Doctor Who’s Flux finale falls flat
Jodie Whittaker's final full season ends with too much plot, not enough heart
TV Reviews Doctor Who
“Can you not say things like we’re supposed to know what they are?”
It’s funny when writer/showrunner Chris Chibnall gives his characters lines that feel like a meta critique of his own writing. Going into this six-part serialized Flux event, my hope was that it would give Chibnall a chance to course correct some of his writing pitfalls; to space out the overexposition he’s so fond of and make more room for the sort of character development he doesn’t usually prioritize. And for a while, at least, it seemed like that might be the case. There were definitely high points across Flux, including a welcome new confidence for Yaz, the fun addition of Dan, and that stellar Weeping Angels episode.
In the end, though, what stands out most about Flux is how little any of it mattered. Last week, the Doctor learned that her abusive adoptive mother had engineered the Flux only to watch mommy dearest get vaporized right in front of her. This week, that doesn’t even get a passing mention. As far as I can tell, by the end of the episode the Doctor has done absolutely nothing about the fact that the entire universe (except for Earth) was drastically decimated by the Flux. In retrospect, there are whole characters and subplots that could’ve been written out of the season entirely, not just because they had so little effect on the narrative but because they had so little emotional impact as well.
Of course, there’s always the caveat that we’ve still got three specials left to wrap up Jodie Whittaker’s tenure as the Doctor (including a New Year’s Day special in just a few weeks), so any of the events and characters from Flux could theoretically come back into play there. But at some point, you can’t just keep kicking the can down the road anymore. Flux set out to tell a six-part serialized story, and on that level I’d say it failed.
Which isn’t to say there haven’t been high points too, even within this overstuffed, choppily edited finale. “The Vanquishers” actually starts with a really fun premise: In trying to escape the Division ship parked between universes, the Doctor somehow manages to “trisect” herself into three different forms across three different places. One stays at Division HQ to grapple with Swarm and Azure; one joins Bel and Karvanista on a Lupari ship; and the third reunites with Yaz, Dan, Jericho, Joseph Williamson, and Kate Stewart in the Williamson tunnels. As the various splinter groups start to come together, I’m not sure Jodie Whittaker has ever had more fun than she does playing the Doctor’s enthralled, flirtatious relationship with herself.
Yet instead of putting that character stuff front and center, Chibnall becomes obsessed with expositional details and tangents; including a whole unnecessarily detailed subplot about Diane showing Vinder how the inside of a Passenger ship works. And because there’s so much going on plot-wise, the moments that do hit emotionally—like the Doctor’s sorrowful reaction to learning that Yaz has been separated from her for years or Professor Jericho’s moving death scene—wind up feeling like side dishes when they should probably be the meat of the meal.
I mean, I suppose it’s not not payoff to have this whole story boil down to the Sontarans trying to double cross the Daleks and Cybermen, and the Doctor giving the militant potatoes a taste of their own medicine—with a triple genocidal-level of death along the way. But given how much this season was built around questions of the Flux and its origins, having it defeated in such a mechanical way is fairly anticlimactic. (Plus if matter is the thing that stops its anti-matter properties, how was the Flux able to wipe out whole planets during its initial swipe through the universe?)
Yet I think the single biggest weakness of this finale is the bizarrely casual way it dispatches Swarm and Azure after building them up as our Big Bads. Given the abstracted way they speak (they’re rooting for “the end of all spatial objects,” for instance), I always struggle to figure out when something they’re saying is new information vs. something we’ve heard before. Regardless, this was the first time I really understood that they literally worship Time as a god and plan to sacrifice the Doctor to it as part of a half religious ceremony, half revenge scheme. Yet instead of doing anything interesting with that idea, the episode just has Personified Time casually kill them because they failed to bring about the Final Flux event. So… a win for Space I guess?
In the end, Flux feels less like one unified miniseries than like Chibnall threw several dozen ideas into a hat and worked each week based on whichever handful of them he happened to draw out. There’s little consistency or cohesion to what happens. (The last time we saw Claire, she was a prisoner of the Weeping Angels, here she’s just casually wandering around 1967.) Even the order in which the characters were introduced this season is odd. Though Diane was crucial to the premiere and this finale, she was barely a presence during the rest of the season. Jericho and Bel, meanwhile, seem like characters we should’ve met earlier. And I’m wondering if it would’ve made sense to use Swarm and Azure as smaller mid-season obstacles rather than presenting them as such important players throughout the whole season
What’s especially strange is that when Chibnall puts his mind to it, he can actually write really solid character scenes. The reveal that Karvanista used to be the Doctor’s companion is quietly devastating. (Between that and his entire species dying, the guy sure had a hell of a week, huh?) And the final scene where the Doctor apologizes to Yaz for keeping things from her is maybe the single best character scene in Chibnall’s entire run. It has that nice undercurrent of romantic tension that has often characterized the Doctor’s relationship with their companions during the NuWho era. Plus it’s one of the few moments where it feels like the events of Flux actually did something to substantially change our heroes, rather than just provide them with obstacles to breeze past.
My hope for Whittaker’s final trio of specials is that Chibnall focuses on simplifying things. The pieces are there and the actors are certainly more than capable. Chibnall just needs to trust that he won’t lose his audience by slowing things down and letting his characters talk to each other about something other than technobabble. While frenetic can sometimes be a tone that Doctor Who does well, heartfelt is even better.
Stray observations
- So U.N.I.T. picked up the TARDIS after the Doctor left it in Medderton in 1967, but how did it wind up in the Williamson Tunnels? Did Kate transport it there?
- I wouldn’t mind if the show brought back Craig Parkinson’s Grand Serpent mostly because he really seemed to bring out the best in Whittaker. Their chemistry together was great.
- Given that they spent the past three years living and working with him, it feels like Yaz and Dan should’ve been more broken up when Jericho died. That’s at least as much time as Yaz spent with Graham and Ryan!
- So the floating black and white house really added up to nothing, huh?
- The personification of Time warns the Doctor that her time is coming to an end before advising her, “Beware of the forces that amass against you, and their master.” Or is that… Master?
- As I mentioned above, Doctor Who will be back on New Year’s Day with the first of three specials. The other two are supposed to air in the spring and fall, respectively. You can find me back here then or on Twitter in the meantime.
181 Comments
“Doctor Who’s Flux finale falls flat”Well, that was the least surprising development ever.
I felt this was a stronger finish than last season, since it revolved around the Doctor doing things instead of Shocking Revelations, but yeah- there wasn’t enough time to wrap everything up. This was supposed to be a longer series that was abbreviated by continuing pandemic issues, and I feel Chibnall failed to edit down as much as he should have because he couldn’t stand to lose any of it. That said I liked the matter/antimatter resolution with the Passenger, an appropriately Who-ish solution. And I may find the pacing better without commercials, because man did BBC America milk this one as much as they could. It was like they cut to a break every time there was a plot beat.
I shouldn’t have ever even set an expectation for this series to wrap up whatever it was doing, and I don’t know why it took me until ten minutes into this episode to realize it was all going to end with even more dangling plotlines than last season, and we’d have to wait until the specials to see any remote chance of closure. The Doctor seriously doesn’t even seem fazed by the fact that the Universe is almost entirely gone. Nobody else expresses even the slightest distress, and at the end of the episode, they’re still in “Let’s go on an adventure” mode. Only Diane seemed down, for reasons that seem to be manufactured just to get Dan to mope around outside. I guess Karvanista was too, at that, and who can blame him when Chibnall invented a weird species with a somewhat compelling character representing them and then just handwaved them out of existence.Related to the Flux seemingly erasing almost the entire Universe: It seems the Daleks are all gone. Stay tuned for the next episode, where the Daleks are back again! These sorts of shenanigans are at least normal for the show, and I’m sure an explanation will be available early on during the special (Or maybe not, considering how many things happened in this whole series with basically no justification) but I’m really just not interested at all in what it could be. I love Aisling Bea, and even she seems to be as uninterested in the whole scenario as I feel.
I’m assuming the new years Daleks are going to be yet another group of descendants of the recon Dalek from Resolution, and that we’re going to be treated to another round of Chris Noth gurning around as not-donald-trump.
I’m sure Chris Noth is a lovely person but the last thing I want when watching doctor who is to be reminded that Donald Trump exists. Not to mention when Noth’s character is such a pathetically broad Trump.
This comment didn’t age well 🙁
I was being polite when I speculated his probably nice. At least now I can 100% hate his character without needing to be polite.
the problem with who is that they always come back to the same dalek or cybermen stories, the best ones of new who dont involve them at all, the sontarans new version are more irritating than serious, i prefer the madame zastra version
It’s fair cop, although honestly if you’re searching for positive things to say about the Chibnall era, “had a better hit/miss ratio on Dalek stories than his predecessors” is, surprisingly, one of the more justifiable ones. Resolution/Revolution won’t ever be remembered in the same breath as Genesis, but they were both a damn sight better than, say, Daleks In Manhattan.(Of course now that I’ve said that, I’ve cursed us all and whatever this year’s new years special is — Renovations of the Daleks? — will be an all-time stinker.)
I was a big apologist for this miniseries as it was going on and I don’t mind Doctor Who just being a lot of fast-paced nonsense. However, I shared everyone else’s misgivings that they’d be able to “stick the landing” or whatever cliche and this finale certainly confirmed that they weren’t able to. It wasn’t quite the worst case scenario of what this could’ve been, but it certainly wasn’t a coherent ending for the most part and therefore retroactively made the whole previous series worse. I found the overstuffed nature of it fun as the series was building up but clearly Chibnall bit off more than he could chew and several of the subplots were either just dropped or ended in a nonsensical or anti-climactic way
If anything, I’m glad you and others were able to enjoy the previous episodes for what they were, even if this finale brought it crashing down. I try to be as optimistic as I can with this stuff, but from the first episode I could feel the finale looming over the whole series. I was just thinking it would wrap it up badly, with lousy or no explanations for plot contrivances, not that it would leave the whole thing hanging half open. But it made the cool things all seem much less cool even while they were happening for me.
I really dislike tv seasons (or shows) in which everything comes down to the last episode. Barely anyone is able to put it all together and winds up undercutting everything that happened before. Especially in a season like this one in which it’s basically one super long episode with no one-off to stay with you after everything’s fallen apart
“Go on an adventure” to where, exactly? Isn’t most of the universe gone?
One thing that I thought was interesting, and a sign of changing times is this is one of (I think) 3 shows that I am watching this year that cast someone (the lady missing her right forearm)with a visible handicap, resisted the temptation to do a “Very Special Episode” and not only that, didn’t mention it at all. The other one that comes to mind is the character Echo on Hawkeye, whose deafness is the big deal that everyone talks about, but who also has a prosthetic leg. I forget the 3rd show, but it seems like such a sea change in casting that I had to mention it, even though I almost feel like I am breaking some spell by pointing it out.
The BBC shows have done that for quite some time now
Yeah. I’ve watched a bunch of episodes of the game show Pointless and there have been several contestants with visible disabilities, which not something I see often on American game shows.
Even 8oo10C has had Rosie Jones on several occasions, enough that it’s not just cursory diversity but genuine interest. Plus there’s The Last Leg as a whole show, which is hardly “not mentioning it” but still pretty impressive. I’m not sure if it’s a show of genuine British progressiveness, or just the BBC deciding to try its best and it actually working out really well, but I’m glad it’s happening.
The Last Leg and 8oo10C are both Channel 4 shows rather than the BBC. C4 is easily the most diverse (in all ways) but all the major U.K. networks – including the children’s channels – have a diversity commitment, so it’s not an unusual thing to see at all over here now.
Whoops, sorry. It’s all YouTube to me.
Good point. Dianes’ physical limitation isn’t a focal point for her character, but just another detail. It’s far from a defining quality.
La Brea is the third show. The daughter has the prosthetic leg.
Nice catch, but it turns out I was thinking the lady in the wheel chair in the police station in the new season of Dexter. So that makes at least 4 this year. It’s good to see.
Upon seeing another episode, it looks like the lady on Dexter is missing both legs beneath the knees. She has a small part, but it’s a speaking part.
I struggled with this – since Diane was not particularly memorable, and her variation in ability was very visible this time, I had to wrack my brain as I had no recollection of her earlier performance as I simply hadn’t noticed her. Due to her variation, I was convinced “I would have remembered this” but on review they really downplayed it in her setup. I think this tells you as much about how people of variable ability get perceived in large part through their variation as it does the show. But man I had no idea who she was.(In my mind Claire was the missed date from the first episode)
I made the same mistake vis-a-vis Diane and Claire. If I hadn’t been reading the reviews here, I probably wouldn’t have realized they were different characters until much later, possibly even in this episode. Aside from the arm, they’re not that distinct physically and that first episode really was a lot of “Here are a bunch of characters in succession to keep track of.”
I agree – I liked that. It wasn’t remarked upon nor was it ever a plot point. It was just her character and I have to say that is good representation. I just wish that character might have been more… you know… integral to the plot.
This probably doesn’t quite count because of the lack of appropriate visibility, but I looked up the woman playing Barbara Gordon on Titans — who presumably has been paralyzed by a gunshot to the spine, and is always shown with one leg crossed in front — and discovered that the actress in fact lost a leg in an accident a few years ago.
When I think about Echo – and the actor who plays her, Alaqua Cox – it makes me think of the tiresome chuds who complain about “forced diversity” and always invent some hypothetical character that is, in their eyes, too unrealistic to exist. (“What next, a show about a black gay blind dwarf?”) Cox is a Native American (Menominee/Mohican, according to Wikipedia), deaf, disabled woman, which is no less likely a combination of things than a white, hearing, able-bodied man. People like this exist, and are not just straw people for lousy arguments.
If nothing else, flux was seldom boring, and considering boredom is the default Chibnall reaction from me, I’ll take this is as a sharp improvement. The majority of non-writing elements felt much better this season. The music has improved dramatically, the characters are more likable and the performances have improved across the board. Whittaker has actually felt at ease this season and come close to finally feeling like a real doctor. It’s almost a shame she’ll be out the door next year, but honestly Chibnall needs to go. He spent his first year trying to make new villains that all failed. His second tampering with the past to a pointless unnecessary level, and his third experimenting with a long form narrative that collapsed under the weight and had nothing inside.
Swarm as a character is very much a symbol of this whole season. A great start. Some really solid acting and visual design and ultimately a total waste of time that will be swiftly forgotten.
This was how I felt too about the previous episodes of this miniseries. At least it wasn’t boring and so much of Chibnall’s era has just been plain boring. I liked all the craziness and overstuffedness but it made nearly impossible for there to be a cohernet, satisfying ending
I’ve been enjoying watching the episodes as they’ve been at least fast-moving but I don’t see myself being episode if I were to stumble upon this season during one of those Doctor Who marathons. Same with all of the Chibnall seasons. In three or four years, when people are doing things like arguing over who the best Companion was or the best Master, would anybody even think about this era or will this be the “gas leak” season that everybody forgets about.I do agree, though, that they’ve finally made Jodie act more Doctor’ish. Having her save the universe and have real villains did a lot for her.
Chibnall-era Master (writing and performance) was pretty great, on par with Missy.
Chibnall might be remembered for making good on The Cartmel Plan.
– Given that all Space vs. Time was on the table, I expected at least something of a reset button by the end of the episode.
– Instead we got the destruction of quite a lot of the universe; the death of both the Dalek and CyberMan races, with the Doctor’s passive approval; the death of the Sontaran race, essentially arranged by the Doctor; the loss of the adorable Lupari (who were good boys, yes they were!); and another complete conquest of Earth for – what? Two, three years? – which may or may not have any impact on the planet, given the way these things go. That’s a lot, particularly since I’m left feeling (at least for now) that it all won’t really matter very much.
– As this review points out, the idea (embraced by the Sontarans) that the Dalek and CyberMan armies add up to enough positive matter to balance out the anti-matter of the Flux doesn’t really make a lot of sense, since the Flux swallow multiple planets without burping and was on the path to eating the entire universe. But if I started listing all the lapses in “logic” embedded in this story, I’d bee here for a while. Doctor Who gets by on charm. This time I wish I had been more charmed. But that’s just me. YMMV.
– Maybe the specials will clear some of this up. Here’s hoping…!
Didn’t most of the universe survive, though? If I’m understanding the plot correctly, everyone ended up going back to the moment the Flux started, and the Flux wiped out the Daleks, Cybermen, and Sontarians, but was absorbed by the Passenger before it could spread to the rest of the universe. I think that’s what happened, anyway.
If that is what happened, I don’t think it was communicated clearly at all. As far as I could see, the Flux was supposed to finish at the coordinates that the Sontarans found, and the fact that it got stopped there means that everything that it consumed beforehand was still gone. That in itself was weird, because in the last episode they said that Earth was where the Flux was supposed to end and that’s why the map of the Universe looked so strange to the Doctor.When 11 reset the Universe, they did a whole new Big Bang. Even if they didn’t want to repeat that, they could have set some sort of visual of the flux rolling back or something. Instead it just all went in Passenger.
I think the deal with the second Flux event was that Mommy Issues was going to center it on Earth to be eeeeeeeevil to her adopted daughter, but after she got dusted by Mr. & Mrs Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, they asked the Ood to please aim it at Atropos because they had a different plan for being eeeeeevil to the Doctor (and apparently Time God Guy We Forgot To Hire An Actor For was going to like this plan?) and then the Doctor asked the Ood guy to…dial the Flux down a bit and the Ood guy basically does the last thing anyone asks him to that wasn’t contradicted by a subsequent order which left us with Flux V2, Slightly Less Fluxy, starting from a random location that the Sontarans figured out using She Just Has Susan’s Haircut She’s Not Susan and aimed at Atropos but never gets there because it gets sucked into Mannequin Darkseid.Totally clear, right?!
This is the best review I’ve read yet.
On one hand I can’t argue it was flat. On the other hand the wrap up of Who arcs almost *always* falls flat so I never went into it expecting anything else. They had explanations for why the majority of pieces were where they were even if they, like the Grand Serpent’s machinations, were perfunctory and didn’t leave any massive gaping loopholes and that’s about the most I ask of them. So, yeah, not amazing but they met expectations.
I wish that they swapped this season and last season around. Have the serialised story with a thousand main characters be the last one with Bradley Walsh And That Dyspraxic Fella and have this one be a normal series in which we’re introduced to Dan and we actually have him have a character because Dan like this series was superfluous to a T.Like my favourite part was when The Doctor decided to go full 9/11 and crash her plane into big buildings. But yeah too many cooks not enough time 3/10.
If you are going to do one continous six-episode story, each episode needs to build on what came before. Everything about Tecteun, the Weeping Angels, Vinder, Bel, and the Grand Serpent could have been cut and affected very little. This should have been a 2-arc, 10-episode season. Have the first five episodes focus on the aftermath of The Flux and the Sontaran vs. Dalek vs. Cyberman war, which would be more plot and action focused and deal with a situation that would actually be quite interesting to see play out. Then, have the second half of the season focus on The Division and Swarm and the creation of The Flux itself, focusing on character development and interactions. Not helping is that, once again, The Doctor’s main companions were useless. Dan rescued his Lupari and Yas helped distract the Sontaran at the convenience store, but what else did they do? Bel and Claire were the important ones in this episode. Even Jericho did more. And while they were interesting characters, what purpose did Vinder and Kate serve in this story? The former’s main contribution was serving as a stand-in for those gold Space Time whatever people, while the latter basically served as a TARDIS delivery girl.
The worst part is how pointless everything felt. There is no way in hell all the Daleks, Cybermen, and Sontarans are dead forever and the rest of the universe being dead makes for pretty shitty storytelling, so willing to bet that one of the Specials will do yet another universe reset like at the start of Moffat’s tenure, which would like result in not just those three reviving, but also the Lupari and Tecteun. nd quite frankly, the fact that Space and Time are, like, physical beings is a lamer and stupider retcon than the whole Timeless Child twist.
Vinder was a last-minute insert when John Barrowman turned out to be too toxic to hire at the moment, which is starting to look like a stroke of luck for Barrowman.
Ah, I was wondering how he was teleporting around with one of those wrist devices that Jack used to use. That makes much more sense now.
Was there a reason for Dan? He didn’t even get to do all the standard Companion type stuff, including actually spending time with the Doctor. Like if the actor showed up at Comic-Con as “Dan” would anybody care? Same could be said with Yaz (unfortunately).
Although individual episodes occasionally belie this, I just think Chibnall doesn’t have a firm grasp on what companions should be in his series at all. From the beginning, where most viewers expressed surprise that he was taking on three at once, he seemed more focused on having a gang than on having individual characters. And of course common complaints throughout his first two series were that none of the companions really distinguished themselves in any way.Nevertheless, I really liked Dan. It goes against storytelling law, but I don’t think characters necessarily have to have a lot to do, and it amused me that he sort of floated along in the Doctor’s wake being genial and fairly unperturbed about everything happening around him. It’s only a problem when there are ten characters running around, and most of them are doing nothing, while the main character literally splits herself in three to do three times the work.
I kind of like Dan too which is why I wish he had more of a point to him. Both he and Yaz have a lot of potential but there characters aren’t developed enough.
From the moment the Sontarans changed the history of Earth it was pretty clear this would all be retconned. Either that or they’ll just pretend it never happened. Guess we’ll find out which on New Year’s?
orDaft Doctor Who Derails Denouement
I gave up on Doctor Who back when Cappaldi took over, when episodes seemed to be all about “fixing the fabric of the universe” or some other global event, while actual character driven episodes were just cheap fillers. Guess I’ll pass on another season…
Capaldi’s entire era is… kind of the exact opposite of what your impression seems to be? the threats he deals with are generally more small-scale (one ship or train or building even) or borderline abstract (if his tenure has a Big Bad it’s arguably grief and trauma than any tangible threat). even his series finales tended to be pretty contained and character-based; not once did the whole universe end or reality be threatened like in the Tennant and Smith eras.hell, man there’s an entire episode of just Capaldi’s character grappling with grief, no other characters or real plot other than a deep dive into the Doctor’s mind. it fucking slaps – it might be the greatest episode in the history of this show.what I’m saying is, Capaldi’s era is absolutely worth a fair, open-minded go. it’s probably my favourite era of the show. you can safely skip Jodie’s entire run and miss almost nothing except the generally good acting.
hell, man there’s an entire episode of just Capaldi’s character grappling with grief, no other characters or real plot other than a deep dive into the Doctor’s mind. it fucking slaps – it might be the greatest episode in the history of this show.Co-sign. “Heaven Sent” is maybe one of the greatest episodes I’ve ever seen. (assuming that’s the one you’re talking about)
definitely the one. I think if you squint you can see a cool little experimental trilogy across Capaldi’s three seasons with Listen, Heaven Sent and Extremis. all 3 are phenomenal but HS honestly towers above most of the show for me
I did like some episodes, more than the Clara ones, but sometimes the show reverted back to filler episodes with low production values (like flatline) that plagued the early seasons.
Filler episodes are what make the show great. Seeing whatever bonkers idea a writer can has and if the production team can convincingly present it on a BBC budget is at least half the fun.
But… but… Flatline was really good? (To each their own, I know.) Yes the monsters were a one-off but they were a really good one-off monster and it still played a major part in Clara’s arc that season.
see I absolutely love Flatline. the monsters are a simple idea but super unnerving, it’s terrifically written, and I would personally never call it filler because the shift in 13/Clara’s relationship and the introduction of Rigsy are absolutely essential to what happens in s11
Even flatline was an absolute blast. That one had the doctor use his hand to scuttle around the mini tardis like the Adams family.
I also loved how personal and contained so much of 12’s run was, particularly his last season.* The Ice Fair episode in particular was a great return to form after so long away. It was basically just: “lets have fun exploring the past, and do what we can to help the people in front of us.” * It was sad that Capaldi only got one season free from all the Clara drama. It was only post-Clara that they started writing him as his own version of the doctor, and turns out I love the doctor in ‘crabby but secretly kind professor’ mode.There are many reasons I’ve tuned out during 13’s run, but one of them (that started back in 11’s run, to be fair, but has gotten worse) is this trend of massive revelations that upend the Doctor’s history. Not everything has to be about the Doctor, and if the Doctor’s history keeps being massively re-written then ultimately we can’t trust any of it anyway. I want the doctor to be special because (s)he is clever and brave and kind of snarky, not because (s)he’s a hybrid/timeless child/ xyz.
RTD and Moffat both put their own stamp on the Doctor’s history, though Davies was clearly less interested in backstory than Moffat and Chibnall were. The Timeless child thing though feels like Chibnall deliberately rewriting the character’s history just so he could make his own mark.
It doesn’t particularly add anything to the Doctor, not with the scant information we’ve been given about her past lives, and as an origin story for the Time Lords it is a good idea that suffers from its execution.For a while now I’ve felt that the best way for the show to move forward is to just restart it entirely.
Capaldi’s run snaps into focus once Clara is disposed of (why did they keep her that extra season?).There are some bright spots in his 2nd season, but it sort of comes down do finally sorting out Clara.
From all accounts it was a last minute decision: Faye Marsey (Shona) was already signed to play the new companion, but Capaldi and Coleman were getting along really well and he convinced her to stay for one more season.Opinions obviously differ wildly about Clara as a character, but we got Heaven Sent out of that deal, so it’s hard to be entirely unhappy about it.
It’s odd how you see certain criticisms pop up over and over. The back half of Death in Heaven, Hell Bent, and The Doctor Falls are by far some of the most intimate finales of modern genre tv.
God, thinking about The Vanquishers in comparison to World Enough and Time / The Doctor Falls is just physically painful. The “why can’t I be angry?” conversation between 12 and Bill was one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen on television and three years later we’re back to monologuing villains telling the Doctor that they’re not so different, her and them…
The doctor falls is an absolute masterpiece. The horror of Bill being converted. The epic battle with the cybermen. The disturbing trippy physics of time moving different at either end of the ship. Capaldi roaring with rage at the horror he sees. Plus it was hilarious, particularly with Missy and master. Master: “The doctor’s dead. He said he always hated you”
(Ten seconds later)Missy: “The doctor’s dead. He said he always hated you”
I recently (like, yesterday) found a site that has text transcriptions of what appears to be nearly every single episode of Doctor Who (god bless internet obsessives) and I can confirm that reading the transcription of WEaT/TDF is substantially more entertaining and a hell of a lot more emotionally involving than watching The Vanquishers.
Absolutely true. The S10 finale is just brilliant on every level. I was also just thinking about Hell Bent and S9, and how hilariously it mocked the idea of an Important Lore Revelation (TM). “Everyone’s a hybrid!”
And three years before The Doctor Falls, Death in Heaven wrapped up with the Doctor and Clara hiding their inner turmoil from the other because it’d be easier than admitting it. Now I just wanna go marathon the Capaldi era again……
He fought a mummy on a train.
C- at best.I laughed at how, after everything they’d been through, Diane was suddenly horrible to Dan at the end just because…he was a bit late? Or something? Maybe she was actually horribly rude all along and he just didn’t see it because he fancied her.I liked when the Sontarans did a genocide on the entire dog race off screen and the only reaction is the Doctor saying “sorry!”
Maybe she’s just a bit traumatized by the events she just went through and Dan is a reminder of that? The whole thing played out in three lines of dialogue, it’s hard to say…
I think you could infer that Diane just had been through too much & needed to put it behind her. But maybe she just isn’t that into him, or saw red flags. It was not great storytelling that we are having to guess at the motivations of a fairly significant character for this season.Also did the doctor & Yaz somehow know Diane was going to rebuff Dan & that is why they were there to pick him up? Lucky timing otherwise
The Dan-Diane thing shows a big fault with Chibnall’s weakness as a writer. He loves to have characters give emotive speeches, but when two people actually have a reason to talk to each other, he can’t bother to try to pull it off.The three second “sorry about the airlocking” is another. We get a supposedly massive reveal that Swarm (or Azure — it doesn’t matter, why were there even two of them if they were so similar?) know that the key to The Doctor is how much she cares about life.And then Chibnall can’t be bothered to illustrate it at all by having the Doctor do anything or show any sign of caring.Chibnall speeches are always just empty disconnected words, forgotten as soon as they’re spoken by everyone, including Chibnall himself.
All three of Chibnall’s finales deserve straight Fs.
He really is just absolutely incapable of writing a decent ending for this show. (Opinions differ on Broadchurch, but at least “wrap up a police procedural plot” seems to be much more in his comfort zone than “conclude a universe-shattering scifi epic.”) Battle of Rawhatever, Timeless Children and now this: they’re all so bad that you’d almost suspect him of doing it deliberately to make Resolution/Revolution/Renovations of the Daleks look better in comparison.
His Dalek ones are usually alright, that’s true. Nothing entirely special, but not as bad as these, either.
Yeah, he’s just… a lot better at writing self-contained stories. And the presumptive structure of any Dalek story (Daleks have absurd plan to conquer the universe; Doctor stops them in some equally absurd way) plays to his strengths.
They only made one dog costume so they had to kill off all of the others for budgetary reasons.
What’s killing me is that there’s a version of the scene between Dan and Diane that works, because it’s not just that he was late, it’s that he was late and as a result she was kidnapped and tortured by aliens for months and had to escape from an alien prison largely on her own and she’s just not ready to pretend none of that happened and have a date yet and of course that’s exactly the scene Chibnall didn’t bother to write.It’s baffling, because if nothing else Broadchurch showed that when he concentrates he has a solid ear for dialogue about emotional issues between more or less normal human beings and he just… forgot to do that here.
Oh, man, the trial stuff in Broadchurch S2. Don’t remind me.
“The personification of Time warns the Doctor that her time is coming to an end before advising her, “Beware of the forces that amass against you, and their master.” Or is that… Master?”It would be easier to take these Big Bad Threats to the Doctor seriously if they stopped warning the Doc that something is afoot all the time.
I don’t even mind the eerie premonitions. Both Ten and Eleven had randoms warning him of crazy stuff all the time. But this was just boring.
I have found Chibnall’s era to be weak to middling at best. His historical episodes have been quite good, IMHO. His non-historical ones have been okay, until now. This one just made no sense. When The Doctor asked her companions if they wanted to go, all I could think was “where?, the whole universe was destroyed or left in a mess”, plus The Swarm said they were going to unroll and redo the Flux over and over. I really expected The Doctor to wait until they had unrolled the destruction to stop it.
The miniseries had some good moments, but when the whole is looked at, it was a flop.
For what it’s worth, the series was adequate — I thought it was relatively coherently plotted out, and there was an effort to keep track of the different characters and keep storylines connected.But it wasn’t very good , and as it progressed, its faults added up.The exposition dumps mentioned above were especially bad for a final episode — more than any other time, an audience ahould be clear about what’s going on, and the show needs to be about how things unfold.
But over and over, especially in the middle, the momentum would grind to a halt while Chibnall filled in details with speeches. The universe balances on a thread, but let’s just stop and chat. And not even chat efficiently — let’s be as tongue tied as middle schoolers at a mixer.Adding to the problem was the dumbness of Chibnall’s driving motivations. I was struck by the moment of the reveal by The Doctor to Yaz about how she had been walled off because of her missing past… and Yaz’s reaction was functionally “that’s the stupidest motivation I’ve ever heard!” even though it was played a little more straight up. It came off as superficial as someone moaning they have a bad case of the Mondays — on Wednesday, ha ha!I don’t think it helped that the Flux Siblings were such bad villians. They were so inert, both functionally and on screen — I think even the Sontaran prosthetics allowed more expression. Chibnall’s insistence on hiding details from audiences followed by late expositionary speeches meant we could rarely see the sibs really doing things, and their crazy overpowered quality meant there was never any real back and forth with their opponents. The Doctor’s Mom is a universe dissolving supervilllian, but she’s taken out with a snap. That doesn’t make them chilling, it’s boring.He seems to have at least given Whittaker more to do. The worst part of the Chibnall years was she was almost always paralyzed by her emotions, but this season half the time she was actually motivated to do something. Her hidden past was still bogging her character down in inertia too much, but Chibnall seems to have understood that you can’t go all-in on paralysis.
They were way overpowered, and it means there’s no way he can resolve their threat. The doctor never defeats the ravagers, they essentially get hit by a truck while crossing the street. The doctor just got lucky.I get that chibnall wants to make the doctor feel more vulnerable, but 13 is frequently written as completely helpless or even a bystander to the heroism of others. Such an unfortunate choice for the first female doctor.
For what it’s worth, the subtitles did specifically capitalize the word “Master”.I found it amusing that they specifically chose to spare the Grand Serpent from death, yet the Doctor’s plan was to subject the entirety of the Sontarans, Daleks, and Cybermen to mass extinction. Seriously, when has the Doctor ever been so blasé about genocide, even against their hated enemies?
she literally went scorched earth on army general guy three episodes ago for blowing up all the Sontarans only to outdo him with triple genocide without a hint of remorse this week. both of these episodes were written by the same person, who I honestly think at this point just throws out scenes one by one that he thinks are cool with absolutely no conception that they should be relating to a larger whole
My guess (or possibly just fanwankery) is that the Doctor’s plans to undo the Flux, which would mean the Daleks, Cybermen, and Sontarans would only be gone temporarily.
The glaring hypocrisy of the 13th Doctor, and the head writer’s apparent obliviousness to this problem, just boggles the mind.
From the beginning he never had any core idea of who he wanted her to be, and most of the time she was on screen he had her spinning around confounded and withdrawn.
So many if the problems with his plots and her relationships with companions came down to Chibnall never deciding on who she was.
Totally agree. And super frustrating because Jodie was right there to give an incredible performance, if only it was on the page.
It is tremendously disappointing that the first female doctor is so frequently written as completely helpless.
Right,I sometimes miss the days when the effects maybe weren’t as great, but the writing was.This review was spot-on and all the more disappointing because Village of the Angels was SO good and raised the hopes the Doctor would now have to cope with life an as Angel (as least, for an episode or two,) but, alas, no.Then, in this episode, watching everyone embrace Claire without the obligatory step back because, you know, her Angel is still, ostensibly, a threat. What is wrong here?Is there no one in the writer’s room willing to speak up?I love Doctor Who, but it’s sad looking at it and seeing what it could be with a sensible rewrite.Too bad Jodie didn’t get another year with a better writer.
It’s painful to imagine how good the 13th Doctor written by RTD would be.
We don’t have to wait much longer, thankfully! Pretty sure she’ll show up in the 60th. Her, Smith, and Tennant would make a fun special.
I’m in!
I have to imagine this will happen. Aside from “Time Crash,” we never did get an RTD multi-Doctor episode. (Not counting the two 10th Doctors.) Of course, I go right back to hoping Paul McGann and Christopher Eccleston will appear.
Eccleston is never working with RTD again. Whatever happened behind the scenes with S1 broke their working relationship.
Truly a shame, that entire situation. I’d like to think they could make amends, but it seems like whatever happened was too painful for Eccleston to revisit. The best chance we had to see the 9th Doctor again was probably if Moffat had granted Eccelston’s demand to have Joe Ahearne direct the 50th.
Yep, it’s been nice seeing him re-embrace the show and the fans.
Or : It’s painful to imagine the 13th Doctor written by RTD .
I’ll admit, I sometimes look back with my nostalgia goggles and forget the dregs of the RTD era. (Fear Her, blurgh!) But overall, I think he wrote much more exciting stories and compelling characters than we have today.
To be fair, Fear Her only exists because Stephen Fry’s planned episode fell through, and they had to get something up on screen.
Hey, the animated doodle WAS kinda neat.
(Fear Her, blurgh!)I like that everyone has to still bring up this last-minute panic episode when Love & Monsters is right there.
Love & Monsters wasn’t GOOD but I thought there was at least something creatively interesting and different there. It’s an experience, anyway.
Somewhere under Love and Monsters is a brilliant episode. Somewhere in there.
Ah, ‘Love and Monsters’, the ‘Doctor Who’ episode that dared to ask the question, “What if we chuck a fellatio joke in there?”
She either realized she wasn’t getting a good part and went with it. Or she didn’t realize it was bad. Why does she deserve another chance.
Then, in this episode, watching everyone embrace Claire without the obligatory step back because, you know, her Angel is still, ostensibly, a threat. The rogue Angel that occupied Claire was brought onboard the Division Command Center by Tenteun, no longer a part of Claire.
No more hypocritical than any other incarnation. The Doctor is a pacifist until forced not to be. A split second decision had to be made. Save the Sontarans, etc., who have promised to wipe out everybody else or save everybody else? No brainer.
Why? It’s hardly a new concept. The oncoming storm, time Lord victorious, valeyard, etc etc
Bingo. Chibnall knows how to write doctor who shaped things that look and feel like doctor who but when you scratch the surface there’s rarely a second layer.
This is the same Doctor who freaked out when anyone shot a being who was moments ago threatening their life, yet doesn’t bat an eye at genocide.
Hell, the entire through-line of 13’s first season was that she was an avowed pacifist who hated guns and went out of her way to try to figure out how to solve problems without bloodshed. It was a terrible, show-wrecking premise but it was at least a discernible idea for the character and apparently Chibnall just got bored with it and tossed it.
For me, the worst thing they did with her was to mess with her self-confidence. After 50+ years of men playing the part, as soon as you cast a woman you take away one of the defining qualities, which is overweening self-confidence? Really?
“The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.”—Joseph Stalin
Didn’t the Flux destroy like the Universe? Earth might have been saved by the Lupari but the Sun, Moon? I was expecting some rewind (Swarm even mentioned that he planned to rewind the Universe and do it all over again). But this is just glossed over. I love Dr. Who and will still watch it, but between that huge plot hole and the Timeless Child, Chibnall really screwed the pooch.
I think the point of Tecaton’s (is that spelled correctly? not. can I be bothered to look up the correct spelling? also no.) speech to the Doctor was that she’d deliberately put the Earth in line to be destroyed last by the Flux but the whole thing was so poorly fleshed out that honestly you can just make up whatever reason you want that Earth’s sun survived and it’ll likely make as much if not more sense.
Jodi Whittaker has my sympathy. Her run as the Doctor should have been awesome, but she got stuck with a showrunner who didn’t seem to have a clue about what Doctor Who is about. She did the best she can and I don’t hold her responsible for what happened to the show.
Honestly, for all we lionize all the other actors and their runs, every single one of them has been plagued by a showrunner at some point whose shworunning flaws started to outperform the actual stories. Whether that was Davies’ turns for goofiness (how many times did Tennant have to say “Raxicofallipatorious” with a straight face?) and consistently upping the stakes, to Moffat’s companion-as-mystery and nearly-fanfic-fast-paced-nonsense plots, to Chibnall’s…”chibnalliness” we just have to selectively remember the bits we liked and continue to ignore the other terrible episodes.
This is true. When I heard Davies was coming back as the showrunner, my first thought was “Oh great, the 14th is going to be Tenet all over again”. I’m glad they didn’t bring Moffat back. The whole thing with Clara burned me out on his run (though I did like 12, he’s my fave Doctor so far).
Even burned out Moffat (S7) or running-on-autopilot Moffat (S10) is still miles ahead of Chibnall at his best. Same for Davies.
I think the damning thing about the Chibnall era is that there’s nothing like Midnight or Heaven Sent that really stays with you. There were a couple of slightly better episodes and this whole mini series is sat on my TiVo because somehow a show about a time and space traveller has managed to become dull and emotionally uninvolving.
Serializing an anthology series has never quite fit, I think. The entire appeal of Doctor Who is that you’re not locked down to one location or story-line every week.S1 is very tightly knit together and is one of my favorite seasons/series, but the actual Bad Wolf plot resolution is almost a footnote to me. It’s the other stuff that makes it work.
Maybe for you. I still personally feel that their weakest seasons (2 and 7, respectively), are still decent tv. And their frequent best (1, 4, 5, 8, and 9) are outstanding. Chibnall is the worst steward, by far, that this show has had since Eric Saward. I simply don’t agree that all of Doctor Who is this bad.
I survived first run John Nathan-Turner. I mean, they’re all better than Paradise Towers or…um, most of Colin Baker’s run.
But still, every season has its share of clunkers and every showrunner has their weaknesses.
Flux ended flat but it gave us the stellar Village of the Angels, and on balance that’s juuuuust enough to tip it into the positive for me. Maybe it was nothing more than it finally redeeming the angels as “scary” after the execrable Angels Take Manhattan, but…yeah that’s enough.
“But still, every season has its share of clunkers and every showrunner has their weaknesses.”That doesn’t equate to every era in the 50 year run being equal in quality. As you just noted, the Saward era has few redeeming qualities.
Saward to me is far worse on balance than Chibnall ever would be. Hell, most of JNT’s run irked me a lot more than Chibnall, and I actually loved Peter Davison’s doctor.
Ahh, the days when the rule for companions was “the sillier the name, the better.”
Being better than Saward is a low bar, though (I also love Peter Davison’s Doctor).JNT’s time was up and down, but it does contain some of my favorites. Warriors’ Gate, The Curse of Fenric, etc.
Eccleston, Tennant and Smith, you knew who their Doctors were and they rose above even middling stories. Capaldi’s characterization bounced around a bit but coalesced by the end. Whitaker is likable but is a mish-mosh of conflicting traits and flat writing. I’m praying RTD comes back refreshed with an actual vision for the show.
Capaldi I think had a pretty natural progression. Going from being a lovable bastard, to getting in touch with his heart again. Those three Capaldi seasons really work as a complete story. Primarily that the first two were him needing Clara to be a good person and the final season being him needing to be who he was without her.
Yeah, I think people sort of ignored the character beat at the end of Season 8 where Capaldi admits that he’s sort of lost his focus about who he really is, and remembers that he’s an idiot with a box. It’s sort of a throwaway line in the middle of one of his long speeches, but it shows a clear through line for his character. Though honestly, I was never so put off by his supposed grouchiness that season. I think it was just a stark contrast to Smith’s weirdness.
Also, all four have fairly clear arcs if you really look. Eccleston’s is the most obvious, because S1 is very tightly-knit and mostly sticks to Earth. Harder to do across multiple seasons with varying locations, but there’s still quite a bit of character work for the 10th (learning to control his ego), 11th (learning to be a more responsible person to the people around him/moving past the Time War and the Oncoming Storm persona), and 12th Doctor (learning who he really is at his core/learning to accept endings).
The nature of a BBC production pretty much guarantees that every season will have a stinker or three. Hell, even S3, which had the insane run of Human Nature / Family of Blood / Blink / Utopia / Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords also had a front half that asked us all to sit through The Shakespeare Code, that dreadful Daleks in Manhattan 2-parter, The Lazarus Experiment and 42. Man, 42 stunk on ice, I hope they never hired the guy who wrote that back…But even given that… when we’ve put the capstone on the entire Chibnall era, what are we going to point to as worthwhile? Demons of the Punjab, okay, yeah, out of nowhere stone cold classic. Beyond that? The Woman Who Fell to Earth was okay, so was Resolution. It Takes You Away was entertainingly weird. Village of the Angels was surprisingly good. Fugitive of the Judoon was a very good introduction to the worst ever plotline. The rest of it? We’re seriously into Colin Baker era ratios of quality to dreck here, and in the era of peak prestige TV, it’s really hard to make excuses for this: this level of quality would get a Flash spinoff series cancelled on the CW.
At the risk of following up to myself: Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror was, also, okay.
I’m grading this on a curve because so much of it was thrown together after Covid truncated the series to 6 episodes. Given that, I largely enjoyed myself, certainly more than during much of series 12. Series 11 remains my favorite of the current era, popular opinion notwithstanding.
How many more times does Chris Chibnall have to prove his incompetence as a storyteller? Thankfully for Doctor Who, only three.
This week, that doesn’t even get a passing mention. As far as I can tell, by the end of the episode the Doctor has done absolutely nothing about the fact that the entire universe (except for Earth) was drastically decimated by the Flux.Yeah, there was even a relatively easy fix for this that was casually dropped in the episode that never paid off — so when this thing just… ended… I was super-confused because I was like “ummmmm, didn’t this thing still eat a whole bunch of the universe?”Much like the Angel finale when Hamilton tells Angel “Their strength flows through my veins. My blood is filled with their ancient power.” and Angel just calmly tells him “Can you pick out the one word in there you probably shouldn’t have said?” Swarm literally tells The Doctor that he’s going to watch The Flux destroy her universe on a loop — finishing eating it, and then starting over — so all she’d have to do was wait for the universe to be destroyed, have him loop it, and then stop the Flux right after the loop began again?
I at least got the impression that this was supposed to be the last few moments of the Universe on repeat, and not starting over and running through the whole thing again. I’m not sure though, because I definitely did think at first that he said he’d restart the whole thing, and by the end of his monologue I changed my mind. Don’t really feel like reviewing it though.
Is there any way we can swap the Chibnall era and let it be lost in order to get back the missing 1st and 2nd Doctor episodes?
Whittaker has deserved so much better than what was written for her. I found her Doctor to be really charming and a lot of fun, but the content rarely delivers to the level of her capability.
I checked out of this season (and series) after the second episode. I can’t bring myself to care anymore. Hopefully RTD will give me a reason to be excited (or even mildly care) about DW again.
If you want to make Time the bad guy, Sapphire and Steel did it better first.
Looks like Master Windu’s lightsaber is having a hard time getting it up.
God, where to begin with this mess?As far as I can tell, the status quo as of the end of this episode is that nearly all life in the universe… in fact nearly all matter in the universe has been destroyed by the two Flux events. The primary survivors are the 8 billion humans on planet Earth, and however many people were still inside the Passenger Forms when Mr. & Mrs. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull got dusted by their personal Deus Ex Machina. So of course the note we end on is… Dan not being able to get a date. You know, the important stuff. (And stay tuned for New Years when we bring back Chris Noth doing his Donald Trump impression!)And after spending over a year exuding flop sweat re-writing the Doctor’s entire backstory, the emotional payoff to the entire “Timeless Child” thread is three repeats of the same CGI sequence of a house falling apart, followed by Chibnall realizing that he actually had nothing interesting to say about this and literally dropping the subject.I get that this season was filmed under some hellish production constraints, and this episode made it more obvious than most. So many scenes were clearly built out of cuts between multiple static takes of people or small groups of people talking directly to the camera while on the same set at different times. But if you’re radically constrained in what you can actually film, maybe this is not the time to try to make your universe-spanning epic?
Let’s just hope RTD memory holes this entire era as quickly as possible.
Honestly at this point… I’d be okay with it if RTD even leans into it. Gallifrey stories have a not-great track record; leave it dead for a while. If RTD thinks he can tell an interesting story around this plotline, he’s earned the right to try. I’m just looking forward to someone who can actually write taking the reins again.
What bugs me is that I love the conception of Gallifrey in “The Deadly Assassin” all the way back in 4’s time. Gallifrey is stale and has become passive and inert as they have grown more aware of the implications of meddling.
I think it’s boring to make the Timelords the world’s cleverest and most evil manipulators and also boring to have the Doctor beating them out of sheer power so much.
It feels like it should be a wistful thing for the Doctor to revisit now and then but not a central focus. It was a good metaphor for the ivory tower…..
As far as I can tell, the status quo as of the end of this episode is that nearly all life in the universe… in fact nearly all matter in the universe has been destroyed by the two Flux events.I thought the Ravagers plan was to let the Flux wipe run its course, then reset it to do it all again. Then the part where it was sucked into the Passenger was the beginning of Round 2?
That whole speech was so poorly written that I think it’s anyone’s guess — I took it as meaning that they would make the Doctor watch on a loop and that it was going to be a loop of Flux V2 (ie: whatever v1 did was still done) but honestly lord knows.
Dropping that chameleon circuit down a chute was the smartest choice he could have made. Hopefully it will stay buried there.The whole universe having been ravaged by the flux is such a wonderfully ridiculous note to leave hanging. No show is more suited than undoing it all with the press of a button, and yet that plotline was just not developed, probably because there was so much other stuff to deal with.
So either it’s just going to be forgotten, or the last of the specials next year will find a way to fix it. Either way, we’re in for a lot of Chibnall-nonsense.
Whittaker’s performance while interrogating The Grand Serpent was edgy and fantastic. Her contempt for him was such a great contrast with her usual busy-and-breezy way of talking. That was one of my favorite scenes and had me wishing that he had somehow been the Big Bad instead of the Ravagers (although I liked their look and performances) — that a guy amassing power would somehow let loose a Flux event is more interesting to me than the abstract “let’s get rid of trapezoids” stuff. I wish this Doctor, Dan, and Yaz would stay for one Russell Davies season. It’d be great to see what he did with them.
Yeah, it was one of the few scenes where she got to be something more than just sweet, outraged, or secretive. She felt like the Doctor there in a way that Tennant often managed to be.
Yeah, if you’re searching for good things to say about Flux on the whole, it’s that Chibnall finally let Jodie actually do a few things, rather than eternally standing around and having the plot explained to her by other characters. (Although it’s not like he entirely gave up on that, cf spending half of E5 having Barbara Flynn recap The Timeless Children for, subjectively, several hours.)
Yeah, Flux has a lot of the trademarks of the Chibnall era, melty skull-looking aliens, villains standing around and explaining stuff for entire scenes, some very dodgy make up, the Doctor keeping stuff from her companions for no good reason. Some of it finally worked, but a lot of it is always going to be frustrating because everything constantly feels like it’s building up to a climax that never arrives. Like the Flux itself was stopped/mitigated, but the fate of the universe is left unaddressed and the whole thing just feels incomplete.
My overwhelming impression of this period of the show is that they’re constantly one rewrite away from figuring it out.
The Capaldi years were on average not the best, but I can pick out a few episodes in there where the show was firing on all cylinders. I struggle to even name one episode from the past three seasons that feels like it couldn’t be improved on.
Yeah. Even everyone’s (including mine) choice for the unqualified classic of this era (Demons of the Punjab) could have stood at least one more draft.
Agreed. One of the most frustrating things about chibnall is that he doesn’t miss the boat by a mile, he gets really close to something awesome… But falls just short
This is a very generous review!I have not really said anything negative about any nuWho and like Jodie Whittaker in the role, but this season was so bad.My hopes were raised recently when I realized the Master hadn’t been around and wouldn’t likely sit by with the end of the universe at stake.Welp…that’s my bad, but this season just raised more questions, and I do NOT know why someone would spend all that time looking for answers only to lock up the answers!?
I liked how the two big scenes with the doctor and Yaz played, them hugging and saying they missed each other, and then the doctor’s tearful apology & telling Yaz she wants to let her in. Whether she is capable of that remains to be seen, but the thought is nice & maybe enough. The doctor-companion relationships are tricky, making them openly romantic can be disastrous, so I feel like they are walking a fine line but doing an effective job. It helps obviously that Jodie Whittaker & Mandip Gill’s chemistry is off the charts
I hate so much that 13 has stonewalled Yaz (and even Ryan and Graham last series) this whole time. It really affects the way Jodie has to play the character, and if it didn’t make her entirely unlikable, it hung over every interaction the two characters had in a really distracting way. And I do think you’re right about them having great chemistry, which made the choice so baffling. But the way it ended here, basically just mentioning what a jerk the Doctor has been and Yaz enthusiastically agreeing didn’t actually fix it for me. It felt entirely superficial, and now I just don’t trust that it’s going to actually happen on screen or off.Other Doctors have withheld personal information from their companions before, but it always seemed to be for a relevant reason before. This not only seemed arbitrary, it seemed like it was unnecessarily hurting both 13, who lacking someone to confide in was spiraling out of control, and Yaz, who got her head bitten off every time she showed an interest in her friend.
The universe was basically wiped out, the Doctor committed triple genocide, the Doctor threw the Secret Origins of her character and thus the series as a whole down a tube, and the season’s least interesting side character didn’t get a date. Sure, these are equally important stories and should all be given the same weight. On a technical and acting level, this season was pretty solid. On a storytelling level this was a mess. Remember when we spent whole episodes on the Weeping Angels?
So I actually did like this episode, for the most part. The reveal that Karvanista was once the Doctor’s Companion really recontextualized all their interactions. The trisplit was fun, with the Doctor crushing on herself, something I don’t think any version of the Doctor has done. 10, 11, and the War Doctor certainly weren’t. Vinder and Bel’s storyline and relationship were highlighs and I’m glad that they paid off. Sucks about Jericho dying since he was also a fun character in the back half of the series.
As far as the whole plot goes, rambling nothing. The Ravagers had a neat design but they kind pretty flat as villains with flat motivations. And this really stands out too considering how much over explaining has gone on in Chibnall’s stories, to then have a pair of villains whose motivations boiled down to “MUWAHAHAHAHAHA.”Likewise the Division fell pretty flat too, being pumped up for so long and then just destroyed by the Ravagers just like that. Maybe we’ll see more since they’re supposed to be an all powerful organization but I doubt it.
Can you really call it a reveal when they spent half of one of the first episodes recalling an adventure that the Doctor and Karvanista were on together?
it became clear pretty quickly that this season had a lot of “look at the birdie” going on and wasn’t going to land the plane, so to speak. As many have noted, the season ends with the Doctor participating in mass genocide, the majority of the universe destroyed, no closure on the Doctor’s past, and then for some reason that lady doesn’t want to date Dan?It’s like a rental, you can paint the walls, you can change the furniture, but you’re not supposed to destroy the majority of the universe. It seems almost like Chibnall dislikes the Who fans, he wanted to make the biggest changes he could in the shortest amount of time, nevermind that they don’t make nearly any sense (in the big Timeless Child sense or in the normal plotting sense, as Caroline points out: the flux eats planets but is stopped by a few fleets of ships?)I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if he is lobbying to kill off the Doctor for his big finale, what a bunch of junk.
you can paint the walls, you can change the furniture, but you’re not supposed to destroy the majority of the universeSo that’s why I didn’t get my deposit back…
a lot of “look at the birdie” going onI was confused by Jodie’s eyelines a lot this season too.
I was confused by Jodie’s eyelines a lot this season tooI’m pretty sure the issue here is that in a lot the “group” scenes, nobody’s actually on set at the same time: they keep cutting back and forth between static shots of people but there’s rarely an establishing shot and I strongly suspect that Jodie is looking at a balloon on a stick being held by the AD.
I’ve seen pictures of cave paintings that told a more coherent story. Chibnal has essentially killed the franchise with his retcon and general ineptitude. There is no regeneration from this disaster. Let the Doctor die. Maybe in a decade they can reboot the series and just pretend that Chibnal’s run was a bad dream…
I thought criticizing women in 2021 was illegal.
That Master tease was so head-slappingly blatant that I’m now hoping that it’s a swerve.Anyway, this was “that second Torchwood miniseries that everyone forgot about” bad, let’s just move on and hope they can salvage something from the end of the run.
I agree with everyone about being bothered by the lack of Chibnall not being bothered that a huge chunk of the universe was left destroyed after this convoluted mess was all said and done. Since, according to Azure explaining to the Doctor that their plan was to put the destruction of the universe on a time loop to enjoy over and over, it would have been nice if the Doctor picked up on that plan and suggested to the Time Avatar that she rewinds time a bit further back to before the Flux had a chance to happen, thus preventing all that destruction. Unless it was Time’s plan all along to destroy the universe. Honestly, with so much thrown into the mix, I got confused on which one of the bad guys wanted what to happen.
I’ll be glad when this mess is over. This such terrible series. I don’t even know how the next showrunner going drive this train wreck to next station with this kind bloated non-sense looming in the background.
I said this over on io9, and I’m gonna say it here:This…was a mess. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t necessarily love it. It was fairly serviceable at best; a decent bit of audio background noise while playing Animal Crossing or Destiny 2. The penultimate episode was damn good, but the finale landed like a wet fart.Yaz deserved better. The Doctor deserved better. Hell, even Dan deserved better, and he just got there.At the very least, I hope Yaz and Dan stick around so that RTD can use them.
I would like to say one thing in favor of this episode.Chibnall remembered that the Sontarans were at war with the Rutans.
Here’s some questions posted to the Fridge Logic page on TV Tropes:
– We’re to believe that the entire Lupari race came to shield the
Earth, but wouldn’t that include newborns who couldn’t operate ships?- With all their capabilities, why would the Daleks, Cybermen and
Sontarans not be able to create matter-generating shields themselves
like the Lupari? The Daleks in particular pride themselves on their
inventiveness.- Even if this Flux has been extinguished, why
have the Ravagers failed Time? Couldn’t they just have gone back to
Division and generated another one?- Can’t the Doctor remove the
kill switch from Karvanista’s brain? Or at least take two seconds to
scan it and say, “There’s absolutely no way I can remove the kill switch
from your brain without activating it.”?
Here’s some questions posted to the Fridge Logic page on TV Tropes:
– We’re to believe that the entire Lupari race came to shield the
Earth, but wouldn’t that include newborns who couldn’t operate ships?- With all their capabilities, why would the Daleks, Cybermen and
Sontarans not be able to create matter-generating shields themselves
like the Lupari? The Daleks in particular pride themselves on their
inventiveness.- Even if this Flux has been extinguished, why
have the Ravagers failed Time? Couldn’t they just have gone back to
Division and generated another one?- Can’t the Doctor remove the
kill switch from Karvanista’s brain? Or at least take two seconds to
scan it and say, “There’s absolutely no way I can remove the kill switch
from your brain without activating it.”?
I didn’t get the impression that the universe outside of the earth, Daleks, Cybermen, etc…are gone. Swarm & Azure said they were going to delight in letting the Flux run its course, rewind it, then run it again. SO IMO it finished Phase I, rewound for Phase II, and that was the moment it got sucked into the Passenger. It’s cheap way to do it, but everything reset.Otherwise, where does the Doctor want to take Yaz & Dan at the end if there’s nothing to see?
I think it must be a byproduct of watching the show and thinking about writing a quick review that causes many TV reviewers to miss details. Claire is obviously walking around 1967 because, as promised, the rogue Angel released her when the Division Angels took the Doctor. Their departure also released the quantum lock over both the 1901 and 1967 versions of the village, returning them to their proper place and time. I totally understood this from watching. It’s also obvious from the fact that UNIT finds 13’s TARDIS in the village in 1967 and sets up their HQ there. Yaz, Dan and Jericho also could not have ventured out into the wider world if the village had still been “locked”. I thought that the finale was perfectly fine, better than many season enders from previous showrunners. I mean, what more do we need to know about Swarm and Azure than what they told us? As far as the state of the post-Flux universe, it’s obviously been fully or partially reset (which Swarm said was possible) either set in motion by Swarm (with the intent of watching it be destroyed again) or by the personification of Time.I think that the bar seems to be set higher for Chibnall than for someone like Moffat who constantly left loose threads and unanswered questions.
I think Flux is probably the zenith of the Chibnall era. The writing in this show has steadily declined since Davies left. Let’s hope his return brings it back up to par.
Chibnall, to put it politely, has been a car crash. His work makes Moffat’s weird River Song obsession seem positively normal (and I love that character, but he did employ her more than was necessary at times). The Timeless Child—while somewhat interesting—screwed with too much of what made The Doctor “The Doctor”. I don’t have as much criticism of JW since an actor has to go with the story that is written. The one bright spot in the Chibnall era has been Jo Martin—the Fugitive Doctor was an inspired bit of writing, but Chibnall had Ryan-Murphy-itis and did not explore it further after introducing it. RTD is going to have a bit of a mess to clean up.(I wonder if the BBC realizes selecting Chibnall was a grave error, considering what he did to a MAJOR international moneymaker for the service))
The one good thing in this episode is the arrival of a Red Shirt character who is introduced and dies in less than 10 seconds!
After watching through all 6 episodes I feel like I need the cliff notes version. This entire storyline was incomprehensible.
I wanted to hold off until the entire season was over since I figured maybe everything was building up to something… And.. yes and no?Yes in that I think this offered some character growth for the Doctor and (especially) Yaz. Both were putting in some good stuff this season and the Doctor ending with letting go of the memories she was obsessed with (for now at least, obviously it’ll either come up in the next 3 episodes or never) was growth. Of a sort I guess.But beyond that… a big No. I mean when we end a 6 episode story and I have to ask the question “Well, is the rest of the universe still there or is it still in ruins?” that’s a pretty large hole in the story. When I have to ask “Who exactly were the big villains and what were their connection to the Doctor?” it’s another pretty large hole.Obviously Chibnall might pick those threads up in his specials. And if he answers them, okay. But that is the problem – if he couldn’t do the story in 6 episodes and needed the 3 specials then why the heck not just make it a 9 episode story?Also this continued my main complaint in this Chibnall era – things happen TO the Doctor but not BECAUSE of the Doctor. She’s been kinda standing on the sidelines until some lucky thing happens and then does something. She never got a story where she outwitted the villains – she just got lucky that they tended to defeat themselves… It’s nice to have a Dr that is maybe less omnipotent than previous versions but, you know… having a plan that works is still supposed to be part of the character.I really do not like this era. I love Whitaker since she seems to be game for any random thing the script throws at her in whatever week I see it but she’s never had the chance to actually get a consistent set of scripts. And that is on Chibnall.