Doctor Who: The Flux
So Doctor Who's 'Flux' mini-series has finished, and my overall verdict is…entertaining nonsense. Entertaining in that I mostly enjoyed watching the series, certainly more than I enjoyed the last two seasons, nonsense in that if you pause to examine almost any element of it in any depth whatsoever, the whole thing falls apart like a house of cards in a storm.
This, of course, is nothing new for Doctor Who, and the same critique can be made of a great many other episodes and story arcs over the years. They all tend to wear their flaws a bit differently, though, from era to era and from writer to writer.
Part of me is tempted to just draw a line under the sentences above and leave it there, but another part of me wants to at least try to delve into the pros and cons of the series in more detail. Maybe I'll just ramble on a bit (okay, a lot - I'll put it all under a cut to spare your f-lists!) and see how I get on.
First of all: Things I Liked.
The characters in general. A lot of the dialogue was poor and everything was so frantically rushed that no one really got much breathing space for anything in the way of character exploration or development, yet the characters, for the most part, managed to shine regardless - especially the ones not labouring under the pressure of being 'The Companion'. The actors all did a great job, occasionally with the odds stacked against them. I liked them all. I wish we'd been able to spend more meaningful time with all of them, to build a bit more genuine emotional attachment, but character has really never been a focus of Chibnall's intensely plot-driven Who, so we just have to take what we can get.
Eustacius Jericho. A strong, dignified, principled character who deserved to survive with a Big Finish audio spin-off series of his own, although I will settle for a Yaz, Dan and Jericho: The Lost Years of Early 1900s Adventuring series, I guess. Because I would absolutely have watched an entire season of those three Indiana Jones-ing their way around the globe; the one episode sub-plot we got was tremendously entertaining. Speaking of which, after three years living and travelling and problem-solving and adventuring together, there really should have been more emphasis on Yaz and Dan reacting to Jericho's death. Yaz spent at least as much time with him as she has the Doctor, if not more, and Dan absolutely spent a great deal more time with Jericho than he ever has the Doctor, despite being billed as a companion. They were a team and seemed to have built a strong bond, albeit mostly off-screen. Jericho's death should have had far more impact. But there wasn't room, in that crowded final episode, to allow it, and the story was all the weaker for that fact. There's simply no point including the dramatic death scene of a stalwart ally if the full emotion of it isn't allowed to land. Even just one little speech centring him as a representation of all that’s been lost to the Flux would have added so much emotional resonance! Without that, his death just felt like so much paint-by-numbers storytelling.
Karvanista. Yeah, the costume wasn't great and the concept of the Lupari species-bond with humanity doesn't really hold much water (who bonded them? How? Why? Did they consent to it? Why?), not to mention that Karvanista's personal timeline is a bit bumpy, but you know what? I don't care, I loved him anyway. His oh-so grumpy commitment to duty and responsibility was entertaining as well as being strong characterisation, and even under all that fur, actor Craig Els sold the hell out of his devastation over the deaths of his fellow Lupari, just with his eyes and the stillness of his posture, despite being given very little camera focus. (The casual genocide of the Lupari, however, I will come back to later).
(Actually, there might still be another Lupari out there, mightn't there? The one who failed to answer species recall because Bel had stolen their ship… And, you know, anyone who wasn't needed for the species recall, because I simply do not believe that there are exactly the same number of Lupari as humans, not a single individual more or less. So there's that, too.)
Bel and Vinder. I really liked them both. They felt like they belonged in a completely different show, a much cooler show, and one that I would watch the hell out of. I really want to know more about them and the society they come from, since they look human but very clearly aren't, given that they are seasoned space operatives contemporaneous with present day Earth - not to mention that at the start of the series Vinder seemed to have been in exile on that outpost for a really, really long time (the daily update he recorded was numbered in the thousands), and yet Bel's pregnancy, conceived before that exile, isn't showing at all. I want to know more! I want to know where they come from and how Vinder knew to recognise a TARDIS when he sees one, what kind of Vortex Manipulator tech he was using to travel from planet to planet - and exactly how long their species gestates! I wish, again, that we'd had more time to spend with these characters, learning about them and watching them grow, because I really enjoyed what we got to see over the course of the season. They were both engaging individuals who felt like they had a life and motivations beyond the demands of the plot, and it was just so refreshing to get to spend time with characters who don't come from contemporary Earth and whose lives don't revolve around the Doctor!
(Thinking about it, if Vinder hadn't been shown to be so very principled, I might suspect that he'd been using his Vortex Manipulator thingummy to sneak out of his outpost exile after curfew to enjoy a bit of nookie with Bel on the side, which would be a much simpler explanation of her non-showing pregnancy…)
I am, of course, thrilled by the concept of Bel, Vinder and Karvanista (plus Tigmi, of course) freelancing their way around a broken universe together after all this, which again is a spin-off show that I would 100% watch and enjoy. Grumpy, duty-conscious Karvanista and honourable, laid-back Vinder would quickly find that they have loads in common, while vibrant, impulsive, 'I can mow down a squad of Cybermen single-handedly and will now interrupt my own self-imposed quest for my lost lover in order to investigate the bad guys who just abducted hundreds of people right in front of me' Bel would keep them both on their toes. And then there's the space baby still to come. I mean, the found family potential is off the charts, right? Why are we still messing around with contemporary human companions without much individual characterisation beyond 'the Doctor has opened my eyes to the stars' when we could have groupings like this??? If Chris Chibnall can come up with characters like this, why has he insisted on limiting himself to contemporary humans without much individual characterisation beyond 'the Doctor has opened my eyes to the stars' as new companions for the Doctor?
(Is it bad that I'm more interested in the spin-off potential inherent in this season than I am the content of the season itself?)
(Another thought: I don't know what Bel had in her gun that allowed her to mow down a whole squad of Cybermen, but everyone who has ever had to fight the Cybermen would now like some, please.)
Also, I know fandom tied itself up in knots over Bel and Vinder and had half-convinced itself that they would turn out to be the Timeless Child's long-lost parents, or something, but I'm really glad that they ended up being exactly what it said on the tin: a young couple caught up in events bigger than them, struggling to find one another across a broken universe. Connecting them to the Doctor would have felt very Small Universe (which is a problem this series already had, to be fair). They were here to represent the impact of the Flux on the wider universe, and I enjoyed having them along for the ride.
Di. She was cool. I really liked her scenes with Vinder when they were trapped inside Passenger together, sharing knowledge and figuring out how to escape. Their practical, down-to-earth conversations made me regret all over again the way this Doctor has been characterised, always so manic and incoherent in her designated role as the showrunner's primary tool for both narrating and explaining the plot, usually in the same breathless run-on sentence. That scattershot, word-vomit characterisation felt especially out of place here, set against how focused and coherent everyone else was, and although the Doctor standing out as different shouldn't be a bad thing - it is in fact the character's usual MO - her characterisation in this era has just never landed for me. And although she has finally this season been allowed to stop saying 'presumably' in every other sentence, the dialogue she was given was still absolutely woeful more often than not.
Whittaker had some really good moments in the final episode where she was allowed to be calm and intent, especially when she was being Time, and I really wish she'd been allowed to play the Doctor that way from the start.
Yaz. Yes, she has been almost criminally underused for three seasons now, but I've always enjoyed Mandip Gill's performance. I think she is a lot more capable than the material she's been given, and in the absence of any focused, meaningful development arc for her, I will just have to take whatever we are given. And what we were given was Yaz being quietly competent throughout the season, drawing on her police training when it was useful (helping to search for a lost child), taking the lead when stranded in the past with two virtual strangers, and never giving up even when the odds seemed to be stacked against ever making it home. She very briefly had a really nice dynamic with Vinder in the episode where they met on Atropos and formed an instant rapport, which I'd have liked to see more of, and then forged a strong dynamic with Dan and Jericho when they got stranded in the past together. It's a shame she wasn't given more structured development and more meaningful time spent with the Doctor, but some of the conversations they did have, bookending the season, did clearly demonstrate at least a bit of measurable character growth. It is satisfying to contrast her strop in Revolution of the Daleks over the Doctor being away for 10 months to her calm but sad 'oh, a few years' when they were reunited in the finale here. She is more mature now, which is as it should be. After three years stranded in the past, on top of the time spent travelling with the Doctor before that, she isn't the inexperienced, insecure 19-year-old rookie cop any more.
Claire. She was a plot device, but Annabel Scholey made her memorable. And at least there is in-universe precedence for the existence of random human psychics, has been ever since Nine and Rose met Gwyneth way back in season one (although I didn't much like the concept then, either).
I guess I should throw Dan in here, too. He didn't get to spend much time with the Doctor (or, really, contribute anything at all to the plot) and he also didn't get to demonstrate anything in the way of development over the course of the season - in fact, he ended the season in exactly the same place he started it - but he was a pleasant enough person to follow through the story anyway. Even if his primary role was simply to provide an ongoing link to Liverpool while being a decent person who is unfazed by, apparently, just about anything and is always willing to get involved and have a go. I feel like he and Yaz should have been allowed to talk about being separated from their families while stranded in the past - should have been allowed to have a conversation about the thwarted hopes, dreams, ambitions, etc. inherent in their predicament - but that would have been a bit too much like meaningful character focus for this era, clearly, so of course they were only permitted to discuss the Doctor and the Plot on-screen.
Swarm. Azure. (The design work on those two was stunning.) The Grand Serpent. Not their storylines, but them as individuals. As recurring villains go, they all had great style and I love what the actors did with them. Watching both Swarm and the Grand Serpent, I really wish Sacha Dhawan's Master had been written in this style, harking back to Roger Delgado's original incarnation of the character, instead of continuing the New Who trend of having him be completely insane.
Ahem. I am very aware that even simply listing things I liked about this season, every single point comes with caveats. Which pretty much says it all, really.
Um. What else? I liked the serialised structure of the season. It was uneven, but that's the nature of the beast, and overall I think Chris Chibnall is better at long-form storytelling than he is New Who's more usual anthology structure. He still can't seem to bring himself to write character-led Who, so it was an intensely plot-driven season once again, but I did appreciate the serialised structure. It felt very Classic, but in a modern way - and the Classic show, of course, also had more than its fair share of stinkers.
The production values. Other than the Time Storm or whatever that the Doctor got stuck in, back in the Atropos episode, everything looked really good. It was all visually impressive, if nothing else!
I feel like I should be mad at the idea that UNIT had a fully functioning TARDIS buried in storage since 1967 that no one ever thought to mention, through all the decades of the Doctor's acquaintance with them, but I can't be annoyed because the thought of it is just too damn funny to me. All those years Pertwee's Doctor spent trapped on Earth because his own TARDIS had been disabled, and no one ever thought to mention that they had another one safely stashed away someplace! It wasn't clear why Kate brought it into play in the finale, though, other than it was required by the plot, because there was no in-story reason for her to know that she was about to meet the very version of the Doctor who had mislaid it.
I liked seeing Kate Stewart again, even if she was given bugger all to actually do. She deserved to get a proper Moment with the Doctor when they first met, so I'm mad that she didn't. Another victim of the frenetic pace of the storytelling.
I liked the use of the fob watch of lost memories, that was a nice little call back to established Time Lord lore. And I like that despite having striven so hard to find those lost memories, once they were finally in her grasp the Doctor couldn't quite bring herself to face up to them after all. It does mean, however, that there will inevitably be more Timeless Child nonsense still to come in the specials - more on that later, because it doesn't belong in the pro section!
It amuses me no end that people are shown going on guided tours of the tunnels that house the magic space-time gateways. Do they ever come back? The magic space-time gateways certainly weren't shown to be switched off in any way! A loose end left hanging.
…and I have run out of pros and pseudo-pros. So I guess it is time for the cons.
Things I Didn't Like - and a few Question Marks:
First and foremost, it was all horribly scattershot come the end, with plot holes you could drive a truck through. All sound and fury without much in the way of substance, always hurrying straight past any moment that could have been truly meaningful in the rush to get to the next plot point. The fast and furious nature of the storytelling is probably the biggest downside of the series, as so much character (and story) development got glossed over and lost in the shuffle. Maybe if we'd had the extra few episodes originally intended, everyone might have had a bit more time to breathe - or then again, maybe not, as character has never really been a focus of Chibnall's time on the show. And while I've enjoyed having the recurring characters through the series, it all got very crowded there again come the end, which meant that no one got much in the way of satisfying interaction or resolution.
Chibnall just does not seem to have ever heard the axiom 'less is more'. Or maybe he figures, like Moffat before him, that what works for mediocre 3-hour blockbuster movies should also work for episodic television. Personally, I'm not convinced. It's hard to even single out specific issues because there’s just so much going on, and yet also somehow so little, and none of ends up feeling meaningful at all. That kind of loose, messy plotwork is forgivable if the themes and characters truly resonate, but although I genuinely liked and felt attached to all the characters here, they didn't have that. They were along for the ride and I loved them, but this story was not about them. It wasn't even, really, about the Doctor. This story was pretty much 100% about its plot, so that plot desperately needed to be really tight and compelling and it simply wasn't. It was messy and unconvincing and kept getting tangled up in itself.
Having the Doctor split into three parts in the finale, skipping around trying frantically to resolve everything all at once, again with the awful dialogue, felt like a covid/episode reduction consequence. I suspect they'd have been able to resolve some of these plot threads a bit more neatly if there had been the originally planned 10 episodes. Or then again, maybe it was always planned to be this frenetic.
I still despise the Timeless Child storyline, which makes no attempt whatsoever to anchor itself to existing Time Lord history in any way, shape or form, but instead focuses intently on overwriting all those decades of accumulated lore by scaling up the Doctor as the most important Time Lord ever to exist. This has been an ongoing problem ever since the reboot launched in 2005, this obsession with continually retconning the Doctor's backstory to make them ever more important. The Last of the Time Lords. The Oncoming Storm. The Lonely God. The Timeless Child. And so on, and so on, repeatedly framed as the most important person in the universe - so important, here, that Tecteun and Division quite literally decided to destroy that entire universe just because of who the Doctor is (although if they were going to offer her a spot in the new universe anyway, I fail to see what's the point of destroying the old one in the first place? The plan made no sense whatsoever).
All that hyperbole is just not who the Doctor ever was, and continually spiralling upward like that does not, in fact, add mystery or interest, it just becomes increasingly unconvincing and inevitably leads to total burnout. The Classic show had it right. The show is not, at its heart, about the Doctor. It’s about the adventure and the stories, and continually teasing deep, dark mysteries over who the Doctor really is only serves to detract from that, rather than adding anything truly meaningful. Chibnall said that he came up with the Timeless Child story because he wanted to add mystery to the Doctor's backstory, but I fail to see how anything can expect to be mysterious if we keep being told about it and having it explained to us over and over, with new detail added all the time. You know what would really make the Doctor's backstory truly mysterious? If it was simply never mentioned or explained at all!
I mean, I don't even really object to the idea of the Doctor having had an existence before Hartnell, that's been implied since way back in the 70s, but there are ways and ways of going about it. And this wasn't, in my opinion, the right way to go about it. An entire set of regenerations blocked from memory? Fine, I can see plenty of interesting stories to tell there. A forgotten period of time spent in service (whether voluntarily or not) to a shadowy Gallifreyan security organisation? Sure, that tracks with what we know of Gallifreyan history and society. I can even see why it is narratively useful to have those past incarnations also call themselves Doctor and have a TARDIS shaped like a police box, just for the audience recognition factor, even though it breaches established continuity, since we saw Hartnell's Doctor adopt the title on-screen and also witnessed the moment the TARDIS chameleon circuit broke, leaving it stuck as a police box, all of which happened long after those previous lives ended. I would prefer it if that retcon was acknowledged, somehow (I can even think of ways of subtly lampshading it in the narrative), but I can just about live with the anachronism, if necessary, although it will never stop annoying me. But the Timeless Child storyline is just an absurdity too far for me, piling ever more genuinely ridiculous amounts of angst onto the Doctor for no good reason beyond 'because'. It doesn't help that the way the storyline has played out so far has for the most part required the Doctor to be completely passive, a helpless victim repeatedly forced to stand and listen while someone else monologues painfully convoluted exposition at her. It's just really poor and doesn't suit the character at all.
The Flux. Division. Tecteun. There was the germ of a decent story idea in there, but it really needed a stronger writer than Chris Chibnall to translate that story into compelling dramatic TV. It was messy. It was convoluted. It was completely over-the-top and not in a good way. There were plot holes, as I said, that you could drive a truck through. There was both too much exposition and not enough, which is an impressive feat. After all that build up, Tecteun was just casually disposed of mere minutes after we met her, with no dramatic impact at all. Her stated motives for trying to destroy the entire universe (all because of the Doctor, of course) made no sense at all. So much hype around the great and all-powerful Division, then when the Doctor finally got there it turned out to be one old lady and an Ood. Where the heck was everyone else? Who is in charge now that Tecteun is gone? Are all those almighty Division agents still out there, wandering about aimlessly, wondering what to do next?
So many questions, and the worst thing is, I don't even care about the answers. I hope we never hear anything about any of them ever again.
(Actually, that's not true. I would quite like to know what that lonely Ood is doing, stranded all alone, apparently, between universes, with no one to tell it what to do anymore. But that was a loose thread left dangling that will probably never be resolved.)
I did not enjoy the retconning of UNIT's history in the penultimate episode. I don't even, really, understand what that sub-plot was all about. The Grand Serpent was using time travel to manipulate UNIT's history, sure, but why? He never actually did anything with that history, other than kill a few people we'd never seen before. It all built up to UNIT being de-funded at exactly the time we already knew it had been de-funded, so why even bother hopping through history like that, just to achieve something that had already happened? It is especially annoying because the sub-plot got the details wrong in ways that can't even be blamed on the Grand Serpent's interference. I mean, the development of UNIT happened on-screen in the late 60s and early 70s (not the 50s, as that episode claimed), so why mess with those origins when fans can go back and see for themselves? Getting the little details wrong just feels lazy.
It just really bugs me that they went to all the trouble of including a little audio clip of Nicholas Courtney as Lethbridge-Stewart, which was a genuinely lovely idea that I really wish I could rhapsodise over, and yet managed to get the details all wrong. I thought Chibnall was an obsessive, nit-picking fan who knew his lore inside out? Lethbridge-Stewart was not a corporal with UNIT in 1967, as the episode claimed; he went to Sandhurst so he would never have been a corporal at all, in fact. When he first met the Doctor in Web of Fear, which aired in 1968 but was set in the near future, he was a colonel with the army regulars, and if UNIT already existed at that time (which it shouldn't, since it is heavily implied in The Invasion that it was established in direct response to the events of Web of Fear) Lethbridge-Stewart very clearly did not know anything about it. The next time he met the Doctor, in The Invasion (which also aired in 1968 but was set two years later again) he had joined the newly formed UNIT and been promoted to Brigadier at the same time.
This is very basic stuff, and it happened on-screen in the show Chris Chibnall claims to love. There is no reason at all, in this day and age, to get these details wrong, especially since the changes made had no bearing on the plot whatsoever. It was just really, really shoddy writing - as egregious as if the plot tried to claim that Rose Tyler was working for Torchwood as far back as 1995, which viewers know isn't true because we saw Rose's story play out on-screen. Just as we did the Brigadier's. And yes, the Classic show was riddled with inconsistencies, but that's no reason to continue to introduce even more inconsistencies today, at a time when we keep congratulating ourselves that TV is so much better now we understand things like continuity! If you continually break and rewrite the boundaries and history of even the most flexible fiction, people will stop caring, because they get the sense that nothing matters anymore, nothing’s really at stake, and nothing has any meaning.
Could the Grand Serpent really think of nothing better to do with the power of time travel, in the face of universal destruction, than mess with Earth's history and join forces with the Sontarans? I can think of easier ways of reclaiming the power and influence he lost to the Flux. Removing himself to a point in time before the Flux was a Thing would have been a good start!
So much casual genocide in this season, the finale especially. Vast swathes of destruction all across the universe. The casual off-screen genocide of the Lupari by the Sontarans - over 7 billion of them, we were told - apparently without any kind of a fight, given that all their one-man spacecraft remained pristinely operational. Then the genocide of the Daleks and Cybermen set-up by the Sontarans, with the Doctor not only approving, but manipulating events to ensure that the Sontarans too were wiped out! The scale of all that slaughter is just mind-blowingly horrific, but in-show it was mostly just sort of shrugged off as no big deal. Karvanista was allowed to be sad about the loss of his people, but no one else seemed to care. Dan even made fun of him while he was freshly grieving for his entire race, which was incredibly poor taste and a waste of an opportunity for a genuinely meaningful character moment between the two, after all they'd been through both separately and together.
Thinking about it, the Doctor was also making fun of the freshly grieving Karvanista at the end there, when she, of all people, should understand the enormity and tragedy of being the last surviving member of your entire race.
I remember a time when the Doctor was a pacifist who took the loss of even one life, even that of an enemy, completely seriously, and always tried to find a better way. There may not always have been a better way, but the Doctor I grew up watching would never have so gleefully participated in slaughter on this scale. Remember when the Fourth Doctor agonised over whether or not it was right to kill just a handful of Dalek mutants in order to re-write their future, the weight and solemnity of that struggle, and the burden of responsibility for making that choice? This Doctor just casually shrugged off the deliberate genocide of three entire species. Surely she should have at least been shown to agonise over the slaughter as an unavoidably awful thing she simply had to do because there was no other way. That would have been more in keeping with who the Doctor fundamentally is. But that would have meant taking the time necessary for a meaningful character moment and the plot was just too breakneck to allow such a thing. There wasn't a single moment in that final episode that didn't feel in a rush to move on to the next plot point.
There's a lot more to good storytelling than cramming in as many plot points as possible, Mr Chibnall.
Not that I agree that the mass genocide even was an unavoidably awful thing the Doctor simply had to do because there was no other way in the first place. I can think of neater, more in-character resolutions just off the top of my head. For starters, the episode itself proposes that a universe-destroying wave of antimatter could be partially annihilated by three fleets of Cybermen, Daleks and Sontarans, because that's totally how matter-antimatter annihilation works (not. Even The Three Doctors had a better handle on matter-antimatter than that, and that's saying something! I mean, what does Chris Chibnall think the rest of the universe is made of, exactly???). But then the episode admits this would not be enough and introduces the limitless passenger form as Plan B. So…why couldn't the limitless passenger form have been Plan A? Surely that would have been a clever sleight of hand worthy of the Doctor. Bring in the passenger form, use it to hoover up all the Flux before it ever reaches the massed fleets, and then leave the Sontarans, Daleks and Cybermen to duke it out among themselves, so that they, not the Doctor, are responsible for any deaths. No out of character genocide necessary. I mean, we all know that all three villains will be back before long anyway, so why even go to a place of apparent total genocide in the first place?
(Okay, now I'm wondering what they did with the passenger form full of Flux afterward? What would be an appropriate disposal mechanism for something like that? What happens if someone opens the door and lets the Flux out???)
Also, I'm just going to note for the record that the Flux was stopped but did not appear to be undone in this episode, which means that vast swathes of the universe remain utterly devastated, billions upon billions of lives wiped out, countless worlds, countless species - not for the first time in the show's history, sure, but I'm wondering if this will ever be referenced again, or if the scale of the devastation will just be swept under the carpet again going forward. Because they made such a big deal about how most of the universe had been destroyed, Earth was one of the last planets left standing - not even Earth's solar system, just Earth itself, which doesn't sound all that viable for long-term survival - and the Flux was stopped at the moment described as its very final event, meaning the final moment when it was meant to complete the destruction of the very last vestiges of the universe…and then getting rid of it was heralded as a victory without any resolution whatsoever to the universe-spanning destruction it had already caused. I mean, it's possible we'll get some reference to it later, but I suspect it is far more likely that we are just supposed to quietly forget any of that devastation ever happened at all, especially with regard to our own solar system, which is clearly just fine at the end there, exactly as if the Earth wasn't said to be the last planet left standing.
(Speaking of which, how long was Earth trapped inside the Lupari shield, with no sunlight to keep the planet warm and distinguish night from day?)
This, of course, is just one of the risks the show takes in scaling up to the point of putting the entire universe in peril as just one of a myriad of sprawling plot strands. We end with the fate of millions of galaxies left completely unresolved. In Logopolis way back in 1981 it was explicit that whole galaxies were permanently destroyed and that had real consequence, real weight. How can it be an afterthought here? Not even that, actually - to be an afterthought it would have to at least be mentioned! This was just, 'the Flux is gone, and everyone lived happy ever after!'
I mean…we were told that Swarm and Azure could control the Flux effect such that they could destroy and un-destroy everything in an endless loop of suffering. But we were also told that this looping would not take effect until after the destruction of Atropos, which never happened, so that was a potential get-out-of-jail-free card left begging. I usually bemoan the use of reset buttons, but this situation was just crying out for one, had one built into the very plot…but didn't use it, chose instead to just gloss over everything.
I should mention that exiling the Grand Serpent to a tiny barren asteroid in space comes across as just another murder, on the surface of it, given that no one could be expected to survive long in such an environment. But the story has established that he has a means of travelling through space and time and there was no sign of anyone taking it from him. So I can't imagine his exile would last any longer than it takes him to activate the device and teleport himself someplace safer!
I still don’t really understand Swarm and Azure’s motivations and honestly, I don’t really care. Also, if Division had Swarm buried in the deepest, darkest, most impregnable prison ever, why was Azure just…on Earth disguised as a human when we first met her? How long had she been there, if Swarm's imprisonment had lasted millennia? Why did she destroy her recall device when it first pinged? What was all that about? That part of her story was never explained or brought up again. It was just weird. Also, after all that build-up, they really were handed the stupid ball in the finale. Earlier in the season they were shown to have omniscient knowledge of the Doctor's every thought and action, the ability to invade her mind and track her through space and time, and even fore-knowledge of individuals important to people she hadn't even met yet. Then in the finale they not only fail to notice that she has split herself across three different time zones, nicked one of their passenger forms, and obliterated the big scary final Flux event by simply throwing matter at it (as if it hadn't already consumed most of an entire universe full of matter at that point), but also repeatedly leave her alone and unguarded to plot against them while they very helpfully chat among themselves over in the corner until she is ready to manipulate them into taking her where she wants to go. Madness. That kind of resolution to any villain's story is just really unsatisfying.
There was absolutely no point in the entire season where I felt as if Chris Chibnall understands that space travel takes time, even for science fiction aliens with faster-than-light spacecraft. The storyline desperately wanted to evoke an epic, universe-spanning scope, but all the characters zipping from solar system to solar system and galaxy to galaxy in less time than it takes me to get to Tesco to do my weekly shop really undermined it and succeeded only in making the universe feel horribly small.
I'm really not clear why the Doctor invited Dan aboard the TARDIS. After a full season, they've shared almost no scenes and formed almost no connection. Remember when the Doctor-companion relationship was the heart of the show? Yeah, I miss those days too.
I feel like we were supposed to find Di's snub of Dan at the end there meaningful or emotional, or something. That after everything he still wants to go out with her, but she is too traumatised by it all, or whatever. But although the basic building blocks were in place, they were just too underdeveloped, so, like so much else, it just fell flat.
When the Grand Serpent introduced himself to the Doctor, I expected her to say 'oh yeah, I've heard of you, what are you doing here?', because didn't Vinder tell her his backstory just the other week? But no, no sign she'd ever heard the name before. Maybe I'm remembering wrong. Or maybe the Doctor just forgot. But it was an opportunity to join the dots between sub-plots, left hanging.
Joseph Williamson and his tunnels. I enjoyed the character, he was fun, and the inexplicable temporal shifting within his tunnels provided a nifty way for Yaz and co. to get back to the future at last, but ultimately I think it was a sub-plot too far for the scant number of episodes available. Why were there random temporal-spatial fractures on his land anyway? What caused them? Are they still there for people to get lost in now that the Flux event is over? We will never know the answers to these questions, because the story does not care. It was just another plot device that the writer never intended to truly explore.
How and why did Vinder end up on Atropos, after evacuating his outpost? That little detail was never explained in any way, shape or form. Why did Yaz end up on Atropos, for that matter? Why did she and Dan 'fall through time' or whatever in the first place, when the Doctor didn't? Convenient how they both landed in the exact place the plot needed them to be, saving the trouble of getting them there by more plausible means.
Why did the Ravages kidnap Di in the first place? Honestly, there were more likely hostages for them to choose than the not-quite girlfriend of a person the Doctor hadn't even met at that point! Not that they even really made much effort to use her as a hostage anyway. They took her, dangled her before the Doctor and companions just the once, and then…nothing. There was no point to it, no purpose. No real reason for her being left behind when all the thousands of other prisoners in the passenger form were removed and killed to create the psychic bridge, either. It all happened purely because the plot wanted her to survive and wanted her to experience the inside of the passenger form so that she could be the one who thought of using it against the Flux. It's a shame, because with just a little more effort made to join the storytelling dots, the sub-plot could have been a lot more compelling. Or…maybe we could have lost that sub-plot entirely, or folded it into another one, and gained a bit of breathing room for something else.
Speaking of the passenger form, that's an interesting bit of technology. Similar to TARDIS tech, I note, being bigger on the inside than the outside. Vinder and Bel were both familiar with the technology, as well. So their society is contemporaneous with present day Earth (unclear how far away, though, given the Small Universe syndrome discussed above) and has human-like appearance, but they have space travel, Vortex Manipulator technology, TARDIS-like dimensional technology, whatever the Grand Serpent was (the Doctor called him a binary demi-species and noted a dual pulse)… Yeah, never mind the rest of the plot, that society is what I want to explore! We saw just enough snippets to make me really curious to know more.
Kate Stewart described herself as the leader of the human resistance, but there was no sign of any other resistance, so was she just leading herself, a resistance army of one? Why was she hanging around the Williamson tunnels with an old TARDIS dug out of storage - and how did she get it there, after she went dark following the Grand Serpent's assassination attempt? Why did she take it there? She didn't know that the current Doctor and her companions were going to show up there, or that they were the ones who'd originally mislaid that TARDIS more than 50 years earlier, so what were her aims? What was she trying to achieve? We weren't told and the story did not care. She contributed exactly nothing to the plot. She was just there to meet the new Doctor, reunite her with the TARDIS, and then stand around watching the story unfold. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's always great to see Kate, but it was a bit of a waste of Jemma Redgrave, really. The TARDIS could have been retrieved by other means.
What happened to the sub-plot about the TARDIS being sick, leaking black gunk and manifesting random doors all over the place? That was thrown out there randomly and then left hanging.
Okay, so I've rambled on for many pages already and yet feel like I've barely scratched the surface of what could be said. How to summarise? Well, this six-part mini-series was very ambitious, and in times of Covid I acknowledge that we are lucky to have got any new show at all. It has definitely been the strongest season the Thirteenth Doctor has had yet, fun and engaging, for the most part, with supporting characters I genuinely rooted for, even if they ultimately contributed very little to the overcrowded plot. If the story had actually been about them, with a cohesive theme at its core, it could have been marvellous. But it wasn't. Overall, a lot of things happened in Flux, but at the end of the day, the actual story didn't actually seem to be about any of those things. It was just... stuff. Stuff happening, one plot point after another. Ultimately, there was just too much going on to land in the screen time available. Entire character threads amounted to outcomes that could have been tackled in a quarter of the time and by other characters. The final episode slam cuts between three episodes worth of story, leaving too many characters just standing in place with nothing to do. Because of that, there's no time to let the viewer really understand where everything is when the dust settles. The show just rushes off to the 'next time' trailer.
So it was entertaining. But it was also nonsense. Not the worst Doctor Who I've ever seen, not by a long chalk, but also very far from the best. The most frustrating thing about it was that it had the potential to be truly excellent, which it then failed to live up to.
Then again, it's been a long time since I felt inspired to write this much about Doctor Who, so there's that!
I suppose…at the end of the day, Doctor Who has never been designed as challenging adult drama - although it can be, and those are moments to be relished, but that isn't what the show is, at its core. The show was conceived as an enjoyable bit of cosy family fun for early Saturday (okay, now Sunday) evenings, so it isn't really fair to expect it to be more than that. It's frustrating to see it come so close to being so good but ultimately falling short, but such is life. For all its faults, this was the strongest season Chris Chibnall has managed yet.
So, after all those words, picking the season apart, I stand by my original assessment of the Flux mini-series as entertaining nonsense!
This entry was originally posted at https://llywela.dreamwidth.org/1056456.html. Please feel free to comment either here, or there using OpenID.
This, of course, is nothing new for Doctor Who, and the same critique can be made of a great many other episodes and story arcs over the years. They all tend to wear their flaws a bit differently, though, from era to era and from writer to writer.
Part of me is tempted to just draw a line under the sentences above and leave it there, but another part of me wants to at least try to delve into the pros and cons of the series in more detail. Maybe I'll just ramble on a bit (okay, a lot - I'll put it all under a cut to spare your f-lists!) and see how I get on.
First of all: Things I Liked.
The characters in general. A lot of the dialogue was poor and everything was so frantically rushed that no one really got much breathing space for anything in the way of character exploration or development, yet the characters, for the most part, managed to shine regardless - especially the ones not labouring under the pressure of being 'The Companion'. The actors all did a great job, occasionally with the odds stacked against them. I liked them all. I wish we'd been able to spend more meaningful time with all of them, to build a bit more genuine emotional attachment, but character has really never been a focus of Chibnall's intensely plot-driven Who, so we just have to take what we can get.
Eustacius Jericho. A strong, dignified, principled character who deserved to survive with a Big Finish audio spin-off series of his own, although I will settle for a Yaz, Dan and Jericho: The Lost Years of Early 1900s Adventuring series, I guess. Because I would absolutely have watched an entire season of those three Indiana Jones-ing their way around the globe; the one episode sub-plot we got was tremendously entertaining. Speaking of which, after three years living and travelling and problem-solving and adventuring together, there really should have been more emphasis on Yaz and Dan reacting to Jericho's death. Yaz spent at least as much time with him as she has the Doctor, if not more, and Dan absolutely spent a great deal more time with Jericho than he ever has the Doctor, despite being billed as a companion. They were a team and seemed to have built a strong bond, albeit mostly off-screen. Jericho's death should have had far more impact. But there wasn't room, in that crowded final episode, to allow it, and the story was all the weaker for that fact. There's simply no point including the dramatic death scene of a stalwart ally if the full emotion of it isn't allowed to land. Even just one little speech centring him as a representation of all that’s been lost to the Flux would have added so much emotional resonance! Without that, his death just felt like so much paint-by-numbers storytelling.
Karvanista. Yeah, the costume wasn't great and the concept of the Lupari species-bond with humanity doesn't really hold much water (who bonded them? How? Why? Did they consent to it? Why?), not to mention that Karvanista's personal timeline is a bit bumpy, but you know what? I don't care, I loved him anyway. His oh-so grumpy commitment to duty and responsibility was entertaining as well as being strong characterisation, and even under all that fur, actor Craig Els sold the hell out of his devastation over the deaths of his fellow Lupari, just with his eyes and the stillness of his posture, despite being given very little camera focus. (The casual genocide of the Lupari, however, I will come back to later).
(Actually, there might still be another Lupari out there, mightn't there? The one who failed to answer species recall because Bel had stolen their ship… And, you know, anyone who wasn't needed for the species recall, because I simply do not believe that there are exactly the same number of Lupari as humans, not a single individual more or less. So there's that, too.)
Bel and Vinder. I really liked them both. They felt like they belonged in a completely different show, a much cooler show, and one that I would watch the hell out of. I really want to know more about them and the society they come from, since they look human but very clearly aren't, given that they are seasoned space operatives contemporaneous with present day Earth - not to mention that at the start of the series Vinder seemed to have been in exile on that outpost for a really, really long time (the daily update he recorded was numbered in the thousands), and yet Bel's pregnancy, conceived before that exile, isn't showing at all. I want to know more! I want to know where they come from and how Vinder knew to recognise a TARDIS when he sees one, what kind of Vortex Manipulator tech he was using to travel from planet to planet - and exactly how long their species gestates! I wish, again, that we'd had more time to spend with these characters, learning about them and watching them grow, because I really enjoyed what we got to see over the course of the season. They were both engaging individuals who felt like they had a life and motivations beyond the demands of the plot, and it was just so refreshing to get to spend time with characters who don't come from contemporary Earth and whose lives don't revolve around the Doctor!
(Thinking about it, if Vinder hadn't been shown to be so very principled, I might suspect that he'd been using his Vortex Manipulator thingummy to sneak out of his outpost exile after curfew to enjoy a bit of nookie with Bel on the side, which would be a much simpler explanation of her non-showing pregnancy…)
I am, of course, thrilled by the concept of Bel, Vinder and Karvanista (plus Tigmi, of course) freelancing their way around a broken universe together after all this, which again is a spin-off show that I would 100% watch and enjoy. Grumpy, duty-conscious Karvanista and honourable, laid-back Vinder would quickly find that they have loads in common, while vibrant, impulsive, 'I can mow down a squad of Cybermen single-handedly and will now interrupt my own self-imposed quest for my lost lover in order to investigate the bad guys who just abducted hundreds of people right in front of me' Bel would keep them both on their toes. And then there's the space baby still to come. I mean, the found family potential is off the charts, right? Why are we still messing around with contemporary human companions without much individual characterisation beyond 'the Doctor has opened my eyes to the stars' when we could have groupings like this??? If Chris Chibnall can come up with characters like this, why has he insisted on limiting himself to contemporary humans without much individual characterisation beyond 'the Doctor has opened my eyes to the stars' as new companions for the Doctor?
(Is it bad that I'm more interested in the spin-off potential inherent in this season than I am the content of the season itself?)
(Another thought: I don't know what Bel had in her gun that allowed her to mow down a whole squad of Cybermen, but everyone who has ever had to fight the Cybermen would now like some, please.)
Also, I know fandom tied itself up in knots over Bel and Vinder and had half-convinced itself that they would turn out to be the Timeless Child's long-lost parents, or something, but I'm really glad that they ended up being exactly what it said on the tin: a young couple caught up in events bigger than them, struggling to find one another across a broken universe. Connecting them to the Doctor would have felt very Small Universe (which is a problem this series already had, to be fair). They were here to represent the impact of the Flux on the wider universe, and I enjoyed having them along for the ride.
Di. She was cool. I really liked her scenes with Vinder when they were trapped inside Passenger together, sharing knowledge and figuring out how to escape. Their practical, down-to-earth conversations made me regret all over again the way this Doctor has been characterised, always so manic and incoherent in her designated role as the showrunner's primary tool for both narrating and explaining the plot, usually in the same breathless run-on sentence. That scattershot, word-vomit characterisation felt especially out of place here, set against how focused and coherent everyone else was, and although the Doctor standing out as different shouldn't be a bad thing - it is in fact the character's usual MO - her characterisation in this era has just never landed for me. And although she has finally this season been allowed to stop saying 'presumably' in every other sentence, the dialogue she was given was still absolutely woeful more often than not.
Whittaker had some really good moments in the final episode where she was allowed to be calm and intent, especially when she was being Time, and I really wish she'd been allowed to play the Doctor that way from the start.
Yaz. Yes, she has been almost criminally underused for three seasons now, but I've always enjoyed Mandip Gill's performance. I think she is a lot more capable than the material she's been given, and in the absence of any focused, meaningful development arc for her, I will just have to take whatever we are given. And what we were given was Yaz being quietly competent throughout the season, drawing on her police training when it was useful (helping to search for a lost child), taking the lead when stranded in the past with two virtual strangers, and never giving up even when the odds seemed to be stacked against ever making it home. She very briefly had a really nice dynamic with Vinder in the episode where they met on Atropos and formed an instant rapport, which I'd have liked to see more of, and then forged a strong dynamic with Dan and Jericho when they got stranded in the past together. It's a shame she wasn't given more structured development and more meaningful time spent with the Doctor, but some of the conversations they did have, bookending the season, did clearly demonstrate at least a bit of measurable character growth. It is satisfying to contrast her strop in Revolution of the Daleks over the Doctor being away for 10 months to her calm but sad 'oh, a few years' when they were reunited in the finale here. She is more mature now, which is as it should be. After three years stranded in the past, on top of the time spent travelling with the Doctor before that, she isn't the inexperienced, insecure 19-year-old rookie cop any more.
Claire. She was a plot device, but Annabel Scholey made her memorable. And at least there is in-universe precedence for the existence of random human psychics, has been ever since Nine and Rose met Gwyneth way back in season one (although I didn't much like the concept then, either).
I guess I should throw Dan in here, too. He didn't get to spend much time with the Doctor (or, really, contribute anything at all to the plot) and he also didn't get to demonstrate anything in the way of development over the course of the season - in fact, he ended the season in exactly the same place he started it - but he was a pleasant enough person to follow through the story anyway. Even if his primary role was simply to provide an ongoing link to Liverpool while being a decent person who is unfazed by, apparently, just about anything and is always willing to get involved and have a go. I feel like he and Yaz should have been allowed to talk about being separated from their families while stranded in the past - should have been allowed to have a conversation about the thwarted hopes, dreams, ambitions, etc. inherent in their predicament - but that would have been a bit too much like meaningful character focus for this era, clearly, so of course they were only permitted to discuss the Doctor and the Plot on-screen.
Swarm. Azure. (The design work on those two was stunning.) The Grand Serpent. Not their storylines, but them as individuals. As recurring villains go, they all had great style and I love what the actors did with them. Watching both Swarm and the Grand Serpent, I really wish Sacha Dhawan's Master had been written in this style, harking back to Roger Delgado's original incarnation of the character, instead of continuing the New Who trend of having him be completely insane.
Ahem. I am very aware that even simply listing things I liked about this season, every single point comes with caveats. Which pretty much says it all, really.
Um. What else? I liked the serialised structure of the season. It was uneven, but that's the nature of the beast, and overall I think Chris Chibnall is better at long-form storytelling than he is New Who's more usual anthology structure. He still can't seem to bring himself to write character-led Who, so it was an intensely plot-driven season once again, but I did appreciate the serialised structure. It felt very Classic, but in a modern way - and the Classic show, of course, also had more than its fair share of stinkers.
The production values. Other than the Time Storm or whatever that the Doctor got stuck in, back in the Atropos episode, everything looked really good. It was all visually impressive, if nothing else!
I feel like I should be mad at the idea that UNIT had a fully functioning TARDIS buried in storage since 1967 that no one ever thought to mention, through all the decades of the Doctor's acquaintance with them, but I can't be annoyed because the thought of it is just too damn funny to me. All those years Pertwee's Doctor spent trapped on Earth because his own TARDIS had been disabled, and no one ever thought to mention that they had another one safely stashed away someplace! It wasn't clear why Kate brought it into play in the finale, though, other than it was required by the plot, because there was no in-story reason for her to know that she was about to meet the very version of the Doctor who had mislaid it.
I liked seeing Kate Stewart again, even if she was given bugger all to actually do. She deserved to get a proper Moment with the Doctor when they first met, so I'm mad that she didn't. Another victim of the frenetic pace of the storytelling.
I liked the use of the fob watch of lost memories, that was a nice little call back to established Time Lord lore. And I like that despite having striven so hard to find those lost memories, once they were finally in her grasp the Doctor couldn't quite bring herself to face up to them after all. It does mean, however, that there will inevitably be more Timeless Child nonsense still to come in the specials - more on that later, because it doesn't belong in the pro section!
It amuses me no end that people are shown going on guided tours of the tunnels that house the magic space-time gateways. Do they ever come back? The magic space-time gateways certainly weren't shown to be switched off in any way! A loose end left hanging.
…and I have run out of pros and pseudo-pros. So I guess it is time for the cons.
Things I Didn't Like - and a few Question Marks:
First and foremost, it was all horribly scattershot come the end, with plot holes you could drive a truck through. All sound and fury without much in the way of substance, always hurrying straight past any moment that could have been truly meaningful in the rush to get to the next plot point. The fast and furious nature of the storytelling is probably the biggest downside of the series, as so much character (and story) development got glossed over and lost in the shuffle. Maybe if we'd had the extra few episodes originally intended, everyone might have had a bit more time to breathe - or then again, maybe not, as character has never really been a focus of Chibnall's time on the show. And while I've enjoyed having the recurring characters through the series, it all got very crowded there again come the end, which meant that no one got much in the way of satisfying interaction or resolution.
Chibnall just does not seem to have ever heard the axiom 'less is more'. Or maybe he figures, like Moffat before him, that what works for mediocre 3-hour blockbuster movies should also work for episodic television. Personally, I'm not convinced. It's hard to even single out specific issues because there’s just so much going on, and yet also somehow so little, and none of ends up feeling meaningful at all. That kind of loose, messy plotwork is forgivable if the themes and characters truly resonate, but although I genuinely liked and felt attached to all the characters here, they didn't have that. They were along for the ride and I loved them, but this story was not about them. It wasn't even, really, about the Doctor. This story was pretty much 100% about its plot, so that plot desperately needed to be really tight and compelling and it simply wasn't. It was messy and unconvincing and kept getting tangled up in itself.
Having the Doctor split into three parts in the finale, skipping around trying frantically to resolve everything all at once, again with the awful dialogue, felt like a covid/episode reduction consequence. I suspect they'd have been able to resolve some of these plot threads a bit more neatly if there had been the originally planned 10 episodes. Or then again, maybe it was always planned to be this frenetic.
I still despise the Timeless Child storyline, which makes no attempt whatsoever to anchor itself to existing Time Lord history in any way, shape or form, but instead focuses intently on overwriting all those decades of accumulated lore by scaling up the Doctor as the most important Time Lord ever to exist. This has been an ongoing problem ever since the reboot launched in 2005, this obsession with continually retconning the Doctor's backstory to make them ever more important. The Last of the Time Lords. The Oncoming Storm. The Lonely God. The Timeless Child. And so on, and so on, repeatedly framed as the most important person in the universe - so important, here, that Tecteun and Division quite literally decided to destroy that entire universe just because of who the Doctor is (although if they were going to offer her a spot in the new universe anyway, I fail to see what's the point of destroying the old one in the first place? The plan made no sense whatsoever).
All that hyperbole is just not who the Doctor ever was, and continually spiralling upward like that does not, in fact, add mystery or interest, it just becomes increasingly unconvincing and inevitably leads to total burnout. The Classic show had it right. The show is not, at its heart, about the Doctor. It’s about the adventure and the stories, and continually teasing deep, dark mysteries over who the Doctor really is only serves to detract from that, rather than adding anything truly meaningful. Chibnall said that he came up with the Timeless Child story because he wanted to add mystery to the Doctor's backstory, but I fail to see how anything can expect to be mysterious if we keep being told about it and having it explained to us over and over, with new detail added all the time. You know what would really make the Doctor's backstory truly mysterious? If it was simply never mentioned or explained at all!
I mean, I don't even really object to the idea of the Doctor having had an existence before Hartnell, that's been implied since way back in the 70s, but there are ways and ways of going about it. And this wasn't, in my opinion, the right way to go about it. An entire set of regenerations blocked from memory? Fine, I can see plenty of interesting stories to tell there. A forgotten period of time spent in service (whether voluntarily or not) to a shadowy Gallifreyan security organisation? Sure, that tracks with what we know of Gallifreyan history and society. I can even see why it is narratively useful to have those past incarnations also call themselves Doctor and have a TARDIS shaped like a police box, just for the audience recognition factor, even though it breaches established continuity, since we saw Hartnell's Doctor adopt the title on-screen and also witnessed the moment the TARDIS chameleon circuit broke, leaving it stuck as a police box, all of which happened long after those previous lives ended. I would prefer it if that retcon was acknowledged, somehow (I can even think of ways of subtly lampshading it in the narrative), but I can just about live with the anachronism, if necessary, although it will never stop annoying me. But the Timeless Child storyline is just an absurdity too far for me, piling ever more genuinely ridiculous amounts of angst onto the Doctor for no good reason beyond 'because'. It doesn't help that the way the storyline has played out so far has for the most part required the Doctor to be completely passive, a helpless victim repeatedly forced to stand and listen while someone else monologues painfully convoluted exposition at her. It's just really poor and doesn't suit the character at all.
The Flux. Division. Tecteun. There was the germ of a decent story idea in there, but it really needed a stronger writer than Chris Chibnall to translate that story into compelling dramatic TV. It was messy. It was convoluted. It was completely over-the-top and not in a good way. There were plot holes, as I said, that you could drive a truck through. There was both too much exposition and not enough, which is an impressive feat. After all that build up, Tecteun was just casually disposed of mere minutes after we met her, with no dramatic impact at all. Her stated motives for trying to destroy the entire universe (all because of the Doctor, of course) made no sense at all. So much hype around the great and all-powerful Division, then when the Doctor finally got there it turned out to be one old lady and an Ood. Where the heck was everyone else? Who is in charge now that Tecteun is gone? Are all those almighty Division agents still out there, wandering about aimlessly, wondering what to do next?
So many questions, and the worst thing is, I don't even care about the answers. I hope we never hear anything about any of them ever again.
(Actually, that's not true. I would quite like to know what that lonely Ood is doing, stranded all alone, apparently, between universes, with no one to tell it what to do anymore. But that was a loose thread left dangling that will probably never be resolved.)
I did not enjoy the retconning of UNIT's history in the penultimate episode. I don't even, really, understand what that sub-plot was all about. The Grand Serpent was using time travel to manipulate UNIT's history, sure, but why? He never actually did anything with that history, other than kill a few people we'd never seen before. It all built up to UNIT being de-funded at exactly the time we already knew it had been de-funded, so why even bother hopping through history like that, just to achieve something that had already happened? It is especially annoying because the sub-plot got the details wrong in ways that can't even be blamed on the Grand Serpent's interference. I mean, the development of UNIT happened on-screen in the late 60s and early 70s (not the 50s, as that episode claimed), so why mess with those origins when fans can go back and see for themselves? Getting the little details wrong just feels lazy.
It just really bugs me that they went to all the trouble of including a little audio clip of Nicholas Courtney as Lethbridge-Stewart, which was a genuinely lovely idea that I really wish I could rhapsodise over, and yet managed to get the details all wrong. I thought Chibnall was an obsessive, nit-picking fan who knew his lore inside out? Lethbridge-Stewart was not a corporal with UNIT in 1967, as the episode claimed; he went to Sandhurst so he would never have been a corporal at all, in fact. When he first met the Doctor in Web of Fear, which aired in 1968 but was set in the near future, he was a colonel with the army regulars, and if UNIT already existed at that time (which it shouldn't, since it is heavily implied in The Invasion that it was established in direct response to the events of Web of Fear) Lethbridge-Stewart very clearly did not know anything about it. The next time he met the Doctor, in The Invasion (which also aired in 1968 but was set two years later again) he had joined the newly formed UNIT and been promoted to Brigadier at the same time.
This is very basic stuff, and it happened on-screen in the show Chris Chibnall claims to love. There is no reason at all, in this day and age, to get these details wrong, especially since the changes made had no bearing on the plot whatsoever. It was just really, really shoddy writing - as egregious as if the plot tried to claim that Rose Tyler was working for Torchwood as far back as 1995, which viewers know isn't true because we saw Rose's story play out on-screen. Just as we did the Brigadier's. And yes, the Classic show was riddled with inconsistencies, but that's no reason to continue to introduce even more inconsistencies today, at a time when we keep congratulating ourselves that TV is so much better now we understand things like continuity! If you continually break and rewrite the boundaries and history of even the most flexible fiction, people will stop caring, because they get the sense that nothing matters anymore, nothing’s really at stake, and nothing has any meaning.
Could the Grand Serpent really think of nothing better to do with the power of time travel, in the face of universal destruction, than mess with Earth's history and join forces with the Sontarans? I can think of easier ways of reclaiming the power and influence he lost to the Flux. Removing himself to a point in time before the Flux was a Thing would have been a good start!
So much casual genocide in this season, the finale especially. Vast swathes of destruction all across the universe. The casual off-screen genocide of the Lupari by the Sontarans - over 7 billion of them, we were told - apparently without any kind of a fight, given that all their one-man spacecraft remained pristinely operational. Then the genocide of the Daleks and Cybermen set-up by the Sontarans, with the Doctor not only approving, but manipulating events to ensure that the Sontarans too were wiped out! The scale of all that slaughter is just mind-blowingly horrific, but in-show it was mostly just sort of shrugged off as no big deal. Karvanista was allowed to be sad about the loss of his people, but no one else seemed to care. Dan even made fun of him while he was freshly grieving for his entire race, which was incredibly poor taste and a waste of an opportunity for a genuinely meaningful character moment between the two, after all they'd been through both separately and together.
Thinking about it, the Doctor was also making fun of the freshly grieving Karvanista at the end there, when she, of all people, should understand the enormity and tragedy of being the last surviving member of your entire race.
I remember a time when the Doctor was a pacifist who took the loss of even one life, even that of an enemy, completely seriously, and always tried to find a better way. There may not always have been a better way, but the Doctor I grew up watching would never have so gleefully participated in slaughter on this scale. Remember when the Fourth Doctor agonised over whether or not it was right to kill just a handful of Dalek mutants in order to re-write their future, the weight and solemnity of that struggle, and the burden of responsibility for making that choice? This Doctor just casually shrugged off the deliberate genocide of three entire species. Surely she should have at least been shown to agonise over the slaughter as an unavoidably awful thing she simply had to do because there was no other way. That would have been more in keeping with who the Doctor fundamentally is. But that would have meant taking the time necessary for a meaningful character moment and the plot was just too breakneck to allow such a thing. There wasn't a single moment in that final episode that didn't feel in a rush to move on to the next plot point.
There's a lot more to good storytelling than cramming in as many plot points as possible, Mr Chibnall.
Not that I agree that the mass genocide even was an unavoidably awful thing the Doctor simply had to do because there was no other way in the first place. I can think of neater, more in-character resolutions just off the top of my head. For starters, the episode itself proposes that a universe-destroying wave of antimatter could be partially annihilated by three fleets of Cybermen, Daleks and Sontarans, because that's totally how matter-antimatter annihilation works (not. Even The Three Doctors had a better handle on matter-antimatter than that, and that's saying something! I mean, what does Chris Chibnall think the rest of the universe is made of, exactly???). But then the episode admits this would not be enough and introduces the limitless passenger form as Plan B. So…why couldn't the limitless passenger form have been Plan A? Surely that would have been a clever sleight of hand worthy of the Doctor. Bring in the passenger form, use it to hoover up all the Flux before it ever reaches the massed fleets, and then leave the Sontarans, Daleks and Cybermen to duke it out among themselves, so that they, not the Doctor, are responsible for any deaths. No out of character genocide necessary. I mean, we all know that all three villains will be back before long anyway, so why even go to a place of apparent total genocide in the first place?
(Okay, now I'm wondering what they did with the passenger form full of Flux afterward? What would be an appropriate disposal mechanism for something like that? What happens if someone opens the door and lets the Flux out???)
Also, I'm just going to note for the record that the Flux was stopped but did not appear to be undone in this episode, which means that vast swathes of the universe remain utterly devastated, billions upon billions of lives wiped out, countless worlds, countless species - not for the first time in the show's history, sure, but I'm wondering if this will ever be referenced again, or if the scale of the devastation will just be swept under the carpet again going forward. Because they made such a big deal about how most of the universe had been destroyed, Earth was one of the last planets left standing - not even Earth's solar system, just Earth itself, which doesn't sound all that viable for long-term survival - and the Flux was stopped at the moment described as its very final event, meaning the final moment when it was meant to complete the destruction of the very last vestiges of the universe…and then getting rid of it was heralded as a victory without any resolution whatsoever to the universe-spanning destruction it had already caused. I mean, it's possible we'll get some reference to it later, but I suspect it is far more likely that we are just supposed to quietly forget any of that devastation ever happened at all, especially with regard to our own solar system, which is clearly just fine at the end there, exactly as if the Earth wasn't said to be the last planet left standing.
(Speaking of which, how long was Earth trapped inside the Lupari shield, with no sunlight to keep the planet warm and distinguish night from day?)
This, of course, is just one of the risks the show takes in scaling up to the point of putting the entire universe in peril as just one of a myriad of sprawling plot strands. We end with the fate of millions of galaxies left completely unresolved. In Logopolis way back in 1981 it was explicit that whole galaxies were permanently destroyed and that had real consequence, real weight. How can it be an afterthought here? Not even that, actually - to be an afterthought it would have to at least be mentioned! This was just, 'the Flux is gone, and everyone lived happy ever after!'
I mean…we were told that Swarm and Azure could control the Flux effect such that they could destroy and un-destroy everything in an endless loop of suffering. But we were also told that this looping would not take effect until after the destruction of Atropos, which never happened, so that was a potential get-out-of-jail-free card left begging. I usually bemoan the use of reset buttons, but this situation was just crying out for one, had one built into the very plot…but didn't use it, chose instead to just gloss over everything.
I should mention that exiling the Grand Serpent to a tiny barren asteroid in space comes across as just another murder, on the surface of it, given that no one could be expected to survive long in such an environment. But the story has established that he has a means of travelling through space and time and there was no sign of anyone taking it from him. So I can't imagine his exile would last any longer than it takes him to activate the device and teleport himself someplace safer!
I still don’t really understand Swarm and Azure’s motivations and honestly, I don’t really care. Also, if Division had Swarm buried in the deepest, darkest, most impregnable prison ever, why was Azure just…on Earth disguised as a human when we first met her? How long had she been there, if Swarm's imprisonment had lasted millennia? Why did she destroy her recall device when it first pinged? What was all that about? That part of her story was never explained or brought up again. It was just weird. Also, after all that build-up, they really were handed the stupid ball in the finale. Earlier in the season they were shown to have omniscient knowledge of the Doctor's every thought and action, the ability to invade her mind and track her through space and time, and even fore-knowledge of individuals important to people she hadn't even met yet. Then in the finale they not only fail to notice that she has split herself across three different time zones, nicked one of their passenger forms, and obliterated the big scary final Flux event by simply throwing matter at it (as if it hadn't already consumed most of an entire universe full of matter at that point), but also repeatedly leave her alone and unguarded to plot against them while they very helpfully chat among themselves over in the corner until she is ready to manipulate them into taking her where she wants to go. Madness. That kind of resolution to any villain's story is just really unsatisfying.
There was absolutely no point in the entire season where I felt as if Chris Chibnall understands that space travel takes time, even for science fiction aliens with faster-than-light spacecraft. The storyline desperately wanted to evoke an epic, universe-spanning scope, but all the characters zipping from solar system to solar system and galaxy to galaxy in less time than it takes me to get to Tesco to do my weekly shop really undermined it and succeeded only in making the universe feel horribly small.
I'm really not clear why the Doctor invited Dan aboard the TARDIS. After a full season, they've shared almost no scenes and formed almost no connection. Remember when the Doctor-companion relationship was the heart of the show? Yeah, I miss those days too.
I feel like we were supposed to find Di's snub of Dan at the end there meaningful or emotional, or something. That after everything he still wants to go out with her, but she is too traumatised by it all, or whatever. But although the basic building blocks were in place, they were just too underdeveloped, so, like so much else, it just fell flat.
When the Grand Serpent introduced himself to the Doctor, I expected her to say 'oh yeah, I've heard of you, what are you doing here?', because didn't Vinder tell her his backstory just the other week? But no, no sign she'd ever heard the name before. Maybe I'm remembering wrong. Or maybe the Doctor just forgot. But it was an opportunity to join the dots between sub-plots, left hanging.
Joseph Williamson and his tunnels. I enjoyed the character, he was fun, and the inexplicable temporal shifting within his tunnels provided a nifty way for Yaz and co. to get back to the future at last, but ultimately I think it was a sub-plot too far for the scant number of episodes available. Why were there random temporal-spatial fractures on his land anyway? What caused them? Are they still there for people to get lost in now that the Flux event is over? We will never know the answers to these questions, because the story does not care. It was just another plot device that the writer never intended to truly explore.
How and why did Vinder end up on Atropos, after evacuating his outpost? That little detail was never explained in any way, shape or form. Why did Yaz end up on Atropos, for that matter? Why did she and Dan 'fall through time' or whatever in the first place, when the Doctor didn't? Convenient how they both landed in the exact place the plot needed them to be, saving the trouble of getting them there by more plausible means.
Why did the Ravages kidnap Di in the first place? Honestly, there were more likely hostages for them to choose than the not-quite girlfriend of a person the Doctor hadn't even met at that point! Not that they even really made much effort to use her as a hostage anyway. They took her, dangled her before the Doctor and companions just the once, and then…nothing. There was no point to it, no purpose. No real reason for her being left behind when all the thousands of other prisoners in the passenger form were removed and killed to create the psychic bridge, either. It all happened purely because the plot wanted her to survive and wanted her to experience the inside of the passenger form so that she could be the one who thought of using it against the Flux. It's a shame, because with just a little more effort made to join the storytelling dots, the sub-plot could have been a lot more compelling. Or…maybe we could have lost that sub-plot entirely, or folded it into another one, and gained a bit of breathing room for something else.
Speaking of the passenger form, that's an interesting bit of technology. Similar to TARDIS tech, I note, being bigger on the inside than the outside. Vinder and Bel were both familiar with the technology, as well. So their society is contemporaneous with present day Earth (unclear how far away, though, given the Small Universe syndrome discussed above) and has human-like appearance, but they have space travel, Vortex Manipulator technology, TARDIS-like dimensional technology, whatever the Grand Serpent was (the Doctor called him a binary demi-species and noted a dual pulse)… Yeah, never mind the rest of the plot, that society is what I want to explore! We saw just enough snippets to make me really curious to know more.
Kate Stewart described herself as the leader of the human resistance, but there was no sign of any other resistance, so was she just leading herself, a resistance army of one? Why was she hanging around the Williamson tunnels with an old TARDIS dug out of storage - and how did she get it there, after she went dark following the Grand Serpent's assassination attempt? Why did she take it there? She didn't know that the current Doctor and her companions were going to show up there, or that they were the ones who'd originally mislaid that TARDIS more than 50 years earlier, so what were her aims? What was she trying to achieve? We weren't told and the story did not care. She contributed exactly nothing to the plot. She was just there to meet the new Doctor, reunite her with the TARDIS, and then stand around watching the story unfold. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's always great to see Kate, but it was a bit of a waste of Jemma Redgrave, really. The TARDIS could have been retrieved by other means.
What happened to the sub-plot about the TARDIS being sick, leaking black gunk and manifesting random doors all over the place? That was thrown out there randomly and then left hanging.
Okay, so I've rambled on for many pages already and yet feel like I've barely scratched the surface of what could be said. How to summarise? Well, this six-part mini-series was very ambitious, and in times of Covid I acknowledge that we are lucky to have got any new show at all. It has definitely been the strongest season the Thirteenth Doctor has had yet, fun and engaging, for the most part, with supporting characters I genuinely rooted for, even if they ultimately contributed very little to the overcrowded plot. If the story had actually been about them, with a cohesive theme at its core, it could have been marvellous. But it wasn't. Overall, a lot of things happened in Flux, but at the end of the day, the actual story didn't actually seem to be about any of those things. It was just... stuff. Stuff happening, one plot point after another. Ultimately, there was just too much going on to land in the screen time available. Entire character threads amounted to outcomes that could have been tackled in a quarter of the time and by other characters. The final episode slam cuts between three episodes worth of story, leaving too many characters just standing in place with nothing to do. Because of that, there's no time to let the viewer really understand where everything is when the dust settles. The show just rushes off to the 'next time' trailer.
So it was entertaining. But it was also nonsense. Not the worst Doctor Who I've ever seen, not by a long chalk, but also very far from the best. The most frustrating thing about it was that it had the potential to be truly excellent, which it then failed to live up to.
Then again, it's been a long time since I felt inspired to write this much about Doctor Who, so there's that!
I suppose…at the end of the day, Doctor Who has never been designed as challenging adult drama - although it can be, and those are moments to be relished, but that isn't what the show is, at its core. The show was conceived as an enjoyable bit of cosy family fun for early Saturday (okay, now Sunday) evenings, so it isn't really fair to expect it to be more than that. It's frustrating to see it come so close to being so good but ultimately falling short, but such is life. For all its faults, this was the strongest season Chris Chibnall has managed yet.
So, after all those words, picking the season apart, I stand by my original assessment of the Flux mini-series as entertaining nonsense!
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