Doctor Who Season 2 Fixes The Show's Longest-Running Time Travel 'Error'

Adjust your sonic screwdriver for plot reveals, because this article contains spoilers for "Doctor Who" season 2, episode 2, "Lux".

"Doctor Who" season 2, episode 2, titled "Lux," is a statement of intent. Apart from providing all the usual thrills and spills of a great episode of the venerable sci-fi series, it also ticks the boxes on other modern "Doctor Who" staples, such as tackling social issues and proving that the series continues to have its finger on the fandom's pulse. 

Here, the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa, who accidentally broke a major "Doctor Who" rule when he started out) and Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu) find themselves in 1950s Miami, where the mysterious appearance of a moonlight-animated cartoon character called Mister Ring-A-Ding (voiced by Alan Cumming) provides the episode's central mystery. Still, while they tackle a succession of serious issues, from the grim reality of the era's segregation to the extremely "Doctor Who" twist that Mister Ring-A-Ding is one of the ultra-powerful chaos gods that have been plaguing this incarnation of the Doctor since the very beginning, it's clear that this is ultimately one of the show's many marvelous monster episodes, and serves a greater purpose.

Even with murderous light gods who want to harness the power of the nuclear bomb and some truly surprising fourth wall breaking antics, "Lux" is ultimately a detour on the current TARDIS team's mission to find out what happens on the evidently unreachable Earth date of May 24, 2025. In order to achieve this, the Doctor has formed a plan. Early in the episode, he builds a device called the Vortex Indicator, aka Vindicator. With this, he can triangulate the desired location in space-time and guide the TARDIS there ... which, as a bonus, also happens to solve the biggest "Doctor Who" time travel "error" of them all.

Ever since the First Doctor (William Hartnell), a key aspect of "Doctor Who" has been that the Doctor is a godawful pilot and the TARDIS he hijacked is fickle, faulty, and needs far more pilots than it actually has. As such, the Time Lord regularly ends up in utterly random (and often dangerous) places and times, which is incredibly convenient from a storytelling standpoint. In "Lux," the show almost casually fixes this with the Vindicator ... and, seeing as the device seems like a MacGuffin custom-designed to solve this season's mystery, it might even be completely accidental. 

The Vindicator is essentially a mechanism that the Doctor can use to anchor a signal to a desired destination. A few random TARDIS landings will allow the Vindicator to triangulate even the most difficult time-space coordinates, after which the TARDIS can latch on its signal and pull itself to the correct date and location. In other words, the Doctor finally has a reliable timey-wimey GPS. Could it be that the show has finally solved the decades-old (or from the Doctor's point of view, millennia-old) issue of targeting TARDIS to its destination for good, though?

Almost certainly, the answer is a solid no. Let's face it, the show will likely never use this thing again after this season, simply because it would rob the show of its random time travel allure — not to mention it would be a touch repetitive to use the Vindicator instead of watching the Doctor fail his way across time and space. Still, it's fascinating that at least on paper, the Doctor finally has a proper "GPS system" in his tool kit.

"Doctor Who" is famous for its constantly rotating cast of characters and the semi-regular regenerations that allow the show to replace the main character with a new incarnation, played by a new actor. However, fans of the show know all too well that "Doctor Who" is also incredibly adept at introducing new, game-breaking concepts ... and then proceeding to ignore them forevermore. 

Remember when Jodie Foster's Thirteenth Doctor learned that she's not a Time Lord but something far more ancient and mysterious? The show certainly doesn't want you to, considering how the Disney+ era has utterly ignored this story-breaking revelation, which has barely earned a quick and veiled nod from the Fifteenth Doctor thus far. Likewise, the show has depicted numerous spirited and sometimes successful attempts to fix the broken chameleon circuit of the TARDIS over the years, but none of them have stuck and the iconic police box shape has remained a "Doctor Who" icon. Of course, there are surprisingly practical budget reasons behind the TARDIS design ... but also, who would buy TARDIS merch if the thing could look like anything from a rock to the Statue of Liberty? 

"Doctor Who" might seemingly embrace change, but it also really loves to maintain its most basic status quo. It's a show about a rogue Time Lord having mostly random adventures in a time-traveling blue police box. As such, don't expect anything that poses a risk to this setup — be it the Vindicator or a functioning chameleon circuit — to become a staple on the show.