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Tag: Series 13

Solid, If Not Perfect

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.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2021 BBC

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.

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Surviving “Flux”

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

I’m starting to wonder whether or not I will be among the survivors of Flux. I really thought the story was rolling along well, going in an interesting direction last week, but this week… Well, at least all the major threads are finally coming together.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2021 BBC

To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure last series how I felt about rewriting the Doctor’s history so thoroughly. I like the idea of shaking things up and throwing a spanner in the works, so to speak, but making it so Everything Is About the Doctor™ is less interesting to me. And Chibnall is definitely doubling down on that angle with this year’s Flux storyline.

I haven’t quite put my finger on what changed between part four, where I was all in, and part five, which left me feeling somewhat flat. Perhaps it was the assertion/confirmation of how over-the-top “special” the Doctor is in Chibnall’s version of the show: the entire universe is under attack because of her, and she may or may not even be from our universe!

At least Chibnall has been consistent in switching up the style of each episode. That part I still like. This time we’re flipping from plot thread to plot thread with notations for the various time zones (which, in the case of Yaz and Dan (and Jericho), includes various locations). We come in mid-adventure for Yaz, who is taking on a very Doctor-y role, with Dan and Jericho effectively acting as her Companions. It’s a bit reminiscent of Clara in her later days (somewhat worrying, when I think about it like that…).

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A Much-Needed Breather

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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.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2021 BBC

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.

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Watch Out for the Kitchen Sink

Review of Flux: Once, Upon Time
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

Regardless of one’s opinion on how the series-long story as a whole is shaping up, one can’t deny that Flux is an ambitious project. And I appreciate the fact that every episode so far has felt like a different beast.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2021 BBC

At the beginning, we had a “meet the new Companion in the midst of an Earth-based crisis” episode. Then we got an alien historical. Now it’s a futuristic mind-f***. Whatever the flavor-of-the-week is, it’s been different than the week before.

I am also impressed, as a fellow storyteller, at how Chibnall has woven so damn many plot threads together. After last week, there were only two from the first episode that still needed to get tied back in, but before we even got back to any of those eight, he introduced a ninth with “Bel’s Story.” And by the end of the episode, not only that thread and one of the two previously pending ones, but also a thread from the previous series had been incorporated into Flux. Now we just have Claire’s story to connect into this mess (and it looks like that will happen next week—but I’m getting ahead of myself).

More than any other Chibnall-penned episode, this one felt like it could’ve been written by Moffat. It was packed with plot points, and switched among the various threads so quickly a viewer could barely get their bearings before needing to change focus. Moffat has often used that method to great effect to keep the audience from noticing plot holes, but there is still so much of this story left to tell that it’s impossible to make a judgement yet about how well it all holds together.

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“War” Is Purgatory

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

In the past I have often wished for the modern era to return to the Classic era’s serial storytelling style. It seems that this year I’m getting my wish. And although the pace of Flux is quite different than that of a Classic adventure—somewhat dizzying for Doctor Who, in fact—it feels just about right for the story that’s being told.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2021 BBC

Again I find my recent experience with longer-running storylines to serve me well here. Despite so much information being thrown at us in quick succession (yes, Doctor, I made that face, too), none of it feels extraneous. Rather, it feels like we’re in that end-of-the-first-act period where most of the pieces have been moved into place, and the real maneuvering can now begin.

Last time I mentioned that I’d noticed at least eight disparate plot threads entwining themselves with the Doctor and Yaz. While some of them had already come together last time (Karvanista and Dan, Swarm and Azure), several others were still waiting to be pulled into the tapestry. This time, we almost immediately get most of the rest woven together.

First, the Doctor, Yaz, and Dan all find themselves in the Crimean War, face-to-face with Sontarans instead of Russians. They have just enough time to meet up with Mary Seacole before both Companions are whisked away to other parts of time and space. (As an aside, given that the Crimean War is not a direct part of my country’s history, and the American education system is pretty shit at introducing students to anything but the most basic aspects of US history (from its own biased perspective, at that), I knew nothing of Mary Seacole before this episode. I am, however, pleased to see the show continue to highlight real historical women.)

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An Opinion in Flux

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Review of Flux: The Halloween Apocalypse
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

I’m never quite sure what to expect from a new series—even more so this year, when I haven’t even bothered to watch the trailer. I always go in with cautious optimism, trying to give myself the chance to like (or even love) an episode before the analytical part of my brain catches up and starts picking holes in everything. Sadly, this time around I’m mostly just tired.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2021 BBC

As I mentioned before, I don’t seem to have a lot of enthusiasm to spare these days. What energy I do have for viewing has gone almost exclusively into watching various Korean or Chinese (or occasionally Japanese) dramas, depending on what I can find and what strikes my fancy. Oddly enough, I think that puts me in a better place to watch Flux than I might’ve been otherwise.

The pre-credits sequence is all about the Doctor and Yaz getting themselves out of a seemingly hopeless situation. It’s over-the-top, implausible, and exactly the kind of thing that belongs in Doctor Who. (It’s also rich with fodder for fanfic writers, especially the shippers.) But the audience’s introduction to Karvanista, a member of the doglike Lupari species, is just the first of the eight distinct plot threads I counted.

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Confession #150: I’m Too Burnt Out to Care

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Over this past weekend, the news dropped that Series 13 will begin on 31 Oct 2021. Its six episodes, a story arc titled “Flux,” is reportedly the first single-story season since The Trial of a Time Lord (as opposed to, say, Bad Wolf or the Crack, which—while overarching themes—did not dominate every episode of those series). The series will run through the first weekend of December, leaving only three specials, set to air some time in 2022, to round out Whittaker’s—and Chibnall’s—run on Doctor Who.

This should be an exciting time. In the last month, we’ve had not only this confirmation of air dates, but also the announcement that Russell T. Davies will be back at the helm for Series 14. With that information out in the open, it seems likely that the announcement of the casting for the Fourteenth Doctor may also be in the not-too-distant future.

But I just don’t care.

Sure, when the RTD news broke, I was as agog as any seasoned fan. Whether it’s the best thing to happen to Doctor Who since the last time RTD took over, or a harbinger of the end times depends on who you talk to, I suppose, but there’s no doubt that the news sparked a lot of new discussion. The fan base was, at least for a brief moment, energized by an unexpected turn of events.

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Revolutionary Departure

Review of Revolution of the Daleks
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

Maybe I’m just feeling traumatized by all that 2020 threw at us and am thereby in a headspace where I am only prepared to find joy and not fault, but I was pleasantly surprised at how well the 2021 New Year’s special held up upon a second viewing.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2021 BBC

Usually I can really enjoy a new Doctor Who episode on first viewing, but when I stop to reflect, particularly when I’m watching again and preparing a review, I find aspects that bother me on levels anywhere from mild annoyance to outright ruining the episode for me. (This is especially true of those written by Moffat, who specializes in pacing his stories so fast that you don’t have time to notice its flaws that first time.) This time, however, nothing killed the buzz.

Not to say I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. I think I’m too numb these days to be that effusive. But since I didn’t go into the episode expecting great things—it was a holiday special; I wanted a romp, and that’s what I got—I didn’t come out disappointed. In fact, I came out feeling fairly impressed. Because the thing about Revolution of the Daleks is that its purpose, more than being a holiday special, was to be the farewell story for Ryan and Graham. And in that respect, it did a damn good job.

I think it’s fair to say at this point that the audience has become pretty inured to Daleks. (Terry Nation’s estate is doing no one any favors by insisting that Doctor Who use the damn things every calendar year in order to keep the usage rights.) Personally I kind of roll my eyes every time they show up again, so the entire Dalek storyline was very peripheral to my experience of this episode. What made the special special was the return of Captain Jack Harkness (as more than a teaser) and the ending of two Companions’ time in the TARDIS.

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