Once, Upon Time : Rank - 301

                        Once, Upon Time

(Season 13, Dr 13 Yaz and Dan, 14/11/2021, producer/showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Azhur Saleem)

Rank: 301

'Once upon a time there was a…No hang on first there was a…and then there was a…interrupted by a…happily ever after...Only it isn’t because…FLUX!...and here’s a bit from the sequel…And back again…Upon a time there was once’

Doctor Who’s wobbliest-wobbliest adventure in space and timey-wimey ‘Once Upon A Time’ is confusing in the extreme. I didn’t understand it at all the first time, only vaguely understood it once it was all sort-of-ish explained at the end of the episode, got even more confused when none of these story threads were picked up the following week and even on repeat viewings where I kinda sorta get what’s going on, I don’t fully, if you know what I mean. Not to give away spoilers but, seriously, this is one of those rare occasions where you’ll thank me for them because you need to have some idea of what’s going on to save you switching off, the Doctor has saved her companions from certain destruction by hurling everyone into the flux rift time storm at the Temple of Atropos, which acts as a sort of giant re-set button (weirdly we hear her instantaneous decisions spoken out loud for upwards of a minute and a half for no good reason – I mean, I know I spend paragraphs writing about things that only happen in seconds but that’s my style, we’ve never seen Chris Chibnall write like this and he never will again). Only a Weeping Angel effectively hit the shuffle button at the same time and everyone’s lives have become jumbled up together so that one minute they’re talking to someone from the past from before our friends even met and the next they’re having old conversations with new people who don’t understand what the hell they’re talking about. And if they don’t understand we certainly don’t. It’s all part of the Doctor’s plans to camouflage everyone within their own timestreams, only it goes wrong because of that weeping angel invasion messing with time, an explanation that takes a full twenty-four confusing minutes to arrive. Being confused is a part and parcel of a lot of Dr Who on first viewings but ‘Once, Upon Time’ really pushes that idea to extremes like no other story and, even as a fan who adores stories like ‘The Mind Robber’ ‘Warrior’s Gate’ and ‘Amy’s Choice’ that have a similarly surreal quality, it’s all a bit much. No other story gives me a migraine the way this one does. Not even the year long River Song-Astronaut arc. Temporal hazing they call it. If so then call me sufficiently hazed. Even Yaz, whose used to being cool calm and collected in the face of danger admits she’s ‘freaking out’ a few minutes into this story. You and me both. 

 In other words, it’s yet another idea taken from an era of Dr Who past without anyone really understanding how the ‘old’ days of, ooh, a few years earlier worked. Usually it’s Russell T Davies’ council estate character plot beats that get shrunk in the recycled wash in ther 13th Doctor era, but this time Chibnall’s trying to do the sort of audacious time-travelling jumbled up montages that Steven Moffat always used to do so well and naturally. There’s nothing natural or organic about this story, with scenes that could have come in any order. While I do admire this story’s audacity, there just doesn’t seem enough of a reason or a pay-of to take such a big risk. In Moffat’s case there was usually a strong rhyme and reason behind what was going on, with the rules explained to us just as we were growing bored. Only this time its for a full fifty minutes, the explanations are split up into little bitesized chunks so that we don’t get an overall picture and as it turns out it doesn’t drive the story arc at all but is just an episode long cul-de-sac because Chris Chibnall couldn’t see another way of getting out of trouble from last week’s cliffhanger. Just take a look at the scenes we cover: The Temple, Dan wandering the streets of Liverpool with Dianne, Yaz sitting in a police control car with a colleague on a job, The Doctor as a soldier fighting a war she doesn’t understand, Dan on the steps of Liverpool Cathedral, Yaz and her sister playing video games, Dan in the 19th century in the tunnels under the Wirral with philanthropist Jospeh Williamson (not that he’s introduced himself yet), supporting character Vinder getting his orders from a commanding officer who looks just like Yaz, plus Jo Martin’s Doctor having another adventure pre-Hartnell, interruptions by Swarm whose kinda-sorta in charge of everything and various scenes of Bel and Vinder wandering through worlds looking for each other. Who? Oh yeah, Bel’s a new character who won’t properly be part of the plot till the grand finale (and even then barely) and is never properly introduced. It feels as if your own personal Korvanista has just eaten your TV remote when you weren’t looking and is taking you on the most random channel hop ever, all on fast forward. And then Barbara Flynn turns up as Awsok, yet another baddy, who is talking to the Doctor in a universe that doesn’t exist, about a plot point that shouldn’t exist but does even though we don’t need it yet. And then, when everything seems to be sorted, instead of explaining what happened the story’s immediately invaded by another load of baddies. Throw in a few seconds of Daleks, Weeping Angels and Cybermen for good measure, as the baddies are taking over the universe and fighting over spoils, you have, well, a migraine actually. My head hurts. And it just doesn’t stop! Even Steven Moffat allowed us to take a breather sometimes. 

 As ever with Chibnall I applaud the courage in trying it and the idea is sound, it’s the execution that’s a bit off. In a longer series this story would have made a lot more sense, as, say, episode eleven of a thirteen part series when we’d got to know these characters fully and could recognise all the big life-changing moments from their past. As episode three in a six part series that got condensed because of covid and a plot that desperately needed more room to stop and think as it is and which is, both actually and metaphorically, hit by time running out so every second counts, it’s utterly bewildering. Daleks and Cybermen come and go within minutes (we think they’re both going to become a part of the larger plot, but they don’t). The Fugitive Doctor pops up in to say hello, but basically asks the same ‘who are you?’ questions all over again. They spent a lot of time and effort on tiny scenes that add up to very little, effort that might have been better spent ignoring the cameos and concentrating on the actual story. Everything gets re-set next week. We don’t learn anything all that valuable about anyone: a little bit about Vinder’s desperate need to impress his superiors and his Doctor-like rebellion I suppose, maybe Yaz’s sister and her increasingly complicated lovelife (though as we never see her again there’s not an awful lot of point) and it’s nice to see Dan back when he was happy, but that’s about all. It feels though, at least at first, as if this is all going to matter. Notably the bits of the past these characters return to aren’t the big emotional crisis of their lives but parts they’re still having lingering regrets about now: Yaz regrets not supporting her sister more, Dan regrets splitting up with Dianne, Vinder regrets letting down his commanding officer (and the Doctor? It’s hard to tell but there’s a hitn that, just maybe, she’s still hurting over running away from the time war). For a moment there it feels as if this is all going to mean something, that the Flux is something akin to the Dream Lord from ‘Amy’s Choice’, a similarly surreal story where time kept jumping around, but ‘Once Upon, Time’ doesn’t have the same pay-off, even three episodes later when the series ends. It might as well not have happened at all. When you’re trying to tell a twelve hour story in six hours you can’t afford to have a story like this and it’s this part that should have been cut, that everyone in the script meetings must have been, silently or openly, screaming at Chibnall to drop. Because the last thing you do, when you’re pressed for time and so many episodes of your story have been reduced because of a pandemic, is mess around with time for the hell of it. It’s finger buffet food at what was promised to us as a banquet, bitesize chunks of bread that fill you up so you can’t digest the real bigger story that’s going on. It’s like the trailer for the next episode and the teaser for the rest of the series crammed together in the middle of eight separate episodes run on fast forward and no one, not even Steven Moffat, can tell a proper story in that time. As a newbie whose never used this style before or since Chibnall has no chance. 

 In a covid-free world ‘Flux’ might have been a winner. The idea of so many of the Doctor’s foes fighting over control from a universe that’s imploding and going wrong is exactly the sort of story Dr Who should be telling in such a dark and difficult, confusing time. Had the plot strands been laid out, one episode at a time, across thirteen weeks as usual, leading to a huge showdown with everyone we’ve ever wanted to see on screen together, it could have been like ‘Stolen Earth/Journey’s End’ or ‘The Big Bang/Pandorica Opens’ times a hundred. But covid both gives and takes away from this story, turning it into a very different beast. On the one hand it hit production so badly that everyone scrabbled around trying to make anything out of this story, reducing the planned full series length to just six episodes of varying time lengths. Presumably most of these plot strands would have had a full episode each, with maybe a sub plot or two, properly explained. But instead all these stories have to be told at speed in order to get us from the starting point to the ending and its ‘Once, Upon Time’ that’s the episode that gets hit the hardest, as if all the planned middle episodes have been crammed together. Really, though, it could have been simple(well, simpler). All you need from this story is to move Awsok to the episode before or after, tell Vinder’s memories in flashback, keep the Joseph Williamson cameo until its properly introduced in episode five ‘Survivors Of The Flux’ (yes, they didn’t even explain this strange little sequence away the following week!) and have the cliffhanger from ‘War Of The Sontarons’ (the swarm threatening our friends) lead directly into the next cliffhanger at the end of this episode (The Weeping Angels have taken the Tardis!), skipping the rest of this story completely, with a lot more run for characters to do things that matter to the overall story. 

 On the other, though, ‘Once, Upon Time’ is the perfect product for those frazzled times early post covid (though shown in the second year of what’s still an ongoing pandemic, whatever the papers say or don’t say, it was made in the first when everything was particularly fragile and uncertain), giving audiences who saw it on first transmission an extra connection future viewers just won’t understand, the way that people who didn’t live through joining the EU scratch their heads over the ‘Peladon’ stories or those who didn’t live through the Thatcher years can’t fully grasp how accurate some of the depictions in the 7th Doctor stories are. Time in lockdown was exactly like this: life put on hold, future uncertain, stuck in a present that didn’t seem to be moving or going anywhere but with fears of the future and memories of random times from the past all jumbled up together. Flux is the perfect metaphor for life being interrupted by something outside our control that even the Doctor can’t quite grasp. It’s an overall concept anyone in charge of Dr Who in times past would have been pleased to come up with had they been running the series in a time of plague. By holding back exactly what the flux is, but not dwelling on the mystery of what it might be so the whole thing just ends up a disappointment, it feels – for five weeks at least – as if we’re part of the story too, that something alien and strange and scary has invaded our world and made it stop working properly. This is half of exactly what we needed from Dr Who in those strange and bewildering times: the sense that we weren’t alone, that even the Doctor and friends were struggling to cope in a universe where the rules kept changing and each day depended on each update, life put on hold for the foreseeable future in case nothing we were doing mattered and we were all doomed anyway. Unfortunately, the other half of what we needed from Dr Who in 2021 was comfort food, escapism to get lost in, with the safety that somebody somewhere knew how the hell we were going to get out of this and that’s where this story falls apart. We had enough to be getting on with trying to cope with real life that was dumbfounding us, we didn’t need to be dumbfounded by fiction too. With so much competing for our attention we just didn’t have the spare brain cells to work out a Dr Who plot at its most convoluted. 

 It would have helped if the Doctor was that safe pair of hands in this story, but she isn’t. Even by Jodie Whittaker standards the Doctor is so unlikeable across this episode. She doesn’t once try to comfort her friends, apologise for the way she’s had to hide them in their own pasts or give them comfort that she can get them out of this mess. Instead she’s snappy, rude, belligerent. She’s angry at Yaz for interrupting her train of thought, even though Yaz has been remarkably patient at everything being thrown at her and she snarls at Dan for wanting to save Dianne once she’s trapped at the end of the episode (in another sub-plot that doesn’t really go anywhere), even though caring for other people and wanting to save them is exactly who she’s brought her friends up to be. ‘Does everything have to be a discussion?’ The Doctor yells, but that’s the thing – if even she has no real idea of what’s going on then she does need to have a discussion, she needs every voice in the room to be directed at finding a solution, to be a democracy in a way the Swarm and Aawsok could never be, two tyrants who are obviously going to clash when they (eventually) rub up against each other. Of all the times for the Doctor to turn dictatorial and ignore her friends this isn’t it (if she’d had time to ask Dan where he’d been the whole Wirral sub-plot that sort of leads to the solution could have come out a lot earlier too). Viewers can put up with a lot if they have sympathy for the characters and Dan, especially, gets some heart-warming scenes trying to date Dianne and hinting at a difficult fractured past whose ripples are still felt in the present in a sub-plot that mirrors the overall Flux one. Yaz, too, hasn’t seemed like this much of a real human being since ‘Arachnids In the UK’ – it’s amazing how bland she is on her own but how sharp she becomes when bouncing off members of her eclectic family. But the Doctor is trying our patience, Vinder is too new a character for us to know yet and we don’t know Bel at all. Every time the script bounces somewhere else, especially yet more scenes of people talking to the Doctor while she spouts of about urgency and emergencies but doesn’t actually do anything except stand around listening, you’re screaming, because you want these scenes to lead somewhere anywhere. In other words this is a great idea that perfectly reflected its times, but undone by the problems those very times were causing and handled badly even given the difficulties everyone was facing trying to make this. There are just too many fluctuations in ‘Flux’ as a whole and especially this episode. 

 One other thing: even the characters we know and love are blinking out of time, so we get to see our regular actors ‘play against type’. Well some of them anyway: The Doctor is (briefly) a soldier in Vinder’s unit, and Yaz is Vinder’s commanding officer barking orders and various people are Korvanista. The opportunity to play against type is good for a long running series that needs to give its regulars a break from time to time without stopping production and there are lots of previous examples in Dr Who: William Hartnell as The Abbott of Amboise in ‘The Massacre’, Patrick Troughton in ‘The Enemy Of The World’, everyone bar Jon Pertwee in ‘Inferno’, Tom Baker in ‘The Invasion Of Time’ and David Tenannt in ‘Human Nature/Family Of Blood’. Given a whole episode of this, explained properly and with a proper beginning middle and end, it could have been quite fun. However, the execution leaves a lot to be desired so all you see is some of the worst acting in the series: frankly Mandip Gill’s useless at trying to act a tough middle aged white dude with an ego problem and Jodie Whittaker is so like her usual Doctory self you only learn from the dialogue who exactly she’s meant to be and we don’t know Vinder that well yet so his scenes just get in the way. And what about John Bishop? He’s game for anything and many of the best scenes of his brief nine episode run come from him doing something completely unexpected, like whacking a Sea Devil with a sword or sparring insults off a giant dog. Why didn’t they give him the scenes of acting like a tough RAF-type officer or Yaz’s sister? Instead Dan gets perhaps the most confusing part of the whole episode, ending up in the tunnels under the Wirral in the 19th century (tunnels which, in a few episodes’ time, turn out to link to different timezones: in Dr Who anyway. Having been down them for real a few years ago sadly I can confirm that they just take you to different bits of Merseyside and while a lot of it feels stuck in the 19th century it doesn’t make you time travel really). 

 Talking of which…this is a really great idea had they explained it properly, but an explanation is missing so I’m one of the few people who actually know what was meant to be going on here. Don’t ask me why, but of all the cities in all the world Liverpool seem to have more reported ‘timeslip’ encounters than anywhere else, certainly in Europe. Tom Slemen’s excellent ‘Haunted Liverpool’ books are full of tales of people who walked down a normal side street, had a bit of a funny turn and woke up in the past/the future/parallel worlds. The most moving tale is a woman who found the city centre had been over-run by Nazis in a scenario straight out of ‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’, where the city had been demolished and turned into another sprawling Berlin metropolis. Hitler had a relative in Liverpool and it’s the one part of Britain he visited pre-wars and as an amateur architect with dreams of re-building places remodelling Liverpool in his own image and making it the new capital is entirely plausible as something he’d do, even if he left the rest of Britain alone. I myself have walked down a few streets and had funny turns – regrettably I didn’t wake up in the 1960s or anything (which would have helped with reviews of the missing episodes) but there’s definitely something weird hidden away in the city – not all the time, not everywhere, but in different pockets here and there. Before this series I had my own theory it was all the time travellers in the future going back to 1960 to see The Beatle at the Cavern, but I’m happy to buy it as the side effect of ‘Flux’. One solitary line explaining this for the 999.9% of people who don’t come from round here or who do and don’t know the stories would have done wonders to tie this plot element together though. That’s the 13th Dr era in a nutshell: brilliant inspired ideas, undone by getting the basics of storytelling wrong and not taking your audience along with you when you’re making big leaps into the unknown. 

 The result is a story that’s like nothing ever seen in Dr Who before or since. Generally I like stories that play to their own rules but this one goes too far and is just muddled, undoing the points worth making by hopping about all over the place, like a hyperactive Sycorax on a pogostick. There are at least five too many things being thrown at us with no breathing space or chance to catch up so its bewildering. That’s the whole point I know for the characters as well as us, but when its 45-odd minutes of being bewildered and the audience at home have a choice between this episode and something else you’re just going to reach for the remote control and try TV that doesn’t bamboozle you and fry your brain. We’re back in the 1980s, when Dr Who was made to confuse and reference back to other stories to please the fans instead of telling a story everyone can enjoy – and like the 1980s the viewing figures fell because, even though there are an awful lot of Whovians around the world, we’re still outnumbered by the more general public who tune in because there’s nothing else on (and who can just as easily tune out again and watch something else). So what was it all for? My guess is that Chris Chibnall wrote it partly out of criticism of his first two series that his stories were ‘too simple’. What we actually meant by that was ‘gee, I wish these stories had a bit more depth to them and would go from a to b in capital letters sometimes, not lowercase’. What he took that to mean was ‘gee I wish we could have a story that no one can follow, so we can go from A to Q to I to B to J’. This just isn’t his natural writing style at all, it’s Steven Moffat’s and Chibnall has even less clue about how these sort of structured plots work than he does the emotional rollercoaster rides of Russell T Davies. There are times though when he does Chris Chibnall things, ideas that no one else writing for the show would come up with, really well: the combining of elements that shouldn’t go together, the sense that Dr Who is part of a bigger universe than just being stuck in one particular time or planet, the sense of scale that should come from a series that can cover this much ground, getting away from one particular town or era. It’s the other stuff that goes wrong, with this story particularly trying to be all things to all fans instead of picking and choosing which ones to prioritise. As a showrunner Chibnall’s stories are always in flux, between good ideas and bad, the need to tell a straightforward story and the desire to shake things up, to make drama or comedy, a low budget series with charm or a high budget series with dazzling effects. He can’t be everything he wants to be and he’s running out of time to be them all, so for this episode he’s everything all in one go. I so admire the bravery, even while I get whiplash from heading in so many different directions at once. 

 POSITIVES +It’s great to see Liverpool on screen again after years of seeing Londoners, Cardiffians and even Sheffielders get all the love. I’m particularly impressed with the filming in St Luke’s, a genuine bombed out church that lies on the outskirts of the city centre, which amazingly is still whole that it’s safe enough to walk through, even thought the roof and some of the sides are missing. Left in place as a reminder of the damage the city suffered during the Second World War, but also as a reminder of the city’s resilience in staying upright even when battered, it’s the perfect setting for this story and Dan and Dianne’s curious romantic walk; something from the past that’s not quite right and shouldn’t be there still lingering into the present. Frankly we could have done with more scenes like this and could have skipped a lot of the rest. 

 NEGATIVES – What a waste of Barbara Flynn, who was always somewhere near the top of my list of actors I longed to see in Dr Who. She turns up randomly in the middle of the story on a planet that doesn’t exist to show the Doctor that time isn’t working properly (yeah, we’d kind of noticed that already) and the universe is being destroyed and then vanishes for several episodes. It feels as if she’s about to be a huge character in this series arc but she doesn’t do much more when she re-appears a second time at the end. Most odd – was she a casualty of the covid complications perhaps so could only film some scenes and not others? To be honest the series didn’t need her there at all. 

 BEST QUOTE: The Doctor - ‘We save my friends in the future by replicating what happens in the past. We have to do this or everything will fracture across time and space!’