Survivors Of The Flux: Rank - 290

  Survivors Of The Flux

(Season 13, Dr 13 with Yaz and Dan, 28/11/2021, producer/showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Azhur Saleem)

Rank: 290

In which an Ood, UNIT and The Doctor's adopted mother walk into a time anomalous trap created by The Division to end time. or something like that...

One of the frequent criticisms of the Chibnall era is that there's nothing much going on, so in his third series he changed things around and...well...now there's a bit too much. Episode 5 of Flux and even more than the others it feels as if we're still watching the 'flash forward' bit before the credits jumping around at random until we get to the end. Take the opening 5 minutes: There's just been a really good cliffhanger where the Dr has been turned into a weeping angel (how's she going to get out of that?) Meanwhile Yaz and Dan have been trapped in 1904 for 3 years (how are they going to get out of that?) Other writers would made the emotional implications of either of those events last the episode, maybe the whole series, but both are resolved in blink-and-you'll-miss-it developments. One of the hardest things writing my scifi books is getting the linking scenes 'right', so that you're not just inundated with 'key scenes' and this is what happens when you don't just jump from one to another: genuinely thrilling ideas get wasted. I get that thisparticular series, more than any other, is about time being messed up but that doesn't mean that it should be impossible to follow and at times this episode just is. A real shame because you can feel the promise of what everyone was trying to do - if anything everyone's trying that little bit too hard.

Positives + The Nepalese guru from 1904 is hilarious and deserves his own spin-off series. 'Why would I have a telephone? I'm a hermit. Now what's the gossip down there?!'

Negatives - A recurring problem with the 13th Dr is that she has a tendency to stand around taking things in while people do stuff to her. That's a useful trait in a therapist or a friend or a pet dog, less so in a timelord who needs to be the equal of the baddies. It happens a lot in this episode. The scenes with her 'adopted mother' Barbara Flynn should be some of the most