Lux

What if your cartoons started talking back?

Extended Storyline

The quest that began in The Robot Revolution—to return Belinda Chandra to 24 May 2025—hits a snag when the TARDIS can’t reach that date. Instead, the Doctor and Belinda land in Miami in 1952, and immediately we’re off to the movies. There’s a cinema, the Palazzo, chained up and abandoned—but not abandoned really. The screen still flickers, the projectors hum, the neighborhood whispers about disappearances.

Fifteen people went missing from this cinema after watching “Mr Ring-a-Ding Goes to Town,” a 1935 cartoon short, and the rumor is the cartoon has come to life. Nobody takes it seriously… until lights beam into the screen, the cartoon starts addressing the audience, and the body count begins. Cue Belinda’s horror, the Doctor’s curiosity, and both of them realizing this is going to be very weird.

They meet Reginald Pye, the projectionist, who has been using old film stock to “feed” this cartoon entity in hopes of recreating his dead wife. Because grief, of course. Mr Ring-a-Ding isn’t just rubber-hose animation come to life; he is Lux Imperator, a “God of Light,” a new addition to the Pantheon of Discord introduced in earlier episodes. He wants light. Specifically, he wants the Doctor’s regeneration energy so he can finally become fully “solid” and leave the 2D plane behind. He’s not subtle either—he traps Belinda and the Doctor in a film reel world, turns them into cartoons themselves, and generally messes with perception like a surrealist painter with access to special effects.

Belinda and Doctor claw their way back to 3D by embracing sadness (because apparently feeling bad = dimensional stability), then escape into a meta-reality: a living room full of Doctor Who fans watching Lux as fiction. The fans are thrilled, shouting tips, theories, and pet names—until Lux reveals this world was another trap. A “fictional” reality created by Lux to toy with the Doctor’s expectations and beliefs. The fourth wall becomes a thin membrane, and everybody with opinions about the Doctor! show up as characters.

Back in “reality” (cinema), Lux has begun siphoning Regeneration-energy energy from the Doctor. Classic villain maneuvers. Belinda, torn but brave, helps set fire to film stock in the projection room. Flames rip through the cinema, light floods in, Lux overreaches: absorbing light = expanding → infinite growth. Light becomes Lux. A god made of everything and nothing, dissipating into the universe, no longer a threat (or at least not in the usual sense).

The missing cinema-goers are freed, Belinda officially becomes the Doctor’s companion (or is very close to that), and Mrs Flood makes a cameo, cryptically warning that this show has limited run until “May 24, 2025”—again referring to the date they can’t reach. The Doctor and Belinda depart, watching the sun rise through the burned-out cinema, touching wounds and lighting film ash (metaphor city).