Review of Flux: Village of the Angels
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

I have to admit I’m impressed. It can’t be easy to create the stylistic variety from episode to episode that we’re being offered while still telling a singular story. Yet Chibnall (with help this week from co-writer Maxine Alderton) continues to deliver.

In fact, they delivered not just an extremely atmospheric, gothic, “something’s wrong in a sleepy English village” episode, they also provided us space to breathe. The pace of the first half of this short series has been so break-neck we’ve barely had a chance to look around, let alone speculate freely about what it all means. (Not that we’ve had no time—just not much.)

And there’s something comfortingly familiar about the village of Medderton in 1967, narratively speaking. Whether in Hide or in Amy’s Choice or in The Daemons, we’ve seen this kind of just-a-bit-off village many times before. It’s because of that familiarity that this episode is both relaxing and so effectively frightening.

Now I’ve said before that Doctor Who has never actually scared me, but it definitely provides varying levels of tension, depending on the episode. This one ranked pretty high on my tension scale, with the Angels feeling more threatening to me than they had in a very long time. Perhaps it was because the Angels’ original tendency to make their victims “live to death” (with the new information that “nobody survives it twice”) was combined with the idea that “that which holds the image of an Angel becomes itself an Angel”—which they leaned into hard. Whatever made it work so well, Chibnall and Alderton really made the most of the antagonists this time.

It also didn’t hurt that there were only two plot lines to follow this week, and one of them came in the form of interludes. We’ve finally tied Claire and the Angels back into the Doctor and her Companions’ direct experiences, as well as tying them back to the Division. And now Bel (and Vinder) has been tied directly to the Ravagers (Azure). Those cutaways always felt a bit disruptive, but I understand the necessity, as there is both limited time to tell the Big Plot and also a need keep the other threads from escaping the audience’s mind completely.

For me, though, the Angel story was plenty. It was scary and atmospheric and surprising and satisfying. It successfully separated the Doctor from Yaz and Dan, allowing Yaz to be Doctor-y and let Dan sort of be her Companion. It gave a little girl a leadership role in helping to understand the situation. It heightened the mystery of the Division and its role in the Doctor’s history. And it made excellent use of the Angels and their established characteristics.

I also really appreciate that they didn’t allow the Doctor to just barge into someone’s mind like a bull into a china shop this time. When she realizes there’s an Angel hiding inside Claire, she doesn’t force the issue; she asks. “I need to look inside your mind. … Will you give me permission to enter your mind?” And she waits—not patiently, but deliberately—until Claire agrees before she makes any move toward contact.

Over the past several episodes, I’ve become accustomed to seeing things get ticked off Chibnall’s Who-writing bucket list. The next-time trailer suggests that trend will continue next week, with the Ood and Kate Stewart making appearances, but he was remarkably restrained this time, only tossing in a “reverse the polarity of the neutron flow” for good measure. Much as I love to see all of those things together myself, it was refreshing for an episode to feel like… well, more like a single, good episode of Doctor Who again.

I expect the flat-out pace to resume next week, as we gallop into the series finale on December 5. That’s all the more reason to appreciate this little breather that packed so much tempting information into a single episode and still make it feel “cozy.” It’s certainly my favorite of the series so far.