First broadcast 3 May 2025.

Back during Russell T Davies’ original run as Doctor Who‘s producer, he implemented an annual “Doctor-lite” episode. These episodes would minimise the involvement of the actor playing the Doctor, and thus reduced the time pressure on them in the role. The results were varied: on the one hand it resulted in the divisive Season 2 episode “Love and Monsters”, but on the other it inspired Season 3’s “Blink” – widely regarded as the best Doctor Who episode of all time.

Quite why Davies continues to employ “Doctor-lite” episodes when the series consists of just eight episodes a season is unclear. Perhaps Ncuti Gatwa is simply too busy to squeeze eight into his schedule. On the other hand, it may simply be for creative reasons: there is an immediate frustration in not having your title character onscreen, but there are also enormous and challenging opportunities to innovate. Guest writer Peter McTighe certainly does here.

“Lucky Day” focuses on Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), the Doctor’s former companion who left his side in last year’s season finale “Empire of Death”. It acts as a fascinating character study, and a profile of a woman in trauma. One minute Ruby was travelling the universe, foiling alien invasion, and fighting off literal gods. The next she was home, living a domestic life, and leaving the Doctor’s world behind. How does one adjust to that change? How do they stop anticipating alien menaces around every corner, or the Doctor arriving out of the blue? Millie Gibson gives a strong performance here, and McTighe does a good job of expressing her post-traumatic stress.

The episode also focuses on a man named Conrad Clark (Jonah Hauer-King). He randomly meets the Doctor and Belinda (Varada Sethu) as a child, and then stumbles upon the TARDIS again as an adult. His obsession with uncovering the details of what has occurred leads him to start up a podcast on the subject, and brings him into contract with Ruby. Hauer-King is excellent, and the episode’s first half weirdly operates as something of a light romantic comedy with little science fiction to it at all. Of course at the episode’s midpoint there is a decisive shift in tone and genre – how could there not be? – and it is there that the problems begin.

It is difficult to write about “Lucky Day” without spoiling its central narrative, and it is one best experienced on one’s own. Suffice to say that character logic begins to wobble badly, and while Conrad’s behaviour is consistent in the first half, and consistent in the second, one can see the staples crudely pinning the two halves of the character together. It is partly a problem of time – a lot of plot gets squeezed into a montage – and partly a problem of relatively weak writing. The second half is dominated by McTighe’s social commentary, which is enough on the nose to be noted without discussing it at any length. The problem is not solely with Conrad: returning character Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) engages in some deeply uncharacteristic behaviour that simply did not convince.

Ultimately this episode is the proverbial curate’s egg. The core ideas are good ones, but it struggles to tie them together. Gatwa gets a sensational climactic scene opposite Hauer-King. It is generally very well directed by Peter Hoar, who previously helmed Season 6’s “A Good Man Goes to War”. It is clear that this is not a done-in-one story, and I suspect audiences will be seeing more of Conrad Clark by season’s end.