Village Of The Angels
(Series 13 'Flux', Dr 13 with Yaz and Graham, 21/11/2021, showrunner; Chris Chibnall, writers: Chris Chibnall and Maxine Alderton, director: James Magnus Stone)
Rank: 136
'Oh look, there's future me in many years' time over there through the crack in the village. I wonder what he's doing? And what are those green-ray discs, they look weird. Oh look, he's watching Doctor Who. Again. In another pricey new format. Who'd have guessed it?!'
I was so worried about this one, dear readers. There we were, in the middle of a season-long arc that wasn’t really making much sense and was under-whelming at best, when we switched to a new writer (when this arc wasn’t exactly cohesive with the one) combined with an old foe that, let’s face it, might look ridiculous in the wrong hands. I mean, the Chibnall era was even struggling to do the Daleks properly – what chance a cheap looking statue that moves only when you’re not looking and whose super power is sending you back in time? Nobody had written for the Weeping Angels outside their creator Steven Moffat by this point– maybe he was the only one with the magic touch?
However, much as the rest of ‘Flux’ is a pile of nice and often slightly odd ideas that never quite coalesce (to put it mildly) this is an honest-to-goodness brilliant Dr Who story, one that stands up on its own without the rest of the series and easily one of the highlights of the Chibnall era. Against all odds it’s a tale that actually makes sense, that’s simple and straightforward enough to follow. It feels like a greatest hits package in many ways: the minute the Tardis lands in 1967 we’re in one of those Troughton era ‘base under siege’ stories (with this story set between ‘The Ice Warriors’ parts two and three, fifty-four years to the day before this story was broadcast), with the ‘English Village’ setting of what used to be everyone’s favourite Pertwee story ‘The Daemons’ and an ‘Image Of The Fendahl’ style tale about extra sensory perception layered over the top and arguably the most popular monster of the comeback era. However it’s not simply recycling for the hell of it as ‘Village’ also comes up with all sorts of new Dr Whoy ideas that the series had never quite got round to doing before. In the end the only thing that stops ‘Village Of the Angels’ of being amongst the best Who stories is the links it keeps having to make back to the ‘Flux’ arc very clumsily. This I the only episode out the six that would have worked without being part of ‘Flux’ altogether.
I would love to know,
too, a bit more about the background to this script which, unusually though not
uniquely, has credits for two writers. How much of a hand did Chris Chibnall
have in this story? Was it his original idea? Did he re-write the lot? Was this
part of a deal of getting this story made (as happened when Russell T Davies
took co-credit for ‘Waters Of Mars’ and ‘Planet Of The Dead’?) Did Chibs use Maxine
Alderton’s work to add colour to his own idea, recognising after ‘The Haunting Of Vila Diodati’ (another of the best
Jodie Whittaker stories) she would be perfect for the gothic horror atmosphere
he was after while Chibnall stuck to the plot? Is this a ‘divide’ (an apt word
for this story) down the middle, between the 1901 and 1967 time zones? Or is
the co-credit, as I suspect, a side effect of the difficult circumstances in
which ‘Flux’ was made, whereby covid restrictions meant that certain episodes
had to be dropped and others combined (certainly the Bel and Vinder sub-plot
feels like an entirely different story grafted on top, inserted by an editor
who was either blindingly drunk or perhaps should have been). If this a true
co-write then it’s a real shame Chibnall didn’t do any others during his time
in charge as he’s one of those writers best suited to adding to other people’s
ideas while having the influence of others negate his own weaknesses. But if
it’s a case of a covid re-write then Chibnall has a bit of a nerve taking the
lead writing credit for what amounts to two scenes of badly worded exposition.
Whichever way it goes though, whatever the divide actually was, it’s still to
Chibnall’s credit for he had the sense to keep this lovely story at least
mostly whole even while he was busy
cutting up his others to shreds.
So why does this story
work? Well the Weeping Angels are a
tried and tested monster by this point and already on their fourth appearance
in eleven years (covid messed up the timelines every bit as much as Flux but it
seems likely that, had this series gone out as planned as Chibnall was writing
it, this would have gone out around the tenth anniversary of their debut
appearance in ‘Blink’). However it had been a while since
‘Angels Take Manhattan’ and fans began to
think that they would never be seen again. Moffat was beginning to run out of
ideas for them though as, after all, being statues they can’t really do much
except stand still and send you back into the past: so far he’d put them in a
haunted house, their own planet and (weirdly enough) in the middle of New York
(where nobody happens to notice the biggest local tourist attraction has gone
on a walkabout). What Chibnall (or Alderton or whoever) does very sensibly is
take them back to their origins, where Moffat first saw them, as a statue above
a grave that his hotel bedroom once overlooked on holiday (not the best thing
to see when reading Dr Who target novelisations in bed!) The Angels make sense
in a church-yard in a sleepy village in a way they never quite did on their own
planet or in America’s busiest state capital. They can creep in unspotted,
noticed only by the psychic who urges everyone to count the graveyards, and
ties in to the initial thrill that The Angels could be lurking anywhere,
especially if you live in a village old enough to be shaped by European
customs. Dr Who had played on this once before of course in ‘The Daemons’ but whereas Bok was a
gargoyle brought to life by a devil this one is an alien race feeding off
people’s lives. Having a village be cut off from the rest of the world is also
very Daemonsy and a regular in scifi circles, although it’s a perfect plot for
an alien race that are ‘quantum locked’ and like to feed off people. Having the
village physically ‘cut’ into the middle of nowhere, as if someone has ripped
it out of place and stuck it in a scrapbook, is also a neat mirror for what’s
going on with the ‘Flux’ arc and the best use of the idea that time is ‘folding
in on itself’. There are lots of great moments where Dan and Yaz get separated
from The Doctor and sent back to 1901 while she remains in 1967 (another side
effect of covid quarantine?) and both sides stare at each other,
uncomprehendingly (even if it’s also a side effect of the story that it makes
everyone seem either thick or stupid that they haven’t noticed a whacking great
tear in the sky until they basically walk into it!)
Perhaps best of all,
‘Village’ is properly scary in a way the Chibnall era had never really been
(only parts of ‘Diodati’). The angels lurk in shadows waiting for their prey
closing in on The Doctor as she investigates a psychic medium and her larger
than life professor, forcing them into the basement. And if the angels could
cause so much damage in one house what could they do with a whole village? It’s
the one base under siege story that’s never been told: an ordinary house, where
room by rooms are cut off and the lights flicker. They even ring the doorbell!
Till now for children watching at least the angel statues you’ve seen have been
outside but now they’re actually here, at somebody’s house and you might be
next! After all one girl’s gone missing already, sent back sixty-six years and
there’s a repeat of the Billy Shipton scene from ‘Blink’
(‘it’s the same rain’), only it’s even more cutting to child viewers because at
least he was adult when he was zapped back in time – Peggy is a girl seeing
herself as an old woman, remembering what it was like to be young (nothing is
more disturbing to the sort of imaginative child that watches Dr Who than the
thought that they will get old one day – and turn into the grumpy cynical
incomprehensible adults around them). The angels can also do things we’ve not
seen them do before, coming to life out of mere premonitions (taking over
psychic subject Claire after she sees them in her ‘mind’s eye’), they have the
power to invade the Tardis (something very few aliens actually do, although
there is thought to be at least one Sontaron still rattling around in there as
he’s never seen again in ‘The Invasion Of
Time’), they can now possess humans and (mega cliffhanger spoiler alert)
they can even take over the Doctor herself. Logical extensions of previous
Angel stories maybe, but they’re handled a lot better than other Chibnall
rematches with Daleks and Cybermen who have been thrown into stories that don’t
suit them. Here they’re perfect for a sleepy English village that already feels
as if it’s slipped behind the times (with Peggy’s Guardian still wearing his
jacket from eighteen years earlier in a fun scene where The Doctor tries to
show off her dating skills to her companions and gets it badly wrong). They’ve
never been creepier, especially the brilliant cliffhanger where you think The
Doctor’s escaped (thanks to a conveniently built tunnel under Jericho’s house)
only to be ‘sold out’ by Claire and captured by more Angels than we’ve ever
seen in one place before, then turned into one. In the context of a ghost story
it’s The Doctor dying and waking up as ‘one of them’.
Giving the Angels a whole
‘missing village’ to run around in (of which there are several in England,
abandoned through plague or the industrial revolution mostly though, not
invasion by time assassins with wings) gives us a new angle we’ve never had
before. As it happened I used to live in a village just like that which,
despite being only seven miles from the nearest town, felt as if it was an
entirely different world. And now I live in a town just like that which feels
like another world from the city of Liverpool nearby. And not that far away is another
town even more like that called Formby, which is where Chris Chibnall grew up.
It’s a lovely place (and was even lovelier when it had a whole sanctuary
dedicated to red squirrels, before they died out) but the cutting edge of
pioneering technology has mostly passed it by. It’s the sort of town that feels
as if it hasn’t really changed since Victorian times, where everyone is nicely
spoken and wears nice hats. It’s the sort of tale you get up and down the
British Isles in a way that you don’t, say, in France or America: every few
miles will be another place with its own identity, it’s own accent and quite
possibly its own language and slang that happens to be completely different to
the places around it. Britain was built up from tribes, colonised by different
invaders who only got so far (my town was founded by Vikings) so it has not one
single identity but billions. That’s one of the reasons why Dr Who turned out
the way it did, as a very eccentric series, that had to appeal to lots of
little pockets of often very different people rather than be the cookie-cut
mainstream scifi shows a lot of American franchises are. The past decade had
seen Dr Who slowly move away from this, with Steven Moffat spending time and
effort into making the series a hit with American audiences. Till now Chibnall
has tried to move beyond that by making Dr Who a global brand, with stories set
in different continents (by far the best and most interesting aspect of his
timer as showrunner) but being stuck in covid quarantine seems to have made him
re-think about where he came from and write a very ‘English’ type of story.
One other very ‘English’
idea is the idea of extra-sensory powers, explored in other very English and
mostly 1970s series like ‘The Stone Tape’ (by Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale,
about psychic trying to prove the existence of ghosts) and ‘The Omega Factor’
(no, not a spin-off featuring a rogue timelord but a series of experiments in
ESP that start affecting the outside world too; it’s what Louise Jamieson did
after leaving Dr Who). After all, England is a very old country that’s been
inhabited a long time and where everyone has lived at some point. A lot of
buildings date back centuries, a lot of settlements date back hundreds of
thousands of years: by contrast America has a few native Indian settlements and
that’s it. The idea that we’re surrounded by our ancestors, from the graveyards
at local churches in every village to paranormal beings that remain in the air
after buildings have collapsed and gone, is ingrained into the British psyche
in a way it isn’t most other nation’s. Mostly they’re phantoms that can’t hurt
you (though a few do turn into poltergeists who can throw things) but the
difference is that the Angels can do all of that sort of psychic phenomenon
(being ‘images’ or standing still when people see them) but physical stuff too.
Being created through images means they can pass through walls, while there’s a
neat scene where Jericho’s spectrograph recording Claire’s brain patterns
starts drawing their shape to create another ‘image’, while they are coming to
life through his wonky 1960s black and white TV (it would have been a nice
touch if the resulting angels were monochrome!)
The scariest thing they do, though is borrowed from ‘Time Of The Angels’
where they ‘borrow’ Jericho’s voice but additionally read his mind. We have
plenty of villains in Who that taunt (especially in this era, with Swarm and
Azure from ‘The Divide’, the baddies behind Flux very much in this mode) but
few use your own voice to do it to you – and even fewer can read your mind and
see all your hidden secrets. While we see relatively little of Jericho across
his three episodes he stands out as one of the most memorable characters in the
Chibnall era because the Angels tell you everything he’s too proud to admit
himself: that he feels a failure, overlooked for promotion, always second best
at psychic research. He’s haunted way before the angels come and he thinks
Claire is his ticket to the big time. The slightly pompous but kind-hearted professor
is rather a good surrogate companion, a dotty scientist like Whos of old that
risks life and limb and who will even spend years travelling with Yaz and Dan, ably
played by Kevin McNally (who, unbelievably managed to get work since his last
Who appearance dressed as a baked potato in ‘Timelash’). Alas in future stories
he’ll barely get a line. Much better, surely, to have written him out here
heroically doing something rather than dying later unheroically doing not much
at all.
One of the things that
Moffat never got round to doing with the angels either is the horror not just
of growing old in a different time but in a different time filled with
different social values. While I’d prefer to live in 1967 than 2023 for all
sorts of reasons (the music was better, people were as a whole kinder more
hopeful and leftwing, while there would be the chance to see all sorts of Dr
Who stories since wiped) the casual sexism and racism (as seen in ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’, set in
1963) not to mention the classism and social structures would be a problem and
feel like a huge step backwards. For all that the 21st century often
feels like a poor man’s 1990s, when things are mostly getting better for
everyone but some small pockets of power cling on causing harm, it is as close
as humanity has got to a fair and tolerant society so far. Peggy, the missing
girl, is sad because her parents have been taken and she’s forced to live with
her much older guardians. Gerald has lived through two wars and it’s made him
hard and bitter, distant, so used to death that he doesn’t see why Peggy should
be upset or want to get close to her as a person. He’s from the ‘silent
generation’ who kept everything behind a stiff upper lip and never talked about
emotions, someone who in our day would be considered traumatised but in 1967 is
just one of many (this is where Russell T was going with Ncuti Gatwa’s
emotional Doctor too after years of the lead character keeping their time war
trauma to themselves). Or is he? He wears a coat from 1949 but if, as plot
elements show, he’s been sent backwards in time then presumably he’s quite
possibly a child that hasn’t been born yet (the angels tend to taker sixty
years, although they seem to take you back how many years you were going to
live forward, so if he was old before he touched them and isn’t going to live
very long naturally then maybe it didn’t take him back as far as usual. It’s a
bit of a muddle onscreen though (I like to think covid caused an explanation to
be taken out, but then a lot of Chibnall stories do this with no excuse). His
wife Jean is kinder, but she has less power within the household and her
husband just won’t listen to her. Peggy’s cold dismissal when her guardian is
zapped that ‘he never liked me’ might just be the scariest moment of the
episode and points to a bigger more Human story that was playing out before the
Angels ever came. We talk a lot,
especially in the 1960s reviews, about how Dr Who was the one series watched by
all generations but this is a rare return to that in the post-Russell years, especially
as it depicts a generation that had all but died out by the time this story
went out. Though Chibnall was born in 1970 and is writing a bit earlier he
might well be remembering his own childhood and the different generations since
passed (as working on a series about time travel often makes writers think
about their own past). Times have changed, for the better. But time is also a
perspective: they don’t say it, but chances are Peggy has been sent back in
time to when Gerald and Jean were young and if the village really is cut off
from the rest of the world then in a place this small she’d have definitely
bumped into them. If anything Peggy might be a smidgeon older. In which case is
this a grandfather bootstrap paradox (see ‘Under
The Lake’) where she caused Gerald to be so ghastly by bullying him? Or
does she find out what his parents were like and where it came from? Or is this
story, in co-ordination with other stories Chibnall wrote about pollution and
civil rights and the whole theme of Flux being time unravelling, his fear that
society is going backwards and that one day we’ll end up back where we were a century
ago, with cold guardians who extinguish the warmth of their children? It feels
as if the script is heading that way but, alas, after the revelation that Peggy
is talking to herself it leads into a cliffhanger and neither aged Peggy is
ever seen again. is this a casualty of the Covid re-writes?
If so then it’s a real
shame. Not least because the Bel-Vinder sub-plot, which is so clumsily inserted
it even crashes into the middle of the end credits for no good reason, is poor.
We don’t really know who these people are and they don’t ever end up doing much
even by the end of the series so Chibnall would have been better cutting them
out completely. It also means he has to write Bel, especially, at speed, trying
to give us her character in the form of one interaction and one diary entry but
while Russell T used to do rounded believable three-dimensional characters in
short scenes like this one Chibnall doesn’t have the knack. All we learn is
that the two are married (though they’ve only spent one night together, in a
collapsing hotel), were forced to fight and are now trying to reunite. They
just miss each other, in a scene that feels like a farce. Bel does at least
show us a bit more of what’s been happening to the universe while it’s been in
‘Flux’, away from The Doctor’s gaze, but what we learn just confuses matters
more. Time has been ‘eating up’ worlds leaving a few straggling survivors who
have been pushed back to the planet Puzano (which both sounds like and
resembles a pizza). It used to be a nice place apparently – till Flux came. But
if other episodes are to be believed Flux is instantaneous: surely all these
people weren’t in space at the time and this escaped? Also, in that case why is
the Earth safe and hasn’t been turned into a similar desert? Or Sontar? It
feels like the more usual Chibnall style of writing, that makes things bigger
and bolder based on a pack of cards that come tumbling to the floor because the
foundations aren’t there. Then there’s Azure, the baddy, promising to save
people from it and transport them to freedom in a scene that’s entirely ripped
off from Quatermass (though the lesser seen fourth one this time, where a bunch
of hippies believe aliens promising to take them to ‘Heaven’ , a series that
even its creator hated and tried to make sure was never seen again. Sadly it’s
the most seen today now that talking Pictures bought up the rights to that one
but not the others). It’s not even a plot element handled that well: how does
Bel realise that Azure is a baddy when she’s never seen her before? The script
hints it’s through the technology Azure uses, but nobody else seems to make
that connection. Why is Azure busy transporting people to their deaths in the
short-term anyway when she’s using Flux to kill everyone long-term and there’s
only one planet in this part of the sky to go? It’s daft. It’s also poor
writing, full of endless exposition. Bel doesn’t even get her vindication at
the end by being proved ‘right’ (an unwritten law of twists in plots like
these). Bel must also know that time is tight and she needs to give a clue of
where she’s going next so really she should tell Vinder where to find her
first, before waffling on about missing him and old times (we also never learn
why her message was cut short). It’s typical Chibnall, all that atmosphere is
undone by a poorly written sub-plot point we could have done without anyway.
Especially Vinder’s scene which comes second after the great one of The Doctor
being turned to stone.
Even in the ‘English
Village’ bits I have questions. Good as it is to set the story here you don’t
get the sense of a ‘universe’ wide Flux that the series seemed to be aiming
for. This would have been the perfect opportunity for setting a story somewhere
else with gargoyles (if there’s ever a Weeping Angel invasion of Paris we’re
all toast there are so many). The angels are apparently working for the
Division, but why? Flux is wiping them out too and they’ve never collaborated
with anyone before. Why set a trap for The Doctor here? Surely they’d be better
going to one of her usual haunts rather than a backwater in 1967. It feels more
like they established a trap for The Doctor then went to get her by hijacking
the Tardis, but if they have that power why not just hijack the Tardis and take
it to the Divide straight away? Why bother going to the trouble of planting themselves
in a person’s mind and waiting for The Doctor to turn up when all of time is
collapsing and they’ll have nothing to feed off anyway? That’s like running
into a burning building and setting alight to something: they’re getting what
they want if only they’re patient. Also the angels have developed a new technique:
anyone who’s already touched an angel once can be disintegrated a second time.
Where did this technique come from and how? It’s a shame because it just turns
the angels into a generic monster with a ‘weapon’ rather than a more thoughtful
monster that ‘feeds’ off time. It also badly contradicts other stories (Amy
should have gone boom rather than going back in time to be with Rory in ‘Manhattan’while that story also features an
entire ‘battery farm’ of the same Americans sent back in time over and over).
It wouldn’t matter so much if there was a really good reason for writing this
into the story – but there isn’t one. Had Gerald and Jean been sent back into
time again and collapsed as a side effect it would have been more available (although
anything could have happened – they could have been run over with a
horse-and-cart immediately on their arrival in 1901 for instance). Most of all
it’s beyond painful that they set up such a great cliffhanger (The Doctor
turned to stone and her companions trapped in a different timezone!) that then
gets undone in seconds while the angels are ignored at the start of the next
episode ‘Survivors Of The Flux’ (Or
indeed thereafter). While what happens to The Doctor is fab and putting Jericho
with Yaz and Dan leads to the most interesting moments in next week’s episode,
for everyone else there are too many loose endings: what happens to Claire? Does
she stay an angel? How does Peggy cope on her own for the next sixty-six years
in a seemingly deserted village? Are the two timezones ever reconciled? That’s
the downside of having a rare Chibnall story where you actually care for the supporting
characters: they’re abandoned as soon as the plot doesn’t need them anymore
(something that will just get silly in two weeks’ time for the finale). Yaz and
Dan, meanwhile, wander round nattering and that’s it (even the plot points they
discover and tell The Doctor about are told to them first by Peggy, the ten
year old).
Even so, there’s still a
lot to love about this nicely spooky scary and above all thoughtful story.
There is, if you wish to read it that way, a number of Biblical references, apt
for a story that starts in a graveyard). The title is a riff on ‘Village of the
Damned’: if you were a non-fan it would sound rather nice, but we know that the
Angels only take the form of angels and are far from angelic (it’s ‘a village
of the damned that have been taken out of time by the angels’). Chibnall has
done some thinking and equates the angels with ‘fallen angels’ from the Bible,
Lucifer’s mob of demons, in a series arc that’s a little like the end of the
world (as seen in the Bible’s final chapter ‘Revelations’). They don’t mention
it much on screen but in the script there’s a lot more about how they’re a
renegade faction caused by a civil war, which sounds just like The Devil
splitting from Heaven and taking his cronies with him (this is also where the
spin-off series ‘Class’ would have gone in its second year, had it been
re-commissioned, following the revelation that Coal Hill School’s governing
body is a group of Angels. Which must have made the PTA meetings with the likes
of Ian and Barbara interesting!) Claire is their ‘messenger’, a prophet who passes
on their wisdom (or lack of it). Gerald gets zapped in much the same as Lot’s
wife being turned into a pillar of salt, for exactly the same crime (doing what
he’s been warned about out of obstinacy). Jericho is called out by the angels
directly for his jealousy, that’s one of the seven deadly sins. God brought light
to the world, partly to let people see but partly to give life – Flux keeps
taking that light away, hence the Bel sub-plot. Azure promises the survivors of
the apocalypse life if they join with her, in much the same way the Devil
does/will. But it’s all a trick. The
Bible, of course, is said by some to have been writtern ‘backwards’, i.e.
passed down through time by an omnipotent God who can see all things right the way
through to the end (although it might just be psychic prophets who see the
future the way Claire does). Of course that might all be coincidence – or a
side effect of so much being taken secondhand from Quatermass IV, which was
written partly as an attack on new age cults based on obscure passages from the
Bible – but the very fact that a Chibnall story actually feels substantial
enough to be about something bigger is a real breakthrough.
Another way ‘Village’
feels more substantial is that this is easily the best that both the 14th
Doctor has been written and the best that she’s been played. Maxine Alderton
already ‘got’ Jodie’s Doctor better than any other story but there she had to
share screen time with three companions. Here Yaz and Dan are mostly parked and
The Doctor is on her own unfiltered and she proves that she doesn’t actually need
any companions: her Doctor is distinct because of the internal monologue she
runs out loud, asking then answering her own questions. She’s in full flow with
only the introverted Jericho and possessed Claire to interrupt her and it’s
brilliantly funny. Jodie keeps up a patter that even Tennant and Smith at their
most hyper couldn’t match and it. What’s more it makes of her anti-socialness,
which her creator Chibnall never quite got ‘right’: she ‘collects’ companions to
keep her stable and fill in the bits she can’t do, aware that she’s prone to
missing the obvious and running off on tangents without them. She’s far too
concerned with the bigger picture to bother with social niceties, merrily telling
Jericho that his door is unlocked (‘or at least it is now’) and babbling when she’s scared to fill in the
silence as much as anything. Jodie isn’tusually asked to do more than crack the
odd one liner and stare on as the baddy does something evil but here she gets a
chance to show off her full range and she veers from excited puppy to protective
guard dog to barking hound to weary older-than-time canine across these scenes.
The scenes where she realises she’d been betrayed and this whole time was a
trap, the look of triumph fading from her face,
is particularly strong. Had Jodie been allowed to always play The Doctor
like this, as a hyperactive chatterbox who appears to be social but actually
hasn’t got a clue how conversations normally work, she’d have been a lot more popular
than she turned out to be. It’s also a real shame we didn’t get an Alderton
story in the Disney range, just to see how the writer would have coped with Ncuti’s
very different Doctor (whose warmth and friendliness is far more real but
because of his skin colour hides an even greater feeling of being an outsider
and an outcast).
‘Village’ is then amongst
the best of Jodie’s time in the Tardis despite being one of the 13th
Doctor’s simplest stories. It doesn’t have the groundbreaking work of ‘Rosa’,
the neatly rounded storyline of ‘Eve Of The Daleks’,
the fun of ‘Fugitive of the Judoon’ or
the power of ‘Spyfall’ but it’s
certainly amongst the best of the batch. It’s easily the best episode of ‘Flux’
and the only one you’ll remember any details about long after the credits have
rolled (twice as it happens) with lots of memorable images that stay with you.
The angels coming to life from a screen is better handled than in ‘Time Of The
Angels’ and there are two brilliant scenes as they come for The Doctor as she
desperately tries to burn their image only to find they are covered in flames
(a real triumph for the CGI department) and the grasping arms through the
tunnel. The concept of two locations in splitscreen, as a ten/seventy-six-year
old stare back at themselves (without the risk of the Blinovitch limitation
effect of other stories because they’re physically apart) is prime Doctor Who
(though it’s more an idea from ‘Timeslip’, the excellent rival to the Pertwee
years over on ITV that had a hole in the fence of a ministry of defence centre
where children walked through to various different future worlds and the
occasional past one the best alternative to a Tardis that any scifi series
found), tweaking and twisting a formula as old as time itself and still finding
new things to say with the idea that what you do in your past still impacts
your future in ways you can never understand. That cliffhanger too is one of
the all time greats and one of the few times The Doctor has been utterly and
completely defeated, right at the moment she’s claiming triumph, with Jericho zapped,
her companions in another time and Claire turning into an angel before she does
too. Weird that the stakes feel so much bigger in this story even though the
setting is smaller, but that’s the benefit of having a story where we only have
a few characters all of whom we feel we get to know well and care for. A lot of
times during his run and quadruply so during ‘Flux’ Chibnall thinks that going
bigger and more complex is better, but that isn’t always true. ‘Village’ is a
good example of Who at its simplest: the plot is basic, the monsters are
recognisable at a glance and it’s an old-fashioned fight between good guys and
bad guys. But when you nail each of those elements (at least when you take the
Bel and Vinder bits out) it can still result in some of the best stories of
all. It would easy to dismiss the Chibnall era if it was all bad but at its
best its Dr Who as strong and daring and thrilling as it ever was. It’s the
average of the other episodes that can’t even get the basics right that makes
this period seem so poor and these stories stand out so much. After all, this
is proper Dr Who, telling the same old story and dancing with death and time
but in a whole new inventive way that leaves you gripped to the edge of your
seat and, well, trying your best not to blink, not just because of the monsters
but because so much is going on you’d hate to miss something. Alas the only
thing consistent about Flux is its inconsistency and next week it’ll be back to
square one all over again. Still, that’s in the future staring back at us
across that time chasm – for now, in the ‘present’, this episode felt at the
time as if everyone involved had finally ‘got’ how to do this era of the show and
even if it turned out to be another cul-de-sac of quality some of that magic
still shines through the screen, even when you know that Flux is going to
simply lip through to a sorry end.
POSITIVES + There are
some great lines this week. The 13th Doctor so often feels like a karaoke
version of Drs 10 -12 put through a blender without a persona of her own, but her
lines with Dr Jericho and Dianne are a hoot. Take the scene where the Doctor
boasts about how she can date where she is because of a coat then, on finding
she’s eighteen years out, blames it on people having old coats lying about
confusing her. Or the one where she says she came in because the door was
open...once she’d opened it, anyway. Or riffing on playing scrabble with George
Eliot (who allows for proper nouns, apparently). Or being grateful in an
impossible situation because at least she’d not being eaten by a dinosaur.
Egotistical, cheeky, defensive, silly, optimistic – this is how Dr 13 should
always have been, a goofy chatterbox playing for time with a brain who works
too quick for her social skills. There should have been a lot more Dr 13 moments
like this. Dan too gets one great line. ‘It’s a long story’ he says as Jericho
lands in 1901. ‘Unfortunately for you
you’ve got a long time to hear it!’
Previous ‘Once,
Upon Time’ next ‘Survivors Of The Flux’
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