Doctor Who Flux - The Vanquishers

Split Infinity

Doctor Who Flux
Chapter Six - The Vanquishers
Airdate: 5th December 2021
BBC 1

Warning: More spoilers.

Wow... saved the universe again then.

The final part of Doctor Who Flux, The Vanquishers was, well, it was a bit anti-climactic really. Once again Jodie Whittaker as The Doctor, companioned with her regular ‘besties’ Yaz (Mandip Gill) and Dan (John Bishop) defend the Universe from the evil swarm. Teamed up with Professor Jericho, Bel, Vinder, The Dog Man, Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and Diane from previous episodes. And absolutely nothing is revealed about what the heck any of it is really about by the conclusion of the show.

The novelty aspect this week is The Doctor somehow fragmented and split into three splinters of herself to work with her companions in various time zones simultaneously to defeat the big bad guys The Swarm... and all the other monsters such as Sontarans, Cybermen and Daleks. As usual, the scriptwriters attempt to blind the audience with scientific jargon rather than explain the dynamics of both this transformation and the ultimate defeat of the Flux... and The Swarm. Well, okay, I kind of understood the clichéd old matter VS anti-matter tactic but, yeah, it seemed such a basic idea that one wonders why pretty much anyone in the rest of the universe hadn’t thought of it first.

So... acting was all very good and the old “contact” exclamation to establish a mental link, this time with two Doctors of the same incarnation, was a nice little Easter egg for long term fans who remember stories like The Three Doctors I guess (review coming to this blog in 2022, fingers crossed). They even threw in a character death to try to keep up the audience interest but, nah, it was an okayish episode I guess but that tactic didn’t really do much for me and it was telegraphed so early... and with a character who’s only been in the two previous episodes... that it felt a bit flat, to be honest.

The real kicker on this is the fact that, asides from The Doctor being aggressively warned by the essence of time manifesting as herself towards the end... we get no clue as to what this has all been about in terms of her past and her links to division. Indeed, the dog man even, it turns out, was once her loyal friend in the days she has no memory of... but if he ever talks about it, an implant put in his blood by The Division will let out a poison and he’d be dead within three seconds, so he can’t tell her anything. Vinder and Bel’s baby was an equal wash out... it’s possibly nobody special at all, unless they decide to bring these two characters back in one of the three specials next year.

So all we have left is a tearful Doctor, who is once again travelling the universe, this time with Yaz and Dan as her constant companions... and the Timelord pocket watch which holds all the memories which she’s lost. But, rather than open it and get full disclosure of her past lives, she instead buries it in the heart of the TARDIS with instructions for her to never be allowed to get a hold of it.

It’s interesting because the special effects were all fine (as much as they could be in a show which has a long standing history of having special effects which aren’t always that fine) and the episode was really going for a kind of epic look to it. However, for all the whiz bang glitz and light shows, it felt perhaps the least epic of any of the installments which made up this six part mini series and, certainly, not really something worthy of what some of the more interesting episodes this year have been teasingly building too. At least, that’s what I thought.

And so once again I am left with nothing much more to say about this one. Sorry it’s such a short review, again... but Doctor Who Flux - The Vanquishers really didn’t do much for me and, since the whole serial was so wedded to the underlying story arc, it kinda takes the other episodes down in flames with it too. I mean, it’s kinda okay but, yeah, maybe I’m expecting more from Doctor Who these days. I think we could really do with a return to form, to be honest. Not exactly my favourite episode or season and, well, I still think the writing needs to be less lazy on the science and, just a bit better than this. I love Jodie as The Doctor but, once again, I wouldn’t recommend this year’s series as being in any way special. But, you know, it’s just in a slump. That can change... I’ll be watching on New Year’s Day, for sure.

Doctor Who Flux - Survivors Of The Flux

Eon Flux

Doctor Who Flux
Chapter Five -
Survivors Of The Flux
Airdate: 28th November 2021
BBC 1

Warning: More spoilers.

Okay, so that was a fairly good episode as it happens and I would probably rate it a lot higher if it hadn’t proceeded from one huge... I’m going to call it a mistake or perhaps, more of an ‘error in judgement’ when some important information was perhaps cut for time?

So, yeah, this is going to be a short review but, for the most part, Doctor Who Flux - Survivors Of The Flux, was an exciting and thoroughly entertaining installment. So The Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) is not an Angel after all, just was shipped between universes in that form to where The Division are polishing off their last universe before travelling into another iteration of the multiverse.

Meanwhile, Yaz (Mandip Gill), Dan (John Bishop) and Professor Jericho (Kevin McNally), who had all been left in a shrinking village in last weeks episode, Village Of The Angels (reviewed here) are off on some kind of quest given to them by a hologram of The Doctor left in Yaz’s care, which activated once she had been separated from The Doctor for more than two weeks. So they are travelling all over the world of the early 1900s (and have been for three years) in search of various non-essential ‘busy work’ clues to give them something to do in the script... and that’s my one big problem with this episode. As entertaining as it was. Um... yeah... so does anyone remember that the village they were trapped in was getting rapidly smaller until they would soon end up as corpses floating in the void of space? Well then how the heck can they be globe hopping when it was made pretty clear that they were currently inhabiting a pretty finite version of what remained of Earth? So unless some pretty necessary information was left out of the story for some inexplicable reason... this makes no sense at all. What the heck?

In other story strands... Bel (Thaddea Graham) and Vinder (Jacob Anderson) are still looking for each other and keep playing with different parts of the story ark. Are they The Doctor’s parent’s who leave their child at the end of a wormhole or is something else less revelatory coming? Remembering we have only one episode left of this series.

And, of course The Doctor’s memories were suppressed in a Time Lord style pocket watch... except, hasn’t The Doctor (in David Tennant form) hidden his memories in a pocket watch before now? So, yeah, how does that work then? That must be traumatic. A kind of memory wipe on top of a memory wipe and, if so, then why weren’t all The Doctor’s memories restored to him in one hit back in the Tennant days? I guess this is why people need... I don’t know... some kind of show bible maybe, to refer to so they don’t get their stories bogged down with such inconsistencies. Yeah, okay, I’m being a touch sarcastic here, I’m sure they must have one but then why do they ignore it constantly? Because if someone like me can remember stuff like this, well I’m sure everyone else does too.

Okay, so... other than all this... yeah, really enjoyed this episode. Mandip Gill and John Bishop seem to have good chemistry together and Kevin McNally makes a nice third. It was nice hearing a sound bite from Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart during the early years of UNIT in 1968, maybe a month or two before he first met The Doctor as seen in the Patrick Troughton era story The Web Of Fear (reviewed here). And it was nice seeing Jemma Redgrave back as his daughter Kate Lethbridge-Stewart in the 2021 section of the story too.

And... yeah, I still don’t like the main villains in this and I still think it’s a deeply flawed series but, okay, this one was one of the more watchable episodes this year. I think how the show finally falls with the long term fans all hinges on next week’s episode which, honestly, will have move fairly rapidly to a quick conclusion to this season, for sure. I wonder if we’ll lose the companions by the end of that episode?

So yeah, short review from me again for Survivors Of The Flux and, I hope I’m still caring about the characters a tiny bit after any revelations visited upon us next week. I guess I’ll report back soon on that one.
 

Doctor Who Flux - Once, Upon Time

No Time Or Reason

Doctor Who Flux
Chapter Three -
Once, Upon Time
Airdate: 14th November 2021
BBC 1

Chapter 3 of Doctor Who - Flux, subtitled Once, Upon Time was... well it was better than last week’s episode in that it was a little more keeping with the first part of this series. As in... The Doctor (Jodie Whitaker) saves her companions Yaz (Mandip Gill), Dan (John Bishop) and Vinder (Jacob Anderson) by unleashing a time storm or some such, which throws them all into a kind of central time network where each of her friends are hidden in fluctuating parts of their own time streams... past present and future. As in... yeah, I really didn’t have a clue what was going on most of the time and so the puzzle box element of the story comes back into the foreground where the audience is giving too much information too quickly for it to stick or make sense but... I suspect that was the idea (and that’s what passes for writing these days).

But, I liked that element about it and because of this, well... at least it never got dull.

There are some nice appearances in this one too, as each of the companions get to re-enact different parts of their lives and sometimes this includes one or other of them somehow standing in for someone they knew... or are yet to know. This includes Jodie’s Doctor trying to frequently jump in on them at different points of their lives to try and explain what’s going on (as much to the audience as them, of course) and constantly getting pulled out again.

And The Doctor also has the same problem where she keeps seeing a future... or possibly a past... where she is in command of some kind of military attack on the room where the time guardians are located... but she’s also seeing a future (or past) of herself. As in, her reflection in one of her possible timelines involves the re-appearance of Jo Martin, who was revealed last season as a mystery incarnation of The Doctor herself. Now, Jodie is still convinced that this other Doctor is somehow an earlier incarnation... which would involve some kind of severe memory wipe it has to be said. I’m not so confident of that conclusion and still think it could be a far future incarnation of The Doctor. But, of course, we’ll have to see... assuming they are going to bother to tie up these long standing loose threads in the remaining three episodes.

Okay, so, it’s true I liked it a lot better than War Of The Sontarans (reviewed here) but, honestly, it was still weaker than the first episode, The Halloween Apocalypse (reviewed here), it has to be said. There were some nice monster sightings though... we had a brief appearance from the Daleks, (fully hover converted at this point), a gun battle with the Cybermen and a couple of quick sightings of the Weeping Angels (the next episode is apparently entitled Village Of The Angels and looks like a more traditional episode, from the quick preview trailer on the end of this episode at least).

There was some nice character work with a character called Bel, too... played by Thaddea Graham. Her navigation through a post-Flux universe and relationship to one of the four main cast in this series was nicely revealed by the end of the episode, although her story too, as yet, is left unresolved.

It was kinda confusing a lot of the time but that’s okay, I’d rather be confused than bored any day and, as usual, Jodie and the other actors all knock it out of the park in terms of how they bring their characters to life. All that being said though... I guess I am getting a little bored with constantly being battered with questions and then being teased a possible solution. That’s nothing new for this series, however... I’ve been thinking this for a few years now. I’m hoping the writers (mostly show runner Chris Chibnall this series) can give us an ending to this one worth working towards because, truth be told, not a lot of the end games from the last six or seven years (where story arcs have been hidden in regular episodes) have been much good, it seems to me. So, yeah, Doctor Who Flux - Once, Upon Time is a nice enough and engaging episode but it really does leave you wanting some kind of more positive, coherent narrative to the admittedly brilliant set up. Again, a short review but I’ve not really got a heck of a lot to say about new Doctor Who these days. Let’s see how it goes.

Doctor Who Flux - War Of The Sontarans

 


Wok Around The Clock

Doctor Who Flux
Chapter Two
War Of The Sontarans
Airdate: 7th November 2021
BBC 1

So Jodie Whittaker returns as The Doctor once again in the next installment of the Doctor Who Flux storyline, along with Mandip Gill as regular companion Yaz and John Bishop as new companion Dan. In this episode, the Flux which took a charge at the TARDIS in the previous episode causes said TARDIS to be thrown back to the Crimean War in a story segment called War Of The Sontarans.

And that’s exactly what the three of them find in the Crimean War... that Russia never was and that Sontar exists in its place, with the Sontarans fighting the British. They also meet historical nurse Mary Jane Seacole and, when Yaz and Dan are mysteriously flung out of this time zone and location by forces unknown, The Doctor uses Mary to help defeat the Sontarans, with a little bit of help from Dan, armed with a Wok to bash the Sontarans up on the little weak spot on the back of their heads (their probic vent)... and his designated Dog-man, who have now pitched up back in 21st Century Liverpool, which is also now run by Sontarans.

Meanwhile, Yaz and a guy who was scooped up from his galactic probe in last week’s episode, called Vinder and played by Jacob Anderson (who was apparently a star of Game Of Thrones? I’ll ask my girlfriend.), seem to be caught up in a scheme by the super villains of the piece, who call themselves The Swarm. They have partially destroyed the guardians of a structure which prevents all of time from doing nasty and unexpected things which, frankly, it’s doing a lot of right now... what with the Sontarans launching a kind of time pincer attack at various points in Earth’s history with their collective cry of “Sontar-Ha!”. That’s their basic tenet I guess (I’m here all week folks!).

And... it’s not a great episode by any stretch. And it’s also not a terrible one. I don’t particularly like The Swarm all that much but they are certainly an intimidating and ruthless lot of villains, for sure. I’ve never liked the Sontarans all that much, even when I watched them back in the 1970s when they made their first appearance opposite Jo Pertwee’s incarnation of The Doctor. The only time I enjoyed their presence was when they introduced Strax into the series.

So I was particularly annoyed at the missed opportunity that one of the Sontarans fighting here didn’t get left behind in Victorian times and turn out to be the very same Strax... and that’s how he ended up on Earth with a Silurian and her human wife as a Victorian detective team, as featured in previous episodes of the show during Matt Smith’s tenure. That being said, I kept thinking that would happen because Dan Starkey, who played Strax the Sontaran, is also in this episode and, well, one Sontaran looks and sounds more or less the same as the next, I guess.

But while I’m talking about Strax... another thing which annoyed me is the fact that we are told the Sontarans need to collectively return to their ships for seven minutes out of every 27 hours to top up their uniforms, which apparently allow them to survive on Earth. First I’ve heard of it, especially since Strax was as likely to be wearing an evening jacket or suit for dinner in previous episodes of the show set in Victorian England... so, yeah, just make those new rules up with no concern for the continuity errors you are causing in the previous stories guys... I’m sure the Doctor Who fan base will thank you for that one.  

Okay, the special effects were okay for a BBC production, the actors all good and the story was, well, it would have made a good Target novelisation back in the 1970s but this felt a little underwhelming as an episode, it has to be said. But, like I also implied, not so terrible that it was as bad as some of the stories we’ve been getting over the last few years. I was a bit upset that, once again, the writers played the old ‘the alien race is fleeing but the somewhat evil human ally is going to take the opportunity, when their back is turned, to slaughter them anyway’ card... we’ve seen this done so many times on the show that it’s become an unloved cliché as far as I’m concerned.

And that’s me done on episode two of Doctor Who Flux: War Of The Sontarans. A very short review and I apologise for that but I’m not going to pass judgement too quickly because I’m aware that we are only seeing one fragment of the overall story here... although it looks like they’re just hitting set pieces and then linking it with an underlying arc to help cement unrelated adventures together, to be honest. Although, there’s more of the underlying arc showing than there usually would be in recent, previous seasons, I’ll give them that. So, yeah, anyway, next week we’re back with the Cybermen making an appearance so... lets see how that one goes. We’ll be halfway through the series already by then.

Doctor Who Flux - The Halloween Apocalypse

Man’s Best Friend

Doctor Who Flux
Chapter One
The Halloween Apocalypse
Airdate: 31st October 2021 BBC 1

Well that was alright.  

 Doctor Who returns to our screens once more after a lengthy absence and, despite my misgivings about the show because, frankly, it’s been hit and miss just lately... mostly miss... it turns out that the first episode of the new mini series episode of Doctor Who Flux,  The Halloween Apocalypse, is quite an exciting and interesting set up for what I hope will be a thrilling story arc binding this exceptionally and inexcusably short season together. Despite all my expectations and after, it has to be said, a fairly shaky opening.

That opening being The Doctor, played by the always wonderful (despite the scripts she gets) Jodie Whittaker and her remaining companion Yaz, played by Mandip Gill, escaping from an elabourate deathtrap in about as dodgy a way as possible. Why is it remote controlled death probes can’t shoot for toffees? However, after this elabourate opening, things immediately get exciting and, as importantly, intriguing as we watch the mystery set up of a new story develop.

First things first, we get a new companion introduced called Dan (played by someone called John Bishop who is apparently famous but, I confess, I’ve not seen him before). We also have his potential love interest introduced but, Dan’s too busy being kidnapped by a dog-man kind of alien and having his house shrunk down to something the size of a fist to be worrying about that too much just yet.

Meanwhile, The Doctor and Yaz are trying to stop the Earth from being destroyed but there’s something The Doctor is not telling her... that she keeps having visions of an ancient enemy who she doesn’t recognise (my money at the moment is on another incarnation of The Master and, I suspect, his similarly ugly alien companion may possibly be a future version of The Doctor herself... but I’m probably wrong about that one... it’s probably a bit too obvious).

Then, when The Doctor and Yaz ‘rescue Dan’, it turns out that the various ships of the particular species aligned with dogs really are man’s best friend. They are each assigned to one human to get the humans off the Earth before the planet is destroyed by... The Flux.

Now the Flux is some kind of energy source which is eating through the entire universe and, so far it seems, The Doctor can do nothing to stop it. Also thrown into the mix is a woman on Earth who isn’t recognised by The Doctor but she definitely knows her. She is taking ‘the long way home’, which I assume means she’s existing on Earth and has somehow been thrown back in time and she’s just waiting to catch up... somewhere in our future. This is confirmed soon after, in a way, when she runs afoul of a Weeping Angel who whisks her back to Liverpool in 1820 by the looks of it. Although how she’s not aged by the time she returns to 2021 if she originally went back in time the same way also throws up questions about her actual species. Also, don't quote me on this but... why am I getting the feeling the angels aren't actually working ‘against’ The Doctor this time around? Hmm... time will tell.

And it’s in Liverpool of 1820 that a man is building a mystery project which, you at first think might be quite sinister but, with the way the episode has gone so far, I suspect is some kind of ark or rescue structure built in our past to rescue humanity in the future. I expect we’ll find out at some point towards the mid-way part of the story arc, is my guess.

Throw into the mix Dan’s love interest, who is kidnapped by the main bad guys (identity unknown but, like I said, I had my suspicions) and a group of rowdy Sontarans... and we have a recipe for success. And if that wasn’t enough, the TARDIS also seems to be in a state of flux, with new doors popping up in the interior... and also a special message for long standing fans of the show. By which I mean, the dreaded cloister bell in the TARDIS is ringing the house down... and as every Doctor Who fan has known since the cloister bell was first introduced in Tom Baker’s final story in 1981, this means bad news is coming. Could it be the bad news that the Flux is now coming for the TARDIS and is about to disintegrate our heroes? Well, not all bad news because, at the very least, Doctor Who has become a serial again like it was in the old days... along with a cliff hanger ending which crosscuts to all of the important characters included in the mix thus far (and I believe a fair few classic monsters will be turning up in the story over the next few weeks... Daleks and Cybermen for sure).

And, yeah, apart from the rough opening to the episode, I had a blast with this one all the way through. My only other problem other than the first five minutes was that, for an episode which is partially set in 2021, why the heck was nobody wearing Covid masks. We already knew Covid 19 exists in the Doctor Who universe because we had a very short clip of Jodie as The Doctor telling kids to wash their hands and mask up, right at the start of the pandemic last year. So is everyone in this episode just being completely irresponsible for not masking up? Not sure what’s going on here but it seems a bit of a strange oversight considering that the earlier short suggested it’s ‘a thing’ in the world of Doctor Who.

But there we are... I liked the set up, liked the new assistant, Jodie and Mandip were pretty cool and the pace was fast and furious, what with the amount of different story elements already thrown at us. I hope show runner Chibnal can land a decent conclusion this time around when we get to episode six is all I’m keeping my fingers crossed for right now. This episode was a blast and... long may it continue.