I’ll tell you one thing, that was a war crime committed by a man. I’m telling you, these men committing crimes because a woman has the coat and screwdriver are shocking, to say the least! Right, if that wasn’t on the nose enough and somehow you still missed it, this week, a Tory MP that no one has ever heard of (including his constituents) said that because women have major roles in entertainment, men commit crimes. I’ve not seen stupidity like this since all the political jokes I wrote here were edited out by a do-gooding time traveler. Moral of the story: Stop dog-whistling your hatred of any minority to get in the press, you are already irrelevant.

Speaking of Irrelevant, Chris Chibnall is back helming a Doctor Who episode, and unsurprisingly, it is another episode of the build. The standard: “I am Chris Chibnall, hear me make Wikipedia editors’ heads explode and go on a circle for a globe-trotting adventure” episode. An episode that did nothing but add an extra paragraph to every third Wikipedia entry of all the fansites, and spoil the only good bit of imagery with his segments from “Village of the Angels.” Did we need Jodie out of the Angel-form right away? No, the Angels were being somewhat telepathic; Good direction and employing quick panning for effect could have enhanced the scene on its own.

I know I have banged on about Chris Chibnall needing an editor, and in the first two reviews, I tried to narrow in on what could have been done by an editor to tighten up the episodes. Despite my abrasive nature towards him, I do want the show to be good. I want Jodie’s Doctor to be as fantastic and brilliant as possible, but Flux just isn’t doing it. We’ve had five episodes of build, and we have very few personal stakes now as we’re going into the 6th and final part of the story. The biggest reset button in the universe, or in this case just between universe 1 and universe 2 with Rose Tyler and the blimps, could not save this story from being flat and boring. I’m not being needlessly harsh, I’m looking at Chris’ pattern.

This episode alone, despite having one or two moments being reasonably ok, where did it get us to that we weren’t already? Kate is on the run from UNIT which is apparently reformed, as I seem to remember they were disbanded when Stephen Fry ran MI6. Meanwhile, we had the reveal the woman between universes is the Super-Nanny gene splicer from “The Timeless Children,” and then of all things, we spent the better part of a minute having to remind the audience that the Doctor isn’t Gallifreyan. If you have to remind your audience after the fact once your reveal is done, maybe what you’ve written is, in fact, not what you think you’ve set up.

Putting aside that this woman is apparently the head of The Division, which is basically the CIA (not that one) but evil, and putting aside the idea that the Doctor was an experiment turned “virus.” Why is she the inciting incident for the Flux? Surely, if you have an issue with one person, you take that one person out when they are having a poo, sleeping, or what my editor would like me to call “personal activities.” Logically, you don’t destroy a whole universe and literally go straight to the Frankie Boyle joke “Level 2” by rebooting the universe. However, thinking logically for just a moment, if the universe ends in 2021, when did the Doctor take Rose Tyler on their third adventure?

Taking a moment away from that, why did the Grand Serpent have to be around UNIT and have Chibnall make a mess of the timeline? In the late 50s, we already had a secret organization tasked to look watch over extraterrestrial and supernatural happenings within the UK, or more specifically Cardiff. In fact, Chibnall wrote a majority of it, with his first episode being the sex ghost. Have an actress play Queen Victoria again and have him kill her with his creepy snake thing on January 22nd, 1901. Have him leading Torchwood before Captain Jack, and you hire Eve Myles as Gwen again. That hits the same beats, you just aren’t ruining a good thing.

I’ve not even spoken about Yaz, Graham, and Ryan… Oh wait, no, it is Yaz, the Northern, and Eustacius, which means Chibnall now has two bumbling funny old men to write for while Yaz twiddles her thumbs again. That was a B-plot running in circles because the writer had no idea what it was they were doing. I’m not going to dig into the mountain of things I’d say about the morality of hoiking a bloke overboard or putting blankets over some cartoon TNT. Actually, why can’t characters think to put their fingers over the burning string fuse? It would burn for a second, but that’s it.

What bothers me more is the issues we had with “Revolution of the Daleks:” Globe-trotting events in aid of just going in bloody circles. Great idea painting a massive early-20th century equivalent of a text to Karvanista saying, “Hiya babes, can U pick us up, 1904?” It was wasting our time and nothing more because he doesn’t time travel, and moreover, it was painted on the floor next to the Great Wall of China in the middle of a forest. Something tells me that between 1904 and 2021, the paint will corrode and fade, plant life will grow, and someone would have started a war over those words given it is written by the Great Wall of China!

All of which dragged us back to Liverpool to finally reveal that the Williamson tunnels have some magic doors and thus explain Joseph and his technicolored nightmares. While we’re, as Scooter once shouted “Back in the U.k.,” you are telling me that Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, one of the most important people in UNIT and to the UK, doesn’t have a more secluded house or even security? At least put one dead guard on the inside of the door before you blow up her house in the middle of a normal street. It would make more sense for fire investigations after the fact, only if Kate didn’t snap her flip phone from the mid-2000s and leave it right outside.

I like Karvanista, and I like Bel, but when they start firing at each other because she stole a Lupari ship, why did she have to tell him to stop? Surely she’s just human, and the Lupari are species-bound to protect humans, so he should be able to smell that, right? Though this brings up another issue this entire series has had, establishing where we are. I don’t mean the “1902 Mexico” thing, I mean the state of the universe. Only now have we established the Bel and Vinder were with us in real-time, relatively it is 2021 for them too, but because they aren’t altered much aside from their costume, they could’ve been from several hundred years in the future for all we knew.

My point is that we’ve still to establish they aren’t human, and if we don’t establish the baby providing it survives because Chibnall loves horrible events, I’m willing to bet we’ll see Bel and Vinder by the end of 2022 again. Though speaking of Vinder, it was nice seeing that Diane is still about doing absolutely nothing. I wonder if Chibnall spent two seconds giving the RSC actor some time on screen, if it would cause that stupid “look at me, I am a funny monk” to set fire to himself? I didn’t like the one-joke Chibnall wrote and repeatedly used for about 2-minutes straight. It was a very American way of doing comedy. I could see Will Ferrell or Seth Rogan (I know he’s Canadian) jumping at a scene like that.

Ok, pulling back for a moment to the tree of life and all that is trying to test my patience with Doctor Who, we did have personal stakes for a moment. We don’t anymore because Chris can’t let a ball stay in the air for more than a few moments, but there was something with the fob-watch. We had: “If you open that, I will do X, but if you relinquish those memories, I’ll save Y,” putting the Doctor in a position of having a choice, having some agency, and… Oh, we’re just going to have Swarm and Azure fizz step-mum away in a ball of glitter, oh good. Why doesn’t he want the Doctor to have some agency in any of their stories? I think the last time Jodie had agency was “The Woman Who Fell to Earth” back in 2018.

in spite of all the posturing that this is the end of the universe, this will change Doctor Who forever, and so on, none of it matters because the stakes have not been raised. I’ve been told they were raised, but we’ve not seen them change. We’ve been told the entire Division is behind that curtain over there, just don’t look, and a majority of the Milky Way (which we know as empty) is now gone. The thing is, we as viewers had no connection with a character whose planet was fizzed to death before the Flux began its assault. You could show one-hundred-billion planets dying, but I won’t care because I don’t know why I should care. The writer should be providing me with a reason.

If you want to see how something like that can be done and done well, go watch Star Trek: Discovery‘s first episode of Season 4: They show a character in distress, then they blow the planet up and we know how they feel. To draw another comparison between that episode and this series of Doctor Who, they established the state for which the universe is in, albeit with dialogue that makes me want to put a brick between someone’s teeth. I cannot tell you where the Flux is right now, I cannot tell you how the Flux works, in fact, I cannot tell if what we’ve seen is the Flux. As far as I understood the Flux was the fizzy glitter Fortnite border thing closing in, and it has passed earth with the three-minute eclipse.

However, the old woman that I was supposed to feel something for because Chibnall thinks kidnapping a kid from a space bus stop is adoption now, suggested she could get rid of earth quite easily. This is despite the fact that the Lupari ships protecting the planet are Flux-proof (just a tin of Ronseal, innit?), and are suggested to be an impenetrable force for, say, the Flux or the Sontarans to breakthrough. We’ll get to that in a minute. My point here is, if the writer doesn’t stick consistently to rules established or suggested by himself, how am I supposed to understand what the flux is going on?

So the big plan by the Grand Serpent is to take over UNIT and get Sontarans to invade. Let me ask you this: How? In “War of the Sontarans” we saw all the Sontaran ships being retrofitted for time travel, and we saw them blown to kingdom come in a temporal explosion, just as we saw Crimean Sontarans blown up later too. If the Flux has eaten a majority of the universe (universe 1) down to the very little left of the Milky Way, where did this lot come from? It was suggested the Sontarans conquered earth in two days once Dan left, so you’d assume between the Flux, Crimea, and the temporal explosion, most of the potato people are dead.

So where in the holy Sontar did several billion Sontarans come from? If I was a betting man, I’d venture on the idea that the Grand Serpent works for The Division and so do Sontarans for the time being. I’m hopeful that is wrong and we just get a big red button resetting the universe, but the way these last two series have been written, I don’t see that happening. As I said, Chibnall seems to want to make as much a mark on Doctor Who in the shortest amount of time: The Doctor’s origins, UNIT, the fact that the next universe is just a few feet to the left, and everything else. Whatever happened to space adventures? I think a bloke came in and stole them because his only role models now are Tommy Shelby and The Krays.

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2

Score

2.0/10

Pros

• Bishop's "I was nearly a kebab" & "Almost out of twine."
• Robert Bathurst

Cons

• Ok, that's a lot of build thing, try putting a roof on it.
• That monk - Chibnall's only joke.
• Not letting anything hang in the air.
• Dumb character beats.