13.27: Survivors of the Flux
In which, just so long as you switch your brain off, everything is fine.
Broadcast: November 2021
Watched: September 2022
An utter mess, but surprisingly fun. Contains numerous, largely unrelated, threads, and feels like a lot of space filling. This is extremely strange when there’s so little time left to articulate or progress the massively complicated *actual plot*? Considering which it’s incredibly entertaining.
Anyway, those threads, in descending order of importance.
1. Division started as a time lord thing, but grew to encompass everything. It thinks the Doctor has mucked up the universe too much, so it’s shutting it down and moving to another, as you do. (This whole plotline feels oddly like one of those literalisations of Chibnall’s writing process this year keeps on throwing up?)
Oh, and it’s run by the Doctor’s adoptive mum, who at one point says, “When you knew the truth you’d never stop hounding us” – kind of making Division *everything*, which is weirdly what Moffat was wrongly accused of doing with the Clara plot. This is surely the biggest thing ever to happen to the Doctor, something which reframes everything else?
I wonder if anyone will care.
On the upside... the scene in which Tacteun offers the Doctor a choice of her memories and rejoining division, or going back to save the universe, is actually quite a good moral dilemma.
(It was at this point I realised my bits on these episodes have taken an entirely different format to the other 800 and something, largely because I’m just trying to understand the plot?)
2. Meanwhile the companions, pointlessly but amusingly, are trapped in the early 20th century for three years, playing Indiana Jones and trying to work out the date the world will end (December 5th, the date of the final episode). I like the Doctor giving Yaz a mission to save the planet in her absence. The bit with the hologram is very Parting/Blink. The comedy hermit is amusing but the shift in tone bizarre.
Anyway, it’s great fun, some of Chibnall’s best material, but none of it goes anywhere. The message to Karvanista is great but... it doesn’t save them.
3. UNIT gets a (new?) origin story! The “corporal/colonel” confusion is dumb as f*ck [no way is Lethbridge-Stewart a corporal at this point], so we can only assume that Robert Bathurst has misspoken. Also, LOL that he only appears in Doctor Who after Moffat left.
Anyway, the Grand Serpent is surprisingly literal! (More Moffat rip offs, this time of Colony Sarff?) It’s hilarious that he goes to all this trouble, taking decades to move himself into heading a committee overseeing UNIT, just so he can shut it down and sell out the Earth.
Oh look, it’s a Sontaran invasion, those come round more and more frequently these days don’t they.
Still, we get an explanation for closure of UNIT, retconning that bit from Resolution we all assumed was just a joke about austerity? Actually, I assume none of this happens in the non-Flux timeline – partly because the Doctor’s TARDIS just hanging around UNIT for decades, presumably the entire time Pertwee is exiled, would be rubbish; partly because the Sontarans occupied Russia three episodes back. But oh well, that’s Lance’s problem.
4. Karvanista is still protecting the earth, Bel is still somehow running round space being badass while pregnant: this week she gets too close in a lupari craft, some plot happens.
5. Vinder is still looking for her, runs into Swarm and Azure, which would obviously happen in an infinite universe. “Your role here is simple. You are space. We are time.” Do you think Chibnall knows what this means? Anyway, he gets captured, meets Di, they plot revenge.
As 50 minutes of Doctor Who this is brilliant. As episode 5 of 6 it’s utterly baffling.
Other things:
I like Tacteun’s hat.
Also, even if it does undo one of the best cliffhangers ever, I like the idea that the angels encase the Doctor in an angel purely to freak her out; sadism is gradually becoming the angels’ thing.
An ood! Love an ood.
Apparently the flux destroyed many galaxies, suggesting that The Halloween Apocalypse had the highest body count of any episode ever. The Doctor talks about how she can reverse this. She never actually does.
Joseph Williamson’s tunnels helpfully connect bits of plot, which makes it even funnier that in War... people literally just vanish and appear elsewhere, they don’t use the plot device explicitly set up for that purpose. (Why couldn’t the TARDIS implode dropping them all in the tunnels or something?
“Any particular reason?” “Death, sir! Endless death!” “That’s persuasive.” Both Steve Oram and Kevin McNally are brilliant.
Oh thats what Swarm was up to with Passenger, harvesting energy to build a device that would take them to Division... where he immediately kills Tacteun, lol.
It’s funny how Jemma Redgrave, despite being a Redgrave, is not actually that great at acting.