Doctor Who: Lux

 "You're Scooby Doo!"

"Honey, I'm Velma..."

I suppose you could, at points, criticise this episode for bits of plot sleight of hand- for example, why does Lux manifest himself in that particular time and place? What's the cause? Is Lux's defeat perhaps a little too neat. Also, there will be those who say that the whole Pantheon thing is tired and, although they can only do episodes with a new "god" so many times before coming to the big conclusion, at this point I think it's basically fine. I like the Pantheon. It's fun.

And yes, there will be those who criticise the meta stuff, the most violence done to the fourth wall in Doctor Who since The Mind Robber. But let us not jump ahead. 

The opening sequence is of course superb, quickly giving us impressions of time and place: what could be more early '50s America than a monochrome cinema newsreel about the atom bomb followed by a cartoon? It's the atomic age, it's Miami... and suddenly Mr Ring-a-Ding starts addressing the audience and comes out of the screen. Brilliant.

The relationship between the Doctor and Belinda develops nicely, too. She's still very firm about getting home but much more open to being "one of his adventures" after her experiences here. And RTD squares this plot circle rather well here, with a machine that needs them to visit several places so the Doctor can "triangulate" in order to get to May 2025.

This is Miami, Florida, in 1952: the story has to address the appalling reality of segregation, but this is well handled, with a subtlety much more effective and hard hitting than would have been the case otherwise. And this is also used as a character moment. So, indeed, is the deliciously fourth-wall breaking moment where the increasingly sinister Mr Ring-a-Ding turns the Doctor and Belinda into cartoons... and they manage to become live action again by acquiring character "depth" so as not to be two-dimensional. Clever.

Of course, the fact that they still find themselves within a frame of film is a whole other level of metatextual because, of course, this is television. if we handwave away the fact that everything is digital nowadays, then... well, non-diegetically the characters always have been trapped in a frame of film and always will be.

And then... Doctor Who fans, who've been following the season and insist that the Doctor and Belinda are TV characters. I love this, and no only for the cheerful acknowledgement that fandom will never, ever rate any other story above Blink. Because this is actually quite philosophical, and evokes an ancient Chinese point about dreams- "Was I Chuang Tzu dreaming I was a butterfly, or am I now really a butterfly dreaming that I am Chuang Tzu?"

The decision that, actually, the Doctor and Belinda are real and the fans are not certainly seems arbitrary, but I'm assuming that all this metatextual stuff is going somewhere. After all, we've seen it before, both with Mrs Flood, whose comments here are certainly interesting, and in The Devil's Chord ("There's always a twist at the end") which is, of course, another Pantheon episode. All very interesting Is Mrs Flood also of the pantheon, "goddess" of reality, or stories?  But I also like the human touch shown here, the real yet humble pathos as the fans imagine they're about to vanish out of existence. It's nice to see them again at the end... although no, RTD, this does not make up for the cat last week.

Overall, then, this episode is crazy and brilliant and right up my street with all the meta stuff, with great production values and superb characterisation. But there's a caveat, of course: this needs to be going somewhere and the payoff has to be worthwhile. I suspect the finale will be more meta still...