13.23: The Halloween Apocalypse

In which Flux momentarily looks quite promising.

Broadcast: October 2021

Watched: August 2022

“I don’t know you.” “Yet I know you.” Or alternatively: “Why? Do things often go wrong?”

The opening sequence is the latest helpful summation of why Chibnall sucks at this. It’s exciting! It’s fun! It drops you right into the action, and has one very funny moment, in the look Yaz gives the Doctor when she said “I can’t help feeling some of this is my fault”! But since we find out very soon that Karvanista isn’t actually evil, it... doesn’t actually make the slightest sense? It’s like Chibnall wrote this, changed his mind about who Karvanista was and never bothered to go back and rewrite anything?

Anyway, the plot! Swarm has been imprisoned forever, possibly literally, by Division. He escapes because something malfunctions something something, gives the Doctor a vision, which is pretty helpful in terms of the infodumping, and then when she comes back to reality the TARDIS has started melting. Oh dear.

Meanwhile Karvanista the giant dog who tried to kill the Doctor in the opening seems to be kidnapping a nice man named Dan Lewis. (The museum bit seems slightly unhinged, the foodbank bit extremely obvious, but Bishop immediately makes him very likeable.) Then it turns out the dog people are invading the earth, only they’re not, they’re protecting it. Still with me?

Some other things which have not been explained yet, many of which won’t be! Joseph Williamson going moleman under Liverpool. Someone named Claire, who seems mad but recognises both the Doctor and a weeping angel, before getting time zapped by one. Some weird witness protection shit in the Arctic Circle. Some bloke called Vinder who is bitching about how much he hates his boss when the end of the universe kicks off. Also, some Sontarans are moderately amusing (“You look disgusting, really disgusting”).

It’s all extremely random. First time round I really enjoyed it. I’d figured that the knowledge that Chibnall doesn’t land the ending wouldn’t really affect a rewatch, because I assumed as much at the time, but... somehow the madness is less compelling when you know it doesn’t cohere, rather than just assuming it won’t?

That said, it remains an extremely good cliffhanger: the TARDIS about to be destroyed, then a quick run through all the major guest characters, including a Sontaran screaming “Attack”. There are worse episodes.

Other things:

• This episode is technically called Flux - Chapter 1: The Halloween Apocalypse. I do admire Chibnall’s determination to break the story table but I refuse to accept that Flux is a single story, sorry.

• I also love that they put John Bishop in a cage.

• There’s a bed in the console room and also some handcuffs. LOL. Although since we know Thasmin is going nowhere, also WTF?

• I quite like the way Yaz is now being played as an old hand: she’s now the “co-pilot”, and can spot invisible booby traps, but the Doctor still won’t tell her anything. She is also now a former police officer, which saves writing the bits Chibnall never bothered to write anyway.

• The Doctor’s attempt to confront Karvanista, in which she continually gets distracted, is really fun. Ditto the objectively ludicrous but also extremely Doctor Who idea of species bonding (“Bring me back my human now!”). Also I’m now soppy about dogs, sorry.

• “Observation Outpost Rose”. Huh? What?

• “Right now you don’t have a house. Very soon, you may not have a planet and there may not be a universe” - I wonder if that’s consciously H2G2. I do like Bishop’s “I can’t live in that!”

• The universe is not 30 trillion light years across, Chibnall. Oh well.