The Doctor meets her maker as Doctor Who barrels towards its endgame
"Chapter Five" brings the Flux miniseries one step closer to its conclusion
TV Reviews Doctor Who
The big question I’ve had all season is whether showrunner Chris Chibnall would be able to weave together all the compelling pieces of this Flux miniseries into a greater whole. And the rollicking, riveting penultimate episode “Chapter
Five: Survivors Of The Flux” keeps that question up in the air as it delivers some satisfying shifts to the status quo but also focuses first and foremost on more set-up. In fact, “Survivors Of The Flux” reminded
me of “The Halloween Apocalypse” in just how much information it throws out
there as the episode hops between all sorts of different storylines before
leaving things on a big cliffhanger. Still, with a stylish tone and some exciting character connections, it makes for a pretty damn fun placeholder.
Before we get into all that, however, let’s have a moment of silence for poor,
forgotten Peggy, the time displaced little girl who gets nary a mention here.
Though I’d assumed there’d be some payoff for that sweet hug she shared with
Professor Jericho last week, instead the Yaz/Dan/Jericho throughline jumps ahead three years to 1904, where the trio are a well-honed team of globe-hopping, Indiana
Jones-style adventurers looking for clues as to when and where the world might
end. It was a task given to them by the Doctor, who recorded a secret hologram message
for Yaz in case they got separated in the chaos of the Flux. And with
little else to ground them, Yaz has clung to the mission (and the Doctor’s
message) as her only lifeline.
That leads to a top-tier acting moment from Mandip Gill as
Yaz forlornly yet lovingly watches the Doctor’s message for what’s clearly the
umpteenth time. If there’s a big weakness of “Survivors Of The Flux,” it’s that it
doesn’t make time for more character-centric moments like that. Though Yaz, Dan, and
Jericho have a nice working relationship and an impressive array of adventure
skills, their dynamics don’t feel all that different than they did last week. A
three-year time jump could be a huge opportunity for the show to move its
characters forward or deepen their relationships in unexpected ways. Instead
the jump feels arbitrary and underutilized—it might as well have been
six months as three years.
Thankfully, the Yaz/Dan/Jericho throughline is so fun and stylish (hats!
pulley comedy! steamships! dead bodies!) that it mostly gets away with it. But where
the lack of character work becomes a bigger issue is with the Doctor’s
storyline. It (somewhat disappointingly) turns out that transforming the Doctor
into a Weeping Angel was just a fun and easy method of transporting her to her
new prison: A Division control center that sits between universes and is run by
the mysterious woman from “Once, Upon Time” who turns out to be none other than
Tecteun—the space
explorer who found the Doctor in her “timeless child” form and raised her as half-scientific
experiment, half-child.
The
Doctor finally coming face-to-face with her Evil Mommy is a massive moment. And “Survivors Of The Flux” sort of knows that. Jodie
Whittaker and Barbara Flynn get one really fantastic scene where they argue
about whether Tecteun
rescued the Doctor or stole her. Who might the Doctor have become if she’d been
left underneath the wormhole where Tecteun found her? Yet, on the other hand,
is what Tecteun did really that different from what the Doctor does with her
companions? Is the Doctor also just a mad scientist running her loved ones
through various physical and psychological experiments?
There’s
tons of meaty stuff to dig into there, but a lot of the emotional weight of the
Tecteun reveal succumbs to the sheer amount of exposition that throughline has
to deliver too. Instead of centering first and foremost on the mother/daughter relationship, Chibnall has Tecteun lay out the massive scope of the
Division, the nature of its universe-controlling mission, and the idea that the
Doctor is a virus that infected their experiment, plus some details about how
the Flux operates and the ways in which the Doctor still has a chance to save
her universe. It’s a lot to take in, and the moment where the Doctor
switches from processing her mom-related angst to chatting with an Ood about
logistics feels less like an organic emotional reaction on the character’s part
and more like the script clunkily keeping the plot moving forward.
Indeed, much of “Survivors Of The Flux” is clearly biding its time
because Chibnall wants to save the big, explosive stuff for next week—with the ultimate time filler being Yaz, Dan, and Jericho’s pointless trip to write a message at the Great Wall of China. Still,
what “Survivors Of The Flux” lacks in clear emotional arcs, it makes up for in fun intersecting storylines.
It’s an absolute joy to
watch the Joseph Williamson subplot finally brought into the main story in a substantial way. All it takes is for the “Mad Mole” to wander aboard the companion’s ocean
liner and mention his name for Dan to immediately recognize the famous Liverpudlian.
(Did you know Dan is from Liverpool??) And even though the eccentric early 19th century tunnel builder is supposedly ancient history by 1904, Yaz, Dan, and
Jericho are able to find him in his base of operations:
An underground room with 12 doors that lead to 12 different places in time and space—all of
which have been shifting since the Flux started. (Door nine now leads to endless
death, for example.)
Equally satisfying is the way Karvanista and Bel cross paths when he recalls her Lupari
ship to fill a gap in the shield around the Earth. Their initial animosity melts
away when they find a common enemy in some invading Sontarans. It’s another
element from early in the season that makes a welcome return here, courtesy of,
unexpectedly enough, Craig Parkinson’s Grand Serpent a.k.a. Prentis. Though I’d
assumed the Grand Serpent was a one-off bit of worldbuilding for Vinder’s backstory, it turns
out he’s also responsible for a time-hopping masterplan to invade 63 years of U.N.I.T.
history in order to lower the metaphorical gates for the Sontaran army. That
leads to the very welcome return of Jemma Redgrave’s Kate Stewart, who was
forced to go off the grid in 2017, but will hopefully make her glorious return in
the finale.
Speaking
of that finale, my biggest question heading into it is how the Ravagers are
going to pay off. Though they’re easily the best of the various skull-like
aliens Chibnall has crammed into his era of Who, they’ve still yet to
fully click into place for me. And ending with a cliffhanger that sees them dust Tecteun
and then threaten to do the same to the Doctor falls flat—especially since killing off Tecteun so soon after introducing her just feels like a waste. (Although maybe she’s not permanently gone?) It’s a flaw that’s easy enough to overlook in a penultimate episode that’s largely carried along by its zippy, stylish tone. Next week, however, the show will finally have to try to stick the landing.
Stray
observations
- I
didn’t put this together on a first viewing, but the waiter who attacks Yaz, Dan, and Jericho has a snake tattoo on his
arm, which implies not only that he works for the Grand Serpent but also
that the Grand Serpent started weaving himself into human history well before
he met with Robert Bathurst’s General Farquhar in 1958. - Also,
every time Robert Bathurst pops up in something I just think of him as the guy
who dumped Lady Edith at the altar on Downton Abbey, - Did
I miss how Vinder tracked down the place where Swarm and Azure were dusting
people for fuel? Regardless, him meeting Diane inside a Passenger prison was another fun “worlds collide” moment. - Loved
the shout-out to Osgood, and the nod to future Brigadier Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart, who’s still just a corporal
in 1967. - Maybe it’ll pay off next week, but it feels like the ultimate bit of Chibnall overexposition to have Tecteun explain that the Doctor’s old memories were Quantum Locked in a Weeping Angel before Tecteun transferred them to a fob watch. Why couldn’t they have just been in the watch to start with?
- I’m
very curious to see what’s up with that weird black and white floating house
that the Doctor keeps envisioning. - Of course, that mystery “December 5th” date coincides with the air date for next
week’s finale. See you all back here then!
101 Comments
Unfortunately, once again the Timeless Child stuff boils down to the Doctor having things explained to her at length, and not actually doing a damn thing. Despite being such a big deal it feels like it changes so little. So having that take up the bulk of this episode hurt it a lot, even though Yaz’s adventures were fun. On a fundamental level I didn’t really respond to why Tecteun was doing any of this. Like I think I got the gist of it but it didn’t hit with any impact. Having the whole thing come down to the Doctor’s evil mum wanting her time-CIA shenanigans to continue unabated feels very small. Also I don’t really see why they spent so much time on the Serpent dude if his entire purpose was to let the Silurians invade because A) it’s not like UNIT have ever stopped an alien invasion without the Doctor’s involvement anyway and B) who cares, the UNIVERSE is ending! Like, sure earlier in the season you had a couple of more immediate threats but it feels like just before the finale a few alien spaceships are not really important next to the whole universe thing.
“Unfortunately, once again the Timeless Child stuff boils down to the
Doctor having things explained to her at length, and not actually doing a
damn thing.”
On the other side of the coin, I think the Flux Siblings were also awfully inert. They just sort of show up and dissolve Tecteun, like they always seem to just sort of pop in and deliver some vaguely louche stingers that lack any real snap or menace.
“On a fundamental level I didn’t really respond to why Tecteun was doing
any of this. Like I think I got the gist of it but it didn’t hit with
any impact.”I think this came down to Chibnall’s tendency to get vastly overabstract in the big speeches he writes. There always seem to be a lot of Successories Poster references to ideals like Freedom or Spirit but never much tie in to anything we ever see on screen. What plans of The Division, exactly, did The Doctor foil?
I think this comes down to a basic problem with Chibnall’s writing — he loves keeping audiences in the dark until a big reveal, but the problem is he ends up vastly underdeveloping plots to try to maintain the surprise. Which means he ends up relying on long expository speeches to tell the audiences what they’re supposed to think and feel, and they’re always unsatisfying.
“I don’t really see why they spent so much time on the Serpent dude”What was the entire point of the confrontation with the UNIT chief? Why didn’t she plant a rubber ray gun on him and toss him in the clink? Did she really just go home to her bomb knowing this guy’s been killing leadership for decades?
Ah so he subscribes to the J.J. Abrams style of writing!
It’s so funny you should write that because I have been thinking that Flux is basically the Doctor Who version of The Rise of Skywalker. It uses all the common tropes and characters of Doctor Who but without any of the elements that make Doctor Who work. It’s also got a totally unnecessary fetch quest in it in the same way TROS does.
One of the worst ways to resolve a villain plot is to build them up to be all powerful and terrifying and then have them get hit by a truck while they’re crossing the street. And chibnall does it twice on flux – first Tecteun gets dissolved by the ravagers, then they get dissolved by time, and time… Just lets the doctor go. That’s not heroism, it’s coincidence.
Haven’t seen this weeks ep yet, but I gotta concede last week’s Weeping Angels ep was the most fun I’ve had with Doctor Who in years.
I loved Yaz bossing her team around and making fun of Dan for being so proud of being from Liverpool, but him cheering her up when he realized she was sad & must miss the doctor & promising her she would see her againInterested to see how things play out with Yaz and the doctor
As somebody from Liverpool (did I mention it) I think Yaz was speaking to all of us, not just Dan.
Did I miss how Vinder tracked down the place where Swarm and Azure were dusting people for fuel? Bel left a message that she was seeking the Passenger – presumably he followed the same trail she did.
With the cliffhanger I’m left wondering if Azure is going to doublecross Swarm and in giving the Doctor her memories back allow her to resist his touch somehow.
There also appears to be fewer and fewer places in the universe one can travel to at all.
If I had to bet on the answer to your big question, I would bet on “No.”
I really wonder if the Grand Serpent’s “Prentis” persona’s first name started with an A, and if he ever crossed paths with the other Time Lord we know to be running around, perhaps to study under him….
I was toying with this idea over that name too, annoying as I think it would be. Would be nice to see more Sacha Dhawan though.
It would explain the whole “turns into a snake before crawling into Eric Robert’s mouth” turn that the Master’s story took once.
I just have the queasiest feeling that Chibnall’s gonna make Vinder and Bel the Doctor’s true parents, who threw her through the wormhole (probably from this new universe that got so much unnecessary description this episode) where Tecteun found her as the timeless childe or some other smug circular closed-loop storytelling Chibnall nonsense.
I didn’t dislike most of this but once again things were just too overstuffed. We’re five episodes in to our six episode season and there’s just some many balls in the air. The Serpent who Vinder worked for is suddenly another major villain, the Sontarans are back, Kate and Osgood are back (!), and now the Doctor’s adoptive mom is a villain and also dead.The Division stuff feels like the most waste since we spent so long introducing them and suddenly Swarm and Azure walk into the room and kill Tectuen. Maybe this would feel more meaningful if we had spent more time with the Division or we knew what the hell Swarm and Azure were up to.
It seems to be very late in the game for this much exposition and introducing new major villains. Maybe 6 episodes wasn’t enough to tell this story, but more likely it’s just Chibnall being Chibnall.
Well there’s this story plus a couple of specials next year before the next regeneration. So I can see an angle where the show tackles some more Division stuff post-Flux.
There’s really just two stories going on. The Earth story where the surviving aliens are going to be trying to take over Earth since it’s the only safe place for the time being. Then there’s the Doctor’s story, which I think will ultimately lead to her meeting her real parents who I think are Bel and Vinder. Swarm and Azure I think are just a force of nature and they ultimately want to eat the multiverse and won’t be anything beyond that.
Huh, well I’m certainly an idiot, reading these comments I’ve only just realised the Serpent and the male Ravager aren’t meant to be the same person.. I thought that was going to be an obvious reveal because we saw the female one was human looking at the start.
I am not impressed with past few episodes of this serial, but I guess I can say that the longer format seems to help Chibnall handle some of his worst mechanics. The added time helps him avoid a lot of the time management problems he’s had in single episodes where a lot of plots just end with all kinds of characters and subplots left hanging, and I think he’s been forced to think more about what function characters have in the story, instead of just dumping them in the mix. But I don’t know if this is just forestalling the same old pileup at the end. I’m glad they finally got the Williamson piece locked in, but I feel like all of Yaz and Dan’s Big Adventure was just a device to forestall the reveal, and thinking about the time remaining, I don’t think much will be done with Williamson in the end. One trek would have been plenty, but they ultimately felt like wheel spinning, and the incompetent assassins were just dumb. Why did the waiter poison himself instead of just putting the poison in the coffee? If this is Yaz’s end coming up (even if it’s not) it would have been nice to see her do more to add to the story. Keeping her so much in the dark about what’s happening for so long really robs her of any real agency.
The poison tooth is a classic trope. I’m not sure if it’s historically valid, but Nazis and other bad guys have been replacing their teeth with cyanide and then I guess just never chewing on that side again for ages. I suppose he still could have poisoned the coffee, especially since he walked into a room with three people (Though I think maybe he thought it was just Yaz and Jericho), but it looked like he was expected to bash heads against the wall.
I’m hoping that when RTD takes the show back over he slows things back down a bit. I’ve been rewatching some the first four series, and it’s remarkable how much more room they give their plots to breathe: actors speak a little more slowly and clearly, the plots are simpler and easier to grapple with, and they’re far lighter on exposition because there just isn’t as much to expose. It really lends to a far comfier viewing experience.
I give Chibnall credit for his ambition, but I spend most of each episode in my own sort of temporal shift: I constantly feel like I’m about five seconds behind, still absorbing something that happened a few moments before. I admire the dense plotting but I find at the end of it that I haven’t retained much.
Yeah, what I love about RTD is that he’s able to keep your focus on other things, so that the lack of cohesive plotting only rarely becomes an issue.
For all his faults and tendency to choose spectacle over cohesion, RTD did those things in service to emotional beats that made sense, and characters that were relatable. Chibnall’s problem is that the characters get lost in the spectacle.
I hope that he tones that spectacle down when he returns in 2023. It only undermined his episodes rarely for me–it’s one my favorite eras of Doctor Who—but I still think it’s not where his strengths are.
I think there will be some aspects of it that are bound to return, but it’s also been more than a decade and he’s grown as a writer. So I think that we’ll be seeing something new from him as well.
I liked his more is more-approach to writing season finales, despite their flaws, but I hope we get to see more of the RTD who wrote Midnight.
The other big question is will Murray Gold be returning with him?
To be fair, Moffat was capable of moving at the same speed but he’d always manage to get some sort of character stuff in there or at least much better dialogue. I am, however, following this plot much more than I ever could during 11’s time.
I feel the same way. But to be fair, this season / mini-series got cut short by at least two episodes thanks to pandemic-related delays. Some things just had to be, well, shmooshed together.
I could not tell, this feels like how all his episodes feel.
The Division stuff feels like the most waste since we spent so long introducing them and suddenly Swarm and Azure walk into the room and kill Tectuen. Maybe this would feel more meaningful if we had spent more time with the Division or we knew what the hell Swarm and Azure were up to.Personally, I think it’d be more meaningful if the Division were more than just “shady Time Lord conspiracy, just on a slightly larger scale than usual.” Is there anything more to the Division’s plan than what Rassilon had in mind way back at the end of Tennant’s run, with ending time itself and ascending to godhood or some such?
Yeah, it feels like three major season arcs are stuffed into 6 episodes. Sometimes that muchness works, but here it just came across as a bunch of plots that are just crashing into each other.Tecteun should have been a major development and she gets one scene to explain her whole deal and then is shuffled off the board because we have those two villains who need some more time to gloat. The ravagers have been a disappointment because they haven’t really done anything, they just show up, dissolve some people and talk nonsense about time battling space.
Similarly the Division still feels like a bad fit onto the whole show, because a Time lord organisation that monitors the entire universe (and all of time one assumes) seems like it should be so powerful that it begs the question; how have they escaped notice from the entire history of the show, and wouldn’t they have been able to save Gallifrey from the Daleks and the Master? They have the ability to destroy the universe, compared to that everything else seems small.
Also what are they a division of?But then that’s kind of the problem with the Chibnall revision of the Doctor’s history, it rewrites the show in a way that’s hard to square with the previous eras.
I quite liked the Himalayan seer’s dad jokes.
The Seer was one hell of a one-scene wonder, I loved him so much. The Ood no-selling the ‘rabbit out of a hat’ line was a good humor beat, too.
“Blimey, try to make an Ood laugh.”
The Doctor getting those memories back would be far too much of a change for the show, I think. My suspicion is that they will have the choice to let it all back in, but at some carefully calibrated expense (like maybe there would be a way to use the stored Artron energy in the watch to stop the Flux but it would destroy the contents forever), and will have this big realisation that their old life doesn’t matter.
Everyone stands still for a big sententious speech about how people are who they’ve chosen to be, obsessively chasing old selves and old ways is wrong and destructive etc. etc.). Running around, shouting and pulling levers ensues (door 9 will lead to the inside of the Passenger form where the gang will get back together and escape into the Division control room), ‘decompression’ happens and UNIT is back (they haven’t got time to sort this out so it’ll be a brief, affecting Coda where Kate meets the new Doctor for the first time).
Hopefully it doesn’t write itself as obviously as this, but on past experience…
Better than the other ways it could go, like the Doctor and Yaz having never gotten back from wherever they were sent in Spyfall, and “decompression” really being something happening in a virtual world.
Loved the shout-out to Osgood, and the nod to future Brigadier Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart, who’s still just a corporal in 1967Seems like someone’s goofed somewhere; Lethbridge-Stewart should be a Colonel in 1967.
Eh, it’s not completely impossible he was promoted from the ranks given UNIT was relatively small and did have a seemingly rather high bodycount at times.
His first appearance, “The Web of Fear”, was shown in 1967, he’s a colonel there, and he’s apparently just in the regular British army; UNIT doesn’t show up until “The Invasion” in 1969 (though admittedly it all still falls into the quagmire of the UNIT timeline). But even with that taken into account, UNIT is still drawn from the British army, and even for a small outfit like that going straight from corporal to colonel is a massive stretch; it’s jumping, like, at least seven ranks.Though having not seen the episode yet, I suspect this may just be a typo.
But even with that taken into account, UNIT is still drawn from the British army, and even for a small outfit like that going straight from corporal to colonel is a massive stretch; it’s jumping, like, at least seven ranks.It’s a massive jump in peacetime but if you consider UNIT a more wartime organisation given it’s constantly getting into scrapes then it isn’t unfeasible.And while The Web of Fear aired in the late 60s it never explicitly refers to exactly when it’s set IIRC, like a lot of “present-day” Who stories.
But again – UNIT wasn’t founded when Lethbridge-Stewart first appears. He’s clearly a member of the regular British army in “The Web of Fear”, and a colonel, at a point where it seems pretty clear that the British army hasn’t had a lot of experience fighting aliens. For the regular British army to even consider promoting a corporal to the rank of colonel, that would have to be a “fighting a world war and the officer class is getting massacred on a weekly basis” level situation, which doesn’t seem to be the case in “The Web of Fear”. By the time UNIT shows up, Lethbridge-Stewart is a Brigadier, and is pretty much outright stated to be the organisation’s first commander — which, well, neither the UN nor the British army are likely to promote a corporal all the way to colonel or brigadier just for that purpose when they can get an actual officer to do it. So either it’s a typo in the article or someone got sloppy with their homework.And while they didn’t explicitly state the year, “The Web of Fear” is clearly supposed to be set somewhat contemporaneously with the time it’s being shown, just like most of the modern-day episodes of Doctor Who are clearly supposed to be set roughly around broadcast even though no one explicitly points it out.(Lethbridge-Stewart’s whole character also screams “has gone through officer training at Sandhurst rather than being promoted from the ranks because everyone else is dead”, but that’s a whole other matter. Realistically, Lethbridge-Stewart would likely be at least a lieutenant, not an NCO.)
His whole character also screams “has gone through officer training at Sandhurst rather than being promoted from the ranks because everyone else is dead”Officers from the ranks can still go to Sandhurst. It’s not the Western Front. UNIT wasn’t founded when Lethbridge-Stewart first appears. He’s clearly a member of the regular British army in “The Web of Fear”, and a colonel, at a point where it seems pretty clear that the British army hasn’t had a lot of experience fighting aliens.Nah, like a lot of Who it’s vague and then later retconned. This is the latest retconning where UNIT now dates back to the 50s which makes sense given how alien encounters have been known by governments since before the 50s.The timeline is sloppy but this latest change isn’t impossible when much of the prior details have been via semi-canonical sources.
Officers from the ranks can still go to Sandhurst. It’s not the Western Front.I never said they couldn’t, but they still wouldn’t go into Sandhurst a corporal and come out a colonel. They would come out a second lieutenant or so at highest. Nor would they send someone to Sandhurst if they were giving them a battlefield promotion because everyone else was being killed, as you’ve been repeatedly suggesting; a course at Sandhurst takes almost a year to complete, which is a bit inconvenient if you need the officer literally right now because all the other ones are dead.Nah, like a lot of Who it’s vague and then later retconned.It’s not vague at all. It’s made crystal clear in “The Invasion” — Lethbridge-Stewart’s second appearance — that UNIT is a new organisation, that he’s been put in charge of it, that he’s been promoted from Colonel to Brigadier, and that the story is occurring after “The Web of Fear”. As in, there’s actual dialogue between the Doctor and the Brigadier that establishes all this stuff. There’s nothing “semi-canonical” about it; this is all happening in the series itself. Sure, it’s not actively spelled out in “The Web of Fear” that this isn’t UNIT, but the viewer is clearly supposed to see the military characters and assume that they are members of the regular military, since there is no indication given that they are any kind of special forces al la UNIT.A retcon it may be (assuming we’re being generous and that this is deliberate, not a screw-up somewhere), but the things it may be retconning are not in any way vague or semi-canonical. The things it’s contradicting can be easily checked by watching the episodes themselves. Heck, the episodes themselves aren’t even missing; there was even a big to-do when they found “The Web of Fear” a few years ago. It’s been given a flashy new blu-ray release just the other month with animations and everything.(And if it is a retcon, then frankly it seems like kind of a pointless one, since there’s never been any real suggestion presented in either the old show or the new that there was an abnormal amount of alien activity in the 1950s requiring military attention as opposed to the 1960s. There’s been, like, three stories in the show overall off the top of my head that have even been set then. But then, if I may editorialise for a second, pointless retcons appear to be something of a speciality of Chibnall these days, so perhaps in that sense it is appropriate.)
I never said they couldn’t, but they still wouldn’t go into Sandhurst a corporal and come out a colonel. Again it’s a fictional military organisation drawn from the British Army. If they needed a Colonel and only wanted someone from inside the organisation they could do it feasibly. There’s nothing “semi-canonical” about it; this is all happening in the series itself.The semi-canon stuff is all the outside publications that detail his history before this retcon. Sure, it’s not actively spelled out in “The Web of Fear” that this isn’t UNITYeah you’ve just admitted it’s not explicit. That’s all the show needs to make it work. UNIT wasn’t created by the showrunner for that episode but it was created on the back of it and since then other showrunners have massively convoluted the timeline.Look it’s Doctor Who, the whole timeline has been a mess for donkeys. This isn’t even the first era there’ve been regenerations preceding Hartnell. Whether it’s a cockup on the script or deliberate it doesn’t matter because it’s a single-line easter egg for fans and can be hand-wavingly worked like all of the show.
Yeah you’ve just admitted it’s not explicit.In that story. It is, however, made quite explicit in the next one the character appears in. As I stated. At length.I mean, I know I can be quite verbose, but at least read what I’ve said, don’t cherrypick a single sentence and act like it proves your overall point. “The Web of Fear” doesn’t exist in a vacuum. “The Invasion” clearly draws upon and builds upon it, in ways that this episode seems to actively contradict.Again it’s a fictional military organisation drawn from the British Army. If they needed a Colonel and only wanted someone from inside the organisation they could do it feasibly.It’s fictional, yes, but “it’s fictional” only goes so far. Especially when — as I’ve stated repeatedly — it’s actively contradicting information we’ve already been given about a fairly well-known and well-discussed character and organisation at this point for what would seem to be no real reason, and is on top of that making it look like you’re getting the basic details of a real-world organisation wrong. UNIT is fictional, yes, but it is heavily based on the functions and structure of the actual British army, it’s not completely made up out of whole cloth — saying “it’s fictional” just starts to look a bit lazy and like you can’t be bothered to do actual research. And even more especially when it’s just as easy — and looks more realistic, less reliant on fanwanking solutions and less like you’ve just screwed up basic research — to call him “Lieutenant / Captain / Major Lethbridge-Stewart”, if you must introduce him at a more junior rank. It’s far more plausible that a lieutenant in the British army would get promoted to colonel in such a short span of time than a corporal would. Look it’s Doctor Who, the whole timeline has been a mess for donkeys.True, but that’s no reason to actively make it worse (and make it look like you’ve got basic real-world facts wrong) for what would seem to be no real reason. Anyway, I think I’m starting to repeat myself at this point, and to be bluntly honest this whole conversation seems like it’s getting at little bit contrary-f0r-the-sake-of-it at this point, so I’m leaving it there.
UNIT is fictional, yes, but it is heavily based on the functions and structure of the actual British army, it’s not completely made up out of whole cloth — saying “it’s fictional” just starts to look a bit lazy and like you can’t be bothered to do actual research.Except it’s not and hasn’t been for a very longtime. At most it was always what the writers thought the army was like.I mean you can’t go for the “realism” angle now when we’re discussing a character who was a Brigadier for a very many years too long and who went into active combat akin to a junior officer. It’s far more plausible that a lieutenant in the British army would get promoted to colonel in such a short span of time than a corporal would.I agree it’s far more plausible but however this situation occurred it’s still plausible if unlikely.“The Invasion” clearly draws upon and builds upon it, in ways that this episode seems to actively contradict.The Invasion has the Brigadier inform the Doctor he’s been placed in charge of UNIT, not that UNIT never potentially existed before. So it’s still fine by Doctor Who standards of continuity. True, but that’s no reason to actively make it worse (and make it look like you’ve got basic real-world facts wrong) for what would seem to be no real reason.If you think that a single-line reference to him being a corporal “actively makes it worse” then you care far in excess in regards to the show’s timeline than any member of staff on the show has ever done in its near 60 year history.This whole conversation seems like it’s getting at little bit contrary-f0r-the-sake-of-it at this point, so I’m leaving it there.No, it’s just you’re getting way too hung up on a single word in a kids TV show about a time-travelling space alien not being in line with The Queen’s Regulations for the Army 1975 which you’re apparently an expert on…
I meant what I said about leaving our disagreement where it is, but since this is a little bit more of a dig at me rather than an extension of our disagreement:No, it’s just you’re getting way too hung up on a single word in a kids TV show about a time-travelling space alien not being in line with The Queen’s Regulations for the Army 1975 which you’re apparently an expert on…This is the kind of thing I meant when I said things were getting unnecessarily contrary; apparently I should have also added “unnecessarily snotty” as well. At no point did I ever claim to be an expert on the British military; all I did was point out what I thought was a basic continuity error about what the character’s rank should have been at the time he was being discussed (and which, on further reflection, suggested a lack of some basic research); in fact, I even openly admitted a few times that I could have been wrong about certain things and was willing to acknowledge a certain flexibility in the situation. You’re the one who started badgering me about it and acting like I was being unreasonable for doing so, which I don’t think I was being. I’ll also suggest that I made every effort to treat you and your views with respect despite our disagreement, so to be honest I find the hints of dismissiveness in this particular paragraph to be undeserved and unnecessary.Okay, maybe I was getting a bit hung up on a particular word — but words have meanings, and if you’re calling a character a ‘corporal’ instead of a ‘colonel’, you’re suggesting completely different things about his position and role in the military (especially when he’s been previously identified as being the latter). That’s not just the linguistic pedantry you’re trying to paint it as, it’s a pretty big distinction.
Its a massive leap anytime. Lieutenant to Brigadier is a huge leap taking years.
They would have brought in new officers not promoted from the ranks.
Yeah, he should of at least started as a Lieutenant. An enlisted man, becoming an officer, and then a general in like a decade? Yeah, that’s not happening. Someone doesn’t understand the difference between enlisted and officers.
Cadet, they started as cadets.
I thought the original head of UNIT must be joking about Lethbridge-Stewart being a “corporal” when he was actually a colonel
Given that guy’s character, it’s believable that he still refers to Lethbridge-Stewart as “corporal” from however many years ago when he first joined the organization. That’s a perfect example of what passes for humor for that sort of man.
That’s fair enough, actually.
Glad I read through all the comments before I said the same thing.
The Grand Serpent feels like one twist too many right now. We were plenty stuffed already, we didn’t need him too, not right now, even if it feels like the conflict between him and Kate has some legs.That said, ironically I think he’ll do better with less, if his only job is essentially just to set up the Sontaran invasion he’ll be fine. In a way because that would feel sort of meta; I don’t need a lot of extra explanation around him if his entire thing was just going ‘you know what, the Sontarans having a finale would be cool’, I immediately get that.
I don’t know if I more want Vinder or Kate Stewart to take down the Grand Serpent. Or maybe I would be happier if it was Bel or Osgood. Hard to say really. I do really hate him though, as intended
How did Prentis even get there? It’s not lending this series any credibility that I can’t remember things from week to week, but did they show him traveling to Earth for some reason, or did he just appear there because that’s what happened?
Obviously he’s associated with the Division, which implies that Vinder was, too. Not really a twist, per se, but something that got heavily undersold.
I thought the implication was that Prentis/ Serpent guy was one of the people that the doctor warned Yaz about in her message, who would be looking for a new planet to conquer now
I guess that makes sense, but I assumed that line was about displaced species looking for a new home, not a single person looking to actually take over. Also, if that is the implication, I would have put the hologram scene before the Prentis scene, not the other way around.
Ah, but he’s not just taking over. He’s got a deal with the Sontarans. He gets them in the door, they do the heavy work, he’s probably expecting to live easy on the last planet in the universe, inevitably one will double-cross the other.
Right now, unstated. All we’ve got is basically what Kate has deduced; ‘alien, either very old or time traveler’.
I have this vision of Chibnall being struck by a revelation: “Of course! That’s what Doctor Who needs! Mommy issues! Which can always become Daddy issues! How can the show have survived for 58 years without them?”
Well, I have issues, and they mostly revolve around Chibnall retconning whatever he feels like and thinking he can get away with it.- UNIT being founded in the 1950s blatantly ignores 53 years of the show repeatedly saying it was founded in the wake of the Yeti invasion of London, which happened in the late 60s (or early 70s at the very latest).- If Lethbridge-Stewart was a Corporal in 1967, there’s absolutely no way he could’ve become a Colonel by the time of the Yeti invasion. (Additionally, according to various spinoff media, he was a Second Lieutenant by 1946, which outranks a Corporal.) He was nothing to do with UNIT until the Yeti stuff happened, so while it was lovely to hear Nick Courtney’s voice again, I’m regretfully going to pretend I didn’t.- I can just about buy UNIT being shut down by New Year 2019, but if it were shut down in 2017 then it must have happened basically straight after ‘The Zygon Inversion’. Which makes no sense at all, given that UNIT was supposedly shut down because of a lack of any recent alien attacks. “Yeah, no troublesome aliens have killed anyone for at least a year. Oh, unless you count that Zygon terrorist cell. Yeah, apart from them.”- Don’t even get me started on the Timeless Child bollocks. “Is it true?” “Yes.” Discussion closed. Nice. Although I did think Tecteun’s return was a nice twist, and added a layer of pathos to the whole Flux situation it didn’t otherwise have. Which is a weird thing to say about the end of the universe.Bah. Easily the weakest part of ‘Flux’ so far, even without all the aforementioned plot holes. Which is a deep shame, considering how fantastic part 4 was. Why couldn’t all of it be co-written? xD
I was so damned happy to see Kate back. Like “finally, an adult’s in the room” happy. My guess is that the fob watch is a weapon to be used against the discount glamrockers.
Does Jodie still have another holiday special, or will episode 6 be her last?
There’s been a lot of messy confusion throughout this series (to say nothing of playing fast and loose with bith NuWho canon and I imagine that of the series as a whole), but if we get some strong Osgood scenes beyond a quick visual cameo, something good might have come from this whole thing.
Honestly the biggest demonstration of how pointless this entire “one series story” thing has been is how the bit parts have stolen the show. Dan has zero personality outside “he’s nice”, Yaz just seems increasingly superfluous to requirements, and the whole Timeless Child thing is utterly pointless in how it’s meant to be momentous yet conveniently has zero actual impact on the show.Like if RTD took over this Christmas and not next year, next week therefore becoming Chibnall’s last episode, can we honestly say what if anything is actually different about the show? The only change seems to be Gallifrey being destroyed again but that fits RTDs preferred lore quite nicely.
Promising “everything will change forever” on an infinitely running anthology show like Doctor Who is a terrible idea for that very reason.
Yep, something that RTD thankfully noted with his only “big change” being the Last Great Time War mostly to cut down on the lore for new viewers.
You can’t do anything too crazy on a macro scale, because the status quo must reassert itself in some form to make room for future stories. It’s the micro scale where the best drama is.
The Division sucks all the joy out of everything (and not in a good way), but having said that Yaz’s 1904 fits were fire, as the kids say (do the kids still say that?)
Yaz in period clothes has consistently been a highlight of this era of the show The doctor’s interactive message for her was so sweet
“The Division sucks all the joy out of everything…”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_DivisionDeliberate, or accidental?
I will be surprised if they manage to tie up every plot introduced in Flux to give us a good ending.
I was kind of meh on this one. Way too much happening.
With Doctor Who I find the more happening the better
Another episode I found massively fun to watch.But there is ….zero chance they stick the landing on this serial. There is just too much crammed in here and not nearly enough time (ironic).
That’s my take too. There’s no chance they’re going to “stick the landing” or whatever cliche but I’ve found this whole series massively fun. Unbearably negative comments section though
I have to say, the big surprise for me this week is that Tecteun confirmed (or possibly went along with) the Master’s claims regarding The Doctor’s origins. Right now I don’t expect that part of the story to really reckon with that, given that Chibnall and Whittaker have a couple more special episodes next year going into her regeneration.
One thing I did like about Kate’s involvement this week: it did add more context to the gag in “Resolution” about UNIT losing funding. Gotta think the Serpent went further in gumming up the works there after Kate went to ground.
I’m going to laugh if RTD handwaves the pointless Timeless Child bunk out of continuity.
This has got to be a foregone conclusion, unless Chibnall himself somehow miraculously ties it up neatly enough that it can be kicked to the corner and ignored. It’s definitely not happening next week, but he still has a year to go.
This storyline reads to me like Chibnall hitting a massive universal reset button for the next showrunner. “When the Doctor restored the Universe some things got put back different!”
I’m willing to be that it’s not so much a handwave, but that it never ever comes up ever again. It just quietly gets dropped, never to be seen again.
Did the dialog seem mixed unusually low to anyone else? Flux already has a few more accents that I have trouble following than normal, but I felt like I was missing a lot more than normal on this episode. And reading this review, I can see that I did. When was Osgood mentioned?
Kate called her briefly when her house exploded, to say she was “going dark” and then snap her phone in half. We don’t actually hear any dialogue from Osgood.
Oh, that makes sense. I heard the part about going dark, just not the “Osgood” at the beginning.
The actress is not bad, but Tecteun was a really lame villain, disappointing given her connection to the doctor, feels like a wasted opportunity. Even as evil time lords go she and her motivations were awfully generic
I struggle to see how this will end differently than “The Big Bang”. I think destroying the universe would be more interesting, but it just seems like the Doctor will reboot the universe, again.Also, how did Tecteun know what the Master told the Doctor? The Doctor asked, “Is what the Master said true?”, and she replied, “Yes”.I also got the impression that Vinder/Bel/Grand Serpent were all from the future, so it was strange to see Grand Serpent on Earth in the past. Maybe that was just a misunderstanding on my part though.I know a lot of people seem to be saying that Vinder and Bel are the Doctors parents. I can see this going even more timey-wimey with them naming the child Doctor, after the Doctor. That just seems like something that could happen in this season.
One maybe little, maybe huge, thing. The snake tattoo that the Grand Serpent’s underlings all had is the same tattoo that the 3rd Doctor had. Now, this has previously been explained as the mark the Time Lords gave him to show he was an exile, and the even more fun truth of it is that Jon Pertwee got riotously drunk one night and woke up with it the same morning. But I’d be surprised if they don’t try to shoehorn in some connection.
“Also, every time Robert Bathurst pops up in something I just think of him as the guy who dumped Lady Edith at the altar on Downton Abbey.” Hahaha! That’s exactly what I thought. When he got “alien-ed” by the Grand Serpent’s cybermat-like thingy, I thought “That’s your long overdue just deserts for what you did to poor ol’ Edith!”“Loved the shout-out to Osgood, and the nod to future Brigadier Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart, who’s still just a corporal in 1967.” Bathurst’s character also makes a remark about (paraphrasing) “missing out on that post office tower drama.” That was a reference to the first Doctor serial “The War Machines”, in which a supercomputer, WOTAN, takes over the London Post Office Tower in 1966. It was also a precursor to the UNIT era of stories.
The big question I’ve had all season is whether showrunner Chris Chibnall would be able to weave together all the compelling pieces of this Flux miniseries into a greater whole.
A three-year time jump could be a huge opportunity for the show to move its characters forward or deepen their relationships in unexpected ways. Instead the jump feels arbitrary and underutilized—it might as well have been six months as three years.Honestly the three-year time skip seems less weird to me than the sheer amount of traveling the characters are able to arrange in 1904. Sure, there’s probably less infrastructure to get around, security’s very different, etc., but it seems like they cover a lot of ground for people without access to modern transportation (Mexico to Constantinople to Nepal to the Great Wall of China and then back to Liverpool). I mean, sure, some of that you can do by train but I’d love to see the travel itinerary that gets you to all those places in the span of a year. Especially given they got dropped onto Earth in 1901 with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. Did they spend the three years somehow exploiting future knowledge to build up a fortune without breaking the timeline or tipping off Torchwood or the Time Agency?Did I miss how Vinder tracked down the place where Swarm and Azure were dusting people for fuel? Regardless, him meeting Diane inside a Passenger prison was another fun “worlds collide” moment.As near as I can tell, he figured out where Bel would have been headed (that monolith or whatever), and Swarm and Azure were there. If she hadn’t been recalled, she’d have gotten there with him.Maybe it’ll pay off next week, but it feels like the ultimate bit of Chibnall overexposition to have Tecteun explain that the Doctor’s old memories were Quantum Locked in a Weeping Angel before Tecteun transferred them to a fob watch. Why couldn’t they have just been in the watch to start with?My guess is that Chibnall came up with the Weeping Angel thing first, then realized he could do a Chameleon Arch reference, and just didn’t feel like giving up the Weeping Angel bit. Sort of like how Claire starts off like Sally Sparrow in reverse, that she already knows the Doctor from the Doctor’s future, but then we find out “Oh, no, she just saw the future and couldn’t explain that for some reason.” Like Chibnall really wanted to do a Sally Sparrow time loop, got too deep into writing it before realizing he didn’t have a good closing for it, and rather than rewrite the whole bit from the start just did a really weird swerve.All in all I enjoyed the ride the episode took us on (maybe part of what Chibnall’s needed all along was to do stories in arcs rather than go pure episodic), but I’ll admit that I was a little disappointed that the Division reveal was “Oh, okay, it’s extra-shady Time Lord stuff.” I’m not 100% sure what I was expecting, but I thought it’d be a little more than ‘a rogue intelligence agency that now works for itself.’ Why wipe out the Time Lords (again) and then just do another “evil Time Lords” plot but without Gallifrey?Also, if I were Bradley Walsh (Graham) and Tosin Cole (Ryan), I’d be pissed. This season we’ve gotten a parade of interesting, quirky, side-characters, any of whom could have been interesting Companions on their own. The show’s done more to get us invested in these characters in a few episodes than the first two seasons did with any of Jodie’s original Companions. Instead, they basically got to metaphorically pass her test tubes and tell her how brilliant she is (to mangle a reference). Maybe it’s because he just bit off more than he could chew, but you’d think an experienced showrunner would have an idea of how to do this by now.
Come on now, even in the late 19th century people were able to go all the way around the world in just 80 days.
It took about 10 days to go from New York to Constantinople in 1900. 4 1/2 days to Europe and 4 days from Paris to Constantinople on the Orient Express.The trans Siberian railroad was completed in 1904, but the war between Russian and Japan also started in 1904.
Fair enough. I do still wonder where they’ve gotten their resources for traveling, supplies, etc. At least a quick scene of one of them pawning something and winning a couple of long shot sports bets. (Liverpool’s had a football team since 1892, so Dan probably knows a few historical games they could bet on.)
Some fun Doctor Who trivia: Robert Bathurst also plays a pretty prominent recurring role in the “Doom Coalition” audio play series from Big Finish, featuring the Eighth Doctor (played by Paul McGann).
– I keep having this thought that Swarm, Azure, and Passenger are Dan, Yaz, and Jericho. I don’t believe it for a second – it would be too grim even compared to the destruction of the universe – but I keep looking at Swarm’s face and wondering…
– Also, I’ve been unable to wrap my mind around the Lupari since the very start. They are “species-bonded” to the human race, and each one of the more than 7 billion Lupari is bonded to a particular human being, who is their charge. We see Karvanista rushing in to save Dan at various times (as well as SUDDENLY, in 2021, see the message painted on the Great Wall in 1904, and complaining that he doesn’t have time travel so he can’t go fetch his human.) (That’s a paraphrase.)
– But they’re so BAD at it. Humans are getting killed every day, in car accidents, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and the Lupari are nowhere to be seen. Each Lupar is bonded to a specific human, but they only show up when the universe is being destroyed? Doesn’t sound like much of a bond.
– (They are adorable, though, and lend themselves to clever wordplay. Who’s a good Lupar? Who is, who? Is it you, Karvanista? Yes it is!)
every time Robert Bathurst pops up in something I just think of him as the guy who dumped Lady Edith at the altar on Downton Abbeyfor me, it’s Ed from Toast of London