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 21st 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 19th 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 3rd 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’.
Previous ‘Village
Of The Angels’ next ‘The
Vanquishers’
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