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 - Village Of The Angels

Village People

Doctor Who Flux
Chapter Four
Village Of The Angels
Airdate: 21st November 2021
BBC 1

Warning: Spoilers sweetie!

Okay, so this week’s episode, the fourth installment of the latest Doctor Who serial Flux, is Village Of The Angels. Set mostly in 1967, it’s kind of got an almost John Wyndham feel to it to start off with... once The Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) has saved Yaz (Mandip Gill), Dan (John Bishop) and herself from the Weeping Angels who had invaded the TARDIS at the end of the previous episode (by ejecting them under the blind of more scientific, jargon laden jiggery pokery.

So they all find themselves in a village on the evening of 21st November 1967 (literally 54 years to the day before this episode was broadcast), with a group of villagers trying to find a 10 year old girl who has gone missing. Well... Yaz and Dan find out where she is fairly quickly, as an Angel gets them and whizzes them back to 1901, where they find the girl but in a deserted version of the village which has been ‘quantum extracted’... the borders of this version of the world slowly shrinking to the bleak void of space just outside the borders of the land mass.

Meanwhile, The Doctor finds Claire (Annabel Scholey), the woman from the first episode, The Halloween Apocalypse (reviewed here) in 1967 but it doesn’t quite explain why, when The Doctor first met her, she had somehow taken ‘the long way home’ without ageing... and I don’t think they’re going to explain that now, either. It’s really sloppy writing but I suspect it’s going to remain another of those interminable loose ends. By the finish, the rogue Weeping Angel which, it turns out, has inhabited Claire’s mind to get The Doctor to help it stay safe from its fellow Angels (who work for the mysterious Division, who we saw the other version of The Doctor working for last week)... changes the deal and instead uses Claire to lure The Doctor, her memories of working for The Division still wiped, to a point where she can be ‘recalled’ and then turned into a Weeping Angel herself!

Also meanwhile... Bel (Thaddea Graham) is still looking for Vinder (Jacob Anderson) and the search continues as they manage to miss each other on a planet as Bel works the other, post-Flux end of the story involving the villainous Swarm. I'm now wondering if the baby (or one of the babies plural, possibly) inside her is actually The Doctor, to be honest.

Okay, so the Weeping Angels were absolutely brilliant in their very first Steven Moffat penned story Blink... no question it was one of the best episodes of the show ever. However, since then, Moffat continued to use them in ways which severely compromised or made mistakes about the rules under which the ‘quantum locked if you observe them’ Angels function and, alas, while this particular episode was thoroughly entertaining, it continued the traditions of a) breaking the rules and b) further draining their impact with another new element to their personalities we’ve not seen before.

The first problem is, if there’s someone else observing them at the same time you are then they can’t move in on you, right? You’d think that would be an easy rule not to break but, no, dramatic effect means that this is going to happen even though there are clearly eyes on them a couple of times. And, no, running through the wet paint of your painted in corner by saying ‘oh, don’t get in front of them otherwise we can’t see them’ is a complete cop out and, frankly, a load of rubbish... you’d still be able to see a bit of a shoulder or a foot.

Second problem... yeah, due to holding on to one of their possessed humans they can now communicate by first speaking through her and then speaking through... I dunno. Not sure but giving these previously silent and therefore more disturbing and sinister stone cold killers the power of speech really robs them of that unique quality. They instantly become less scary... especially since you can now at least have a stab at negotiating with them. It robs them of any scariness and softens them up once again.

Also, yeah, totally called it back in episode one that The Doctor and the Angels would be working together in some capacity and, though it was a short alliance, I’m not completely sure we’ve got to the point yet where that particular team-up might not be needed again. It’s a good cliff hanger to leave things on... The Doctor now a stone angel about to be returned to The Division while leaving her companions in an ever decreasing 1901 and, yeah, you have to wonder where they are going with this... particularly since there are only two more episodes left to go. I’m really dreading the ending to be honest but I’m keeping my fingers crossed for it to not just ask another load of uninteresting questions about The Doctor’s origins... which we’ve not needed to hear about for the majority of the show’s 58 year history.

Not much else to say though. There were some nice visual references which recalled Amy Pond’s first encounter with the Weeping Angels from Matt Smith’s first season and Village Of The Angels was certainly better than the other three episodes so far. It is very much becoming a proper serial too, although it does still feel like two stories threaded together after the fact. What this means, though, is you do need to watch these 'in order', to make any sense of them (and even then, you might not have much luck with that as far as episode three is concerned) so, yeah, nice episode, deeply flawed when it comes to the ‘guest antagonists’ and definitely not a jumping on point. As usual, I’ll keep my eye on it and see how this one develops. Oh and by the way... those old 1967 television sets were a lot heavier to carry than that, I believe.

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.