Saturday’s episode “Lux” was an extremely enjoyable Doctor Who story. Despite featuring an actual cartoon character as the villain, the episode wasn’t just a bit of pantomime silliness. It was an episode that was emotional and imaginative, full of many memorable moments. For example, one great scene saw the Doctor and Belinda suddenly transformed into cartoon characters. But the real highlight of the episode was the two meeting three Doctor Who fans: Lizzie, Hassan, and Robyn.
Depicting fandom in an actual episode is a risky move. Sometimes, it can be too easy to laugh at a show’s fandom rather than laugh with them. And Russell T Davies certainly made sure to include a few little jokes about how critical fandom can be. I must admit, the line “RIP Doctor Who” brought a smile to my face.
But while the three fans were depicted wearing multi-colored scarves and t-shirts featuring Cybermen, UNIT, and the Meep, the scene feels affectionate to the fandom overall. Russell T Davies likes to include plenty of humor in his stories, but he likes to go for the emotional and character moments more.
Celebrating fandom
And that’s exactly what he does with this scene. Mere minutes after meeting the Doctor and Belinda, the fans very quickly work out that they’re not real. More than that, they believe that when the Doctor and Belinda escape back into the real world, their brief existence suddenly ends. It’s a surprisingly emotional scene, especially as we've only known these characters for just a few minutes.
And yet, at the same time, it works, probably because these are people that we can generally relate to. As fans, we might criticize the show, and there’ll always be a toxic element in the fandom, because there’ll always be toxic elements in any fandom. But as a whole, Doctor Who fans are the best kind of people, and it’s great that Russell T Davies acknowledges that with these three characters. They even help the Doctor and Belinda by actually pointing out the solution (while of course criticising just how obvious it is). So I was more than happy to see them show up at the end, discussing the episode right before realizing, with sheer joy, that they’re still alive.
There’s one more detail that I enjoyed about the fans, one that’s easy to miss. There’s a particularly melancholy comment Robyn makes about how they’re “the sort of characters that don’t have surnames”. When you first hear it, it’s a particularly sad line. But when you get to the credits, if you look closely enough, you can see that the characters are credited as Lizzie Abel, Hassan Chowdry, and Robyn Gossage. It’s a lovely little gift from the writer to the characters, just as the characters themselves represent Davies’s affectionate tribute to the fandom.