Ruby Sunday comes back, meets a charming man who says he met the Doctor as a child, falls for him, and discovers he’s spent the whole relationship recording her to launch a streaming career built on proving that aliens are a government lie. “Lucky Day” is the angriest thing this era has produced and it has far more teeth than I expected. I mostly liked it a great deal. The bits I didn’t are the bits where it flinches.
The Doctor is barely in it, which is the right call. This is Ruby’s episode, and Millie Gibson finally gets an hour built around her instead of around a question about her parentage. It’s the closest this era has come to an episode with something genuinely on its mind. It gets there by keeping the science fiction small and the human behaviour large.
Conrad is a well-observed villain
Jonah Hauer-King plays Conrad as likeable for most of the runtime, which is the whole trick. He’s warm, he’s interested, he listens, and the episode lets me enjoy him for twenty-five minutes before showing what he’s doing with the footage. The story is told largely from Ruby’s side, so I spent the first half enjoying him as a love interest and the second half going back over every scene I’d just watched. It’s the same trick Dot and Bubble pulled last year, and it works for the same reason: the information is all there and the episode simply declines to point at it.
What makes him work is that he isn’t stupid and he isn’t a true believer. He knows perfectly well that aliens are real, because he met one as a child and it terrified him. The lie is a business decision, and the episode is clear-eyed about the economics: denial gets more views than wonder, and a man who can perform righteous scepticism to camera will always out-earn one telling the truth. There’s no wound that explains him, either. Nobody hurt him and nobody abandoned him, and Hauer-King plays the confrontations with no rage underneath, just mild irritation at being interrupted, like a man with a content schedule.
The stream itself is well done, all jump cuts and direct address and manufactured outrage, and the bit where his followers turn on Ruby in real time is genuinely nasty. This show has handled disinformation badly before, usually by having somebody explain it. Here I watch him build the lie, watch it work, and watch what it costs the person on the other end of it. That’s how it should be done.
Ruby, finally given something to play
Gibson is very good. Ruby isn’t the wide-eyed new companion any more; she’s someone who has seen impossible things, can’t talk about them, and is lonely enough that a man taking her seriously is irresistible. The scene where she realises what he’s done, and the camera stays on her while she works out how much of it was real, is the best acting she’s done in the part. The show lets her be angry instead of sad, which is the better choice. Kate Stewart is used well too, and the scene where she has to decide whether to confirm anything on the record, knowing it’ll be cut into the stream, is a genuinely modern problem for a secret organisation to have.
Underneath the thriller is the most interesting thing this era has said about its own format. Ruby travelled, saw impossible things, came home, and has been left holding all of it alone, with the Doctor moved on and UNIT offering a debrief and a phone number. Love & Monsters is the obvious ancestor, an hour about the wreckage the Doctor leaves in ordinary lives, and Conrad is that episode’s Elton turned malignant. Elton had a support group and a website nobody read, while Conrad has followers, a revenue stream and an algorithm that rewards him for the worst version of the story. That’s a genuinely current update instead of a fresh coat of paint.
Where it flinches
There are two problems. The first is the Shreek attack, where the creatures are decent puppetry and the siege at UNIT is well staged, but the episode clearly needs a monster in it to count as Doctor Who, and the plot bends to fit that instead of the other way round. The second is the ending, and it’s the more interesting failure. Kate effectively has Conrad locked up and, in the final scene, leaves him in a cell with an alien in it as a lesson. It’s played as a satisfying comeuppance and it sat badly with me, because UNIT is a military organisation disappearing a British citizen for embarrassing them, and the episode frames that as a win.
I don’t think the show noticed what it was doing. You could argue the intent behind that last scene is more generous than it looks, and I’ve tried to see it that way. The Doctor’s brief appearance at the end is the best part of the coda, quietly furious with Conrad in a way that recalls the cold streak in The Waters of Mars, and Gatwa plays the restraint as something that takes effort. Kerblam! took a swing at a contemporary target and lost its nerve in the final act, and this does the same thing far better right up until the cell door closes. The argument underneath it holds together, even if the last scene doesn’t.
Rating: 3.5/5. Really enjoyed this. It’s sharp, angry and well cast, and by a distance the best use of Ruby the show has managed, with a villain built out of recognisable behaviour instead of a plan. It loses ground for a monster subplot bolted on out of obligation. The ending also hands the good guys a win nobody should be comfortable with.
