Ruby learns just how much 50p can cost.

Like last year, it feels uncomfortably early in a season to be having a Doctor-Lite story. They tend to work better as late in the season calm-before-the-storm pauses than momentum disrupting brake-pumps just as things were getting going but that’s probably more to do with the fact that eight episodes are just too short a season for an adventure of the week show like Doctor Who. The more compelling mystery might be what is it about the working environment and creative process of Russell T Davies’ showrunning that so necessitates Doctor Lite episodes, a phenomena that simply doesn’t occur with such regularity and obvious contrivances under the other showrunners? Anyway, if you were one of the many fans who felt that Ruby Sunday’s departure from the show was abrupt and underwhelming then today’s your Lucky Day.

Lucky Day opens with a flashback to a child’s New Year memory: a lucky coin, and a softly spoken podcast reminiscing about an encounter with a mysterious stranger and his vanishing blue box. It’s a tale as old as Timelord adventures and the set-up to a fair few episodes in the modern era, but episode writer Pete McTighe has some tricks up his sleeve. This isn’t a fairy tale; it’s a story about the tales we tell ourselves; the self-mythologising we do to self-soothe and self-compensate—even if those stories have a funny way of turning on us.

With the Doctor and Belinda still time-locked from returning to 2025, they manage their closest landing yet — in 2007, where they encounter a young Conrad Clark, distracted from the New Year fireworks by the sudden appearance of the TARDIS. A brief conversation and the gift of a found 50p from the Doctor change Conrad’s life forever, much to the disinterest of his neglectful mother. Flash forward to the present-ish day (it’s necessarily coy about exactly when it is set so as not to undermine the season’s ongoing arc) and we pick up with Ruby Sunday, first as she enjoys a hitherto unseen adventure with the Doctor battling the Shreek and then a year later as she tries to rebuild a normal life after her decision to leave the Doctor to spend time with her disappointingly terrestrial and unremarkable* mum (sidenote: I’m not sure of the point of bringing back said biological mum or actual mum Carla and gran Cherry for such brief, impactless cameos). As she adjusts to the mundane, she crosses paths with Conrad, now a rising online influencer and podcaster. As their shared experiences turn into budding romance, Ruby finds herself at ground zero of the return of an alien threat she thought contained, but everything is not quite what it appears to be.

Lucky Day may share its initial set-up with the likes of Love & Monsters’ L.I.N.D.A. and even Rose‘s Clive Finch, but this is Doctor Who in its darkest domestic mode: no alien empires or bombastic gods of mischief this week, just a man with a microphone, a grudge, and a growing following, rubbing salt into a festering culture war wound. Conrad Clark, whose brief childhood encounter with the Doctor has metastasised into a twisted, conspiratorial worldview, reimagines that memory into the spearhead of weaponised paranoia and insidious populism. His Think Tank (a lovely callback to Tom Baker’s debut story Robot or, if you’re in the mood for a deeper cut, Skagra’s puppet scientific collective in abandoned but perennially resurrected Classic Season 17 closer Shada) isn’t just a podcast — it’s a multi-media brand, a platform and rallying point for the angry, the disaffected and, of course, the very, very stupid. As Doctor Who baddies go, it’s both topical and challenging for the series to confront, because – as real life has repeatedly demonstrated – they’re near impossible to reason with and even harder to defeat given their proclivity for martyrdom and persistence of their own infinite capacity for motivated reasoning and self-reinforcing delusional belief persistence.

Where Lucky Day starts to struggle is after the big second act reveal. From that point on it can’t quite decide what it’s actually revealed. Is Conrad a charismatic grifter? A radicalised conspiracy convert? Or are we dealing with a true believer tipping into fanaticism? It wants him to be all three at once, but doesn’t have the time to do the legwork to make the progression feel earned once he crosses the line from button-pushing populist to armed extremist. For a man supposedly swept up in the power of his own myth, his decision to storm UNIT and murder its agents lands like a third-act rewrite to add some action to a battle of ideas with the motivation scribbled in the margins.

The Shreek are nominally the monster-of-the-week, but they’re really just the slime trail of the real threat: the manufactured paranoia and outright lies Conrad peddles to the credulous and the curious. The Shreek’s green goo as metaphor isn’t subtle, but it doesn’t need to be when it’s this effective. One squelch of this glowing ooze and your face is on a watchlist, your life under constant threat from those lurking in the shadows watching your every move. They’re the monstrous manifestation of everything Conrad wants his audience to be afraid of.

The script weaponizes Conrad’s snake-oil charm with unnerving precision. He isn’t a cartoon villain — he’s affable, handsome, a bit wounded – selling the lie with the soothing fluency and practiced ease of someone who genuinely believes he’s the only one brave enough to speak the truth. Jonah Hauer-King plays him with just the right mix of Hallmark Meet-Cute RomCom earnestness and a slightly sour, nagging sense that something’s off, so that when his heel turn comes, he absolutely nails the moment and his sociopathic detachment during the final moments of the episode are genuinely chilling. But as sharply executed as those moments are, they hang in narrative air. Lucky Day gestures at how modern radicalisation happens – how personal stories are hijacked, reframed, and fed into a monetizable outrage machine – but ends up being both too specific and too vague. It’s very keen to make points, but hesitant to dramatize them.

It’s a Doctor-lite episode and the absence of the Doctor for most of the runtime is no handicap although the question of exactly how the Doctor could defeat an enemy as pervasive and nebulous as Think Tank lingers like a spectre at the feast. Ruby Sunday, now obliged to live a post-TARDIS life, carries the episode with practiced ease. Millie Gibson sells Ruby’s heartbreak and confusion, even if the emotional arc through the episode feels underbaked. For too much of the episode she seems far too well-adjusted for someone supposedly processing the trauma of her time with and/ or being left behind by the Doctor and her final UNIT HQ monologue, though punchy, doesn’t land with the cathartic force it could or should have. Still, Gibson delivers that final “go to hell” with enough conviction to sell the moment regardless of how the script got her there.

In common with much of this current era of the show, the episode uses pace to mask its flaws, hoping that if it keeps the plot moving fast enough, you won’t pause to consider the things that don’t make sense. There’s a lovely bleakness in the way Lucky Day presents UNIT not as heroes, but as just one more institution being demonised by grifters who figured out long ago that outrage is profitable and truth is negotiable. Jordan, the radicalised UNIT junior officer caught between sworn duty and intoxicating faux-righteousness, offers a glimpse of the kind of nuanced supporting character this story could have explored further, if it weren’t so busy trying to juggle polemic and pacing or if – gasp – it had been allowed more than one episode to unfold. His sacrifice plays like a commentary on both institutional loyalty and the expendability of followers, but there’s no room to examine what either of those mean.

The biggest flaw, perhaps, is the idea that public sentiment could turn against UNIT this quickly – in a world where alien invasions are routinely televised – stretches credibility beyond even this storied series’ boundaries, although it’s a very neat touch that the American news network is repeatedly shown to embrace the conspiracy theorists’ agenda with full-throated glee. Perhaps the most unlikely thing though is, given UNIT’s previously demonstrated reach, resources and technological superiority, how a handful of smugly sanctimonious trolls holding smartphones and using public social media platforms could possibly out-manoeuvre a global intelligence task force. They’ve dealt with far, far worse with far less fuss.

Jemma Redgrave finally gets something a bit more interesting to do as Kate Stewart and mostly makes it count. Her mentorship of Ruby is superficially touching and well-played but feels somewhat undeserved, especially given how together Ruby’s life in general seems to be. Does Kate do this for all of the Doctor’s discarded plus-ones? She must be rushed off her feet if so, there are plenty of former companions with more field experience and institutional knowledge than Ruby still knocking about (The Power of the Doctor proved that much). More compelling is Kate’s darker edge here: her uncharacteristic aggression toward Conrad and her willingness to weaponize the Shreek feels like the beginning of a Harriet Jones-style crossing of a line that may put her on a collision course with the Doctor himself.

Production-wide, there’s a tightness to the direction here that makes the slow unspooling of tension work. The scares are small – especially compared to last week’s The Well – but surgical, and when the big genre moment lands – a UNIT HQ confrontation that should be ridiculous – it somehow works because Lucky Day earns its tone beat by beat. There are shades of The X-Files in the way the episode frames its horror as something administrative and encouraged by algorithmic indifference even if it doesn’t even begin to explore the culpability of big tech and social media in bringing events to a head.

The bookending appearance by the Doctor, confronting an unrepentant and chillingly zealous Conrad in his cell gives Ncuti Gatwa a rare opportunity to show a steelier, angrier side to this most emotionally expressive Doctor and it mostly works because Conrad is impervious to the Doctor’s lecture. We don’t often see that, and it’s scary. We have to hope this isn’t the last we see of Jonah Hauer-King’s Conrad (and the obligatory Mrs Flood coda suggests it won’t be). He might just be the best non-monster villain of the modern Who era. He’s better than Rosa’s disposable space racist or even The Robot Revolution’s incel afterthought yet encompasses elements of both, wrapped up in the headlines of the times; a villain that it’s hard to see how the Doctor could possibly beat him. Kill him? Sure. But defeat him? Feels dangerously unlikely. Rumours, lies, amplified grievances, wilful misinterpretation and cynical culture wars becoming Doctor Who’s most implacable and unbeatable adversary? Who could have seen that coming?

* Audience sentiment, not Ruby’s.