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Doctor Who: Flux – Chapter Six: The Vanquishers (Review)

Posted on December 5, 2021 by Darren

“Not like we don’t have enough to do.”

And, like that, Doctor Who: Flux collapses into itself, in a season finale that manages to combine the worst aspects of both The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos and The Timeless Children.

To be fair, this was always the risk. It was obvious from The Halloween Apocalypse that the season would be putting a lot of weight on the finale to determine whether it all worked or not. Particularly in episodes like Once, Upon Time and Survivors of the Flux, Chibnall was effectively able to structure the season so that the finale would make or break the season as a whole. Given Chris Chibnall’s track record with season finales, this was always a gamble. However, it was an approach that allowed the entire season to buttress itself with the audience’s good faith and hope. With The Vanquishers, it all comes down like a deck of cards.

Watch yourself.

The Vanquishers is in many ways a very typical Chris Chibnall episode, indicative of his approach to showrunning Doctor Who dating back to The Woman Who Fell to Earth. It’s an episode that is powered by plot, based on the assumption that more plot makes the episode better, and that the episode is more engaging whenever Chibnall has something else that he can cut to. In some ways, the splitting of the Doctor into three versions of herself “split across three realities” feels perfectly suited to Chibnall’s sensibility, effectively allowing Jodie Whittaker to star in three separate episodes that the series can keep cutting across.

The problem is that none of the three episodes are any good, and none are in anyway satisfying as a conclusion to this epic saga.

Ood one out.

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: doctor who, doctor who: flux, flux, the vanquishers | 34 Comments »

Doctor Who: Flux – Chapter Five: Survivors of the Flux (Review)

Posted on November 28, 2021 by Darren

“We’re not in the universe.”

Survivors of the Flux marks a return to the narrative style of both The Halloween Apocalypse and Once, Upon Time.

It’s not so much an individual episode of television so much as it’s a space in which the larger narrative threads of the season advance itself. While it’s not as scattershot as Once, Upon Time, it lacks the clarity of focus and momentum that held The Halloween Apocalypse together as a season premiere. Surivivors of the Flux often feels like things happening, which is particularly noticeable in the two story threads focusing on the Great Serpent and the separated companion crew, which are largely a series of disconnected vignettes jumping through time and space respectively to provide a sense of scale to the adventure.

Tomb to manoeuvre.

Even more than The Halloween Apocalypse, Survivors of the Flux is an episode that hinges heavily on the looming series finale. The nature of Doctor Who: Flux places a lot of weight on The Vanquishers. If the season finale is suitably compelling, any earlier missteps will either be retroactively justified or easily excused. However, if the last episode of the set collapses into itself, it may erase a lot of the more interesting ideas leading into it. It is best to travel hopefully, but The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos and The Timeless Children are perhaps cause for concern.

Survivors of the Flux is not only a heavily serialised instalment, it’s also recognisable as the first half of the season finale. It is comparable to something like The Stolen Earth or Dark Water. The best of these penultimate seasonal episodes manage to balance a compelling self-contained narrative, or at least engaging character work, with the necessity of setting up larger plot arcs to pay off the following episode. Survivors of the Flux feels a lot more like homework than episodes like Heaven Sent or World Enough and Time.

Glowing concern.

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: Chris Chibnall, deconstruction, division, doctor who, doctor who: flux, flux, loki, status quo, survivors of the flux, Weeping Angels | 28 Comments »

Doctor Who: Flux – Chapter Three: Once, Upon Time (Review)

Posted on November 14, 2021 by Darren

“Love is the only mission.”

Once, Upon Time is equal parts ambitious and frustrating.

It feels like an attempt to adopt the approach that Chris Chibnall took to The Halloween Apocalypse and apply it to a mid-season episode. Allowing for the tertiary plot involving Yaz, War of the Sontarans was recognisable as a fairly straightforward Chibnall era episode, albeit one tied to the season arc. It was a historical epic about a marginalised female hero like Rosa or Spyfall, Part II and it was also a modern-day invasion story like Arachnids in the U.K. or Revolution of the Daleks. Sure, the plot mechanics where governed by the larger concerns of Doctor Who: Flux, but it was recognisable as an episode of Doctor Who.

Blaster from the… future?

In contrast, Once, Upon Time is a radically different approach to Doctor Who on television, one that feels like an extension of the style of The Halloween Apocalypse. On some level, it recalls another of the bolder scripts of the Chibnall era, The Timeless Children, in that it really feels like Chris Chibnall is driving Doctor Who like he stole it. He is trying to do something new with a nearly sixty-year-old franchise. That is genuinely admirable, particularly given how traditionalist the rest of the era around it can feel. For Doctor Who to grow and evolve, it needs to be able to try new things.

However, that’s a very qualified comparison. Like The Timeless Children before it, Once, Upon Time is an episode that doesn’t necessarily work on its own terms. It demonstrates that an episode like The Halloween Apocalypse – an episode with multiple seemingly disconnected threads constantly pushing the narrative forward – only really worked as a season premiere. The Halloween Apocalypse worked because it started with a bang. The audience were oriented coming into the episode, which made the chaos somewhat compelling.

Time, pyramided.

In contrast, Once, Upon Time is too disjointed. It never provides the audience with enough to hold on to as it jumps from one concept to another. It is an episode that should theoretically have a set of clear emotional hearts – Dan and Diane, Vinder and Bel, the Doctor and her past – but gets too tied up in scale and speed to really ground anything that is happening. Once, Upon Time feels like a more dynamic version of The Timeless Children, a lot of exposition in place of what should be a compelling and engaging emotional narrative.

Once, Upon Time feels like it is trying for something new, but it isn’t quite succeeding.