Review of Flux: The Vanquishers
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.
I didn’t hate it! I know that sounds like I’m damning The Vanquishers with faint praise, but for the final installment of a multi-parter—especially a series finale—in modern Who, that’s actually a pretty glowing endorsement on my part.
To use a gymnastics metaphor, this series was attempting a high-difficulty routine with lots of twists, flips, and unexpected combinations. It’s been looking pretty good in the air, but the question we’ve all had on our mind is whether or not it could stick the landing.
I don’t think I can honestly say it felt like a stuck landing to me, but neither did it miss and fall on its ass. There was a little hop there, worth a deduction to the final score, but I’m a little surprised to discover I don’t think it’s worth more than about one tenth of a point.
To analyze how this final installment performed, we need to look at the series as a whole. Way back in the first episode, we got a ton of seemingly disparate story threads thrown at us: Yaz and the Doctor, Karvanista, Williamson, Dan and Diane, Swarm, Azure, Claire and the Angels, Vinder, the Sontarans. Later we added Bel, the Grand Serpent, Jericho, Tecteun (as incarnation of Division), an Ood, and Kate Stewart to the mix. It seemed nigh impossible to tie them all together in a coherent and satisfying way, especially in the context of the overall threat of the Flux.
I shouldn’t have been surprised that the Doctor herself needed to be split three ways through most of this episode in order to keep up with everything. I suppose that is the ultimate way to tie it all together. We have Karvanista!Doctor battling Sontarans with the Lupar and Bel, which pulls the Grand Serpent into that thread. We have Division!Doctor, with the help of the Ood, facing the torments Swarm and Azure visit up on her (including the nightmare house from the beginning of the second episode—her lost selves rather than the TARDIS, as I’d surmised). And we have Yaz!Doctor, finally reunited with her dear friend in Williamson’s tunnels, along with Dan, Jericho, Kate, and Williamson himself before they collect Claire from 1967, adding her to their collection of friends.
Because Yaz!Doctor has access to the TARDIS, she is able to reunite (though not reintegrate) with Karvanista!Doctor. Most of the gang is thus together when Vinder and Di call the Doctor for a rescue that results in two much-anticipated reunions. Once all three parts of the Doctor are put back together, then, the plethora of disparate threads have coalesced into one (somewhat messy) whole. I wasn’t entirely sure that could be done, but Chibnall proved me wrong.
The real question, of course, is whether or not he did it well.
For the most part, I think the answer is yes. I liked all the “good guy” characters and loved-to-hate all the “bad guy” ones. I found the ties among all of them believably crafted. But Tecteun’s sudden dissolution at the end of the previous episode—never to be mentioned again!—felt very sloppy. And don’t get me started on the Flux.
Okay, okay… I know we can’t just let that slide. Whoever made it happen, the Flux is really the ultimate Big Bad of the series. (Says so right on the tin.) What it really was, and therefore how it could be resolved, was always going to be something that needed to be addressed directly.
But Chibnall tried to make it kind of sciencey (ooh! antimatter!), rather than technobabbley (binary demispecies with inter-body bio-projection!), and that is where Doctor Who stories almost always fall apart for me. Granted, it was nowhere near as bad as Kill the Moon (nothing is as bad as Kill the Moon), but I can’t even explain how wrong the whole “matter slows antimatter down” idea is. Nevertheless, I’ll give it a try.
When matter and antimatter meet, they recombine to form energy (a process known as “annihilation“), according to Einstein’s famous energy-mass equivalence (E = mc2). Direct conversion of a mere 1-lb mass of matter/antimatter into energy would yield more than 11 billion kWh of energy! Yet the Flux supposedly swept across the universe destroying (partial?!?) star systems left and right without any sign of the kind of energy such annihilation events would actually cause.
Thus even when I can suspend my disbelief enough to accept that the Passenger form had “infinite matter” inside it (???), I can’t quite get past the absence of extreme energy output from the process of it “Hoovering up” the Flux’s antimatter. This is where Flux really took a hop on its landing for me.
I was also mildly disappointed that Jericho didn’t make it out, but I suppose he was the least objectionable sacrifice to the cause (because apparently we can’t possibly have an “everybody lives” moment and still have the show be taken seriously). But everything else got tied up into tidy little bows: Williamson went back to his tunnels; Karvanista (okay, the Lupari were also a sacrifice to the cause) got sent off with Vinder, Bel, and their sprog; Claire and Kate got left back where they belonged in 2021; Diane turned Dan down (at least for the time being) so he didn’t have enough tying him to home to prevent him from traveling with the Doctor and Yaz; and those two finally started a long-overdue heart-to-heart. (I am so pleased that Jodie finally got to show the softer side of her Doctor, though I’m totally rolling my eyes that it wasn’t “safe” to do so before now.)
Now that the Thirteenth Doctor has had her own version of the “dire prophecy of impending doom” that some of her predecessors have had, with a strong implication that the Master will be behind it, we just have to wait to see how Chibnall plays her departure. For now, though, I think we can breathe a little easier, knowing that Flux gave a solid routine, even without a perfect landing.