rest of the story isn't of world-beating pedigree, it's enough to relegate it. Day-glo decor and Bonnie Langford impressions in Time and The Rani, for example; a bad performance by a child actor in Fear Her; day-glo decor and bad performances by child actors in The Twin Dilemma. But mid-table are the stories where there's nothing too offensive, but nothing particularly exciting either. Looking at the midway point of the stories in descending order of Appreciation Index makes even less sense: Fear Her, the post-2005 Who whipping boy, which always comes bottom of any poll, is squarely in the middle, alongside other stories with much better reputations - it's obviously more hated by fans than the general public, whereas Love & Monsters is disliked by both. The only sensible message one can take from this quantitative analysis is that a divisive story won't divide the audience evenly - it's more likely to be less loved.

Should programme makers hold off from taking risks and experimenting, though? Of course not; that way blandness lies. So, ultimately this was probably a pointless exercise (like most if not all attempts to quantify the artistic and subjective). More interesting to me as I scoured these lists of story titles was noting that - containing as it does an ampersand - Love & Monsters is one of very few that has a "special character". It's much rarer than I'd thought. A few stories have apostrophes (The Daleks' Master Plan, Father's Day) and numbers (Galaxy 4, 42, Orphan 55). Two stories in the history of Doctor Who have a hyphen - Time-Flight and The Talons of Weng-Chiang. The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe is the only story title with a comma, but at least one individual episode title in the William Hartnell era had a comma too (Small Prophet, Quick Return - part 2 of The Myth Makers). Then, there are three more special cases, each with their own unique use of punctuation. For many years, Love & Monsters was the only one, but in the last couple of seasons - one per season, so maybe it's part of Chibnall's master plan - a new one has been added. In Jodie's first year, Kerblam! claimed the exclamation mark, and this year Can You Hear Me? was the first to be phrased as a query. Think of that. For the whole of the 1980s, the Doctor had a question mark or two constantly on display as part of his costume, but it's taken until 2020 for one to appear in a story title. I will be disappointed if we don't get a story with an @ or a $ next time a series of Doctor Who airs.

In Summary:

I love Love & Monsters, but most seem to find it monstrous.