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I’ve been wrong before, but as I sit here before Lucky Day goes live, I’m pretty sure that this is going to be one of the more controversial episodes of the season, but to a certain extent, I think that’s the point.
To start off on a positive note, it does a brilliant job of misdirecting your attention as to what the episode’s actually about. In the first 5 minutes, we get our monster of the week set up with our surrogate protagonist and the start of a super cheesy romance story right out of a Hallmark movie, and we think that’s all we’re in for. Had the episode been trying it sincerely, I would be heavily critical of it, but once we hit the mid-point and discover this by-the-numbers adventure has all been a ruse, it recontextualizes everything in a brilliant way.
Cheesy though it is, I did see Conrad as pretty sweet in the first half. He does show a couple of red flags, but to be honest, I put that more down to the straight white man writing him rather than any intentions of the narrative. Still, intentional or not it works once Conrad turns heel on us and becomes the human embodiment of every blue-tick who’s ever replied to your posts on Twitter.
This is where the controversy will come in because this episode is about the modern social media landscape and doesn’t even try to be subtle about it. Still, in a world where misinformation is now just a regular form of communication online I think we’re well past the point of subtlety — lord knows the very people this episode puts on blast wouldn’t have the media literacy to pick up on it. I’m sure there will be a bunch of comments online about how this was “as bad at tackling modern issues as Orphan 55”, but (and maybe this is just my nihilism talking) I don’t see Conrad as that unrealistic a depiction of the kind of people who revel in the attention of starting conspiracies and using their cult of personality to create harmful movements.
To that end, I think centering Conrad’s vendetta against UNIT – an entity that exists only within the confines of Doctor Who – was the right call as opposed to a half-hearted attempt to connect it to any real-world issues. This show occasionally flirts with what effect constant alien incursion would have on the world but never likes to follow through on it. The Doctor constantly claims that human beings just forget these things ever happened, even when global invasions from Daleks, Cybermen, and even trees have happened repeatedly over the last couple of decades.
It’s something I’ve always found very unsatisfying about this universe, yet this episode leverages that hand-wavey lore to its advantage, allowing Conrad to easily stir people up into a frenzy over whether all of those alien encounters were even real; and again, if even one such crisis did ever occur in the real world, I have no doubt a very vocal group of morons would start shouting about it all being a global governmental conspiracy.
I also liked the touch of making sure he didn’t have any kind of sympathetic backstory. We see his mum strike him as a child in the opening – in a “stop being stupid” kind of way rather than a “I’m trying to hurt you” kind of way – but it doesn’t use that as a crutch, clarifying that she’s fine, living a luxurious life that he happily pays for. It’s a bit refreshing to see someone like this in fiction who isn’t horrible because of some tragic childhood, but instead, to quote The Simpsons, some people are just jerks.
I like how it all comes to a head, especially seeing how Kate behaves when the Doctor isn’t around. She’s been willing to go against the Doctor’s wishes in the past, but generally tends to defer to him whenever problems arise, knowing there are lines that she would cross he never will and finally we see a scenario where he isn’t around to stop her. Seeing Conrad get so profoundly put in his place is satisfying, but it’s also a very good portrayal of this kind of person that even being confronted with a real alien biting his arm off doesn’t change him.
As soon as he’s no longer in immediate danger, he goes right back to grandstanding and conspiring, and his time in prison at the end clearly hasn’t caused him to relent. Again, I’m not sure if this was intentional or not, but it does make a depressingly good point about how just about any “put down” you can throw at these kinds of people just makes them double down on their idiocy.
You can argue that the Doctor confronting him with a big speech at the end was unnecessary, and yes, I can see how it gives the same vibes as 13 staring down the lens and directly telling the audience “global warming bad” in Orphan 55, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near as bad as that — if only because the speech itself is way better than the one in Orphan 55. 15 doesn’t get to be intimidating nearly enough, and he does such a great job of it. Even as Conrad stands there unfazed by his speech, you can see in his eyes how little the Doctor cares about this guy – how he’s seen his like millions of times before all through time and space – he’s just here because Conrad upset his best friend and needs telling off.
My issues with this episode don’t come from any of what it does, though; it comes from what it doesn’t do. This is the first time we’ve seen Ruby since she left the Tardis at the end of last season, and I was disappointed about how much of a non-factor she becomes after the mid-point twist.
The first half does a really good job of establishing how difficult it has been for her to settle back into life after the Doctor, especially given that she was whisked away to see all of time and space at 19 before coming back to Earth at 20. I was interested to see a deeper dive into that, but the episode didn’t deliver, as that thread mostly gets forgotten after the halfway point. There’s such juicy character development in the only man she connected with since meeting the Doctor betraying her, and I don’t think a “go to hell” after saving his life was big enough of a moment.
Her realization at the end that she just needs to disconnect from everything and be alone for a while is a good one, but I wanted to see more of her inner journey to come to that realization. It’s just the age-old problem in Doctor Who of an episode trying to juggle more plot threads than it has time for, and the drop to eight episodes per season eradicating two-parters outside of the finale has made things worse in that department.
Lucky Day is an episode that, for all its flaws, I will defend as being good, but if you didn’t like it, I get it. I think the mid-point twist was brilliant, and Conrad was a villain who is unbearably annoying in just the right way, tackling the modern landscape of misinformation and mob mentality in a way that may not have been subtle, but was effective.
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