The Vanquishers: Rank - 279

  The Vanquishers

(Series 13, Dr 13 with Yaz and Dan, 5/12/2021, showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Azhur Saleem)  

Rank: 279

‘Hello guyssssss, it’s Sssssssarg the Iccccce Warrior here. I heard you Ssssssssontaronssss had offered a trucccccce to the Dalekssssss and Ccccccybermen. Well, we’ve teamed up with the Rutanssssss to dessssstroy you. We’ve got many more monsssssterssss on our ssssside: sssaay hello to your worst nightmare: The Krotonssss, The Abzzzzzorbaloff, The KandyMan, The Taran Woodbeast, The Myrka, The Ergon chicken and Yartek, Leader of the alien Voord. Darn, he’s jussssst tripped over hissss flipperssss and accidentally ejected ussss all into sssssapce, ruining our grand massssterplan. Pretend I wasssssn’t here!...’

Let’s start off with the positives. I really admire Chris Chibnall’s ambition in making ‘Flux’ a full-on-epic, with a single storyline that runs across every story. It’s a good idea having the tension ratchet up every week and have things get so big that the Doctor struggles to undo things as easily as normal. It’s like having a whole season of season finales! It’s admirably brave too, trying to do something this big and unwieldy as a statement of intent back when the series’ standing is looking a little bit shakey. But just as when they tried something similar with ‘Trial Of A Timelord’ back in 1986 it doesn’t come off because nobody ever sat down long enough to work out what the end goal should be. If you’re going to invest six weeks of your life into one storyline then you need to know what the pay-off is going to be and you need to make it every bit as big and ambitious as the rest of the storyline has been. Instead Flux just kind of ends. There’s no great moment of vast peril, no great moment when annihilation has been undone, no moment when you’re on the edge of your seat wondering how The Doctor is ever going to get out of this one. It’s just one set of baddies destroying another until an omnipotent being named ‘Time’ undoes the flux in one go. Admittedly I remember doing that writing my own Dr Who stories, but in my defence I was aged seven at the time.

Another thing I used to do when I got stuck was jump about from one sub-plot to another when I got stuck so that older future me would have to work out how to get out of something, before I inevitably forgot and it all got solved anyway. Chibnall does that a lot in this story. I mean a lot. It’s in a few other reviews that Dr Who often works best when it’s like channel hopping, dropping The Doctor and co somewhere that they’re not supposed to be and seeing them disrupt it. But this story is channel-hopping between lots of different Dr Who stories, none of which have been properly thought out. There are the Sontarons, who double as both the main warriors and the comedy relief, opportunists who take advantage of time folding in on itself by offering the ‘three-fingered salute of uneasy alliance’ with The Daleks and Cybermen, who get ten seconds of screen time total before they’re wiped out. There’s Yaz, Dan and Jericho making their way across the Mersey tunnels back to the Doctor’s side. There’s Kornavista sitting around in his spaceship waiting to do something. There’s Bel and Vinder and their wonky romantic sub-plot, rushing towards each other across space and time. There’s a nasty being known as the Grand Serpent who’s been manipulating time and causing trouble. There’s Dianne, Dan’s ex, who goes from being ordinary Scouser to knowledgeable gun-toting marine scientist awfully quickly (I know she was paying attention to the Sontarons talking about their anti-matter machine, sorry, advanced trans-dimensional engineering control system, but even they seem a bit clueless how to use it and she gets it right first time). There’s The Swarm and Azure who might say they have the power to shift all of space and time to get what they want off-screen (to rip the universe apart for all eternity and turn all memories of The Doctor to dust…Most people would settle for dropping her from their Christmas card list), but on-screen it doesn't feel as if they have the power to make soup. There’s Kate Stewart…Actually what does she do? She just sort of stands around for a couple of scenes nattering about antimatter (maybe her dad told her all about it during a holiday to Cromer?) and doesn’t even get a decent farewell. I got whiplash from the amount of times the action changed setting and by the end of the episode the person who had done the most work on this story was the establishing caption writer given that a new one went up every thirty seconds.

It has one hell of a lot to do within an hour ending a series arc that threw everything at us except for a dimensionally transcendent sink. Only Chibnall has backed himself into a corner. The only way he can solve all these problems at once is by having The Doctor present at each of these scenarios so he turns this into a sort-of multi-Doctor story, though alas only with multiple copies of Dr 13 running around the place. There’s no justification for it in the plot whatsoever, except of course that ‘Flux’ is damaged so weird things are happening with time. But why isn’t it happening elsewhere? Why aren’t there multiple Sontaron storm-troopers and weird guys painted blue running around too? There’s no internal logic to how the idea of Flux works, which means that it’s hard to believe in how Flux as a series works. It’s all very well having a series where time is wibbly wobbly but you still need to have a concrete final end. There isn’t one and it’s all horribly disjointed, to the point where the entire episode feels as if it runs on at speed like the pre-credits ‘recap’ in equally small and pointless soundbites. What’s more Chibnall actually seems proud of it and has the characters comment on the disjointed nature of the story as if he’s doing something clever rather than, say, explaining the plot to us. ‘I’m getting really dizzy now’ says Jericho at one point. Not half, sunshine!  ‘Distance and time seem to work a bit differently today’ says Dianne. You betcha! ‘There’s too many questions’ howls The Doctor. You said it, love! ‘I had a reckoning with time’ she adds later. Me too, it felt like it was going backwards or that I was caught in a neverending timeloop of exposition and unexplained scenes by the end. ‘I do not have time for your delusional witterings!’ snaps the Sontaron with the unlikely name Commander Stenck. Even I wasn’t going to be that harsh but he does have a point!

To be fair, I suspect at some time and some draft this did make sense, for it’s not the loose association jumble of ideas of some other Who stories that don’t have a lick of sense in them at all(‘Once Upon Time’ for instance). There clearly was meant to be a story here somewhere, we just jumped from A to B to C to Q to X to Z without any warning. There’s probably good reason for that though.  We don’t know the full details but we do know that a lot of the Flux series got cut because of covid restrictions which meant that Chibnall had to work at speed taking bits out and adding other linking passages in (alas while it’s a matter of record that great swathes were cut the only scene we know about for sure is one where Korvanista comments to the Doctor about K9, not essential to the plot but more fun than anything we get all year). While Flux started in a reasonably easy to follow way with ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ by the time we get to the finale six weeks later it’s obvious that a lot of key moments are either missing or have been skirted over. Chibnall did well to get this series out at all, given how many things were working against him and even the best writers would have lost something important somewhere having to re-write scripts this last minute. But even so there are clearly too many characters here. The obvious thing to do would be to cut the roles of the incidental characters who really don’t do much like Bel and Vinder entirely and concentrate on the main cast – even have Yaz or Dan doing their parts if need be in order to cover the gaps (as Dianne so obviously does out of character.  Was she meant to be either a much bigger character or a different person altogether originally?) Instead Chibnall cuts scenes down to the point where some of them are impenetrable and the big bads (especially Storm and Azure) stand around talking about all the terrible things they can do without ever actually doing any of it. The plot throughout is all about reaction, but so much is going on that it’s hard to work out who is reacting to what. ‘Flux’ was never going to be a straightforward story, but it never needed to be this much of a muddle. Every scene and every monster is be-twixt someone or something else.

Talking of Twixes and other chocolate bars, the one race that does do something are The Sontarons and Chibnall handles them well. While The Daleks and Cybermen et al would only be happy with mass invasions that made them look good and powerful The Sontarons are totally the sort of opportunists who are just happy to win, even if it’s in strange circumstances. They’re pretend power grab alliance with The Daleks and Cybermen is the highlight of the episode, although you have to wonder why their rivals didn’t assume from the first they were going to be betrayed somewhere down the line (they probably had a sneaky plan of their own to betray The Sontarons but were wiped out). Nice to know the Sontarons still hate the Rutans above all else and won’t enter any sort of alliance them though. The other ‘best’ scene comes when The Doctor makes a truce with Commander Stenck, who sells out his platoon’s soul in return for some chocolate (did they try the baked potatoes first, thinking they could do a trade?) Who would have thought, half a century after ‘The Time Warrior’, that one of the fiercest and most military-minded race of them all would be selling themselves out for a chocolate fix? While I suspect their creator Robert Holmes would be turning in his grave at this scene, it does fit their reputation of not being able to see past their own needs and helps add some much needed comedy to a very dark and sombre episode (they should have made cocoa deprivation a torture in ‘The Sontaron Experiment’). The scenes of him stuffing his face in a corner shop in full armour, having just got off a horse, are the sort of mundane real-worldly things turned on their head that Dr Who does so well (and there’s a nice bit of continuity with The Doctors love for corner shops, though it really is an amazing chance she happens to choose this one. Funnily enough it was my local during an apprenticeship at the nearby offices for the Liverpool Echo so I can vouch that it’s nothing special, although it did use to be the only place you could buy those delicious and now defunct Marble bars from. Had the Sontarons found those they’d have been too blissed out to invade anyone ever again). The Sontarons somehow manage to be both the butt of the jokes and a credible warrior force, which is hard to pull off. At least they’re defeated in the best way too, as The Doctor does something physical and crash-lands a spaceship into theirs. Sontar-whoops!

The weird thing is too Chibnall is rather good at capturing the atmosphere of covid restrictions in 2021. This was a messy, scattershot time when we were mostly living from one news bulletin to the next, when right-wingers were busy trying to re-write history and pretend the pandemic hadn’t happened and we should all be out making and spending money instead of putting it to good use with masks and ventilators and getting rid of covid entirely. This is a story very much written in the ‘present day’, one of only six in the 21^st century to be set on the day it’s transmitted (along with ‘Halloween Apocalypse’) and with the thrill that this story ‘could’ be happening in real time and you wouldn’t know it (although that said I don’t remember anything weird happening in Liverpool that day). It was a year of lurching from one major crisis to the next, of going ‘what now?’ day after day and having the rug pulled from under you by the latest often hypocritical press release from the government (who said covid wasn’t a threat but put ventilators everywhere and literally had their cake and ate it when everyone else was following restrictions). If ever there was a year to try messy free-form Dr Who this was it and you have to admire a series that goes quite this far in trying to push the envelope of what can be done. That’s kind of it though: in theory a story with this many short cut scenes should be thrilling but because so much is going on and it’s so easy to get lost (and the few explanations we do get make no sense) it winds up being boring. There’s nothing in ‘The Vanquishers’ to get a hold of nothing to care about, nothing to get your teeth into. It’s just impenetrable scifi gibberish. And if ever there was a year when Whovians wanted to get utterly and properly lost in a bigger world so they didn’t have to think about the ‘real’ one it was 2021.   

Every thread in this complicated patchwork quilt but the Sontaron one falls to nothing as Chibnall simply moves his playing pieces off the board in unspectacular form. The Grand Serpent, the big bad who defunded UNIT and seemed to have special powers, is simply moved by The Doctor to an asteroid where he can rant to himself in peace and he really doesn’t put up much of a fight. Swarm and Azure keep threatening The Doctor with all those horrible things that are about to happen, but rather than get on with it they’re the sort of baddies who stand around nattering about their plan so that by the time they come to use it The Doctor has pulled off the old ‘Space Museum’ trick and let all the people she’s inspired to fight come to her rescue and have Flux gobble them up instead. I’d lay odds that even the comedy Sontaron could have them in a fight. Yaz and Dan barely have time to say a word and half of those are the duo being patronising to each other and calling them ‘Scouse and ‘Yorkshire’, something that’s clearly meant to be endearing, but patently isn’t. Dianne seems to take all of her frustration out on Dan for no good reason (he was rather busy and had good reason for missing their date: honestly he’s better off without her if she’s going to pick on him like that. Or maybe she’s competing with Bel for Vinder’s attentions given that it’s time on board his ship where she changes her stance). Kornavista has long since passed his sell-by-date too, still making snide points at Dan for having to save him instead of the bigger picture of the universe being unravelled (while it’s odd that an amnesiac Doctor should have her memory awoken by him but not Yaz. That romance really isn’t going anywhere fast is it if The Doctor can’t even remember her). They say every dog has his day, but that was in ‘Halloween Apocalypse’ and since then he’s been a spare part, there to get the ‘Flux’ series rolling and keep our heroes out of harm’s way and nothing more. They could have thrown him all sorts of bones across this episode, especially after the hermit mentioned him last time out, but they don’t. The way Chibnall dispatches Joseph Williamson is particularly laughable: this is a man who’s had visions of time breaking through and dedicated his life and half his fortune to the great folly of digging tunnels under the river Mersey. Everyone thought him mad but he knew the day would come when it would be useful and after decades it has. Then ten minutes later The Doctor basically says ‘well, there’s no point putting you in danger – off you pop’ and he just turns round and heads for home. Though at least he gets a better farewell than professor Jericho, trapped in a Sontaron spaceship with no means of rescue. Now, on screen we've only followed him for episodes so for us at home his death isn't up there in the grand pantheon of Who sacrifices. For Yaz and Dan, though, they've lived together for three long years stranded in time, convinced they were trapped forever and they’ve come to rely on each other. Now, just at the point of rescue it all goes wrong and he dies a terrible senseless death. Yaz was specially close to him and does at least have the good sense to squeak ‘Jericho!’ But then a second later she has a big fat smile on her face and is asking The Doctor what came next. If even Chibnall can’t be bothered to care about these characters why should we?

The classic cliffhanger from the week before, of the Doctor being shot at, is ducked (quite literally – she just avoids the shot).  Again (this happened when she turned into an Angel too). The plot point of the fobwatch containing all those past memories the Doctor has been after for several episodes now is thrown away (literally - it's banished into the depths of The Tardis, where it’s only ever mentioned once more, when The Doctor randomly decides to chuck it). The Mersey time tunnels are never explained, just a side effect of Flux apparently and not just an easy way for characters to meet up with each other conveniently at the right time again, gosh no.  All of those things could have been huge: we need to feel that The Doctor’s life is in danger and she’s the only person who can put time right. Having her escape death by a fluke and then cloning herself is just a cop out. Also we’ve been made to invest good time and emotion in The Doctor’s own personal story arc, we’ve seen her being nasty to Yaz as a side effect for being so preoccupied with it, we’ve waited years to see Gallifrey come back and multiple arcs where The Doctor has been heartbroken at being the only timelord left alive and then…nothing. The fobwatch might as well have not been there for all the dramatic use  Chibnall makes of it. There are no end of plot elements left untied too, presumably another side effect of the covid restrictions The whole Village of the Angels sub-plot that took an episode is left unexplained except for timey wimey fluxy wuxy reasons. The entire ‘Once Upon, Time’ unravelling of time ditto. Had either of these episodes tied in better to the finale then they would deserve to be there (especially the former, a decent episode in its own right) but they don’t: they ended up just cul-de-sacs. Which means they’re two obvious episodes to pull from the overall series as they don’t relate to the main plot at all. Instead Chibnall seems to have pulled out parts of the script that we actually needed to follow things.

Instead we get ‘Time’, who turns out not to be a concept or a metaphor but an actual being, for the first time in sixty-two episodes. To be fair it’s no worse a Davies et machina than the ones from series one-four or the timey wimey time unravels of Moffat in series five-ten, but Chibnall doesn’t even do the basics his predecessors do. Time has never been mentioned in that sense before this episode. We learn nothing about Time’s background, how it exists, where it exists, whether we can only see it because Flux has gone wrong. All we learn is that Swarm and Azure have held it to ransom but that there was a clock ticking with the speed at which Flux could work before Time freed he/she/itself. In other words in the end it wasn’t The Doctor who really did much at all, she just delayed stuff until Time could rescue her. And as it had never been mentioned anywhere in the storyline and even The Doctor doesn’t have that sort of a relationship with Time, she had no way of knowing what was going to happen. Remember, this is a story titled ‘The Vanquishers’, someone who defeats someone or something absolutely. It’s not titled ‘The person who managed to survive by delaying tactics until time got re-set’. Because if it was we wouldn’t bother to watch it. After all, it’s bad enough when that sort of thing happens in a single episode, but across a whole series and six hours of your life it feels like the worst sort of copout. The first time around I didn’t even know that was meant to be the end, it seemed the biggest anti-climax ever. I understand the speed with which this story was re-written but surely something, anything, would be better than having a character we’ve never met arrive out of nowhere to put things ‘right’.

 So ‘Flux’ fizzles out in the tamest mildest way, throwing away all that promise and Team Tardis just walk away into the night. There’s no punching the air moment, no tearful farewells and the only people who seem even remotely pleased are Bel and Vinder (and that’s because they have each other, not for the (universe being safe). At least Dan gets a sort of redemption, mirroring his opening scene as a volunteer/man off the street at the Liverpool Walker Gallery, waxing lyrical about the Merseyside tunnels but even here Chibnall doesn’t seem to have cared much for him: he’s left without a house (and still doesn’t have one in his last appearance in ‘Power Of The Doctor’) and without a girlfriend (Dianne seems to be more cross about him being late for their date in understandable circumstances than someone destroying the universe). Some friends The Doctor and Yaz are: they late him wonder out the Tardis and back to his miserable lonely life and only late think to come and pick him up (and given how badly the Tardis was acting up even before Flux never mind during) they seem to have more faith in her navigational skills than usual). Yaz, remember, has travelled the world with Dan: he’s only a ‘new’ companion to us at home. They must have discussed somewhere all the thing they were going to do when Flux was over, yet they don’t even have a proper ‘goodbye’ before they pick Dan up. Presumably Korvanista heads off into space for adventures with Bel and Vinder, but the rules of ‘Halloween Apocalypse’ stil apply: Dan is still ‘his’ Human twin and he has a care of duty. It would make more sense if Dan wandered off with him, for all that they don’t get on. As for the baddies there are some good CGI images of time unravelling, but seeing them disappear in stages isn’t the big exciting visual climax this story needs either. Most of all, though, The Doctor especially has had quite the day, with multiple versions of herself running around fixing things, saving the universe multiple times over and separated from her friends for years. Yaz has been without The Doctor for longer than she’s known her and even by The Doctor standards this has been a long old haul. Yet neither of them ever stop to comment on how glad they are to be together again, how much they’ve missed each other or their (supposed) developing feelings for one another. Chibnall misses a real trick here. We had nearly sixty minutes of things happening that were more or less instantly unravelled. Couldn’t we have had five minutes of feelings that weren’t? Dan says that Yaz is amazing at one stage admittedly, but it’s weird both that Yaz never says it back to him and that The Doctor never agrees. Even when I was seven I knew the importance of always having a final scene set in the Tardis where we get to know how everyone’s been changed by the story or what was the point of it? Alas Flux, which was sold us to as this big unbelievable plot twist that would change everything, changes nothing for anyone who isn’t Bel or Vinder. Even Dianne is still as mad with Dan as she was in episode one.

There are just no explanations for anything here. For five episodes now the core concept of ‘Flux’ has been pushed down the road in the hope that it will all be tied up at the end: it isn’t. You’re led to believe that Swarm and Azure somehow live outside time and know all about The Doctor, privy to the secrets of her early life as told by Tecteun. They somehow keep that quiet. The Grand Serpent arrives out of nowhere, defunds UNIT then disappears again, easily defeated without any of the super-powers he seemed to have the last couple of weeks. Korvanista seems to have a lot of back story about the special relationship between Humans dogs, which he never thinks to tell us, even though he’s left twiddling his thumbs for half the story. Talking of which at one point Korvanista talks about someone injecting a poison into his brain – there are moments of Flux in general and ‘The Vanquishers’ in particular so weird, so disjointed, so formless that you’ll wonder if someone has just done the same to you. The frustration is that Chibnall was clearly going for something higher and deeper here but whether due to the covid restrictions or a change of heart he never fully goes there. After the Sontaron scenes the best part by far is The Swarm’s debate of what The Doctor stands for, that she goes the extra mile to keep people alive and make civilisations last longer, while he’s unravelling and destroying time partly to undo all her good work. ‘What’s the point?’ he hisses. ‘Why are we here? We’re all going to die in the end’. This is a very Dr Whoy moment and ought to have been at the heart of Flux: in a year of covid, in an era of climate change, nearing the end of fourteen years of cruel and pointless Tory austerity setting factions on top of each other, this should have been the story’s rallying cry. The Doctor makes things better because all life is important. Because it’s worth living on and defying the odds even for a day, because you can do a lot of brilliant things in a day and you’re a long time dead. Swarm and Azure hate life itself but what does that mean? Why are they so prepared to kill other people rather than just killing themselves? Besides, this story is really solved not just by what The Doctor does directly but by who she inspires, by the people who take up arms and fight the good fight and extend life just a little bit longer. Because the last thing to be extinguished in humanity is hope and as long as there’s still some hope it doesn’t matter if The Doctor is trapped, if her companions are scattered, if her only outside help is in form of a mad ex, two starcrossed lovers and a big hairy dog, there is always a chance. ‘You’re the universe’ says Swarm at one point – The Doctor is in all of us and it’s up to all viewers to fight the good fight, together and not let the bullies, the racist and the halfwits send us back to darker days of prejudice and misery. What a message for 2021 that could have been; just hang on, help is coming, all this can be unravelled and we can go back to normal. But it ends up a character we’ve never met with powers who are never explained putting things right again. What a swizz.  

Like ‘The Ultimate Foe’, then, ‘The Vanquishers’ is a badly written lopsided bit of fiction that had to be carefully pruned back because of the limited amount of sets and actors available because of circumstances beyond the writer’s control (not that you’d know that exactly, given how many actors there are – the credits last nearly as long as the programme). But while Pip ‘n’ Jane Baker at least tried to make their plot line up with what had come before it despite having only three days, Chibnall seems to have gone ‘well, that’ll probably do’. It feels suspiciously as if he gave his final draft to someone else to prune, who just picked all the big action sequences and the big rows, without any regard to whether the bits fitted together (indeed it feels as if it was pruned by a Sontaron who was a bit clumsy with the scissors given they only have three fingers, who then burnt the editing suite down for good measure so the leftovers were all they could salvage). This is no ‘War Games’, an epic where the end topped even what had come before it, but an anti-climax that didn’t explain anything that had come before it. There are just way too many characters and Chibnall doesn’t know how to juggle them: I think the original plan was to show how different they were, to have Sontarons as ruthless militaristic opportunists, The Swarm and Azure as ruthless know it alls and The Grand Serpent changing shape, bending his narrative with his appearance. In the end though they all get lumped in together, equally unravelled when Flux goes wrong without any karma for their modus operandi or any recognition of why their individual plans were ‘evil’ and ‘wrong’. There are a few nice lines here, most of them said by the Sontarons, but Dianne too gets one decent gag (‘I figured they were built to stop interference so I sort of…interfered’). I’m really fond of Commander Stenck’s lines too, as he tells Jericho and Yaz they only have two options ‘victory for Sontar or death’. Jericho asks what will happen to them in the case they win to which he’s told…death. They’re not really built for diplomacy are they, Sontarons? Then again there are some right clunkers here too. A good soap opera line to join in with is Bel’s ‘But we’re having a baby. If the universe survives!’ ‘The Vanquishers’ tries hard to go all out and big and build the tallest highest dangerous story ever seen in Who, but the foundations are so lax it all ends up crumbling to the ground and looking silly.

It would be wrong to say this story is utterly hopeless or worthless because it isn’t – the scenes of The Sontarons are fine and deserved to be the main feature of the story with everything else moved to the side, while the overall arc of time being in flux and everyone and everything in the universe in danger is too good a hook to hang a series on. It’s just a shame that Chibnall could never quite work out how to turn those ideas into a cohesive plot and ‘Vanquishers’ suffers from the bits taken out more than the rest. It’s a mess, stylistically artistically and logically, a piece of drama that lacks any tension, a scifi story that throws the laziest scifi clichés at the wall suddenly out of nowhere and a comedy that only has one funny scene.  Flux as a series had its problems but it could yet have been great had Chibnall stuck the landing. Instead it’s one of those’ season finales that doesn’t explain anything that came before it and goes in a whole new unwanted direction. ‘The Vanquishers’ is a story redeemed only by the occasional fine direction and model work (that really do make Flux feel as if it’s happening on a grand scale) and the hard work of the actors trying to make things work (although even there it’s only really John Bishop and Kevin McNally’s Dr Jericho trying their absolute hardest) and despite its specially extended running time of an hour is either another hour too short (to explain everything that’s going on and allow them to unfold at normal speed) or fifty minutes too long, depending how you look at it. Something has gone very wrong when the final destruction of everything still somehow winds u as being boring. Ultimately the only thing that got ‘vanquished’ were the ratings as even longterm fans gave up in disgust. Many won’t come back for the specials next year (which is a shame as they’re a lot better than this mess: well, two out of three anyway). ‘Vanquishers’ never quite feels real, never quite feels as if it matters, never quite gives you a reason for watching and ends up a colossal waste of everyone’s time – even and especially how hard everyone was pulling together to make even this diluted nonsense make it to our screens. Far better would have been to have written another draft and waited till 2022 then everyone could have started again. Now there’s an unravelling of time that would actually have been useful! I wasn’t writing classic Dr Who scripts aged seven either but none of mine were ever quite this poor.  

POSITIVES + Like ‘Trial Of A Timelord’ the model shots really are brilliant and clearly where most of the money has been spent. We see London and Liverpool both surrounded by spaceships in effects that manage to seamlessly merge real life and fantasy. Even by recent Davies and Moffat standards it sets a new bar and for my money has never been matched even with all the extra money over at Disney. Had the script been as convincingly ‘real’ as this it would have been gripping.  

NEGATIVES – A shame, given that they’re by far the most watchable thing here, that the Sontarons look so anaemic, Jonathan Watson clearly using a loose-fitting mask built for Dan Starkey (they cost a packet those things. No wonder this one wants to scoff his face with chocolate. The ones seen in ‘The Two Doctors’ are clearly part of the same faulty clone batch!)

BEST QUOTE: ‘I approach everything with caution. Or abandon. One of the two’.

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