If, and this is something we don’t want to wishcast into existence, Series 15 is the last run of new Doctor Who for a very long time, future Doctor Who historians might look back at the undisguised meta-middle five minutes in the second act of Lux as a parallel moment for Russell T Davies compared to Whizz Kid in JN-T’s The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, in-story characters commenting not only on the story they’re in but on the whole construct–including fans–of Doctor Who itself.
As fans ourselves, you can’t help but wonder for an episode which, despite overflowing with imaginative ideas and having the time and budget to execute on them, struggled to fill a 44-minute run time, the literal boundary-pushing element of the fictional Doctor meeting his fictional fans would, and indeed should, be a divisive plot point. Was this a commentary on Doctor Who fans by a showrunner who has been at the helm for a very long time? It can certainly be read that way. Or, more practically, was it the difference between a 44-minute episode and a 39-minute story.
In 1988 when this happened the first time around, the classic series was only a few stories away from a very long hibernation. Is a rerun about to happen in 2025?
