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...

Last week ‘Village Of The Angels’ had moved from the good into great in the past few minutes and hopes were high that Who’s most muddled season, thirteen (‘Flux’) was finally back on track and then…Well, not a lot really. Or rather quite a lot, arguably a bit too much, but none of it much related to what had gone before and not much of it in a direction we wanted to go in. ‘Survivors Of The Flux’ snatches defeat from the jaws of victory again, going back to the sense we had in parts one-three that nobody was quite sure what this series season, even this series, was about and what it was meant to do. And like every time Who has an identity crisis it tries to be something else: we’re back in the late 1980s when the show didn’t know if it was a silly colourful cartoon or a dark film noir, or the mid 1960s when a slew of producers taking over from Verity Lambert tried to make Dr Who the way other programmes were made and failed. More than at any time in the 21^st century ‘Survivors’ feels like  the days when ‘Dr Who’ was like watching the telly and having the Tardis pop up in another story, be it a Western (‘The Gunfighters’) Gameshow (‘The Celestial Toymaker’) or a pirate story (‘The Smugglers’). Only this time rather than have one story be all in one style someone keeps pressing the remote and channel hopping at random, to the point where some scenes don’t even seem to have an end and just bleed into one another. In quick succession we move from Dan and Yaz doing ‘Indiana Jones’ searching for historical artefacts that can save the world, Vinder  doing all the usual scifi stuff, a UNIT Le Carre adaptation via ‘Alien’ with snakes inside people’s tummies and The Doctor having her own soap opera showdown (‘You really messed me life up mam!’) while the Kornovista parts look like 1980s CITY series ‘Woof!’, all done without a pause. 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. I know the theme of ‘Flux’ is seeing the world unravel, but it would be nice to get a handle on it before it did.  

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? It’s easy as it happens). Meanwhile Yaz and Dan have been trapped in 1904 for 3 years (how are they going to get out of that? In the most unlikely way possible). Then later there’s a ‘Serpent’ defunding UNIT and sabotaging it from the inside out, rewriting history to leave the Earth really vulnerable (How do we collectively get out of that? We never find out, this whole plot arc gets undone next time out).  Then The Doctor finally meets her ‘mum’. How is she going to get out of that? She gets killed by the next baddy as it happens, The Swarm, who is out to kill The Doctor. How does she get out of that? Hard to say really, it just sort of…happens. Vinder and whatever her name is are having their own stories: he’s seen a fleet of Sontarons preparing for war and she’s on a Korvanista spaceship and found out she’s pregnant! How are they going to get out of that? Dunno, the credits rolled that time. Once again I’d love to read the original script for ‘Flux’ before ‘Survivors’, even more than the rest of ‘Flux’ is a victim of the squished series, so that we get what feels like ten episodes in one, but rather than the plot moving quickly before our eyes it’s slammed in our faces. There are no linking scenes, no slow moments of pause to digest what we’ve seen, no signs of our friends coming to term with what the episode throws at them – it’s just big scene after big scene after big scene. That’s not storytelling anymore, that’s brainstorming. It’s like when you’re little (or maybe not so little) and playing with your Dr Who toys making up a story, only you don’t know how it ends, so you swipe everything off the table and start again. Steven Moffat did that a lot and it was irritating too, but even he didn’t try to cram so many stories in one as this and at least he paused just long enough to let you know how his characters were feeling. We don’t know any of that in this episode: things happen to people, then before they can re-act other things happen to move the plot along.   

The thing is though these are decent storylines if only they were allowed to breathe. Let’s take Yaz, Dan and Professor Jericho’s trip through time. The idea of using archaeology from the distant past to plot an invasion in the future – what a very Dr Whoy idea! One of the best features of the Chibnall era is the sense that these stories affect everybody on Earth, not just a few people in the home counties. These three unlikely explorers end up passing through Mexico, China, Constantinople and Nepal before ending up back in Liverpool in one of those ‘the solution was under our noses all the time’ type twists. You really do get the sense of a long journey and even though we don’t really see much more than a room, a train and a hilltop you feel that they’ve all come a long way. The scene of Yaz playing back the hologram she got from The Doctor on her phone (sent automatically after they’d been cut off for two weeks) and looking lost and lonely feels as if it’s going to be a really big emotional moment, but then they blow it by having the others come in before we really find out how she feels (if she’d been wiping tears from her eyes, even, it would have helped). Also how do they live? This trio must have found some work to pay for fgood and lodgings and train travel, but we never find out what it is. What could they even do, a specialist professor in an era that doesn’t exist yet, an unemployed art gallery attendant and a policewoman in a day when girls didn’t have jobs like that? They could have had Dan, down about being out of work for so long, saving them all by having a gift for some random talent that’s needed in 1904 but not 2024 (or whenever Flux is actually set), with Yaz chomping at the bit to be more than ‘housewife’ and Jericho doing the archaeological work. We could have had comedy scenes of everyone assuming Dan and Yaz are a couple and Jericho their dad, to the spluttered indignation of all three (along with trouble at the thought they’re spending so much time together when they’re not married or family). There is a really fun interlude with a hermit atop a mountaintop who isn’t what we or they expect at all – but this scene would be better still if we felt more of what our intrepid travellers felt, after going all that way and still not being any better off. This sub-plot reportedly takes three long years, which ought to be ripe for all sorts of juicy emotional expression: by now they must be feeling hopeless, desperate, abandoned, worried that they’re too late even though in plot terms they’re a hundred years too early. For all the emotion we see it could have been three minutes. The thing is, too, if ‘Flux’ really did have a number of episodes dropped this entire sub-plot could have gone: searching for the pots doesn’t solve anything and the idea of ‘call your dog’ is deeply unhelpful, given that Kornavista can’t time travel. Instead the three happen to hear about the Williamson tunnels under Merseyside and head there just in time for the finale.

These tunnels happen to be another great idea that doesn’t really work. It makes perfect Dr Whoy sense that there are special gaps in the space-time continuum where you can enter different parts of history. It makes sense too that they’d be somewhere like the 19^th century tunnels under Liverpool city centre. Joseph Williamson, eccentric millionaire, must have some reason for excavating so many curious caves under the city with suggestions varying from transporting goods that fell through to smuggling to because he was a bit gone in the head (my favourite suggestion is that he was looking for Fraggle Rock). As ever with Dr Who something scifi helps fill in an everyday mystery. Only here’s the thing: I know about the tunnels because I live locally – I didn’t learn any of that from watching the story. I also happen to know a lot of very interesting things about Liverpool city centre that, as a local lad, Chibnall should know too, such as the crazy amount of timeslips and ghost sightings in the area (to the point where Tom Slemen’s ‘Haunted Liverpool’ book series is now on volume thirty seven and counting). There are endless tales of people walking into Victorian Liverpool, 1940s Liverpool, even an alternate universe Liverpool where Germany won the war, never mind the phantom sightings of Spring Heeled Jack, Devils and banshees as well as your regular ghosts. Why is the city such a hotspot? Was it built on sacred land? Are all the ghosts time travellers who came to see The Beatles at The Cavern and got the date wrong? We just don’t know, but it would be fun if ‘Flux’ had a bash at finding out, by having the tunnels be a particular weak spot in the fabric of time or something. Alas we still don’t know why quite why and how these tunnels are there by the end of the story they just are. They seem like a made up thing done to get Yaz and co back home to their own time easily rather than a genuinely thrilling idea.

The Doctor is having a particularly odd time of things. Last weeks’ cliffhanger, where Jodie Whittaker turned into a Weeping Angel, was a corker. For the first time in a long time I spent the week between episodes wondering how she could possibly get out of that one and, well, it turns out that it wasn’t a plot device, just transport. Why did The Doctor need to be a ‘statue’ to beam aboard? Don’t quite know. Where did the Weeping Angels go once she was on board? Don’t know that either. Then we see an Ood beckoning her – and then they go too. Why is there an Ood on this spaceship? Not a clue. Because it’s really the home of Awsok (who everyone had forgotten all about after she wasn’t in last week’s episode) aka Tecteun aka The Doctor’s adoptive mother aka That weird woman who keeps turning up. Here’s the good news: she’s played by Barbara Flynn, an actress I’ve long had on top of my Dr Who wish list. She’s exactly the soert of person who should be in Dr Who, not least because she tends to play salt of the Earth types paired with Doctory eccentrics, from James Bolam’s jazz collector in the glorious ‘Beiderbecke’ trilogy to Granville’s pinup in the original ‘Open All Hours’, to Kris Marshal’s exasperated mother-in-law in ‘Death In Paradise’ spinoff ‘Beyond Paradise’. When word first leaked that we were getting a female lead who would be ‘older’ than the usual speculation about teenage heart-throbs my thoughts immediately went for Barbara Flynn: she can do kindness, she can do angst, she can do mumsy, she can do quiet rage, she can do borderline psychotic. So casting her as The Doctor’s ‘mum’ ought to be brilliant.

Unfortunately here’s the bad news: these scenes are some of the dullest in the series. We get the sort of scenes that are common to long running soaps but which we thought we’d never get to see in Dr Who: the emotional showdown with the parent who abandoned the central character and caused them to become who they turned out to be. Unfortunately doing this through a Dr Who lens dilutes the feeling because it’s all through technical jargon and it’s hard to get emotion through that. All Tecteun does is gloat and goad (and that’s the one thing Barbara Flynn’s never been too good at), taunting The Doctor about her background and all the things that she doesn’t know. Given we had a two-parter of The Master doing this at the end of the previous year and the revelations don’t offer up anything new, that’s not helpful. Other than getting The Doctor out the way so the other plots can ‘catch up’ what do these scenes really do? We and she don’t learn anything useful. The Doctor doesn’t get to do the full ‘you abandoned me! Why?’ sob story. We don’t even get a chance to learn how The Doctor feels about coming face to face with the closest she’ll probably ever come to having a blood relative (give or take Susan) before Tecteun is killed by The Swarm. So what was the point of it all? That whole sub-plot was just two people in a room talking and going round in circles, both figuratively and literally given the sometimes odd camera work. No check that, one person in a room talking. The Doctor just kind of stares back blankly. If you’re going to tease us with big revelations then you have to deliver on what they are. The only useful thing we learn is that The Division are prepared to destroy the universe if it means keeping The Doctor out of their business, which is just daft. How are they going to survive exactly? And even assuming they can, what are they going to do all day? Who are they going to have to talk to? There might be a few Eternals banging around but mostly things are going to be just like they were on their own planet (wherever that might be), only each of them will be further apart with their own empty world to rule. At least there were no more childhood in Ireland flashbacks this time though. Being a Dr Who fan means learning to be grateful for small mercies. Also, I can’t believe they missed the opportunity to have the following dialogue: ‘You’re an Ood one’ ‘Yeah, well so’s yer mum!’

Then there’s UNIT, The Doctor’s ‘adopted’ family. That’s another good idea,  the thought that our beloved organisation is being properly broken for the first time not b invading monsters but by spies within. The Serpent aka Prentis aka That weird expressionless guy is another promising character. He’s also as old as time itself. He has a real bee in his bonnet about UNIT for reasons that, wouldn’t you know it, are never fully explained, yet has managed to work undercover to the point where he’s quite high up: we hear The Brigadier in one scene just out of earshot (it’s an audioclip from ‘Terror Of the Autons’) and we see his daughter Kate very nearly get blown up in a doorway. How are UNIT going to get out of that one?  Erm, well, the universe just kind of rights itself next time out as it happens. He’s a rare baddy who doesn’t even get to meet The Doctor. While showing how lax security really is around Britain’s top military organisation (no wonder they got defunded) there’s no real purpose for this bit to be here either. Throwing in an X-Files idea of conspiracy is all well and good but there’s no way it fits in with what we saw in the 1970s. Why would it? UNIT were doing a grand job with alien invasions nearly weekly. There’s no explanation as to why the 3^rd Doctor, one of the sharpest of all regenerations, never noticed this collusion going on around him even though he fought against bigwigs like Prentis every single week. We don’t even get time to dwell on the fact that UNIT and so many of our friends are destroyed because we’re on to the next bit already.

I don’t quite know what to say about Vinder or Bel (I remembered her name! Weird we should have two prominent characters by that name just a few years apart but then they are both kind of forgettable). Bel’s been picked up the big hairy comedy relief in space, beamed over at the point of death which makes her sub-plot in ‘Once, Upon Time’ even more ridiculous than it already was. Annoyingly she was just about to meet up with beaux Vinder,  who’s been with Dan’s sort-of missus Dianne but is interrupted when he discovers the survivors of the episode title who have been attacked by The Swarm already, who is now represented by a claw in space (!) that’s started eating people for fuel (!) None of this is explained by the way: it just sort of happens, like much of the story. Only it’s all a trap and he’s been vapourised!...Maybe. Both of them only seem to exist for other people to talk to, one about his dastardly deeds and another about his rescue attempt. None of these ideas really move any further. Usually the joy in scifi is seeing characters come back together after they’ve each found something out in a way that’s rounded and satisfying. Having Bel randomly zapped aboard by someone she doesn’t even know is just a copout. There are no ‘linking’ scenes here at all. Were there originally? Did these bits get taken out to make the series fit the six episodes of a reduced lockdown workload? Quite possibly and I have sympathies with a writer who seems to have got quite far working out his Chibnall masterplan before the call came that season thirteen as going to look a bit different to normal. But there’s lots we could have skipped to give the main stories more room to breathe. Keep the Vinder-Bel plot to a bare minimum, skip The Doctor talking to her mum, have the ‘Fam’ head straight to the Williamson tunnels without all the faffing about. Effectively skip this entire episode and move from last week to the finale (and skip episode three while you’re about it too). If it had been The Sontarons (arriving in this week’s cliffhanger) destroying the Angels and saving the Doctor it would have made more sense.
It’s all very English, a story told in frowns and tuts rather than the expected angry showdown.  In fact, for all its globe-trotting this is a very English story all round. Nobody talks about anything this story. How do the three travellers feel about beihng cut from home? We don’t know, they hide it behind a stiff upper lip. There’s no chance for Yaz to talk about The Doctor or Dan to talk about missing Dianne (another character who comes and goes this story) and despite spending three years in the story (making him one of the longest running Who ‘companions’ inside the stories themselves) we don’t learn enough about Professor Jericho to know if he’s missing anyone back home. We never find out how Bel feels about being pregnant. How she feels being apart from Vinder or how he feels being apart from Bel. This is a story so ripe for big emotions for the sort of gut feelings of loss and grief, or terror, or frustration that Dr Who does so well but we don’t get any of it. The closest we get is a hologram Doctor, who isn’t even there, telling Yaz ‘I’m sure I miss you’. ‘I’m sure???’ They’ve been together two seasons and two-thirds by now. I know this particular Doctor doesn’t always find I easy to talk about her emotions, but she’s gone to the lengths of setting this message up for Yaz in the first place and what’s more is recording it in private, without seeing any reaction. This is the one time she could be able to talk about her feelings openly. The fact she doesn’t is so odd if you come to this story after one from any other era (especially Dr 15’s); Yaz’s reaction is scarcely more believable too.  

At least there’s some nice scenery to watch while it’s all going on The upside to only having six stories this year is that each one feels as if it has a bit more money spent on it than usual and if you keep the sound down and watch rather than listen this might just be one of the best Who’s of them all. The scenes of deserts and mountain-tops look convincing (perhaps as a sign of how little interest there is in this era of Dr Who, this is the first time I’ve not been able to track down details of where they were filmed), while the inside sets are no less impressive, looking like the outsides (which might seem an obvious point but actually rarely happens on this show) and all so very different, from 1904 trains to the inside of two very different futuristic spaceships. As ever with BBC historicals the costumes for the globe-trotting are superb, while everyone else seems better dressed than usual too. Only The Swarm, with their skeletal 1980s computer game monster game look let the side down a little. Segun Akinola’s score, too, is another gem: he’s the only person giving this story any cohesion at all, finding a middle path between Indiana Jones action past, soap opera present and scifi future. If you feel anything in this story for anyone at all, chances are it’s because of him. Or perhaps because of the computer effects, as the scenes of ‘The Serpent’ in his true form are pretty horrific, the stuff of nightmares long after everything else in this story gets forgotten. It’s impressive too, given the difficulties going on backstage (which hit crew more than it hit cast) that they managed to make anything, never mind something that looked this good, often with half the amount of people this show would usually have.
Even so, an episode can look amazing but still be a wretched viewing experience if the story isn’t up to it. As with the other episodes this year it’s not that ‘Flux’ is a bad idea. It’s been a whole since we had a whole season wrapped around one particular topic (1978 in fact) and the idea of the universe unravelling is a good and poignant one. This was and in many ways still is an era of change, when everything we thought we relied on as a society is changing: the covid pandemic, the political shift to the right, the rise and fall and inexplicable rise again of Trump and Farrage and all those rightwing losers who weren’t brought up properly on proper values (i.e. watching Dr Who) and the changing landscape of a.i. and computers making some jobs outdated and others brand news led many fans to feel they were living in a parallel universe. The idea of a race like The Swarm who have the power to undo time and make things unstable, simply because they feel like it, is the perfect way of mirroring back an increasingly unstable and fragmented world that feels like it’s grown out of kilter. The fact that the universe won’t simply be destroyed but undone, so that all the good things never existed, is that special kind of horror reserved for special moments in Who, from Jamie and Zoe having their memories wiped at the end of ‘The War Games’ to Donna being doomed to never remember her past in ‘The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End’, only on a wider scale. But to do that you need one clear baddy with one clear motivation to do what they do. This season, this story gives us multiple ones, none of whom ever hang around long enough for us to get to know them and all with their own individual axes to grind. We know they can do it because they did it last week, with ‘Village Of The Angels’ a real return to form. But somehow this series has fallen out of its groove again and lost its confidence and heading into the finale next week there just isn’t time to put things right.

You also need to tell an actual ‘story’, not just a collection of scenes. One of the hardest things writing my scifi books (Kindred Spirits is up to eight volumes, folks!) 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, because they don’t make sense. It’s like the ghost of The Brig was on Chibnall’s shoulder saying: ‘Chap with the weird skull mask there. Five round sentences rapid. Now next The Doctor’s mum…’ It’s all done in such a hurry, as if to cover up how little there is here when you stop and think about it, by not letting you stop and think about it. The one time these different scenes link up is no better mind: the corny fact that The Division invade just as The Swarm invade. What are the odds of that then eh?!? Life doesn’t happen in parallel, in a string of coincidences, it happens organically and the best stories reflect that, moving from A to B to C because that’s how the story should naturally go. There’s none of that in ‘Flux’ and it’s exhausting. I get that this particular 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. The ‘Flux’ capacity for throwing too much at us is never worse than in this episode, though, because all these parts individually would make great episodes. It’s as ten minutes chunks in a bigger episode where the parts have nothing to do with each other where things fall apart. There comes a point when you start groaning as, mid-sentence sometimes, we get yet another caption on screen saying ‘1904’ or ‘Constantinople’ or something similar, ushering in yet another scene you probably won’t be able to follow and even if you did will probably be undone before the end of the episode anyway. Like The Doctor as a Weeping Angel you become numb to it all, refusing to feel anything for anyone in this season because you know it’s going to be a waste of your time And unlike The Doctor as a Weeping Angel there’s no easy way out of it. At this rate there aren’t going to be any survivors of the flux next week. And for a moment there I seriously considered dropping by the wayside too. Judging by the viewing figures I wasn’t the only one.

POSITIVES + The Nepalese guru from 1904 is hilarious and deserves his own spin-off series. He’s the last thing you expect in this rather po-faced series (especially after the more serious gurus and hermits in past stories like ‘Snakedance’), with a quip for every remark and a more worldly wise sense of both the bigger and smaller picture than any of our time travellers. He’s like Graham, umm if Graham had been an all-knowing philosopher. His first remark to the trio is that ‘It took you long enough’. You think this is going to be a comment on the slowness of their spiritual approach but noooo: he’s being rude about how long it took them to puff up his hill and how they need to do more exercise. Then when he asks what’s been going down below (because he’s starved of gossip) professor Jericho feebly mentions they invented the telephone. 'Why would I have a telephone?’ he asks ‘I'm a hermit’. A silly joke but a very funny one all the same.

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 (arguably the Korvanista should be more like this), 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 emotionally charged the series has ever seen. Remember, this is the being who’s tortured The Doctor through multiple lives. She might have given The Doctor life and indeed lives, but she’s the sort of amoral scientist that The Doctor defeats in season finales, evil and unrepentant. The Doctor doesn’t challenge her. The Doctor doesn’t complain. The Doctor doesn’t even attempt to stop her – The swarm do before she has a chance, but only after half an hour of being talked to. And not very effectively either given the ripe dialogue; you have expect Tecteun to tell The Doctor to ‘go to her room’.

BEST QUOTE: Awsok/Tecteun: ‘You won't be told, will you?’ Dr: ‘It's a defining trait’.

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