The second episode of last series involved the Doctor and Ruby encountering one of the Pantheon, Maestro. This time around, we get another member: the titular Lux, god of light. What is it with second episodes and the Pantheon?
It must be said though, that, from a visual standpoint, this episode is a real tour de force. The sets look fabulous, with a bit of a heightened realism effect happening in the main Miami set, all clean and neon and glistening with wet, while the diner and the theater both look just as a great. But the real star of the show is Lux himself: Mr Ring-a-Ding the cartoon looks absolutely gorgeous, and they do a great job of integrating him into the picture, with eyelines generally lined up properly and nice use of shadows and such. I also love how there's some subtle film noise flickering through him even when he's left the silver screen. They've also really nailed that "bouncy" elastic feel of early cartoons. It's really well done, and that's before we even get to the mad middle third of the episode, with the Doctor and Belinda converted into Scooby-Doo-esque cartoons themselves.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves here. The episode starts with the TARDIS traveling to Miami so that the Doctor can use his newly-created Vortex Indicator (or Vindicator for short) to triangulate 2025 Earth and basically force the TARDIS to land there. The fact that they've landed in 1952 means the Doctor and Belinda get an excuse to dress up ("this is the fun bit, honey," the Doctor tells Belinda), with both of them looking absolutely stunning their clothes: the Doctor in a nice blue suit and Belinda in a fun yellow poodle skirt. Of course, being the first completely non-white TARDIS team means that, since we're in 1952 Miami, the Doctor and Belinda do have to deal with racism, as segregation is the still the law of the land in the United States. It's a bit odd; the script brings it up and devotes a couple lines to it, but they don't make a big deal of it, as if they wanted to have an adventure in 1950s America but not deal with the consequences. Granted, they'd already tackled this more directly in "Rosa", but it still seems slightly insincere; the Doctor and Belinda are lucky to have encountered people who were so open-minded, with the only person making a fuss being the false reality they get put into by Lux. But since this isn't the focus of this story, and, as I said, they'd covered similar ground before, we can perhaps forgive them this.
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| The Doctor and Belinda meet Mr Ring-a-Ding. ("Lux") ©BBC |
The climax of this episode works reasonably well, though -- better, I would argue, than the defeat of Maestro in "The Devil's Chord". I like the idea of Lux using the Doctor's bigenerative energy to turn himself into a (quite horrifying-looking) real three-dimensional being, and the idea of Lux receiving so much light from the sun, and subsequently all the stars in the universe, that he expands into nothingness is well done. (Although what's up with the weird bit about the Doctor using some leftover bigenerative energy to heal himself? That sounds like either they didn't want to deal with putting make-up on his hand for later scenes or they felt they needed to remind people that the Doctor can change into someone else before Lux started pulling that energy out of him. Either way, it feels tacked-on.) It's more satisfying than "The Devil's Chord" in that regard, and the smaller stakes (a roomful of people in a cinema, rather than the entire world) make this feel a bit more believable.
So in the end, "Lux" is another strong episode for this series, with some truly outstanding effects and performances. It's more experimental than "The Robot Revolution", but it still hits the mark. If things continue in this vein then we're in for a strong series indeed.
(Oh, and look: there's Mrs Flood again at the end, in 1950s America. Now there really is a mystery going on: can she travel in time? Or is she just very long-lived? We'll have to keep watching to find out...)