Warning: The following review will contain spoilers for Doctor Who: Flux chapter 1, “The Halloween Apocalypse.” Reader’s discretion is advised.

Well, this first episode was an episode of television, not a very good one, but one nonetheless. As you do when you watch a car wreck, you want to see other people’s reactions. So, I had a slight look at general opinions soon after the episode finished, and I will never understand what brand of crack some are injecting in their eyeballs. Some called single episode stories the worst thing in the universe while some said that because they don’t know where they are going, it is suddenly great. Thus far, it has been one episode full of cheap exposition, a dime-store thriller with half-hearted conflict, and a very nice dog.

A majority of this series is written by Chris Chibnall, a man that if you’ve forgotten, is my very best friend in the whole world and… I can’t even keep up a lie that is poorly constructed. I hate his lack of imagination, the lack of direction he has taken Doctor Who, and I think the BBC would have done better handing the reigns to those four bits of dry spaghetti in Dan’s cupboard. He has just produced a minuscule amount of good TV in the few years has had the strap, and this is his last-ditch effort with three specials after this.

All but episode 4, which is co-written by Maxine Alderton of “The Haunting of Villa Diodati” fame within Doctor Who, is written exclusively by Chibnall and I’m not liking that prospect. Two seconds into “The Halloween Apocalypse,” you are smacked in the face with exposition so blunt it is legally classed as a weapon on 15 space-ports in the Delta Quadrant. You can’t move for the stuff. I didn’t think I’d be pulling out my reference to Meet Me In St. Louis that quickly, but there I was, hearing saucepans for clogs clomping down the street at 12-mph.

I haven’t even gotten to the sixty-five villains introduced over 50-minutes. In fact, let’s be honest, everyone could be a villain in this. We’re traveling from several different periods in the worst possible way. I mean, the first thing I want to say about the time travel and this episode is that Diane, the amputee woman from the museum, should have been the one to be sent back by the Weeping Angel to the point when Williamson was building that tunnel. Why? He explicitly said “We need more workers. Returned Soldiers, the poor, they must all be brought here and put to work,” and “I provide work and wages for those who would not otherwise find it.” It would give you an in when we finally get back there with Dan and the thin romantic connection would be intact.

Putting that aside, it was just messy. I’m reminded of Bo Burnham’s “Welcome to the Internet:” It was a little bit of everything all of the time, an episode that threw all the pieces onto the board and didn’t care where or how they landed. Why were we even shown Joseph Williamson digging his tunnel for the yellow submarine? So we can have Claire show up and say: “Hi, I am a character in this program, but I won’t be important for two or three episodes. I just want face time before the Weeping Angel I will look away from won’t jump me until I do that the second time.” The rules are established, if you blink or you can’t see the angel, it can move. So when you go behind a telegraph pole or tree and you can’t see it, it can move!

Just so I can get this straight in my head, and maybe in yours too, the villains consist of The Candyman’s Fruit Winders-based cousins, The Weeping Angels, the Sontarans, and Karvanista’s people who weren’t actually bad. Let’s say for now it was Williamson who is probably digging out the super-make-feel-better beam of doom and he’ll turn out good in the end too. It is hard to keep track when you spend a few seconds with someone, see them established poorly enough you don’t know their goals or aspirations, and then get told they’ve been twisted in every way possible to be something else.

The only one that didn’t change much is Karvanista, and that’s because that’s just me. They are angry at having to do something and would put the annoying people out of sight and out of mind. Yes, I am somewhat skipping over the fact the very first scene we have Yaz dangling over Awful Crayon Inscriptions of Death or, as the kids call it, ACID. Karvanista, a person of K9-Kind (no, not that one), is duty-bound by species to protect the human race of Earth and dangles a normal human woman over firey ACID and several other death traps. Do I have to become a script editor to bring us out of the drought of common sense going about right now?

Though, at the very least, could someone just sit down and explain something to someone properly? In “Year of Hell,” series 4 episodes 8 and 9 of Star Trek: Voyager, where the ship has been blown to bits and debris everywhere, Janeway goes into her office, clears her desk of debris, and gets a moment to sit down and establish what’s going on. That’s what this episode badly needed, a moment to clear the desk and let Dan know what’s going on. Something that lets the Doctor know Karvanista is actually good, and lets us catch our breaths to understand what anyone is doing or wants.

Instead, we spent 50-minutes in a world written to be dark by a writer who’s too immature to understand the themes, pacing, how to tie an episode of TV together, or anything else important. It felt like a Marvel film that was attempting to be dark and gritty but with a shine of non-sequitur jokes to balance out the mood and drop any pretense this was actually happening to people instead of cartoon characters. Black Widow was horrid for this. You spent three minutes listening to a god-awful version of Nirvana’s only song that 99.99% of the population can spot right away as young women (children) were being drugged in horrific conditions. Why did we see that? To show David Harbour is an awful dad and will continue to be throughout the film.

My point here is, that was never resolved because Marvel hates dealing with those heavy themes, most of the time. This episode wasn’t even hitting heavy themes other than the fact that the UK has a major issue with food poverty, resulting in decent and honest people having to use a food bank. Specifically, people who have homes in decent areas and half-decent laptops, if you were to believe this episode (which I’ll get to in a minute). There is one dark section in the whole episode’s ninety-five separate plotlines, and it is the one we’re not going to touch upon ever again because we’re off on the big space adventure in a direction that is not established in 50 minutes. The fact Dan is poor enough not to have food in his cupboards and prideful enough not to accept food from the food bank he is working at will never be touched upon until his sacrifice in five episodes’ time.

While we’re on my many gripes, why was it called Outpost Rose? In two seconds flat I came up with something moderately sci-fi sounding for a little observation post on the far reaches of the Milky Way. Are you honestly telling me that a writer of a sci-fi adventure show couldn’t think of a better name than Rose? I’m going to bang on about it because the name of the episode is clunky as well. Much like “The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos” feeling like someone threw the alphabet down the stairs, and whatever landed face-up ended up being the worst named episode in history. That’s what you get from Chris Chibnall, uncreative messes or ridiculously incompetent nonsense.

Let’s move on to the Lupari, the only Good Boy(!) of the episode. Nice to know we’re doing the whole Vor thing again where no one seemed to have checked that Lupari in its Latin origins suggests two things: She-wolf and prostitute. The awkward bit of dinner conversation on Sunday aside, I love their story. If we focused on this as the A story to pick up Dan, examining them as a people, and making the Candyman’s escape the B-plot, I think this would have been a much better episode. They are a species with a clear goal, Karvanista has personality, and generally speaking I think it is a good thing to explore.

Ok, sure, a race of fluffy friends protecting humans is a bit on-the-nose for symbolism. Also, I think how aggressive Karvanista is, to begin with, is a little unwarranted. Clunky and impressionable beginnings aside, we get to a point where there is something finally introduced by Chris Chibnall that I think we’ll see years down the line. I’ve been asking for this since Series 11, a new thing in the world of Doctor Who by the latest showrunner. Most of the time it is a monster: The Silence, The Weeping Angels, Judoon, the Raxacoricofallapatorians (clearly a non-clunky sci-fi name), and several others.

Just the same, there has been nothing particularly new since series 11’s Tzim-Sha (Tim Shaw), unless you count space Amazon, the Racnos 2.0, that man that liked to finger people, and the Thijarians. If I am completely honest, I only want to see the Thijarians and finger-man back because they provide interesting stories. The Lupari, which is not a collection of hairy space prostitutes, make that the third thing to return. You’ll notice I’ve not said I want the decomposing sweety with a face to return either. We’ve seen very little of Karvanista or his people, but we know their goals and who Karvanista is: A grumpy old pro just looking to get the job done. Yet, the Doug Jones wannabe has almost nothing.

Shall we actually talk about Dan, played by the questionable John Bishop? Since Catherine Tate’s Donna, I’ve always had a bit of a question mark put against a comedian coming into Doctor Who to play that long-term role. Tate held it well and stood upright often by strong writing and a popular Doctor. However, despite questions (to begin with) she stands out as one of the better companions when you are older. It goes without saying that I had reservations when John Bishop was announced to be the new companion after we got rid of one and a half. Is that a joke about how Ryan wasn’t really a fully-formed character? Yes, yes it is.

This is a problem with the episode on the whole, why add characters when you can’t write the one you already had? I don’t think his acting was as bad as I was expecting it to be. All the same, this episode wasn’t a “Smith and Jones,” “Rose,” “The Eleventh Hour,” or even “The Pilot.” This is why I said that focusing on the Lupari and their mission to exfiltrate all 7-billion humans from Earth before the Flux can touch it is a better story. It would give us time with Dan. Instead, the episode is a series of disconnected moments splayed throughout 50-minutes with only a small amount of time devoted to that. You could put almost every other shot in any other order, and it wouldn’t make an ounce of difference.

This is what makes it feel entirely like whiplash, aside from Chibnall’s idea that children are dumbfounded by their own existence. It was 50-minutes of “on the next exciting episode!” The thing is, it is done in the wrong order. Who puts in the “I am very important” bit and then shows the Weeping Angel? That was signposting that there is going to be a pleasant shiny sign three feet down the road informing you that this is the way to hell. In terms of writing, it was an idiot tracing the copy of a copy of someone else’s homework. The lines are smudged, you can see where things were slightly altered a bit, but you can still tell Clair’s whole thing was stolen from “Blink.”

Let me ask you this, where was the human reaction to the Lupari encompassing the globe to protect it? We see the Doctor seeing a far-off planet from a cheap Star Wars fan film being eaten by the Flux instead. Cut that, paste in the moment of a child looking up at the night sky and seeing ships interlocking. The viewers who seemed to have followed Chibnall over from Broadchurch seem to be parroting that this episode was more human, but where? Because Dan lives a pebble’s throw from the Premier League winning team he supports and doesn’t have enough food for himself, yet can buy stuff for Halloween for the kids?

Look, I love the idea of the boring bloke actually having something he likes and having personal conflict. However, I don’t care who you are, if you are spending money on Halloween for anyone else’s kids instead of feeding yourself, I have to ask what is mentally wrong with you. By all means, be nice to the kids, have the conflict of personal pride of an older man and working at the food bank, but for the love of all that is holy make some logical decisions. If you are going hungry but handing out a Twix and Mars bar to every kid that comes to your door, you are possibly the biggest moron next to Yaz.

Shall we get to Clara 2.0, I mean, Yaz? For two series already. Yaz has done sweet diddly squat. In this one episode, she’s co-piloting the TARDIS and breaking Dan out of space jail. Meanwhile she is an ex-cop, as she seemed to remember this one time, with issues of needing someone else to hold their hand and tell them they are doing fine, otherwise she turns into the rattiest person you’ve ever met. It is going from 0-100 in a femtosecond. After four years (yes, she’s that longstanding already), we knew she was a cop and is now the neediest person on the planet. If she doesn’t get to be co-dependant, god does she get into Mean Girls territory with that playground politicking.

You have Maxine Alderton on staff, so why not pull her in and place her in front of a laptop to write another “sometimes this team structure isn’t flat. It’s mountainous, with me at the summit in the stratosphere, alone, left to choose.” I hate the phrase I’m about to use, but shut Yaz down and put her in her place as a companion. We had this with Adam from “The Long Game,” he stepped outside of his boundary and the Doctor did a simple thing to put him in his place. It was maybe slightly morally questionable before UNIT was established clearly, outside of passing mention with Clive, but this is the same Doctor that has used Nazis to solve her problems, twice!

If there is one thing missing from all of this, it is character. We finally know that Yaz is beyond needy and that there is just a double bed laying in the console room of the TARDIS. I think my notion that’s she is a lesbian and her big thing will be suicide because the Doctor rejects her will be true. It has taken four years to get there, so when Dan offers to sacrifice himself at the end of the last episode because he’s prideful and works at a food bank, I’m not going to be surprised. Honestly, who is this Doctor? “I hate understanding,” is not a line from the Doctor. It is a writer not understanding a character and needing a beat. I’d love it if someone with skill (anyone) could write Jodie to be the Doctor, just once.

This is the thing about Law and Order UK and Broadchurch, it was misery. It is a man seeing The Wire or Breaking Bad and believing that all the horrible things, the murder, the child abuse, and the constant pain and suffering of a character or group is how to write TV. It is not, it is growth that does that. It is moving from one spot to another in terms of character. It took a while, but Ryan’s growing relationship with Graham was that. Thus far, Yaz has gained a personality trait, the Doctor is chasing ghosts after running around for years with Jack Harkness who’s entire thing is a past filled with ghosts he doesn’t know, and we’re once again adding pieces to the chessboard. To go on with the metaphor, we don’t know if there is a Queen, a Rook, or a Bishop on the table, but someone’s starting the clock.

Did this episode even have a structure? That’s where we’re at within 50-minutes of an opening episode. We didn’t have clear act 1, 2, or 3 marker to place because it wasn’t an episode of television. It was the first 5-10 minutes of the next five episodes, while this episode was only 25-minutes long and cut up between other scenes that make no sense to be here. Sure, this is meant to be a larger arc spread over several episodes, but you still need the structure in this one. It should consist of loops-within-loops or couplets within poetry. You need to anchor this episode into its own story while playing a part in your stupid grand plot nonsense.

90-99% of the episode was just plot, constant neverending plot. That’s great if you don’t understand stories, writing, or concepts at all, but you need to give me something with characters. You need to put the world into context and not just show me everything happening at once. Who was the husband that got fizzed away? Why did we need two guards for the prison break? Why did we need to see the Sontarans this episode? Why show Claire before she has seen the Weeping Angel telling the Doctor she’s important? That’s not how the Weeping Angels work, then again, walking behind a tree where you can’t see them is also an issue.

If it seems I am all over the place, that’s because this episode was a childish mess. “And then, and then, and then,” is how a child tells you about their day. To write a competent story you put “therefore” or “because” between your beats. If the writers behind South Park can get this despite being the most immature and vitriolic lens of the world, then the showrunner/head writer of one of the longest-running pieces of entertainment in history should be able to understand this. However, someone at the BBC didn’t know what to do when Steven Moffat was leaving.

Speaking of the BBC’s hiring practices, and this will seem like a nitpick and a half, the sound engineering and composition from this era can jump in the bin. If I am debating whether or not I am going to put subtitles on during your live broadcast because you can’t put music at a decent level, there may be something wrong. I only got some of the lines when I rewatched the episode to catch details I might have missed. By the way, did you catch that the strawberry flavored bloke is called Swarm? Or that Anne/Aruze is never actually given a name in the episode? Swarm is said once, and it is hard to notice when you are asking yourself why they’re killing off the Black woman in several seconds.

What this era has so desperately needed is a script editor that has seen TV and understands both a script and narrative structure. Why did this episode have Dave Lister pop up? If you are a script editor and you are in the UK, but don’t understand that, get a new job. Within two seconds I thought that was a segment snagged from Red Dwarf, and anyone with half a brain could tell you that this was a messy and incoherent episode that went nowhere. Where do we go from here? Sure, there is a Sontaran war fleet going up against the French Foreign Legion, but how do we get the Doctor from about to be eaten by the Flux to that? Is it just eating planets and people resulting in clashes through a messy timeline?

If that’s the case, why are we fumbling about with this nonsense that pretends the end of the universe is the plot? Make the man that looks like a boiled Jelly Baby in a suit come out and yell that he’s going to mess with time to bring about the end of the universe. That does the same job and brings in the campiness Doctor Who can produce without whiplash-inducing scenes as we saw on Sunday. We also wouldn’t need a Battle Royale-style moving wall through-space eating planets separated by three whole feet. Just use a big button for your man Swarm to press and for the Doctor to try and thwart before having to go on five time-traveling correction missions.

Ultimately, this was an episode without direction, character, or a story. It was a whole load of set-up without any actual structure. Within it stood an idea used to punt a boring bloke into space, but it did so without exploring itself because the writer was too immature to understand pacing, structure, or how to flesh out a character or even write a story. This is something he’s had trouble with for years though. Here is hoping that the next episode isn’t just eating pure sugar by the ton or I’ll have to write another 10,000 words about how this man needs to go and someone else should have written Jodie’s entire run. I honestly don’t give a flux what happens at this point, just give me November 23rd, 2023.

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Doctor Who: Flux "The Halloween Apocalypse"

3

Score

3.0/10

Pros

• The Lupari and Karvanista.
• Two decent humorous lines.
• John Bishop is not bad as an actor.
• Nice to see Diane is just disabled without making it big.

Cons

• Saucepans for exposition.
• Plot holes the size of the universe.
• Stealing everything from everyone.
• Audio mixing for the broadcast.
• Does the writer/script editor not understand the Weeping Angels?