Warning! The following contains spoilers for the Doctor Who episode "Lucky Day." Stream it with a Disney+ subscription and read at your own risk!
When it was revealed Doctor Who was bringing back Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday, I'm not sure fans expected the return to go down the way it did. Things got a bit twisted for the former companion when her boyfriend was later revealed to be a conspiracy theorist convinced that UNIT was faking all the alien activity the world had seen for years. Jonah Hauer-King played that role to a T, and was very helpful in answering the big questions I had about his character Conrad's future and that big showdown with The Doctor.
Jonah Hauer-King, who some may remember because he played the absolutely jacked version of Prince Eric in the live-action adaptation of The Little Mermaid, was gracious enough to speak to CinemaBlend about his exciting new role as a boyfriend-turned-villain on Doctor Who. During our discussion, I had to ask the actor what Conrad's issue with The Doctor was, considering they'd only previously had a pleasant exchange in his childhood. The actor described the situation as he saw it, thinking he lumped The Doctor in with UNIT:
Yeah, I think The Doctor for him is the symbol of UNIT, and I think ultimately Conrad is quite a small man and wants to be the center of attention. The doctor is not a small man, and is the center of attention, not because he craves it or goes after it, but simply because of who he is and the kind of adventures that he's on and the people that he's helping and saving. I think ultimately that makes Conrad feel small because he's very insecure, and he doesn't feel loved. He doesn't feel seen, and he rightly or wrongly projects all of those things onto The Doctor.
I think that tracks, considering all we saw from Conrad in the episode. In fact, it seemed at several points in the episode that he had some envy of The Doctor and wanted to be a hero in his own way. He found community amongst a community of conspiracists, who drew him in with acceptance as he sought out answers behind seeing The Doctor and the TARDIS as a child.
This began his crusade to lead the charge in exposing UNIT, despite knowing deep down that The Doctor, aliens, and all of what he'd seen previously were true. Jonah Hauer-King went on to explain that it set him on a path that led to him raiding UNIT with a gun, and how that's something the character likely didn't want to do:
Conrad always has this agenda in his mission at the beginning of the episode, but I think it gets a bit out of hand. I think it goes a lot further than he was really expecting. And what starts as this kind of conniving, divisive mission becomes something bigger. I think it snowballs beyond what even he was expecting. And I think he now, whilst being insecure and feeling small as is often the way with people like that, is they have this inflated sense of self. And so I think suddenly he wants to try and go toe-to-toe with The Doctor, and his best way of doing that is kind of making himself seem bigger than he actually is.
After The Doctor gave Conrad a good tongue-lashing for hurting his friend Ruby Sunday, he left the villain to rot in his jail cell. Conrad didn't have to wait long before he received an unexpected visit from another being, the mysterious Mrs. Flood. This time, she appeared as one of the jailers at the prison he was in, and she told him it was his "lucky day" as she flashed the keys to his cell in her hand.
Doctor Who fans likely don't need someone to connect the dots that The Little Mermaid actor has a chance of appearing on the show again after Conrad's release.
However, I decided to try to pull some answers out of him anyway. While I knew the actor likely wasn't cleared to confirm when his character may return, it seems he can't even give a timeline of when we may see him again:
Who knows? I'll admit that that's the way it looks. But [Russell T. Davies], he keeps us guessing. He has a mind of his own. Uh, it could be sooner, could it be later. We just, we'll have to wait and see.
While Jonah Hauer-King wasn't budging on an answer, I have a suspicion we'll see Conrad pop back up in the season finale. After all, the episode is called "The Reality War," and while I initially theorized this could mean Doctor Who is finally embracing the multiverse, what if it has a more direct tie to Conrad's efforts to expose UNIT as a fraud?
What if it turns out the conspiracy theorists were onto something after all, and The Doctor is trapped in a false reality? We've already seen him come face-to-face with fans of Doctor Who, and now we learn there are people who think it's all a sham? Let's not forget his very existence began with a bi-generation, which sounds like an unprecedented fairy tale twist in the first place.
I'm speculating that Mrs. Flood is pulling the strings behind this grand illusion, and she might've just enlisted Conrad as a key player in her efforts to continue to keep The Doctor fooled for as long as possible. Of course, I could be dead wrong, and we may not even see Conrad again this season or perhaps ever. He wouldn't be the first Doctor Who character to get a return hinted at only to never be heard from again. I do hope we get him back, though, because Jonah Hauer-King's performance was devilishly entertaining.
Doctor Who streams on Disney+ on Saturdays. Be sure to get current, because it looks like next week's episode might have some reveals on what's really going on this season!
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