“Lucky Day” is the fourth episode of the 15th season of the new “Doctor Who” series, also indicated as season 2, and follows “The Well“. It’s available in the UK and Ireland on BBC channels and in many other countries on the Disney+ platform.
Beware that in various adverts and marketing materials, this season is promoted as season 2 passing through a new start with the production by Bad Wolf and distribution by Disney+, hence the double notation.
Note. This article contains some spoilers about “Lucky Day”.
The 15 Doctor’s (Ncuti Gatwa) attempt to bring Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu) home takes the travelers to 2007, where they encounter a young boy named Conrad Clark (Benjamin Chivers). As an adult, Conrad (Jonah Hauer-King) seeks out the Doctor and Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), with whom he begins a personal relationship. During a short holiday, Ruby fears that Conrad may be in danger and seeks advice from Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave), but things are not what they seem.
I confess that initially, I was starting to get really bored with Ruby’s story and her life after travelling with the Doctor. On the surface, “Lucky Day” was developing into a corny little romance between her and Conrad, which is exactly the kind of story that puts me to sleep quickly and can also make me a little nauseous.
In some ways, this opening part felt like a version of “Love & Monsters” with better monsters than the Arbzorbaloff but also without all the things that made it make sense (I know, it’s a controversial episode but for me, the story of Elton meeting the Doctor as a child and being influenced by him is winderful). All that changed when the plot completely turned the point of the episode upside down, and you could say that this made Conrad the anti-Elton.
The episode’s central theme ends up being the manipulation of reality with the conspiracies that are created and spread through social media and the interests of the people who create and spread disinformation to manipulate public opinion. Useful idiots who think they’re clever are the ideal target for the people who create this type of manipulation because they act with an almost religious zeal in spreading fake news.
For the people who try to be rational, it’s impossible to keep up with those idiots: it can take hours to analyze and debunk a message that supports some conspiracy theory, and in the meantime, these useful idiots have shared it thousands of times. In this episode, it’s UNIT that pays the price, with the complication of having to keep many secrets.
In my opinion, the Doctor’s speech should be added to the memorable moments of his story, in this case, to comment on a phenomenon that social media has greatly amplified. It really is a situation in which there are people who wouldn’t accept reality even if it bit them!
As the episodes go by, the role of Mrs. Flood (Anita Dobson) seems to become more active, so to speak, well beyond the comments to which she got us used to. Having reached the halfway point of this season, we can start wondering about her agenda.
