There’s also a risk that the episode, being so of a piece with “The Devil’s Chord”, practically demands comparison. Mr Ring-A-Ding is certainly a visual delight, a spot-on evocation of classic Fleischer Studios cartoons, and it’s fun that when he starts becoming more ‘real’, his appearance accordingly becomes more grotesque and unsettling. But even voiced by the mighty Alan Cumming, an actor who never met a piece of scenery he wasn’t willing to heroically chow down upon, Lux just doesn’t quite have the juice of Jinkx Monsoon’s powerhouse Maestro.
That said, it’s not entirely fair to ding the episode because the villain doesn’t rise to the heights of (in this writer’s opinion) one of the all-time great guest turns in Doctor Who. And Lux is certainly a distinct creation – it’s interesting that, unlike the other members of the Pantheon we’ve met so far, he doesn’t seem to be completely evil. The cutaway from Mr Pye dancing with his black and white celluloid wife (a quietly haunting image) is intriguing in that respect, as Lux seems to be earnestly moved by the sight. And his desire to find and harness the power of nuclear energy seems to be less about mass destruction, and more about reaching some sort of apotheosis – he is a creature of light, so he is naturally seeking out the brightest light he can.
It’s fitting, then, that his death is less a death, and more the achievement of that apotheosis. Unlike Maestro, Lux isn’t dragged kicking and screaming into the Doctor’s terrible trap. The Doctor just gives him what he wants – “two billion times more energy than the biggest nuclear bomb on planet Earth” – and he floats off into the cosmos, his cartoon tears dissipating in space as he ascends to become “everything and nothing”. It’s strange, poetic and slightly unsettling, and feels consistent with the fantastical nature of the Pantheon.
The episode is also clearly having a ball playing with the possibilities of its premise. The Doctor and Belinda becoming cartoons is delightful, as is watching them figure out how to escape Lux’s traps – acquiring physical dimensions by demonstrating emotional dimensions, speeding up the celluloid, pointing out continuity errors, and eventually climbing out of the screen itself for some meta-commentary on fandom, spoiler culture and the history of Doctor Who. The scene with the fans could have been too cute by half, but it manages to be enjoyably rather than obnoxiously knowing, partly because it’s funny, but also because the affection for the three Who fans is clearly genuine.
There’s also something potent in the idea that even within Lux’s nesting reality traps, the Doctor still has power; that fake fans created to ensnare and destroy him instead harness their love of the show to achieve a measure of ‘realness’ and use their knowledge to help him escape. There’s undoubtedly an essay here about what this means for the ‘Doctor as Lord of the Land of Fiction’ theory, especially considering the fans’ return in the mid-credits scene – I’m absolutely not the critic to write it, but I look forward to reading it when someone does.
Not everything here works, admittedly. Composer Murray Gold manages to overdo it not once but twice – first during the diner scene with Tommy Lee’s mum, ladling on the syrup just in case we weren’t appropriately moved by a mother sitting alone in a diner at 5am desperate to talk to someone about her missing son, then again for Mr Pye’s dead wife story. The creepy echoing song is a much stronger, more specific choice, and it makes you wish they’d stuck to that.
