They had beaten the Sea Devils, and he was close to working things out with his would-be girlfriend, but Dan would regret streaming the Champions League Final.
In a recent interview with the Radio Times, outbound Doctor Who showrunner, Chris Chibnall, stated that he expects Russell T Davies will ignore the changes he made while showrunner. According to Chibnall- “every era contains a contradiction or left-turn from what has come before.” Like when Moffat completely ignored the regeneration limit or the destruction of Gallifrey. Ignore the fact that in doing so, he also took into account the War Doctor and two Tenth Doctor regenerations, effectively making the Eleventh Doctor the Thirteenth Doctor. Or that the War Doctor and his future selves reversed the outcome of the Time War. Steven Moffat didn’t simply ignore what came before, he wrote something that worked within the parameters of the show. You know, like a writer.
It’s odd then that Chibnall should find himself on his second to last episode following a time-honoured tradition in Doctor Who reaching back as far as 1972. That tradition being the making of a Doctor Who story starring the Sea Devils that isn’t very interesting. Because let’s be honest, this isn’t exactly a sacred baddie. To the best of my knowledge, what most anyone likes about the Sea Devils is how they look. The sympathetic redesign of the Sea Devils leaves nothing to be desired, they look great. The good news is that the Sea Devils are no worse off than they were at the end of 1984’s “Warriors of the Deep.” The bad news is, there’s very little worth mentioning about “Legend of the Sea Devils.”
From the outside, this episode should be a winner. A beloved classic villain making its return for the first time in the new series, with pirates nonetheless! The problem here is that, much like the Sea Devils, Doctor Who has never really done a decent pirate episode before. If “Our Flag Means Death,” has proven nothing else, it’s that the pirating world is still rife with possibilities. Yet on Doctor Who, they always seem to fizzle (except “Enlightenment,” which owns ass, and I will not take questions). The pirates never feel particularly campy in this or even “The Curse of the Black Spot.” When you hear about the Doctor on a pirate ship, you want to get terrible dialogue and ridiculous set pieces. What we got instead were terrible dialogue and ridiculous set pieces. But you know, not like that.
Doctor Who has swashbuckling in its blood. Just look at Jon Pertwee or Tom Baker. David Tennant riding through a mirror on the back of a horse in front of the entire French court is as dashing as any pirate. The Doctor is a penniless explorer in a stolen ship crewed by wayward souls. She’s rubbed shoulders with the Corsair and fenced with a spoon. So why does this suck so hard? Probably the pacing, the writing, the plot, the structure, and the everything. I’ve said in the past that all I really wanted from Chibnall’s remaining episodes is that he fly under the radar, and boy howdy did he deliver. It would have been nice to expect some big dumb fun, but what we got was closer to big dumb boredom.
Right away you know something is off because everyone is stupid and vague. We meet “Madam Ching,” the pirate Queen of 1807. We don’t really get the giant obnoxious letters telling the location like we normally get, just the year. A father and son argue about stopping Madam Ching who is currently banging a MacGuffin dagger against a MacGuffin statue of a Sea Devil. It’s no question to the audience as to what is about to happen. The giant statue looks almost too big to be a Sea Devil, which is driven home all the more by the presence of a human figure in the grasp of the creature’s scaly fist. If this creature was frozen into a statue, was the human figure as well? Why didn’t they also emerge from the statue? Why were they so small? Was the Sea Devil killing a child? Did the child not survive the carbonite freezing process? Maybe someone added it later to make the creature more terrifying to ward off potential idiots like Madam Ching.
The entire scene plays out in the dumbest way possible. An older man, Ying Wai, tells his son, Ying Ki, to take over guarding the statue in case he dies. Ying Wai promptly goes off and dies. The Sea Devil, known as Marsisuss strikes him down. The magnetic whathaveyou of Marsisuss being freed pulls the TARDIS off course and draws the Doctor toward the action via her earring. Then, as if lying in wait, a floating pirate ship equipped with floaty green bits emerges from the sea, piloted by Sea Devils. What they had been doing in all that time is anyone’s guess. You would think that if your captain doesn’t reappear for about 300 years, the first mate might take command, eventually. It’s like Marsisuss left the car running with the window cracked and his kids are still waiting for him to return from the bank.
What may have been more illustrative, or even more engaging is perhaps Marsisuss needs to first awaken his troops from the sea. Maybe he needs to blow a conch that signals the reviving process and the Doctor tries to stop him. Instead the ship merely appears in the sky like Bowser’s airship. I say this not just because the ships are similar, but that they both have about as much setup. Despite the abrupt and unlikely appearance of Marsisuss’ getaway ride, it does at least look cool. Up to that point, the special effects had been somewhat lacking, so much so that my wife spent the first five minutes marvelling at how bad everything looked. But I honestly don’t mind when Doctor Who looks a bit naff. Like Nintendo, it’s not about the graphics. You want Playstation 5 quality, go watch The Madalorian. I knew the score though, they were saving most of the effects budget for the Sea Devils and their giant sea monster. It’s pretty standard filmmaking, that. Save the money for the important stuff.
There’s a sort of parallel between the Doctor and Madam Ching. Both are famous women travellers piloting a ship by themselves, which actually should be piloted by an entire crew. The parallel is strained by the fact that Madam Ching is so much better a solo pilot than the Doctor. It’s not a question of skill, but a mere observation of facts. We’ve all seen sail barges in movies. You don’t keep a ship crew for the company, these men all have jobs! No matter how much tenacity one woman may have, nobody could sail such a ship alone. If she is on the hunt for the Legendary Ji-Hun’s sunken treasure, she would need a crew to operate a bottom trawler. We’ve all seen these movies and read these stories. We’ve heard “Raise the flag and hoist the mainsail!” time and time again, so it rings hollow when we see something so physically impossible. It’s like Mr Plinkett says- “You might not have noticed, but your brain did.”
The Doctor and Yaz go off to have a bit of lesbian processing while Dan and his new friend Ying Ki are caught spying by Madam Ching. The Doctor’s plan is to go to the point where the treasure was lost at sea and rescue it before it falls to the bottom of the ocean, even though the Doctor illustrates that the TARDIS can actually sit at the bottom of the ocean with an air bubble protecting them. While back in time, aboard Ji-Hun’s ship, we see Ji-Hun forcing his men overboard and pledging allegiance to Marsisuss. The ship never actually sank, but was rather taken over by the Sea Devils and decked out with green floaty bits. They must have been proud of this visual because they give the ship three big reveals. It’s like “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” in here. The Doctror and Yaz abscond back to the TARDIS just as a fight breaks out between Ji-Hun and Marsisuss. Landing at the bottom of the ocean, the Doctor finds no sign of sunken wreckage. Using the Little Mermaid ambience, the Doctor chooses this as the moment to flirt with Yaz a little.
At this moment, the ground begins to open and a giant sea monster emerges and captures the TARDIS within its mighty jaws. If only that thing could dematerialise. Luckily, this sea monster is no more than a glorified lift. I half expected a Flintstones gag where monster looks at the camera and says “Eh, it’s a living.” This wouldn’t be the first time Chris Chibnall has taken a big concept and reduced it to a means of safe transportation for the Doctor. They did that with the Weeping Angels too. It’s the worst kind of consistency. Set up without exploration. Your giant monster isn’t even a giant monster, it’s an elevator. Whatever.
Aboard the Sea Devil vessel, the Doctor and Yaz see Ji-Hun, still alive, but kept prisoner in a Tim Shaw type of thing. My guess is that Marsisuss must have been fully conscious while trapped in that statue. It’s the only reason I can think that he would just spill the beans of his entire plan to the Doctor. He was desperate for a bit of banter. His basic plan is to use something called the keystone, which is yet again, another MacGuffin to flood the earth using magnetism or some such nonsense. Ignoring the fact that there’s not enough water to flood the earth, what would be the point? Water covers over 70% of the Earth. Bro, you’ve already won. If you can’t control the planet from the majority of its surface, another 30% isn’t going to help. Maybe you’re dumb and your plan is dumb and you’re a bad leader. Your crew didn’t even know how to appoint a new captain. You’ve given them no guidance on what to do in your absence, so of course, you’re losing.
After realising the Doctor doesn’t know where the keystone is, Marsisuss decides it’s time for her to die. Before he can cut her down, the Doctor pulls a big switch that sends the ship to the surface of the water. During this time, we’re expected to believe that the ship resurfacing is enough of a distraction that Yaz and the Doctor are able to escape unscathed. Somehow, they are able to gain their bearings faster than the guy who actually knows the ship, and are able to swing from ropes to the safety of Madam Ching’s boat. It’s like when Yaz and Dan witness the Weeping Angels killing two old people and then are perfectly fine in the next scene. It’s almost as if they hope that if they throw this crap at you fast enough, you won’t have time to think about how stupid any of it was.
What comes next is arguably the best part of the episode. Finally, some actual swashbuckling! For a brief moment, the story remembers this is a pirate episode and we get some actual swordfighting. The Doctor even gets in on the action, which is great to see. In fact, Jodie Whittaker is on her A-game for this story. Unfortunately for her, the writers, Ella Road and Chris Chibnall were not. I feel sorry for Ella Road because so many of Chibnall’s deficiencies are on display here, that it feels unfair that she must shoulder the blame. We get the Doctor’s weird morality in the form of disgust that Ji-Hun may want to avenge his crew by cutting down Marsisuss. I say weird in that just moments later we see Dan cut down seven Sea Devils in two blows like he was straight from Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
Even worse than that is the moment where the Doctor lets Ji-Hun die in her place. Evidently, he deserves to die because he killed the guy who imprisoned him for 300 years. It’s as though Chris Chibnall took none of the criticism from “The Timeless Children,” to heart. The Doctor, who once gave one of her lives to save a companion she’d only just met, allows men to die as doorstops. Their sacrifice affording her a coward’s exit every time. When Steven Moffat received criticism for his writing, you would often see a meta commentary within the show, as if it were Moffat’s way of addressing the issues. There was a conversation going on. Here you see a cowardly writer writing a cowardly Doctor and refusing to admit any wrongdoing. I feel as though any restraint shown by Chris Chibnall at the end of Flux was more of a dictate from above, than any kind of re-direction. It feels petulant and selfish. The only way to redeem this kind of cowardice would be for it to be how the Doctor dies.
Speaking of the Doctor’s death, we get a bit of a glimpse into the future with the Doctor mentioning she promised Yaz a beach. I can’t help but feel this is foreshadowing of the Doctor regenerating on a beach. It’s already been established that the Doctor will not be regenerating aboard the TARDIS. The cynic (or realist who has eyes and has been writing about this shit for four years) in me thinks this is probably going to be some weaksauce attempt to recapture the emotion of Ten and Rose’s teary goodbye at Bad Wolf Bay. Only this time, instead of an established romance, you’ll get the tacked on gay tragedy of Thirteen and Yaz. And I don’t care if you’ve been shipping Thasmin since day one, the relationship has been all in your imagination. Even Chibnall admitted it wasn’t a planned storyline.
As you would expect from an unplanned storyline, the Doctor and Yaz’s romance subplot comes out of nowhere, gets barely explored and is gone immediately. It’s exactly what I’ve come to expect from Chris Chibnall- an idea is presented, they talk about it, nothing happens. That isn’t to say that either Whittaker or Gill do a bad job in this scene. There is a part of me that really enjoyed the Doctor finally saying out loud why she doesn’t do romance. Though you could also argue that it never really needed saying. We already knew it. But I guess Yaz needed to hear it, because the poor girl is about to pop. At this point, all they’ve done is made an argument for the healing power of a quickie.
All in all, I place this episode as the third in a sort of spiritual trilogy of Chibnall episodes. Right alongside “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship,” and “Arachnids in the UK.” The central theme being that the premises of all three episodes promise big fun, and somehow manage to bore me out of my mind. Not everything was a disappointment, however. The Sea Devils looked great and I loved the costuming. The Sea Devil’s swords reminded me of the knives people make from bismuth on Youtube. It’s a cool way to make something look more natural while still other-worldly. I loved seeing the Doctor do a bit of action and drama. But the characters are so ill defined that I found it difficult care about anyone or anything. Madam Ching is a cool pirate, but other than that, she’s giving me nothing to work with. So when she and Ying Ki ride off into the sunset, I forget about them completely. In fact, I forgot most of this episode the moment it ended.
I wanted to save some room here at the end to talk about the end. Not of this episode, but rather, this era. If you hadn’t noticed, I haven’t written anything since the New Years Day special, and with good reason. I’m tired of writing about being disappointed. Granted, I could write about any other era, but mama needed a break. The tagline on this blog is “One girl talking about the shows she loves,” which is true, but not lately. I point this out because I feel like it’s important to illustrate the journey I’ve been on with Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who. The excitement for a female Doctor inspired me to start writing these articles. Now my lack enthusiasm for Chibnall’s idiotic brand of cruelty has left me drained. In fact, the biggest points of excitement I’ve had for the show have been about things beyond this era. Reading that Russell T Davies intends to return to a new series every spring filled me with joy. Far more than the revelation that one of my favourite companions, Ace, will be returning in October. With any other writer, I would be ecstatic.
Sure, it’s almost over, but we’ve seen the kind of damage Chris Chibnall can do with a single episode. Now he’s dragging one of my favourite companions into his mess? It’s like one last twist of the knife. I have loved writing for you all, but I have not loved writing about Chris Chibnall. I cannot wait to be excited for Doctor Who again. I cannot wait for this all to be in the rearview mirror. I used to speculate as to what certain clues meant, but lately, I just don’t care. Why speculate when it’s going to lead somewhere vague and depressing? Do you really expect Chibnall to give the Fugitive Doctor a satisfying character arc with only one episode left? With the reintroduction of Vinder, do we once again need to worry that bellend is going to introduce the Doctor’s parents?
Showrunners don’t outright ignore bits of Doctor Who that don’t suit their version of Doctor Who, they ignore the mistakes. We should ignore things like the Doctor being half-human on his mother’s side. We should ignore the times the Doctor’s age fluctuates back and forth. We should ignore the Twin Dilemma. But never in all of Doctor Who have I seen a bigger call to ignore an entire era. This is a real damn shame because I love Jodie Whittaker. I’ve heard fans suggest they bring Capaldi back for a new regeneration. I feel like that would be a mistake. Losing both Jodie and Jo as the Doctors would be a great loss, in my opinion. I don’t think it’s fair to the people who are fans of this era to do away with it. But if someone found some way to fix this mess, I would love to hear it. If RTD can’t fix this, I hope he does ignore it.
In 2005, psychologist Barry Schwartz gave a TED Talk in which he posited that perhaps the best way to avoid disappointment is to lower your expectations. It’s a life lesson I’ve found very helpful through the years. Over the course of the Chris Chibnall era, it’s become the only way to watch Doctor Who. Every time I get excited, I end up feeling burned. My zen has come in the form of expecting nothing and being pleasantly surprised when it turns out well. The concept of another New Years Day special with Daleks was not one I met with much anticipation. There were even moments when I forgot about the upcoming episode. Because let’s be real, there wasn’t a lot to get excited over. Another Dalek story for New Years Day? Not exactly breaking new ground. So was I pleasantly surprised? No, not really. But I did have a good time.
If there is any hope I have left in the remainder of Chibnall’s Doctor Who is that he shoots for mediocrity. It’s practically the man’s wheelhouse at this point. That isn’t to say, however, that Chris Chibnall is not an ideas man. He has loads of ideas. The thing is, being an ideas man is the easy part. It’s exploring these concepts deeper than the initial premise that makes something truly thoughtful. So when I heard that the holiday episode would be a love story with a time loop and Daleks, it played out in my head pretty much exactly as we saw onscreen. It’s hard then to temper expectations when the premise is about as deep as it gets. With ideas left this unexplored, premises count as spoilers.
This is why I always go back to my number one litmus- was it fun? And the answer is- “Kinda, yeah.” I kind of had fun watching last night’s Doctor Who, and I am going to chalk that up as a win. It’s been a particularly depressing winter with the omicron variant, and a new Doctor Who episode was very welcome. Ultimately. “Eve of the Daleks,” had very little it needed to do other than be more Doctor Who, and with that, it succeeded. You cannot say that it did not begin and end. The cherry on top is that there were also moments of pure entertainment in this disjointed, but ultimately satisfying episode.
Setting the story within a multi-floored storage facility works for Doctor Who. They did it in the Twelfth Doctor comic “Space Invaders!” and it was about as exciting a location as it was then. But Doctor Who has always been about the mundane meeting the absurd, so I like it. It’s also a rather cheap way to do an episode, which is not at all a criticism. With Sony owning Bad Wolf, our days of quaint low budget Doctor Who may be behind us. We should take a moment to appreciate the fact that Doctor Who comes from a long line of people trying their best on a shoestring budget. We may make fun of it, but if Doctor Who is going into the territory of competing with Disney+, it’s worth appreciating its underdog status.
Our two new leads, Aisling Bea’s “Sarah,” and Adjani Salmon’s “Nick,” aren’t your typical run of the mill side characters, and I appreciate that about them. Their initial “meet cute,” is still rife with cringey hamfisted dialogue, especially at the beginning. The desire to have the characters simultaneously espouse exposition while developing their awkward chemistry was a bad start that left me with a feeling of unease. Aisling Bea does a good job of lending depth to the apathetic Sarah, who inherited the storage facility as more of a burden than a boon, but even she can’t make exposition sound natural.
The Doctor, Yaz, and Dan, have finally decided to address the dying TARDIS. Once again, the premise of a dying TARDIS goes left unexplored. Was it to do with the Flux? Did Swarm and Azure sneeze on the console? The answer remains a big fat “Who the hell knows?” What we do know is that evidently resetting the TARDIS back to factory settings is enough to expel the black gunk and white spider-web infecting the TARDIS out from its system. It’s a rather underwhelming solution to what was one of the better mysteries during “Flux.” All this really does is allow for the time loop to exist, which is about as deep as the concept goes. They may yet still address this in Jodie’s final episode, but after Dan confirmed that they weren’t going to explain how the Doctor saved the universe after the Flux destroyed most of it, I very much doubt it. Underwhelming solutions aside, the scene of them leaving the TARDIS as it begins to pull apart was one of the best visual moments in the show’s recent history.
Having sensed the Doctor’s presence, the Daleks have arrived to dish out a bit of revenge for the Doctor’s attempted genocide of the Daleks. Leave it to Chris Chibnall’s Doctor to not only address genocide, but the brag about it. That tracks with the rest of his morality which is mostly all over the place. The Daleks have trapped the Doctor and everyone else in the storage facility with a sort of force field. But as it would turn out, the Daleks are also trapped in the time loop, and thus, also forced to repeat the events of stalking the humans within the building, and lighting them up with their new fancy guns. Though these Daleks died, they died living the Dalek dream of killing the Doctor over and over. Had they survived, they’d have been legends among their kind. Every Dalek wants to plug the Doctor, but getting to do it over and over? Priceless.
Truth be told, I found a lot of the time loop confusing. It took piecing it together with friends for me to even realise it wasn’t the Daleks making the loop happen. We came to the conclusion that we’re pretty sure it was the TARDIS repairing itself that was creating the time loop. Though it doesn’t seem to play by it’s own rules. At one point, the worry is that Nick won’t survive another loop if he dies before the next revolution. They keep losing a minute per revolution. But they’re not losing minutes from the future, but minutes from the past. It’s always one minute ahead. So how exactly would dying within the first minute not be more catastrophic than dying within the last minute? Even more, why do the Doctor and the TARDIS crew always appear right outside the TARDIS and not where they were a minute or two minutes from the TARDIS? How are the Daleks able to teleport into the facility to whatever location they choose, and not their initial location? If a Dalek is able to teleport into the building, how come they can’t teleport past a storage unit’s shutter? I take it this has something to do with the fact that the Daleks were reacting to the position of the Doctor and thus teleporting in after the fact, but if they’re losing a minute every time, it would catch up to their position.
These questions are as useless as any with Chibnall’s writing. We’re just supposed to be impressed because time loop. Which in some ways I am impressed. I like when anyone tries to do neat things with time in Doctor Who. One of my favourite First Doctor stories is “The Space Museum,” simply because it’s one of the few early stories to play with time as a concept. Never mind that the last half of the story is a bit of a snoozefest, it’s still cool to see them experimenting. Doing a time loop/Groundhog Day/Russian Doll storyline is exactly the sort of thing I like to see them do in Doctor Who. It’s still a bit of a Dr Strange meets Dormamu moment, which is in keeping with Chibnall’s penchant to copy the MCU’s homework. That man just really cannot catch a break.
You have to hand it to Chris Chibnall, though. He said no more Christmas episodes, and he really meant it. The decision to move the holiday special from Christmas Day to New Years Day has not gone without controversy. I myself have always sided more with Chibnall, which is weird to say. I find the idea of seeing the Doctor regenerate on Christmas, acting their ass off while a robot Little Drummer Boy terrorises Cardiff or wherever, a bit distracting. But I also see the reasoning behind it being nice to watch a little Doctor Who after all of the presents have been opened. A bit of daft entertainment is appreciated. The day after New Year’s Eve doesn’t feel as special. A bit of the Doctor while you nurse a hangover feels more like a bank holiday. What’s even weirder are the Christmas elements such as the belaboured “elf storage,” joke on the signage.
Speaking of jokes, it was reported that this episode was meant to be a sort of comedy. Other than the “elf storage,” gag, I can’t remember much comedy. No more than usual, at least. In the words of Homer J Simpson- “I didn’t hear anyone laughing, did you?” If Aisling Bea’s dialogue was meant to be funny, I think I now understand Chibnall’s morality, because for the most part, she was awful. It’s all well and good that she’s multi-faceted, but I found her extremely unlikable. Nick is presented as a guy who’s supposed to be weird in a quirky way, but it comes off as creepy. This isn’t becuase he clearly turns his exes into lamps, but because he is able to form a crush on a woman he sees once a year. I can buy that he is too nervous to talk to Sarah, but if I went into ASDA once a year, I’m not going to form an intense crush on the girl at the customer service counter. I feel like Chibnall is the kind of guy who thinks “Love, Actually,” is this really wholesome classic. Nick and Sarah behave like people from a romantic comedy, and I hate that for them.
Not to be left out, the Doctor gets one badass moment to counterbalance her genocide brag. I loved her delivery of the line when she says “Daleks answer to me.” I’ve said it before that Jodie Whittaker has finally found her groove as the Doctor. It’s sad then that they give her the same lame-ass faux inspirational speech at the end of the story. Something about Chibnall’s speeches always feel forced and unearned. He lacks the ability to write a solid monologue that doesn’t leave Jodie sounding like she’s speaking to school children on Blue Peter. There’s a sort of sappy earnestness that rings hollow in those moments. I much prefer the Thirteenth Doctor when she’s a little snarky, if not also a little angry. Luckily, she’s managed to find that within the character, even when Chibnall cannot.
We’re still getting moments where the action stops dead in its place for the characters to say exactly how they feel before moving on. I had begun to think Chibnall had gotten better at these moments, but Dan pulling Yaz aside for a very special Doctor Who moment that gets real about issues and junk, was Chibnall back at his worst proclivities. I do, however, appreciate the line where Yaz says “I’ve never told anyone, not even myself,” simply because it’s real to a lot of LGBTQ+ experiences. We don’t always know our feelings until they creep up on us. That was a better bit of representation than “I’m gay and now I’m dead,” which has permeated Chibnall’s run. Though Yaz’s story remains the same old tired trope of gays cannot be happy. The Doctor will never return her advances because the Doctor never does. I hope Bill and Puddle girl show up last minute and form a triad with Yaz. That’s my headcanon.
Dan easily has one of my favourite arcs throughout the story. The Daleks write him off as a bit of a dullard compared to the Doctor and Yaz. I liked seeing Dan fool a Dalek while avoiding its gun by running around it in circles. I mean, sure, a Dalek would have figured out turning the opposite direction, but I’m gonna give our man this victory. Dan continues to remind me of Jamie McCrimmon in his “simple but not stupid,” approach to life. He adds much-needed levity to the story. He’s the Graham of this iteration of the TARDIS- practical and elevating what is on the page with a charming performance. Dan is by far my favourite thing of this era, and also this episode. John Bishop gives a gem of a performance.
The Daleks continue to hunt down the Doctor and her friends loop after loop. Though they do get in their licks, like when Nick destroys both Daleks with their own crossfire. I guess they learned nothing from “The Day of the Doctor,” when they shot eachother after Gallifrey disappeared. After dying enough times for it to lose all weight, the Doctor begins to piece together a plan. After discovering a part of the building not blocked in by a forcefield, they manage to lure the Daleks toward some explosives left by some mad lad only known as “Jeff.” By the look of things, Jeff works for the storage facility and uses it to store what I can only assume are the components of his highly explosive meth lab. They set up early on that Sarah’s phone can’t be put on silent, which never really makes any sense to the rest of the story. It does, however, remain consistent with Chibnall’s understanding of technology. The phone is used as a means to fool the Daleks into believing there is a human worth shooting behind loads of explosives. Evidently the Daleks can scan for signs of the Doctor within a storage facility, but not the presence of butane in a canister. Sarah’s mum calls just as the clock begins to count down to midnight, causing the Daleks to destroy themselves and the building.
As the smoke and debris dissipates, we see the TARDIS once again in her blue glory. No longer are her surfaces covered in glowing pink cracks. As our heroes open the door, we wonder what we will see inside. Will there be a new console room perhaps? Maybe it has reverted to the original TARDIS console room from the First Doctor era. Well, as it would turn out, nothing has changed. They even kept the obnoxiously obtrusive quartz time rotor. What a total letdown. I didn’t fully expect the TARDIS to get a new console room, considering just how close we are to the Fourteenth Doctor and RTD2. But nothing? I really gotta say, that was a major flop of a reveal. Even using the First Doctor console would have been something. We’re given no new information, and nothing has changed.
This has been a major issue of the Chibnall era. Most of the intrigue derives from the unresolved as opposed to the unexplained. These aren’t mysteries we’re left with to ponder, but issues left unexplored. And it’s true, despite this review, I did enjoy the episode, but I needed to illustrate to what degree. When the bar is as low as “The Timeless Children,” anything above that is enjoyable. Chibnall’s greatest successes are among the mediocrity of other, better writers. To be honest, the part of last night’s episode that left me most excited was the revelation of the Sea Devil for the next story. I’m excited for the next episode, but not because of what came before it, but because I love the Sea Devils. I enjoyed last night’s episode for possibly the worst reason- it was fine.
Last week I needed a bit of a winge. I allowed myself a mask-off moment where I could just say what I felt. For the first four episodes of Flux, I resisted the urge to utterly tear into the show. I deleted so many opening paragraphs. I resisted every urge to write one-line articles simply saying- “I really disliked that.” I drew some ire from a few of you, and that’s fine. This blog is about my experience, and I’m ok with you disagreeing. I like to think that those of you who read these, do so because I take strides not to impose my views as the only true way to enjoy Doctor Who. When other people do that, it really irks me. But I still needed to let off some steam. I’m glad I did so because this week, I feel a bit better. Not about Flux, but as a fan. I’m glad I got to get all of the frustration out so that I could look at “The Vanquishers,” through sober eyes.
Flux had given me a bit of an identity crisis. I was trying to give Chris Chibnall some room to pleasantly surprise me. This indulgence arose from a genuine desire for the series to succeed. My desire to enjoy Doctor Who put a lot of objections on stand-by. Because of this, I couldn’t tell if I was being unfair, or if it was really that bad. “The Vanquishers,” cleared all of that up for me. I did not enjoy most of that, and a huge portion of it led nowhere. You go through a phase during a bad movie where you stop hoping it will turn out good, and realise it’s actually rather bad. Last night I was struck by a moment of clarity where I found myself thinking “This is how I must have felt watching ‘Batman and Robin,’ in the theatre.” But then I started thinking “No, ‘Batman and Robin,’ was at least somewhat campy and fun.” This was just a mess.
Much like Steven Moffat did in “Twice Upon a Time,” Chris Chibnall has allowed himself a few moments of metatextual commentary for his last series finale. Sadly, I’m not sure all of it was entirely self-aware, like when the Doctor says “It’s quite draining, and confusing, and breaks every known law of every known… everything.” It’s a great way to explain his approach to tying together so many loose ends. Using the conversion plate that had stabilised the Doctor’s body for her meeting with Tecteun, Chibnall was able to split the Doctor into three different bodies in order to tackle this hulking mess of a narrative. Even with three Doctors on the case, the episode still stumbles from location to location, resting long enough to deliver crucial and convenient dialogue. No idea is left explored.
Let’s pick up with Diane and Vinder, still stuck in the prison form. I think it’s important to mention that despite their wish.com masks, I rather like the concept of the prison form. And my objection to Diane being precisely at the doorway when Vinder walked in was slightly quelled by the revelation that she was the last remaining person inside. Where they all went is never really explained, but it does at least explain why she’s the only person Vinder might meet. What she was doing hanging out by the entrance is still anyone’s guess. Vinder and Diane have a clever sequence where they use the edges of the artificial environment to escape. I say clever from their standpoint, not from a designing an inescapable prison standpoint. Evidently, this is a bit of a design flaw to the point that escaping a prison form was part of Vinder’s training.
One of the Doctor’s three forms allows her a moment to meet back up with Yaz, Dan, and Jericho after their three years of travel. She even got a moment to see Kate Stewart and the Mad Mole. Did they ever explain how the Weeping Angel town went from floating in space to back to normal? If they didn’t I have questions about how the three of them were able to travel the earth in search of the dumbest line of dialogue ever. Kate is no longer working as the leader of UNIT, but rather as the leader of Human Resistance Against Sontaran Occupation. Evidently, the Grand Serpent was infiltrating UNIT in order to remove them from the equation, so that the Sontarans could meet humanity with little resistance as possible. I guess they forgot the power of a drywaller with a wok.
The Sontarans are a weird readdition to the storyline. Who would have guessed that after “War of the Sontarans,” they would show up again, and as the biggest villains, no less? Chris Chibnall had said he planned to make them more fearsome, and he somewhat delivered. When they weren’t stupidly sleeping at the same time, getting their asses handed to them by pensioners with cookware, or going cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, they were pretty formidable. As it would turn out, the story Flux was telling was about the Sontarans. Who would have guessed? No seriously, who would have guessed this was all leading to that? All this addition to the storyline really did was explain why the Sontarans were there in the first place. Their plan was basically to draw the Daleks and Cybermen to the Flux under a false truce. The Flux would destroy their greatest enemies while they remained shielded by the Lupari ships. With their competition out of the way, the Sontarans would be able to reign supreme.
The Sontarans use both Claire and Jericho in order to find out the exact time and date of the Flux for their little plan to work. Evidently, both of them have enough psychic ability to foresee this event, which is weird considering the Flux has been going on outside the Lupari shield for six weeks now. None of this holds up when you think about it for more than five seconds, which screams “first draft.” What are the Lupari ships made of that they can ward off the Flux? Why do the Lupari give a damn about humanity? How was Vinder’s planet left in ruins when we saw the Flux destroy entire planets in the first episode? Why do the Lupari ships block the Flux, but not the sun? If the Flux is anti-matter why does it put things into flux? Also, and this is a personal gripe, why use anti-matter and the beginning of the Time Lords and never once mention Omega?
The way in which the Flux moves only further illustrates how ill-equipped Chris Chibnall is at writing the science part of science fiction. We’re supposed to believe that this Flux has eaten so much of the universe that only a small portion of the universe remains. The speed at which the Flux travels vs. the size of the known universe leads one to wonder just how long the universe had been dying. This storyline would take so long that it would have been present during every incarnation of the Doctor. In series four, we got alien invaders after their planet was stolen by the Daleks. Where are the refugees of the Flux? Why is nobody freaking out? What do the people on earth have to say about the fact that the planet is surrounded by Lupari ships? Where are the shots of people coming out of their houses and looking up into the sky? It’s almost as if the concept wasn’t properly explored. Hence, my implication of this being the first draft.
The Grand Serpent’s place in all of this is to benefit from the Sontaran plan. In other words, he’s a bit of a write-off. The Doctor implies during a scene with the Grand Serpent that he must have been some genocidal dictator in his past. This is rich considering that the Doctor aids in a total of three possible genocides in the story. We’re led to believe that the universe is now empty, so any Daleks or Cybermen present are presumably the last, as are the Sontarans. But not only is the Doctor willing to let the Daleks and Cybermen die, she’s also willing to use them as bait to take care of the Sontarans. She even gets Jericho, a person who witnessed the Holocaust, to aid her in triple genocide. It’s Chris Chibnall’s weird mean spirited writing rearing its ugly head again. This is the same Doctor that left a brown man in the hands of the Nazis. All of this is justified because of a fourth genocide of the Lupari that happened off-screen.
Reviewing this episode has proven to be a challenge, as it is so awkwardly paced that it’s hard to remember when certain things happened. Not only is the Doctor jumping around from story to story, but so is the pacing. You could argue that the lockdown was a contributing factor to the mess that is the Flux. Chris Chibnall had originally planned to pace this story over ten episodes, rather than six. I would say he did his best, but nothing about this feels cut for time. Had he edited out the superfluous excess, we would never have met Bel and Vinder, because, let’s face it, their storyline was ultimately as useless as it was boring. While I think they’re fine as characters, did we really need to spend so much screen time watching them do nothing? What about any of their story couldn’t have also been done by Yaz and Dan? Why was Kate Stewart involved? Why was John Williamson there? Why was the Grand Serpent involved? What narrative function does Diane perform? Wouldn’t suggesting the Doctor feed the Flux with the matter inside the prison form make more sense coming from Yaz?
I had read that the Grand Serpent came about from Chibnall’s desire to work with Craig Parkinson. But why introduce a whole new character? Why not just have him play a Sontaran? Why bog down an already bloated script with yet another complication? This isn’t like when David Lynch changed Twin Peaks forever with the late addition of Killer Bob. This is just irresponsible writing. The only thing the Serpent truly manages is to pull UNIT into Chibnall’s web of broken canon. UNIT wasn’t formed in the ‘60s by Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart after the events of “The Web of Fear.” No, it was evidently formed in the ‘50s by General Farquhar. Having this many unresolved plotlines in the final chapter of your epic adventure is a bad sign. Each new storyline should elucidate upon what came before it, but instead, we’re just left with questions. I’ve touched on this before, that Chibnall’s writing leaves you with all of the wrong questions. These aren’t questions pondering the greater mysteries of the story, but rather what the hell just happened and how any of it was important.
Swarm and Azure’s storyline was also a bit of a write-off. As much as I really enjoyed their performances throughout their series, they never really achieve anything and spend the whole time posturing like cats. Their desire to destroy the universe over and over seemed like a good way for them to put the universe back at the end, but instead, they just die like dust at the hands of what I’m guessing was the personification of time. This isn’t before they tease the Doctor with her fob watch, which also doesn’t behave like its supposed to. In the past we’ve seen these fob watches open and restore the Master, the Doctor, and Ruth all back to Time Lords. But when the Ravagers hold it up to the Doctor’s face, it’s just a bit of torture. For some reason, when they threaten to dissolve the “Cabin in the Woods,” poster house, this also causes the Doctor to dissolve, which I guess makes sense. It doesn’t really, but once again, whatever.
The best part about the fob watch is that the Doctor drops it down into the bowels of the TARDIS. When she did that, I said out loud- “Oh thank God.” I couldn’t wait for them to destroy that damn thing and the misguided narrative that comes with it. Steven Moffat teased that he would reveal the Doctor’s name, only to pull back at the last moment. You get the impression that that’s what Chibnall thinks he’s doing here. While I am grateful that he allowed some mystery to remain, it feels less like character development, and more like damage control. After “The Timeless Children,” any restraint on his behalf feels more like a mandate from on high than any sort of artistic integrity. In this way, Flux feels less like the latest thrilling chapter in the Doctor’s adventures, and more like a “what if,” scenario. What if the majority of the audience had wanted to see more of the Timeless Child storyline? What if lockdown had never happened? What if Chris Chibnall had never been sacked? They’d have opened that watch, is what.
Like much of this series, it reduces the bulk of the Chibnall era to a write-off. What’s most frustrating is that, once again, we’re left with yet another finale that explores none of the things in which many of us are even remotely interested. We got close to no new information about the Ruth Doctor. I expected her story to come into focus, but she was completely missing from the story. On top of that, the TARDIS remains infected. The promotional art for the holiday special implies that the TARDIS is still broken and that maybe the Doctor is going to finally do something about it. Though I must say, the TARDIS’ infection was about as consistent as Ryan’s selective dyspraxia. In one story, the TARDIS door’s dimensions are grossly out of whack, and in other moments, it’s running like a finely tuned machine. Diane and Dan don’t end up together out of plot convenience, completely undermining Diane’s agency by turning her into a heartless jerk. Jericho was sacrificed for the cause of genoicide. Looking back, last night’s episode has completely disabused me of any notion that Chris Chibnall has improved as a writer.
One area of improvement across the entire show has to be Jodie Whittaker. This was easily my favourite season with her. And I will admit that Chibnall did give her better dialogue. It’s just a shame that it was bogged down by so much stupid exposition and questionable morality. That being said, I really enjoyed her in this episode. She really feels like the Time Lord we know and love. There were even moments where she was reminding me of Tom Baker’s alien weirdness. I hope that people who hated the concept of a female Doctor can now see this. From the memes and reviews I’ve seen online, the general consensus is that she’s a great Doctor who has sadly been bogged down with some of the worst writing in the show’s history. She’s modern Doctor Who’s Colin Baker, and I can’t wait to hear her absolutely rock shit in her audios.
Usually, I have more positive things to say about a story, but really, my favourite thing about this storyline was that it wasn’t as bad as I feared. It was bad in that it was a poorly written piece of mediocrity, but it wasn’t bad in a way that does lasting harm. “The Wedding of River Song,” was a jumbled mess, but it doesn’t ruin Doctor Who. I’m glad that Chibnall was kind enough to walk back some of his concepts in a way that allowed them to re-establish some of the mystery. This doesn’t change the fact that the Doctor being the first Time Lord is already far more information about her past than I ever wanted to know. My friend Taryn refers to it as “an idiot’s idea of clever writing,” and I can’t help but agree. That being said, it is nice to know that the way in which it ended leaves open a couple of different ways to retcon this mess into something salvageable. If Chibnall plays the next three episodes safe, then they might actually end up enjoyable.
We’re left now with a universe in tatters (in more ways than one). Evidently, the Daleks aren’t all dead because they’re going to be the villains of the holiday special, again. That’s about as exciting as the prospect of someone digging that fob watch out again. We managed to miss a few bullets, for which I am pleasantly surprised. Bel and Vinder aren’t the Doctor’s parents, yet, which was a great relief. And yet I find myself in the same position I was before “The Vanquishers.” It’s hard to rest with three episodes of Chibnall’s Doctor Who left. There are still too many balls in the air for me to feel like we’re past the worst of it. Part of me hopes that the reason the Ruth Doctor hasn’t been fully explored yet is that she’s set to become the Fourteenth Doctor. Part of me worries it’s because Chibnall is saving it for yet another unfulfilling finale. All I really want from Chibnall at this point is to do what he does best- aim low and fly under the radar. Please, Chris, leave quietly.
