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.
