Lucky Day, by Pete McTighe, is the fourth episode of the current season, and continuing the odd trend of this season mirroring the last one, it has a lot in common with the parallel episode from last season, 73 Yards. Both are “Doctor-lite episodes” that focus on Ruby Sunday, both include appearances by Jemma Redgrave as Kate Stewart, and both feature scary scenes of Ruby in small pub that is off the beaten track, which turns out to be a big fake-out.

“Doctor-lite” is a term that we’ve all gotten to know to referring to Doctor Who episodes in which the Doctor himself only plays a small role. Originally, this was done to help the production team work on more than one episode at once. Last year, it was specifically because Ncuti Gatwa had a really busy schedule and it was necessary so the season could be produced all (resulting in two consecutive Doctor-lite episodes). I don’t know what the reasoning is this year. Is Ncuti Gatwa still that busy? Is making eight full episodes this year so much of a stretch? Or is it just that we’ve gotten used to this format that people expect it or even want it (or that the production team thinks we do)?

Spoilers!

In any case, the episode starts with a reminder of our season arc, as the Doctor and Belinda land on earth in 2007 in their quest to get back to 2025, and briefly meet a young and bewildered kid named Conrad. Flashforward to the present and we learn that Conrad has grown up to be a podcaster who has remained interested in the idea of the Doctor and aliens and UNIT–Doctor Who‘s fictional international military and scientific organisation which exists to combat alien threats– and has now managed to score a special guest in his show in the form of Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson, last year’s main co-star, now returned to the opening credits for this episode).

It turns out that Conrad witnessed the Doctor and Ruby on a little adventure set in between episodes 2 & 3 from the previous season, during which he got vomited on by some goo from a feral dog-monster known as the Shreek, which apparently marks him as a future prey for the beast. Ruby gives him an antidote to take and the two of them hit it off. They start dating and go away to his hometown for a weekend away, but then a couple of Shreek show up and terrorise everyone. Conrad it seems never took the antidote in a misguided attempt to emulate the Doctor’s bravery, and so now everyone is in danger.

And then the episode pulls out its big twist–Conrad isn’t a devotee of the Doctor and UNIT–he’s actually part of an online protest group whose goal is to expose the truth that aliens aren’t real, and that UNIT and people like Ruby perpetuate a deception that they are in order to secure funding, develop secret technologies for nefarious purposes and so on. The Shreek in the village are some of his followers dressed up in costume, and the goal was to lure UNIT out into the open so they could film them and humiliate them on social media. Kate Stewart obliges by having all the soldiers with her arrest Conrad and his friends, which begins to turn public perception against them in a major way.

Now, with any big plot twist, there are a few questions that are worth asking. For example, is it written and directed effectively so that it feels like an interesting surprise for the audience? I’d argue that in this case it is–I was genuinely surprised. I didn’t see it coming, and when it landed, it raised my interest.

A second question is whether the twist is more or less interesting than what we thought was going on. Some twists can disappoint because it takes the story away from where you were hoping it would go–that’s how 73 Yards was for me, when we learned that the whole “Mad Jack” thing was just a joke. Here, the results are mostly positive. Conrad’s comparison issues with the Doctor seemed silly and contrived. The truth that he was a total lying creep was more interesting, and the fact the story was less about a monster and more about an entitled jerk at least made it feel different.

But the last big question is whether the work of having the twist at all makes the story better. In other words, if we had just started knowing Conrad’s true character, would that have taken anything away from episode? Here, I’m not so sure. I think a bit of a surprise is worthwhile, but it would have been better if it had landed earlier–waiting for a solid half the episode to reveal what is really going on is too much. The only real reason for the twist is to highlight Ruby’s disappointment and the emotional fallout of her time with the Doctor. The episode does this but not to the degree that it needs to justify spending (or wasting) so much time on the false premise. Shifting the ratio a bit would have opened up some room for to really unpack things for her a bit more meaningfully.

And maybe it would have created space to make more sense of Conrad himself. This is where I really struggled with the episode. We are told a lot about what Conrad is up to and what his motives are, but so little of it holds up to any sort of scrutiny.

To unpack it: Conrad apparently believes that all of the stuff the world has been told about aliens and other threats that UNIT faces are all lies, told to deceive the public, to spread fear, to maintain control, to get funding to develop secret technologies, and other vague reasons. He thinks that the monsters are special effects and people in costumes.

So what does he do? He puts some people into his own monster costumes and uses them to trick Ruby Sunday into thinking she is under attack, so she’ll call UNIT to help.

He wants Ruby to react to fake monsters, that she knows are fake, so that UNIT will come out in force to deal with fake monster that they also know are fake.

It doesn’t make any sense. If I think UNIT knows monsters are fake, why do I think Ruby will be scared by them? Why do I think UNIT will show up in force to deal with them? And how does revealing that I can make pretend monster prove that UNIT has been doing the same?

The episode just breezes past all of this to get us to put UNIT in trouble and to get us to a place where we can see what a snivelling jerk Conrad really is. In case it’s not clear, he mocks Ruby as a person, he insults a disabled woman, and he’s outed as a privileged tax dodger. He then breaks into UNIT, shoots someone, and live-stream that he’s threatening everyone with a gun demanding a “confession.” What is the point? He’s already won, for all intents and purposes–what else is he after?

I suppose the idea is that he’s too irrational for his actions to make any real sense, the entitled, petty, selfish, crybaby that he is–so all his cruelty, all his needless vindictiveness, all his deliberate meanness is just the result of the fact that he’s the worst. Conrad Clark isn’t so much a character as he is a representation of a whole bunch of things that the writer or the producer or the show in general really dislike.

And sure, that’s fine, you are allowed to dislike things. But when that’s all that’s going on with a character, it weakens the episode. And when the Doctor shows up at the end to just give Conrad a piece of his mind, so we in the audience can just go “Yeah, you tell ’em Doctor!” it doesn’t make for a good drama.

Now I kind of liked the idea that even after facing the Doctor, and knowing that he was completely wrong about everything he’s been saying, he is still unrepentant. I could imagine the guy as some sort recurring adversary (even before Mrs. Flood showed up to let him out of prison), but that would only really work if he could be written with more clarity of direction. I guess we will see.

There’s another thing I wanted to cover, which I’d say is paradoxically both the best and the worst part of Lucky Day, and that is Kate Stewart.

After we finished Lucky Day, there was a big discussion in my family about Kate’s actions at the end of the episode. When Conrad breaks into UNIT and threatens everyone and starts insulting Kate’s father, she’s finally had enough. She releases the Shreek (which in a huge contrivance is right outside the office in a box, but I can deal with that one) so that it starts hunting Conrad (who obviously never took the antidote for the goo-vomit, as he never believed that the monster was real). Everyone else in the office is freaking out about this, but Kate refuses to back down. Eventually Conrad is so terrified that he admits his lies, at which point Ruby remembers she is supposed to be the star of this episode and steps in and tasers the thing into submission (for a minute at least).

Anyway, the discussion we had was about whether Kate was wrong to do this. My one daughter thought she acted horribly–a person of power using what she had to punch down on someone more vulnerable just because she didn’t like him. And of course, if I look it as a real event, I agree. Even aside from the absurdity of it (even if she didn’t care about Conrad, how did Kate know it wasn’t going to hurt anyone else, etc?), people shouldn’t go around setting monsters on people no matter how horrible they’ve been.

But, as a fictional character, the scene made me love Kate Stewart all the more. Indeed, I’d say it’s the absolute most interesting she’s been since Jemma Redgrave started playing her back in 2012. This is a Kate that I want to see more of, someone whose patience is not without limit, who can be pushed to a point where she will brook no more nonsense and take no prisoners. I loved the fact that nobody on her team–not Ruby, not Shirley Bingham, not Colonel Ibrahim–were happy about what she was doing, but that she, as the boss, did not care. I would have liked to have seen more of the fallout to this, and I hope we do see more in the future (Pete McTighe is co-writing the Sea Devils-related spin off coming out some time in the future, so maybe that’s a good sign).

Ultimately, I’d say that the confrontation between Kate and Conrad is the single best part of Lucky Day–the most gripping bit of story and the most revealing in terms of character. It made me think that actually, I’d have been down to see a whole Doctor-lite episode about Kate Stewart. Nothing against Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday–she is quite likeable here–but unsurprisingly it turns out that if you give Jemma Redgrave something interesting to do, she can bring it. The series has so rarely provided her with that opportunity, but it’s been one of the nice things about the current era (The Legend of Ruby Sunday also gave her some nice moments).

So my daughter and I did not fully agree. She thought Kate shouldn’t just have trouble as a result of this, she should be fully fired for her actions. I can understand that, but it’s not what I want for the story.

But I said that Kate was both the best and the worst thing about the episode, right? That’s because if we take the episode literally, she absolutely should be fired. Not for releasing the Shreek, but for allowing the situation with Conrad to ever happen in the first place.

Conrad is a public figure. He’s rich, is a social media influencer, and has a popular podcast. He’s sent around a picture of Ruby Sunday with the TARDIS around widely enough that Ruby has seen it. Ruby appears on his podcast talking about UNIT, and starts a romantic relationship with him.

He’s even interviewed at UNIT for a job (apparently as an 18 year old!), and met Kate Stewart herself, who thought then he was untrustworthy.

So all that to say that he’s not an “under the radar” type of guy, but somehow nobody at UNIT cottons onto the fact that this guy is trouble before his big stunt.

Conrad has even managed to start and organise a huge protest movement without them knowing anything about it. And one of their own senior analysts (I presume–he works right there in the main headquarters) is a member of it.

Basically, UNIT is terrible at security.

And when Ruby is in trouble, Kate doesn’t just send a team, she sends all her senior people including herself. There is of course no reason for this except so that they can all be caught on camera during. Then Kate helplessly lets Conrad dominate the social media conversation, including the doxing of everyone in UNIT, before we find out that she can apparently just take control of all of his social media accounts, seemingly without any effort.

So basically, from an internal perspective, this whole disaster is Kate’s fault, and she should absolutely be fired.

Of course, the real culprit here is just shoddy story design. The show wants certain things to happen, so it just makes them happen, and doesn’t worry about whether it holds water or if it’s full of holes.

And to be fair, most of these things didn’t occur to me as I watched the episode. But they did come to me not long afterward. The central conflict in Lucky Day is based on a villain whose motives are too broad and thin to be meaningful, and only possible because of heroes who are too incompetent to know better. There are still good scenes and moments and performances, and that strives to say something (from most of the reactions that I’ve read, that message has resonated with a lot of people).

But they are in a story that because of the kind of problems I’m talking about, I can’t bring myself to actually like it. Not unreservedly, anyway.

Other Thoughts

• Mrs. Flood shows up here as the governor the prison that Conrad is in, apparently letting him go free. Maybe she’s responsible also for the Midnight Entity escaping the planet in the last episode? That would go a long way to making that twist less annoying. Maybe she’s doing this with all the villains in this season’s and in the finale there will a big team up where Conrad and the Midnight Entity team-up to take down the Doctor! Wouldn’t that be awesome?

• Conrad is revealed here as the person that the Doctor referred to obliquely as the guy who told him about Belinda Chandra. To remind us, what he actually said in The Robot Revolution was, “I was told about you, by someone. It’s kind of a long story, and I’ve got to be careful about timelines. But he told me your name, like you would be important.” Is there any significance to any of this in terms of the broader story? Also, does the Doctor at the start of this episode realize who Conrad is when he meets him as a kid. He does learn his name, and then gives him the coin, possibly knowing that Conrad will go on to wear the coin as a necklace, depending on what Ruby told him.

• At the end of the episode, Ruby says she wants to get away by herself to help recover from all the insanity that she has lived through. That’s a nice idea and when she presumably returns for the season finale, I hope we follow up on this in a meaningful way.

• I was fine with Carla Sunday and Louise Miller showing up again, but I got a particular kick of out seeing Cherry Sunday. That woman is pretty hilarious. I was very grateful, though, that UNIT less cluttered with recurring character than last time.

• I am not a fan of the “Vlinx”–that strange robot that sits in the corner of the UNIT headquarters. It could be made to be interesting, but so far it’s not at all. But having said that, I enjoyed the fact that when the Shreek was wandering around the room causing disruptions to technology, that the Vlinx just peaced out. He was like, “I’m not sticking around this!” and just left.

• According to my daughters, both Gen Z, the idea of the hashtag #IstandwithUNIT” is nonsense, and would never catch on. They say this is neither how hashtags nor public opinion works. One of them said she totally buys #hottaserlady, though.