Warning: contains spoilers for Doctor Who episode “Lux”. Picking up mere moments after “The Robot Revolution“, the Doctor and Belinda find themselves in 1950s America, where they face off against another member of the Pantheon in an energetic, inventive follow-up to last year’s “The Devil’s Chord“. Along the way, they encounter malevolent cartoons, banal human evil and, perhaps most terrifying of all, hardcore Doctor Who fans. Spoilers? Don’t make me laugh! For an episode packed with madcap, reality-warping thrills, “Lux” feels oddly familiar, as if this new era of the show has found its preferred mode. It’s very much a sequel to “The Devil’s Chord”, and not just because of the big theatrical villain – there’s the period setting, the aesthetics rooted in old-fashioned entertainment, the Doctor scrambling to keep up with the rules laid down by a capricious god-like entity. Even the picture house feels of a piece with the music studios in which most of “The Devil’s Chord” was set. These similarities are obviously deliberate, and they make sense. Lux Imperator, aka Mr Ring-a-Ding, is a member of the loosely-defined Pantheon of chaos gods, which also included the Toymaker, Maestro and (somewhat confusingly) Sutekh among its number. Sutekh is the outlier there, but Lux, the Toymaker and Maestro all operate along broadly similar lines. And while each brings their own set of ideas to the table, allowing for plenty of loopy visuals and reality-based rug-pulling, there is a risk at this point of diminishing returns setting in. 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. It could even be argued that Gold overdoes it a third time in the scene with the three fans. Bringing back an iconic past theme is a nice gift for loyal Whovians, both in-universe and IRL, but it also has the effect of taking a weird, existentially haunting idea – fake people sacrificing their brief chance at consciousness for the greater good – and turning it into something more conventionally, generically heart-warming. But then again, ‘The Sad Man With A Box’ does get me. So, jury’s out. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! I’m also (prepare yourselves for a crunchingly awkward segue) in two minds about the episode’s treatment of racism, though admittedly it’s hard to know what the right tack is here. It obviously wouldn’t fly to have a Doctor and companion both played by non-white actors travel to 1950s Miami and not encounter any racism. And the episode treating segregation as a horrible but banal fact of life feels appropriate. But as is often the case when Doctor Who tries to tackle real-world prejudice, there’s a point at which the nature of the show as fantasy adventure television bumps up against the horrific reality. Of course the Doctor isn’t going to drop into 1950s America and end racism the way he can topple a tyrannical government on Blargon 6. But while his declaration that, until our world sorts itself out, he will “live in it – and shine” feels consistent with his character, it can’t help but scrape awkwardly against our real-world knowledge. The moment with the policeman pointing a gun at the Doctor and Belinda might be the problem here. It’s an incredibly charged moment for viewers in 2025, as endless horrifying news reports have given us a visceral, unshakable awareness of how this dynamic often plays out in reality – even now, 70 years later after the scene is set. And it just doesn’t feel like the sort of thing the Doctor can imperiously swagger his way out of. It’s the curious tension of Doctor Who, in that it’s far easier to imagine a black Doctor thwarting an army of murderous Daleks than one white cop. Of course the episode manages to have its cake and eat it by revealing the cop to be another layer of Lux’s illusions, though I still struggled to shake the feeling that this imagery is more complex and upsetting than the story is equipped to deal with. But again, there may just not be a perfect way to go about it. And trying is preferable to ignoring. Elsewhere, while it is a bit of a shame that the juicy conflict between the Doctor and Belinda feels largely resolved by episode’s end, Gatwa and Sethu have lovely chemistry and already feel like a fun pairing, distinct from the Doctor and Ruby. Varada Sethu also has a real flair for dry, sarcastic line readings, particularly her “Well that sounds like an absolute epic” after the fans’ underwhelming description of “Blink”. It does seem inevitable that the tension between them will rear its head again,  though, and next week looks like a pretty stressful instalment. Oh, and needless to say – the Doctor and Belinda’s 50s’ fits? Sublime. One has to imagine that staying on the TARDIS is worth it for the wardrobe alone. Doctor Who series 15 continues with “The Well” on Saturday April 26 on BBC One and iPlayer in the UK and on Disney+ around the world.