Lots of things can be terrifying on Doctor Who. Monsters, of course, are terrifying. Standing the face of the unknown in a vast, undiscovered universe is also pretty terrifying. Our noble hero pushed to dark impulses, a terror in a more cerebral way. But sometimes, the most terrifying thing of all can just be a guy who really, really, really sucks.
That Guy Who Sucks is Conrad Clark (played by Jonah Hauer-King, who does a brilliant job saturating Conrad with the most absolutely rancid vibes even before you get to his mid-episode “twist”). At first, “Lucky Day” introduces us to Conrad like many Doctor Who supporting characters before him: we get a brief whimsical encounter in 2007 where he sees the Doctor, Belinda, and the TARDIS, sparking a lifelong obsession with the alien and the unknown that eventually leads to him crossing paths with Ruby after he also witnesses her and the Doctor encounter a hunter-predator alien called the Shreek.
What first begins as an awkward podcast interview becomes a slightly-less-awkward date, which then becomes several, and suddenly Ruby’s post-Doctor life is looking nice and bright. She’s got a new man, a happy family, and a cushy job at the child-labor-and-ex-companion-factory that is UNIT.
Things first take a dark turn when Ruby and Conrad go on a countryside getaway together, only to discover that the Shreek have seemingly returned. Conrad has had a bit of a weird vibe to him at this point in the episode, but mostly in a “slightly annoying but otherwise harmless” way, until he reveals to Ruby that he randomly decided to not take the anti-Shreek antidote she’d given him to protect him. And then, the vibe makes the aforementioned rancid turn when Ruby calls UNIT in to protect Conrad and his friends from the Shreek… and it turns out the whole thing is a hoax. There are no new Shreek, it’s Connor’s friends (in surprisingly good prosthetics for random weirdos!), and it turns out they’re all part of a conspiracy theory group called Think Tank that is trying to expose UNIT as peddling disinformation and simply saying that aliens are real to control the population.
This is where “Lucky Day” gets simultaneously very interesting, and very dangerous if you begin thinking about it for more than five minutes. Again, it cannot be stated enough what a good job Hauer-King does of making Conrad feel incredibly hateful once the mask falls off, even if it is slightly weird that suddenly we get Doctor Who‘s second toxic boyfriend storyline of the season. Plus the prospect of Doctor Who finding its own way into a timely conversation about right-wing radicalization and misinformation campaigns—extrapolated through the reality that, 20 years into its modern run, we’ve just had to kind of accept a broad public awareness that monsters and aliens are a reality of the world—is brilliant, and the exact kind of thing the show can and should do at its very best.
Things get even better ironically as things get worse and worse for Ruby: Connor and Think Tank’s campaign keeps ramping up, UNIT comes increasingly under fire from a suddenly skeptical public, and even really on the verge of implosion, it seems, with double-agents leaking information and Conrad’s goons doxxing every employee to the wider world, putting a huge amount of pressure on Kate. That pressure reaches its climax when Connor stages a one-man infiltration of UNIT’s latest HQ, holding Ruby, Kate, and the command team hostage (including returning faces like Ruth Madeley’s analyst Shirley and Alexander Devrient’s handsome Chief of Security Colonel Ibrahim, who seems to now be in a relationship with Kate? Good for her!) in an attempt to expose them once and for all.
But then Conrad makes a terrible mistake: on the verge of victory for his cause, he disses the Brigadier, as if we weren’t already expected to hate him enough, and Kate snaps. We know it’s bad, but also, as we’ve said already, Connor is an quantifiably awful person, so there’s equal joy and terror in watching Kate cross the line and set the real Shreek out to not just scare Connor into compliance, but, until everyone else steps in to convince her otherwise, essentially attempt to execute him for what he’s done.
Doctor Who loves giving us a villain to hate, but rarely does it allow its heroes to actually hate them in turn, so watching Kate willingly go as far as she does is a boldness the show rarely allows itself. And even when the situation is diffused—in spite of herself, Ruby saves Connor from the Shreek, and even though it does chomp on him a little, he gets taken to hospital and then directly to prison, his live-streamed stunt this time re-shifting public opinion back in UNIT’s favor—it’s clear there’s going to be consequences going forward for Kate and UNIT alike. These consequences will no doubt manifest if not by the end of this season (we know we’re back with UNIT at some point in the next four episodes), then presumably by the upcoming UNIT-focused-spinoff War Between Land and Sea.
It’s here that things start getting a bit more complicated. While “Lucky Day” is full-throated in its presentation of Conrad and Think Tank as not just wrong, but downright villainous, its alternative once they’re foiled leans much more in the line of vindicating UNIT. Of course, we like UNIT, we’re Doctor Who fans. We know they help our hero save the day all the time. But UNIT, especially in the current era’s vision of the organization, is likewise not a flawless entity. In the name of safeguarding the world, we’ve seen them enacting far-reaching surveillance and monitoring of the public; we’ve seen them detain and arrest journalists to cover up operations. I joked earlier, but Kate has recruited multiple children onto staff! Children who now apparently got doxxed by this creep! As cathartic as it is to watch Kate go postal on Conrad, this is still the head of a government-backed organization attempting to extrajudicially murder someone while they’re livestreaming to hundreds of thousands of people. A guy who is incredibly dislikable, sure, but still!
It’s all well and good that Ibrahim tells Kate there will be consequences for her actions down the line, but in the moment, “Lucky Day” only offers trust and absolution of UNIT as an alternative to Conrad’s misguided conspiracies—and even if there are consequences later, will they survive the next time UNIT helps the Doctor save the day? It’s good that Doctor Who is willing to play with the mess of moral compromises that it does here, especially in the name of using it to comment on real-world issues. But taking those complicated ideas and filing them down into an either-or scenario that falls apart once you think about it beyond the moment of the episode, and robs that decision to play with something more nuanced and darkly toned of its effectiveness in the here and now, punting the resolution down the line to either be handwaved or absolved at a later date.
“Lucky Day” even manages to speed-run a condensed version of this compromised vision in its very closing moments. Rotting in jail as he recovers from his bite wound, Conrad finds himself suddenly whisked into the TARDIS console room for an absolute dressing down from the Doctor. Again, in the moment, this is brilliant. It’s Doctor Who trading in any and all subtlety or layers of commentary to essentially have Ncuti Gatwa turn to camera and rage in equal parts against the show’s detractors and the disinformation industrial complex at large. And even better, it gives Gatwa’s Time Lord a chance to have a real element of darkness to him: he’s not here, as Conrad mocks, to try and absolve him, he’s here to tell him he sucks, he hates him, and even that the Doctor knows exactly what the rest of his miserable life is going to entail, including his untimely death, alone, imprisoned, and forgotten. The Doctor saves people, that’s what they do, but sometimes there are people who can’t be saved from themselves.
If this was where “Lucky Day” actually ended, then its mixed handling of the whole UNIT thing might be more excusable—exchanging a lack of bite there to give its titular hero a deliciously compromised character beat. Except, it doesn’t. The Doctor dumps Conrad back in the prison where he will, apparently, eventually meet his end… only for Mrs. Flood, now a conveniently placed prison governor, to come to the door of his cell and let him escape, knowingly raise her eyebrow at the audience. We can’t even be allowed the knowledge that this guy, the guy the almost entire episode has been dedicated screaming about how terrible he is, gets to suffer for what he did!
Again, maybe it’ll come up at some point again whenever the Mrs. Flood stuff pays off (maybe she’s recruiting the Asshole Avengers for the finale?), but in the moment, it robs this particular story of taking a stance on the complicated scenarios it wants to play with. Doctor Who can, and should, use its voice to comment on very real issues our world faces, even if it is extrapolated through the lens of its surreal world of adventures in time and space. But if it’s going to, it should be full-throated when it does, instead of standing on the edge of saying something and then backing down.
Doctor Who can be brave in the face of fictional monsters, it should be brave in the face of real ones, too.
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