Flux

It could have been the series of compromises. It could have been shot with actors standing two metres apart in front of green screens with CG monsters. In Chapter Three there is a bit of that, but despite the limited cast, Flux is as epic in terms of geography, plotting and intent as Doctor Who has ever been. This is the show rising from the ashes of a pandemic, bolder than ever before. The pre-publicity was, for once, the honest truth: Flux is the biggest story Doctor Who has ever told. It’s a Daleks’ Master Plan for the new generation, a War Games, a Trial of a Time Lord but here written not as a pulpy comic book Boy’s Own serial, nor as Terrance Dicks would assert “an effort to make sure we didn’t have to broadcast the test card on Saturday,” or in an unwieldy fit of behind-the-scenes mania with a script editor storming out at the final throes; this is Doctor Who imagined as an epic.  It’s not the sort of shape one would think likely to befit the anthological nature of Doctor Who but, for one series only, it truly works. Flux is a majestic success, one which proves breath-taking in its scope and ambition, a six-hour television novel to be admired holistically after the event and to be thrilled at episodically, week by week, its cliff-hangers each and every time tugging us forcefully back into the game.

Truth be told, I was about through with Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who after Revolution of the Daleks which felt rife with his worst writerly traits. I was not, like the trolls of fan forums, ready to stop watching, but there was a feeling that I’d seen him play all his tricks, that I’d still be squirming at his dialogue and clunking plotting when Series 13 came along despite whatever stories he might come up with. True, there were several instances of wincing during Flux (“your as yet unborn child” anyone?) but for the most part, this felt like a writer at the peak of his powers, suddenly finding himself riding solo, rediscovering his penchant for humour and big ideas. This was the writer who brought us the chutzpah of Dinosaurs on a Spaceship and the pace and heart of Fragments and Exit Wounds. The most disappointing aspect of Chibnall’s Doctor Who has been its reluctance to Go Big. Here, that can never be a criticism aimed his way.

The era’s second most disappointing aspect has been its extremely tepid regular characters. The Fam never truly worked, with three quarters of them miscast. Luckily, for Flux, we kept the best one: Mandip Gill. Jodie Whittaker, however, delivers – undeniably – her best performance here. There are still moments of slipshodness, a lack of focus, of poor textual negotiation and flat gags, but for the most part, Whittaker is finally present. In her stance against General Skaak, she cuts a heroic figure, rocking that foggy, Sebastopolian landscape. In her flight from the Angels through the cellar, she leads that gang with distinguished adroitness. In her quiet rising to Tecteun, she feels – for the first time – dangerous: here, unusually, Jodie underplays. The fantastic, earthy John Bishop as Dan Lewis completes a winning trio of TARDIS travellers, his quirky naturalism a pleasing contrast to the more veteran, unearthly regulars. Funny how the slight re-alignment of a leading cast can make for a considerably more winning dynamic.

The Halloween Apocalypse is a bravura opening, spanning so many locations without feeling the need to tie any strands together. Chibnall tells us we’re in this for the long game by the sheer size of his story-telling. Moments of smallness, however, make this instalment fizz. Dan’s reaction to both the TARDIS and his shrunken house are hilarious, his reaction to Karvanista storming his front room genuinely funny. This is a seam of humour that has been missing from Doctor Who for some time. Amongst all the wild concepts here, there’s room for Chibnall to be funny again. This is perhaps illustrated by the very funny, very exciting pre-titles sequence, which sets out the stall: this is massive stuff but by no means are we going to get reverential. As Jodie would say, “What a relief!”

The introduction of Swarm is a deeply unsettling and mythic scene, which thrills in its strangeness and sense of history. Sam Spruell is one of the joys of this season, giving a frighteningly camp, dangerous and dynamic voice to yet another strong Chibnall villain. I love how Chibnall’s baddies are simply bastards: Tzim-Sha, Daniel Barton, The Master, Ashad – they’re not the sort of people you can psycho-analyse. Indeed, the Doctor tried that with Ashad over the video-comms and he agreed that, yes, he was a mad bugger, thank you very much. Here, Swarm’s motives are equally linear: he wants to reign in hell. Obviously. Azure, his twisted sister, is perhaps even more disquieting, Rochenda Sandall playing her as a sensual, insatiable terror. Her final confrontation with the Doctor in The Vanquishers is her defining moment. Quite what she’s doing here in the Arctic Circle married to the boy from The Demon Headmaster remains a mystery though.

The City of Liverpool is one of the silent stars of this series and in particular, the first two Chapters. Director Jamie Magnus Stone shoots the urban landscape beautifully, those gorgeous drone shots of the museum allowing the environment to sing. The Liver Building and Anfield set-about by Sontaran ships are iconic images, as is the breath-taking explosive finish at the Albert Docks. Later, director Azhur Saleem returns to paint yet more beautiful portraits of the Metropolitan Cathedral and St George’s Hall. And beneath the city, the snaking tunnels of Joseph Williamson connect all these locations together, satisfyingly forming the crucible for the season finale, the epicentre of all of time and space. Only in this mad programme…

Whilst The Halloween Apocalypse delights in illustrating the newfound size of Doctor Who (whilst happily retaining its domesticity) War of the Sontarans is the robust, archetypal action story. It repositions the Sontarans as enemies worthy of the Doctor’s steel. And by the time we reach The Vanquishers, the Sontarans have arguably reclaimed their title of Doctor Who’s Third Big Bad. Their costumes are fantastic, eschewing that rubbery RTD blue for the Classic combat silver and – after years of watching Strax – their plan seems as ambitious as their predecessors who, lest we forget, once invaded Gallifrey.

The Crimean scenes are breath-taking, the scale of this real-life historical epic feeling unhindered by the TV screen. Battle scenes dazzle, making their way rightly into those early trailers (incidentally, way more exciting than the Chibnall era has managed thus far – no complaints on the fantastic marketing this year!) and the episode’s gunpowdered twofold climax is the best Doctor Who has ever looked. As strong as Whittaker’s Doctor is in the aforementioned battlefield confrontation, she flounders when asked to explain some plotting with a blackboard and pointer. She’s simply not terribly Doctor-ish. Unless she has a very obvious narrative drive throughout a scene, she’s all energy and no focus. Look how terrific she proves she could be though in the closing seconds of this episode, terrified for Yaz, in my favourite of the cliff-hangers served throughout Flux. It feels old-skool and new at the same time. The scream of the music howling in over Swarm clicking his fingers whilst Jodie looks on desperately. That’s Doctor Who editing of the highest calibre, a moment where every element of production comes together in an edge-of-the-seat moment of spine-tingling excitement.

Once, Upon Time is perhaps the weakest instalment of the series but is by no means unenjoyable. It’s essentially a Heroes-style Six Months Ago episode but told through a needlessly convoluted time-bending device. This is perhaps the only time in the show when COVID-casting becomes sometimes glaringly apparent, most obviously in the scene where Vinder’s real-life line manager is played by an extra, a fluctuating Mandip Gill given all the lines. There are also quite a few Green Death worthy CSO backgrounds against which our regulars strut their out-of-character stuff. Whilst there’s a definite frisson in spotting Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor in the mirror, as if we’re watching a forbidden text, the episode ends up feeling rather hollow, as though we’ve ended proceedings in the same place we left them, but with Yaz and Vinder in slightly less jeopardy. That said, there’s a definite satisfaction in seeing the jigsaw pieces begin to align. We are now fully equipped to head into the second half of the maelstrom.

Village of the Angels has already been hailed as an instant classic on the fan forums, and it’s easy to see why. This pushes all of Doctor Who’s most intrinsic buttons. The church echoes The Daemons and there is an elemental folklore feel to Village which suits the show down to the ground. It’s also as relentless an episode as you’re ever likely to find. The Angels just keep on coming, using every trick in their Time of Angels book. By the time they’re chasing the Doctor, Jericho and Clair through the tunnels, hands poking from the walls, they’ve been at the door for half an hour and show no signs of stopping. In fact, this proves to be the story where the Angels win. When Whittaker ultimately transforms into a Lonely Assassin herself, we’re out of breath such is the white-knuckle ride. And then, to top it all off, the Hartnell era titles are interrupted by Bel and Vinder, whose story has been delicately playing out away from the main action. There’s a sense that this show can now do anything and it’s a viscerally felt change.

Survivors of the Flux or A Brief History of UNIT feels different again, pushing boundaries backwards as well as forwards in time. The Grand Serpent is another suitably macabre Chibnall villain, perfectly pitched by Craig Parkinson. His motives remain a delightful mystery and when quizzed by the Doctor the following week, he’s not giving anything away. Robert Bathurst gives his usual charming out-of-his-depth-but-elevated-to-a-senior-leader performance and it’s a genuine shock when he meets his horrible demise. To see Kate Stewart again is a joy and to see her in a new era cements her reputation as a worthy successor to her father. Jemma Redgrave is perhaps stronger than ever here.

And then we reach The Vanquishers, which, truth be told, feels a bit like a party balloon slowly deflating, as Chibnall places his toys a bit too neatly, one by one, back in the box. None of his ongoing narrative threads feels as if they’re concluded with any noteworthy grace. The final defeat of the Flux via a Passenger is neat but it’s too easy. Where do the TARDIS crew find him? How do they get him there? How do they eject him from the TARDIS? Why doesn’t he eat them all? Swarm and Azure are disposed of by Time flicking his fingers at them and they seem fairly pleased. Their ambition to reign in hell was presumably just a bit shallow. Joseph Williamson, enigmatically brought to thundering life by Steve Oram is simply told, “That’s it, your plot’s over and done with,” at which, mad as box of frogs, he walks off uncharacteristically into oblivion. After all Bel and Vinder’s universe-spanning agony to find one another, they simply meet and have a hug in the TARDIS. Where’s the moment they glimpse one another again? Where’s the dashing across battlefields towards one another? Elsewhere, this has been a beating heart of the series but here ends on a drab, almost unimportant note. When the Grand Serpent is left to stew in eternity, we’re treated to one reaction shot of Parkinson which bleeds into a crossfade – it feels too brief and he deserves better. The Diane and Dan romance is astonishingly badly handled too: she’s been through a lot, sure, but she comes up with the Passenger solution, proving herself adept at this type of thing, after which it all seems a bit much and without even a “I know you weren’t actually late, Dan” she snubs him and he goes home, sadly. At least we think he goes home, wherever his tiny house is. Jodie’s missing memories amount to the black and white house we’ve already seen a few times; we’re no further forward. Even Karvanista doesn’t get his moment of vengeance and quite why the TARDIS is so knackered I’m still not entirely sure.

What does work in the finale is the imagery: the Lupari ships in formation is an awesome sight, in the truest sense of the word. Dalek, Cyber and Sontaran ships arriving en masse is wondrous. There has been a real sumptuousness about the visuals throughout Flux with DNEG’s CGI becoming a defining feature in this tremendous looking series. The worlds-spanning establishing shots have been a gold standard from The Halloween Apocalypse, but that cheap and nasty, orange typeface I could have done without.

There is a satisfying tidiness in the closing instalment, each plot strand tied up in neat narrative bow, but there’s an even greater feeling that nothing particularly dramatic, nothing particularly human has happened. It could well sully how inarguably strong the rest of the show has been but the remainder glows so brightly, it’s hard to take too much offence at Chibnall stumbling at the final hurdle. He had after all kept so many plates spinning for so long, it was perhaps inevitable that at some stage, he’d drop them.

This reviewer could keep waxing lyrical about the wonders of Flux as a whole though. I haven’t mentioned Kevin McNally’s finely cured Professor Eustacius Jericho, Craig Els’s extremely well-pitched (often hilarious) dog man, the tiny detail of the servants of the Grand Serpent sporting a snake tattoo, Bel’s pre-titles sequence with its surprise flying Dalek squad and a fiercely beautiful look to camera, the lovely Brigadier cameo, the revelation of who the Doctor’s previous companions were, Angelic wings in a mirror, the very brio of a threefold Doctor and that final terrifically well-played scene with the watch – nail-biting.

The closest comparison I have to Flux is Steven Moffat’s ludicrously wonderful novelisation of The Day of the Doctor with its River Song, Silence and Brigadier cameos added alongside its Daleks, Zygons and Time Lords. It’s as if this wants to be the next ultimate Doctor Who story. The Biggest Baddest Baddies are here doing what they do best, UNIT is here being brilliant, there’s an Ood, there’s a fobwatch, there’s even a nod to the Master and it’s a story which puts the nature of the Doctor at its very heart. Against the odds, a 60^th anniversary series is going to need to fight damned hard to make an impact when Flux has running through it the very DNA of Doctor Who. This is everything a fan could want. What a fabulous cast of characters. What a series. Truly, thank you, Chris Chibnall. With Flux, you captured my heart.

As an entity in and of itself, the six-part epic earns a 9/10 from me.

JH

Revolution of the Daleks

Chris Chibnall isn’t going to win any awards for being particularly revolutionary with this New Year’s 70-minute special. All the ingredients are there for a classic story, full of Doctor Who staples: the Daleks out of their shells; the inevitable production line; their blinkered human allies hoist by their own hubris; Captain Jack doing the heavy duty action heroics; the departing scenes of not one but two companions. So what’s wrong with it? Why is it so unaffecting? Why doesn’t it make the heart pound and break by turns?

Workmanlike is a word I feel I’ve used a lot to describe Chibnall’s writing (as well as clunky) but by workmanlike I mean you can distinctly see the writing at work. You can see how the plotting has been spreadsheeted, the “character moments” positioned, the fates of characters foregrounded because his approach is so cliched and hackneyed. Goodness, he even uses the sentence, “You’re meddling in things you don’t understand.” At his worst, Russell T Davies’s writing could sometimes feel like a string of fantastic events and character beats held together by an often very thin thread. Chibnall’s fantastic events aren’t particularly fantastic, his character beats aren’t particularly hard hitting and his threads are bare.

We start with a flashback to the 2019 New Year’s Day episode. It’s odd. As if the production team are asking viewers to remember that staggeringly amazing special from a few years ago. But it’s badly gauged. It leads into a scene in which a dead Dalek is transported in the back of a van. Surely, the moment we’re waiting for is the twitch of an eyestalk or a blinking light? Instead, it stays dead and we have a clunking poisoning scene which relies on the killer knowing exactly which mobile tea unit the victim is destined to visit. Far better surely to have the reveal of the Daleks in the riot scene, where they can be spotlighted in all their newly armoured glory and open with an exciting prison break?

Unfortunately, the prison break is not in any way heroic or clever. We don’t see the Doctor even planning an escape. Instead, our heroine pines away in her cell mournfully reciting Harry Potter. Talk about a teenage fan girl. This is exactly what Jodie’s Doctor feels like generally: someone trying so hard to be the quirky, eccentric hero she worships and getting it so astronomically wrong. It’s as if even Chibnall has noticed. He keeps his leading lady away from the screen for very long sections of the programme and in last season’s finale had her fall asleep while the Master read her an audiobook. I honestly wonder how this casting came about. When The Woman Who Fell to Earth aired, I was delighted to be feeling positive about a female Doctor, the gender of our lead suddenly seemed surprisingly irrelevant but I have never been thrilled by any decisions made by Whittaker herself and here she reminds us in every single scene why she is such a poor choice for this role. Her dialogue, however off-beat it may be, never strikes me as real. She cannot handle the meter, the jargon or even the tone. I look at her and wonder if she has any idea at all as to what her dialogue actually means. “So it looks like a Dalek but it can’t be a Dalek unless it is a Dalek,” she garbles, trampling over all possible meaning that line could have had. She doesn’t know which words to stress, how the gag works, how to play that line. It’s incredibly infuriating to see one of the biggest leading roles on television handed to someone who does not understand dialogue which is in any way heightened.

Captain Jack is a welcome note of cheap campery. At least he would be if he were given anything to do that was cheap or camp. Honestly, he doesn’t even flirt with anyone except Graham and that’s a repeated gag from Fugitive of the Judoon. I can’t think of a character less suited to giving emotional advice to the current companions than Captain Jack but that’s what he seems to be here for. His big scene with Yaz is the best of the episode but it really isn’t what Jack is about. He gets to fire a gun once and look delighted to be immortal but he’s frankly wasted. And he doesn’t even get a goodbye scene! Instead, he leaves in a clearly dubbed phone-call, as if he were an afterthought. It’s as ham-fisted as Chibnall at his most typical.  

Even Chris Noth seems to be camping it up more than Barrowman. His performance here is far broader than the star-quality he delivered in Arachnids in the UK. Despite having the best lines, he overplays them and they occasionally fall flat. Harriet Walter is dignified, making the most of the little she has to do and is exterminated too soon.

By the time we reach Clifton Suspension Bridge, the tension is all but depleted and it’s a struggle to care. To use the spare TARDIS (which perhaps we should have been introduced to in the pre-titles sequence rather than the Dalek) to solve the problem like the Daleks seems over-simple given the episode’s runtime and the protracted goodbye scenes, whilst refreshingly free from the overwrought or the fantastic, don’t feel in any way earned.

Perhaps with a different TARDIS crew, the next series might feel breezier, fresher but the over-riding feeling that Revolution of the Daleks leaves us with is one of tiredness. For over two years, we’ve seen a badly cast quartet of actors tackling lines which more experienced, more talented, cleverer actors might have managed to deliver. They are routinely upstaged by guest stars and have seemed ill-formed and badly managed as characters. The problems with much of the Chibnall/Whittaker era are in evidence here and writ large: good ideas badly handled, tense scenes devoid of tension, a lack of finesse in plotting and dialogue and a leading cast who completely fail to engage. Luckily, we have the best one staying on: and it’s Mandip Gill.

3/10

JH