Lux

[purplecat]

Just as The Robot Revolution invited comparisons to Space Babies, Lux invites comparisons to The Devil's Chord. It is the better structured of the two stories, with the sequences involving the Doctor and Belinda escaping from the film having more inventiveness and narrative coherence than the music battle at the end of The Devil's Chord. It also centred it's emotional weight around the excellently played Reginald Pye, where I'm not sure The Devil's Chord was even attempting any emotional weight and what there was was trying to ground itself on the more abstract concept of a world without music.

I'm not sure I enjoyed it more though. Obviously there wasn't a song and dance number at the end, which was a big negative in my eyes, but even setting that aside, most of the story was focused on the "escape the film sequence" and ultimately that made the plot a fairly short and straight line. RTD's plots have never been all that elaborate, his concerns generally lie elsewhere, but the stories this season have been simpler than many in terms of basic narrative and that makes me a bit antsy. There were a lot of fun ideas in the escape sequence but I was ready for the plot to get on with things by the end.

I think these stories, which (as far as I can tell) use Disney's money to have fun with the concept of the Doctor meeting a god, enrich Doctor Who. Both the one's we've had, however, have suffered slightly from thinking the fun and quirkiness can gloss over a certain thinness to the story itself.