Doctor Who: Flux review (spoilers)
Review Overview
Energy
9Space
6Time
3Mark Harrison | On 19, Dec 2021
Warning: This review contains spoilers. Not caught up? Read our spoiler-free review of the opening episode here.
“The end of the universe – I always wondered what it would feel like.” That this quote comes from the Doctor in the very first episode speaks to the enormity of Season 13’s scale. Presented as Doctor Who’s first six-part serial since 1976’s The Armageddon Factor, and the first season-long story since Colin Baker’s Trial of a Time Lord arc, Flux would be remarkably big even if it weren’t produced with Covid-19 safety measures in place.
Catching up with Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor and her companion Yasmin Khan (Mandip Gill) on the hunt for answers about last season’s revelations, we’re immediately thrown the kind of crisis normally reserved for season finales. It starts with Swarm (Sam Spruell) and Azure (Rochenda Sandall), two powerful foes seeking revenge on the Doctor for stopping them back in her days working for the mysterious Division.
After these new-old enemies commence a devastating attack on the universe, the Doctor and Yaz work with food bank volunteer Dan Lewis (John Bishop), grumpy war-dog Karvanista (Craige Elys) and space pilot Vinder (Jacob Anderson). But as the Flux ripples through all of time and space, enemies including the Sontarans, the Weeping Angels and the mysterious Grand Serpent (Craig Parkinson) all stand to gain from the ensuing chaos and confusion.
Head writer Chris Chibnall writes every instalment of the season, also sharing a co-writing credit with Maxine Alderton (Season 12’s The Haunting of Villa Diodati) on Chapter 4. Although this is a very unusual season of New Who, you can still map what we’ve come to expect from his vision of the show – a barnstorming opener, a lacklustre finale and, in between, a morbid fixation on plot over character.
To be completely fair, the sheer ambition keeps the energy going all season. Beyond the bombardment of characters and incidents, there’s a revival of the good old-fashioned Doctor Who cliffhanger, complete with next week’s chapter title like the old William Hartnell ones used to do. It’s a great way of maintaining the tradition of appointment-viewing status while also doing a story more tailored for binge-watchers later on.
Watched one week at a time, this is dizzyingly entertaining stuff, but the recurring problem of Chibnall trying to compete with Netflix and Disney+ comes to a head when you look at this altogether as one story. Whether it lasts one episode or six weeks, the central plot doesn’t have a satisfying resolution, and three of the six episodes look like they’re moving pieces around the board rather than unfolding more of the story.
The opener styles this out by setting every one of the show’s big alarms all at once, and Chapter 3 (Once, Upon Time) is,?at best, some of the most dense sci-fi storytelling the show has ever attempted – and, at worst, a more ambitious way of delivering exposition and lore than the Master reading the episode’s Wikipedia entry to the Doctor while she stands still. It’s in the fifth and sixth chapters, serving as the traditional two-part season finale, that the season starts to run out of time and space to wrap things up.
The serial approach came about as a direct result of the pandemic, and you can see Chapters 2 and 4 being episodes of a more typical season, with the Flux elements bolted on – it’s possible these were the most complete scripts before plans changed, but either way they’re the standout chapters. War of the Sontarans restores the potato heads’ militaristic might without forsaking their innate comedy value and Village of the Angels is another cracker from Alderton, who once again nails the character fundamentals within the machinations of the season arc.
Chibnall kicks off the season by establishing a fun dynamic between the Doctor and Yaz, but dispenses with it by splitting them up for most of the season, almost without a thought. Whittaker is still saddled with technobabble and lawful-neutral speechifying but, given big stakes, she racks up many of her best scenes as the Doctor.
Meanwhile, Gill is on track to be one of the longest-serving regulars ever, and it’s inexcusable how Yaz is still given such short shrift. Bishop is endearing from the off, but he’s just another guest character who gets stuff to do at the companion’s expense.
Speaking of guest characters, the solid line-up includes Anderson and Thaddea Graham as a star-crossed couple, Parkinson as a suitably slippery villain, and Kevin McNally on top form as paranormal scientist Eustacius Jericho. But Spruell and Sandall definitely steal the show, wearing the heck out of their superb make-up and dominating every scene they’re in as the Big Bads.
Doctor Who: Flux is a sprawling, visually splendid epic that somehow got made during a global crisis that would usually have flummoxed productions on this scale. However, it’s also better at that switch-your-brain-off spectacle than it is at the show’s unique strengths, which is not a good look. Early on, it’s often entertaining, but the bar should be higher than That Netflix Show You Put On in the Background. Boosted by its production value and casting but hindered by its scripts and pacing, this end of the universe starts with a bang, but ends with a whimper.
Doctor Who: Flux is available on BBC iPlayer until November 2022
Doctor’s notes, chapter-by-chapter (contains spoilers)
Chapter One: The Halloween Apocalypse
Perhaps the most “extra” episode of the show since 2005, this one throws a lot of sticks that Chibnall barely starts retrieving until the finale. At its heart, the gag that there’s a species of over-zealous good-boy, dog-faced aliens who race across the universe to protect their person at a moment’s notice is one you’ll only find in Doctor Who.
Chapter Two: War of the Sontarans
The Flux-ening begins in an episode that finds the Doctor and Mary Seacole fighting Sontarans in the 17th century, Dan and his parents discovering the joys of clattering them in the back of the neck in present-day Liverpool, and Yaz meeting both Vinder and our Big Bads on a planet that shouldn’t exist. It’s the only episode where you can see the standalone story-of-the-week that might have been… and Yaz isn’t part of that bit.
Chapter Three: Once, Upon Time
Somewhere in this, there’s the germ of Cloud Atlas-style rhyming of characters and themes as the ravages of time are unleashed on space, but it’s all maddeningly superficial. Thaddea Graham is the star of the show this time around, even if playing Bel’s connection to Vinder as a third-act reveal fatally affects the pacing of the season, with scenes that should be in this chapter popping up all over in subsequent episodes instead.
Chapter Four: Village of the Angels
As mentioned, Alderton knocks her second Doctor Who episode out of the park. The arc elements still rankle – what were they playing at with that sub-Marvel mid-credits scene? – but placing the Weeping Angels in the 1960s again lends them the kind of post-war thematic heft usually reserved for big-hitters such as the Daleks or Cybermen. They’re cleverly positioned as a monster that must be observed, no matter how scared you are watch. It not only finds scary new things to do with the Angels, but also tailors their brand of evil to this non-interventionist Doctor – and what a cliffhanger!
Chapter Five: Survivors of the Flux
Effectively Part One of Two, this is where the enormity of wrapping everything up starts to loom large. Chibnall’s counter-intuitive storytelling starts overpowering things too, whether it’s the resolution of that Angel cliffhanger doing something different narratively than it does visually (she’s been turned into stone, but just to move her to the next episode) or Tecteun’s “we’re not so different, you and I” patter concentrating on the wrong similarities.
Chapter Six: The Vanquishers
This is an inevitably disappointing finale that traipses through temporal trisection, universal mayhem, personal grudges, portentous backstory teasers and loads of big new ideas that are explained at length only moments before they matter, but still finds room for 7 billion dead dogs floating in space. Woof.
Anyway, the surplus of plotting finally overruns the story, eating it up like so many unmentioned planets and species that apparently didn’t really matter. Looked cool, though, eh?
Appendices
– So, in short, the Division is the Time Lord black-ops unit that the Doctor worked for before Tecteun wiped her memory and made her regenerate into a child who grows up on Gallifrey and goes to the Academy and steals a TARDIS. Perturbed by the Thirteenth Doctor finding out about them and exposing them, the Division unleash Swarm and Azure to destroy the universe while they travel safely to a new one, using Passenger forms and the seed bank as arks for every form of life. There’s a clear setup to undo this damage in the finale, but they seem to forget about it by the end.
– If you’ve got BritBox and you’re looking for Classic Doctor Who connections to this serial, you can see the First Doctor dealing with “that business at the Post Office tower” in The War Machines, (Season 3, 1966), discover how UNIT was really established in The Invasion, (Season 6, 1968) and learn how the Sontarans claimed Earth in The Time Warrior (Season 11, 1974). We also put together this list of classic series arcs, pre-Flux…
– What’s growing increasingly clear is that this is still a story in progress and whatever else Flux manages to achieve, it does start wrapping up the going concerns of the Thirteenth Doctor’s era. Chibnall and Whittaker have three 2022 specials in which to finish that story, starting with Eve of the Daleks on New Year’s Day – in the meantime, we just wish he’d finished this one more satisfactorily.