‘Doctor Who’ Season 2, episode 2: ‘Lux’ is filled with light Easter eggs

In dark times, you can count on Doctor Who to bring the light.

That’s what happened in the madcap and meta “Lux,” episode 2 of Season 2 (also known as Season 15 since showrunner Russell T Davies’ Who reboot, or season 41 if you’re classic). Not only does “Lux” manage an upbeat tone in a grim setting — the segregated American South, 1952 — but the episode is also Davies’ love letter to light in all strange and miraculous forms, including the movie projector, the animation studio, and the TV screens on which Doctor Who itself has lit up audiences for 61 years.

Let’s unpack all the references you may have missed, via your most flammable burning questions.

Where have I seen that clothes scene before?

“This is the fun part, honey,” the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) tells reluctant companion Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu) on arrival, before whisking her off to an unseen TARDIS wardrobe. The camera pans up to reveal their 1950s threads.

Indeed, it is fun — so nice they filmed the scene twice. The Doctor and Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) had a very similar reveal for their 1963 outfits at the start of Season 1, episode 2, “The Devil’s Chord.” It has become traditional for the Doctor to go to the past in the second trip of a new season, after the far future; the wardrobe scene may now be part of that tradition.

The soundtrack behind the “Lux” version is a wee bit anachronistic for 1952. It’s Chuck Berry singing “Roll Over Beethoven” and igniting the rock ‘n’ roll era… in 1956. But music slightly out of time in the TARDIS may be a new tradition too; the 1963 clothes scene was set to Marlena Shaw singing “California Soul” in 1969.

Are the segregation scenes accurate?

Not anachronistic, alas, is the racial segregation in 1952 Miami. This is two years before the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education kickstarted the Civil Rights movement and the slow process of desegregation across the South. You can still visit the city’s formerly segregated movie houses and restaurants.

Doctor Who has already explored segregation in the deep South — specifically Montgomery, Alabama, in the well-received 2018 episode “Rosa” — as well as racism against Gatwa’s incarnation in 2024’s “Dot and Bubble.” That may explain why this time around, Davies chooses to focus on characters who are happy to flout segregation laws.

The only actual racist encounter is fake, in a scene concocted by Mr. Ring-a-Ding. Call it cartoon racism.

Is Mr. Ring-a-Ding based on anything?

Before the god-infused, 3D version of Mr. Ring-a-Ding (Alan Cumming) is created via the accidental combination of moonlight, projector and cartoon, “Lux” opens with a fake newsreel that’s very true to 1952. You can watch the actual 1952 newsreels online: British Pathé on that year’s atomic bomb tests that the god later wants to replicate, as well as British Pathé on Queen Elizabeth II pre-coronation.

It wouldn’t be unusual for a U.S. movie house to screen such reels from across the Atlantic in the early 1950s. British Pathé would find it increasingly hard to compete with TV by the end of the decade. A cartoon playing before the main feature, meanwhile, was a tradition that continued well into the 1970s. “Mr. Ring-a-Ding” may remind you of Looney Tunes or its sister series, Merrie Melodies. In 1952, both were in the midst of an Oscar–winning golden age.

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The following year, 1953, saw Daffy Duck in “Duck Amuck,” widely considered one of the best cartoon shorts of all time. It’s also meta in the same way as “Lux.” Daffy feuds with his animator and tries to escape the screen, playing with the frames of film itself — just like the Doctor and Belinda do in this episode.

As for the visual aesthetic of Mr. Ring-a-Ding, Davies says his influence was the late, great Fleischer Studios. Best known today for Betty Boop, plus the earliest Popeye and Superman cartoons, Fleischer was based in Miami — just like “Lux” — and tended towards the surreal.

Fleischer Studios’ earliest black-and-white stars included the unintentionally creepy Koko the Clown and Betty’s dog, Bimbo. Put those two together, add a splash of Looney Tunes color, and you’ve got something close to Mr. Ring-a-Ding.

But is there another, more modern audio influence? We’re not talking about the voice of Cumming, who has appeared in Doctor Who once before as King James I in the Jodie Whittaker-era episode “The Witchfinders” (2018), that time using his native Scottish accent.

We’re talking about Manchester’s biggest superstars, Oasis, whose first hit “Supersonic” included the repeated couplet “You make me laugh / Give me your autograph.” Did the Manchester-based Davies not know that when he wrote Ring-a-Ding’s crucial repeated couplet, “Please don’t make me laugh / Just take my autograph”?

As the god himself says, don’t make me laugh ..

How do we know Mr. Ring-a-Ding is a god?

The laugh that clues the Doctor into his foe being a member of a mysterious Pantheon of gods is the same one featured in the 2023 special “The Giggle.” That’s when we meet the first god-like Pantheon member to have crossed over from another universe, the Toymaker (Neil Patrick Harris), who was also bound by the rules of his games. The giggle returned in “The Devil’s Chord,” courtesy of Maestro (Jinkx Monsoon) — preceded by a young harbinger known as Harry Arbinger. Then Sutekh, preceded by Harriet Arbinger, shows up in “The Legend of Ruby Sunday.”

In investigating the haunted movie theater, the Doctor compares himself to Scooby Doo character Velma. (Let’s hope he’s not referring to Velma, the spin-off canceled after two seasons on Max.) But even Shaggy could have told you the movie theater was inhabited by a god… if he’d been a Doctor Who fan on X in 2024.

That’s where set photos leaked, including the awning where a fake Rock Hudson movie title, The Harvest Bringer, loses enough letters to become “Harbinger.” When one of the ersatz Doctor Who fans later says, “I knew this was going to happen because it leaked online,” it’s art imitating life.

Doctor Who fans are real. Or are they?

There’s plenty of fourth-wall-breaking in Doctor Who history. Nothing beats the scene where the Doctor and Belinda step out of the TV into what appears to be a room of Doctor Who fans, but we can go one meta step further by being Doctor Who fans who drop a bunch of nerdy Easter egg explainers about this supremely nerdy scene.

Let’s take the Doctor’s lead and start with the clothes. The fans are wearing: a scarf from Tom Baker’s fourth Doctor era, a T-shirt with a 1970s logo for UNIT (the Doctor’s former employer), a Beep the Meep T-shirt from “The Star Beast,” a Matt Smith-era fez, and a Cyberman T-shirt that just names the Cyberman home planet (well, one of them, long story!) Telos — perhaps because Belinda and the Doctor keep saying, “Tell us.”

One nerdy step down: The fans all describe “Blink,” penned by Davies pal and former showrunner Steven Moffat, as their favorite episode, but Belinda fails to get excited by the premise (probably because the fans fail to mention the Weeping Angels). This is the second episode in a row where Davies has poked gentle fun at “Blink,” since that script is also the origin of the phrase “timey-wimey.” When the Doctor uttered that in “The Robot Revolution,” Belinda deadpanned, “Am I six?”

It would be even more nerdy to point out that “Blink” is no longer the fans’ favorite; recent polls in Doctor Who Magazine placed it below three other Moffat stories (“Heaven Sent,” “Day of the Doctor,” and “World Enough and Time“). Maybe that should have been the tip-off that the fans were fake.

Or are they? If you didn’t stick around, you won’t have noticed the fans returning for a mid-credits sequence in which they discover they still exist (while giving the episode a 7 out of 10). What that means is something Whovians will be debating as long as the TV lights shine.

Doctor Who Season 2 is now streaming on Disney+ and BBC.