Village Of The Angels: Ranking - 136

    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 21^st 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 14^th 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 13^th 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!’

NEGATIVES - Everything relating back to the ‘Flux’ story arc, which won’t match up properly for another story yet (and even then barely) and just leaves you scratching your head like they did in the last four. The ‘relationship’ between Bel and Vinder, for instance, isn’t interesting enough to make you care – its just two character we haven’t properly met yet who once used to be together. So what? We don’t know who they are yet – they haven’t earned our interest, certainly not compared to the sheer amount of other things going on in this story. Even after they end up getting involved with the Tardis crew separately you never quite lose that feeling of ‘so what?’ The worst part of the story is the after-credits sequence which is all about them and just kills the atmosphere like a stone after that stunning cliffhanger. First rule of writing, any writing: if you have the perfect ending don’t follow it up with a second unnecessary ending that doesn’t even feel like an ending – and then not mention it the following week. Second rule of writing: if you suddenly feel inspiration and write something this great then please please please don’t ignore it to go back to business as usual the week after!

BEST QUOTE: Jericho: ‘How did you get in here?’ Dr: ‘Your door was open’. Jericho: ‘It most certainly was not’. Dr: ‘Well, it was once I opened it!’

Previous ‘Once, Upon Time’ next ‘Survivors Of The Flux’

War Of The Sontarons: Ranking - 216

  War Of The Sontarons

(Series 13, Dr 13 with Yaz and Dan, 7/11/2021, showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: James Magnus Stone)

'I shall fight for the glorious Sontaron empire and will not stop until we have become victorious!...Wait I've fallen off my horse again. I really need something smaller, like that shire pony over there. That's better....Whoops, no even this one's too big. Is there a Doctor in the horse? Oh typical, never here when you need him/her...' 

Ranking: 216

 

I always hoped that one day DW would do a story on the Crimean War, but I confess I never quite imagined it looking like this. Parallel worlds! Sontarons! On horseback!!! I always wondered what the end of the universe would look like if Dr Who ever fully showed it. Apparently it looks like an alien dressed in blue painting Yaz in black lines while some floating alien lights turn on and off. I also longed to see an episode set in or around my adopted home of Liverpool, but never quite imagined that one looking quite like this either: Scouse comedian John Bishop and his parents running round Liverpool docks and clouting potato-headed aliens on the back of the neck with a wok. I certainly didn’t imagine the three strands ever coming together, but then that’s the ‘Flux’ series for you: why give you one sensible vaguely comprehensible thing when eighteen stuffed in the same episode will surely do? We’re in episode two of ‘Flux’ and time is unravelling, which means that Chris Chibnall can get away with sticking random unconnected things together without contradicting history. Which is new: we’ve had monsters meddling with history before (and it makes sense having the Sontarons here as they sort of invented the formula with ‘The Time Warrior’). It means that, like the Sontarons, he gets to have his chocolate cake and eat it: we get all the flavour and fascination of a trip back to the past but we don’t need to care about the details. However the strength and weakness of the ‘Flux’ story arc are both the same: that anything can happen. On the plus side it means you genuinely never know what’s right around the corner and the series can combine past and future in ways that the series would usually struggle to show without good reason. On the minus side it means that we don’t get a story as such, just incidents as The Doctor and co pass through different time-streams on their way to the finale. The Crimea is just another destination and one that’s going to unravel in time anyway so it’s hard to care too much about this timezone or the people in it and you don’t get a fully rounded story here. In other words this is a story full of surprises, which is fun, but surprises that are never going to be explained, which isn’t.

Still, at least there is a story this week. ‘Flux’ was badly hit by covid restrictions which meant a quick re-think at the last minute, with what might have been panned as a ten or possibly a thirteen part series cut down to six more or less at the last minute. Most of Flux (episodes 1,3,5 and 6. Especially 3) clearly suffer for that, juggling multiple plot strands that seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. However ‘War Of The Sontarons’ feels as if it was left alone more than most and was always intended to be like this, with a main plot in the Crimea where The Doctor gets all the action while Dan gets the comedy relief scenes in ‘our’ time and Yaz gets all the exposition. There is, you see, a beginning middle and an end an attempt to tell an actual story before things get unravelled, with ‘Sontarons’ benefitting from lasting ten minutes longer than the episodes around it (although there are still easily ten minutes that could have been taken away without it affecting the story at all). However it’s all split between different timezones and characters having them independently. Given the Liverpool theme: there are some long and winding roads under the Mersey tunnels. The Doctor is learning that to Sontarons Happiness Is A Warm Gun. Dan is wishing it was Yesterday. And Yaz is Nowhere, Man.   
The most substantial of these is The Doctor helping out the charge of the light brigade against the charge of the heavy brigade, as the Russians seem to have been replaced by the Rutan-avenging Sontarons. It seems a bit weird that with all of time and space to play with, we end up in what was really a minor war that didn’t change much (albeit one that inspired  a lot of poems and stories) but then this isn’t the Crimean War as it would be in the history books anyway. For the Russians have been replaced by potato-headed monsters from outer space!

 While some fans were surprised to see the Sontarons here rather than a bigger named monster like The Daleks or The Cybermen it makes sense: most Dr Who monsters would only want to be part of an invasion if they could control it but The Sontarons are opportunists, ready to jump on any bandwagon if it’s heading towards the oblivion of the Rutans. The most one-track minded military obsessed of Who monsters, the ‘joke’ is that they can’t see the bigger picture, that if all of time and space is being undone and all life is being destroyed then their war with the Rutans (and Earth. In the middle as usual) doesn’t matter one little bit. Having them in the middle of what is generally held to be one of the most pointless of all Human wars makes sense. Chibnall also restores The Sontarons’ dignity  to their former glory as the unstoppable war-like beings of the classic series, who won’tlet anything slow them down, even if they’re still on occasion the comedy relief villains of the new series (with Commander Sliik only admitting, reluctantly, to The Doctor that a cannonball taken full force in the back ‘did hurt. A bit’). They also serve as a better contrast to Swarm and Azure, the overall villains of the piece who are manipulating time and getting back at The Doctor for personal revenge (they’re also joined by a third, Passenger, who’s, well, a Passenger and barely says anything all episode as well as wearing a silly mask literally left over from the Star Wars franchise). These are two very different flavours of baddies: the ones who just want to win and will fight to death and one who’ll use every last trick in the book to get what they want. The Sontarons are still the best, even if they’re slightly undermined by two new revelations that make for a surprisingly easy conclusion: they wear their helmets not because they’re Dr Who budget conscious but because they can’t handle Earth’s atmosphere which leaves them tired. There are seven and a half minutes every twenty seven hours (how long a day lasts on Sontar) when they need to go back to their spaceship to ‘refuel’ from the probic vent on the back of their neck. All of them. At the same time. That’s a bit of a strategic blunder isn’t it? Why can’t they take it turns and stand on guard? And why use all those hoses at once for feeding when they could save money for their glorious warfare (those weapons don’t come cheap) and only use a few. If nothing else, though, at least explains a bit more about why  they got the very un-Sontaron idea of gassing humans in electric cars (in ‘The Sontaron Stratagem/The Poison Sky’ which didn’t seem very them at all. However seeing them on horseback, mirroring their ‘knights in armour’ look and ‘Planet Of The Apes’ simultaneously, is a move so obvious and so brilliant it’s a wonder they hadn’t tried it before. Dan Starkey continues to be his usual brilliant self (as Svild) and his repartee Jonathan Watson (as Skaak) gives him one of his best foils to bounce off. Betwene them they redeem at least a little of the might of the glorious Sontaron army while remaining funny. Sontar-ha and indeed Sontar-hahahaha! Im really not keen on the use of ‘Sontar-ho’ when something goes wrong though. I’m glad that didn’t stick for future appearances…

Certainly the Sontarons come out of things a bit better than the Humans do. Commander Logan is entirely fictional but he is clearly based heavily on Brogan, an officer who made several daft moves that put his me in danger (‘rushing’ opponents rather than strategic thinking – it might have made more sense to have the English on the side of the Sontarons and the more ‘scheming’ Rutans joining with the Russians – we still haven’t seen them in the 21^st century yet). Logan ends up destroying the Sontaron battle troops anyway even though they’re in ‘strategic withdrawal’ (a nicer way of saying ‘running away’), in a moment designed to look like the end of ‘The Silurians’ or it’s remake ‘The Christmas Invasion’, showing how sneaky Humans can be when scared. However it doesn’t quite pay off as an emotional ending: we don’t learn much about the people here so we’re not caught up in this the same way. And besides, that’s the downside with Flux: it’s all academic in a dying universe anyway.  The only person we really get to see is Mary Seacole and she’s, well, not much like the one from her books (who would have shown a lot more curiosity and asked a lot more questions, even if she’d no doubt have treated Sontaron patients too). She is, these days, quite a controversial figure (removed from the GCSE syllabus in 2012) which is a shame given she dedicated her life to doing right, though still not exactly a household name (and it seems very out of character than Dan, of all people, should recognise her and her name on sight. Although the line ‘she’s a real person? From history?’ is a truly terrible way of passing on a plot point. I hope that was just a side effect of the covid trims and wasn’t as clumsily as this in the original). She was the first woman of colour to have a book published in England (as early as 1851) and provided great relief to the wounded on either side, providing an easier way to get meals and medical supplies. There was a campaign to make her an example of everything black culture did for the British Empire and there was a huge statue dedicated to her outside a London hospital. But here’s the thing: she wasn’t actually a nurse. She didn’t actually treat patients. No doubt she’d have trained and been a great nurse if she’d been able to, but she wasn’t: black women were barred from learning at hospitals. There’s a school of thought amongst historians that her claims in her books don’t necessarily match what happened in the wars: that she provided an important service but was, essentially, providing a glorified mobile canteen which gave her a lot of profits. So when they took down the statue of an actual nurse who had treated patients in the Crimea to make way for her (Florence Nightingale) it caused quite a flurry of speculation and culture fighting. Chibnall ties his sails to the mast, making Seacole into the only ‘adult’ in the room, who can see the bigger picture and simply treats patients (in a way she wouldn’t have been allowed had this been a ‘normal’ war). But she’s oddly played by Sue Powell, halfway between boringly likeable and interestingly but annoyingly unlikeable and besides, that’s just a waste of a story that could have been. Seacole and Nightingale didn’t know each other well but there’s nothing to say they didn’t get on. So why not do the ‘real’ Dr who thing and have them be friends, working together for the greater good in a script that acknowledges how brilliant both are? Personally I’d go the whole way and throw in a scene where the Doctor tells them about a statue in a more tolerant 22^nd century where they have their arms round each other. For Florence, the Lady with the Lamp, is conspicuous by her absence the whole story, treating Sontaron ladies with a limp. As it is Seacole never really comes alive either: she’s there as someone sensible to do The Doctors bidding and ask questions. Because yet again The Doctor is standing around not doing much except talking while everyone else has all the fun (mind you, Mary isn’t exactly rushing around for someone in the middle of a super busy war with lots of casualties either).

Because The Doctor is alone, covid bubbles meaning that Dan and Yaz are enjoying different stories, disappearing in a puff of convenience. Dan gets the more interesting plot, running around Liverpool landmarks and dodging Sontaron spaceships with nothing more than mum and dad and a wok. Now Chibnall is a local lad who grew up in Formby, not many miles away, and this sequence feels like one of those childhood dreams come true. There surely can’t be any of you reading this book who hasn’t, like me, spent time wondering what an alien invasion of the place you grew up in might look like. Only Chibs has now got the time and budget to do it. And it’s great seeing Dr Who ‘invade’ a place you know. The CGI effects of the spaceships are great (while everyone else suffered through covid ost-production had more time than usual and less episodes to work on without the restrictions of the actors and production crew, so they had time to get it right). Dan’s mum and dad are a great comedy duo too: they still treat Dan like a child even (just as Kornavista treated him as the ‘pet’) and don’t bow down to his superior knowledge of outer space. Indeed, they don’t bat an eyelid and don’t seem surprised at all (John Bishop was greatly tickled by the fact that actors Sue Jenkins and Paul Broughton were less than a decade older than him and must have had Dan ‘very young’!) They do, however, have a wok. We haven’t met Dan much and what we’ve seen of him so far just makes him out like a Scouse version of Graham, but he really comes into his own in this story and John Bishop adds a nice lot of layers, making Dan secretly scared but trying not to show it and covering up with deadpan humour (I can vouch that a lot of Scousers are like that, making jokes to avoid crying). I wish these scenes had gone on a bit longer actually as there’s a lot more mileage in them but, before too long, Dab’s made his way to a spaceship and talked to the Doctor.
This scene is perhaps the shining one in ‘war’. Much as Flux sums up the messy confusing jumble of contradictory evidence, slight panic and timelessness of covid lockdowns so this scene sums up the practical day-to-day events. Dan and The Doctor effectively Skype/Zoom each other, like a lot of the rest of us were doing for people outside our covid bubbles. Just because the future of the universe is at stake doesn’t stop the pair of them having the problems we were all having: ‘No you go first’ they both say at the same time before pausing and launching into their long spiel. Dan mishearing something as important as ‘the ten poral portal’ is also something that tended to happen a lot too, to much hilarity (slash borderline hysteria depending what the day’s covid figures were). Then The Sontarons walk in at just the wrong time, during the middle of this ‘meeting’, in much the way your mum/dad/grandparents/children/pets did. ‘Flux’ should have done more of this sort of thing: it’s those moments of shared community, the ‘we’re-all-in-it-together-in-difficult-circumstances’ where Flux shines best.    

While the others get the ‘outer war’ sub-plot Yaz alas, gets dumped with the ‘inner peace’ sub-plot, the short straw where nothing happens. She’s been dumped on a planet called Time and ‘The Temple Of Atropos’ that, ironically enough, we never get time enough to explore. She bumps into Vinder, who will hang around for the rest of the series but never really gets anything much to do. He’s presented to us as if we should know him – and actor Jacob Andersen was in everything at the time (including ‘Game Of Thrones’, the big hit of a few years earlier, which is like the Sontaron bits of this episode if they were in-bred Royals rather than clones and had dragons instead of spaceships). However I don’t think it’s just that; Vinder is presented to as a sexy man about time, a lovable rogue who comes good in the end, even if Jacob sensibly plays him a  bit more down-to-earth and natural than the character on the page. On paper though he feels like either Sabalom Glitz or his 21^st century re-write Captain Jack Harkness. We know that John Barrowman’s character was all set to come back to the series (even promising as such at the end of ‘Fugitive Of The Judoon’) before certain murmurs about what sexual antics he’d got up to backstage meant it was probably a good idea for Dr Who to keep its distance (this is in the wake of the more serious allegations about Noel ‘Mickey’ Clarke, though thankfully away from the Dr Who set). Was Vinder, then, meant to be Jack? Alas taking away the innuendos and making him a ‘romantic’ lead doesn’t do Vinder any favours: he never quite gets a personality the whole way through the series even if we’ll come back to his storyline lots. Here he’s paired with yaz who doesn’t have much of a character either as the pair wonder round looking at some fancy lights (no seriously: they’re just like the Megara from ‘The Stones Of Blood’ though the two are never connected on screen. If the voice  sounds familiar it’s Nigel Lambert who was in another 4^th Doctor story ‘The Leisure Hive’). We learn something about the locals on the planet who are dying out and are called the Mauris, though they don’t look like New Zealand natives to me (they don’t even do the hakka). Then poor yaz bumps into swarm and Azure again, who spend several minutes taunting and teasing about all the awful things they’re going to do – and yet the only thing we actually see them do is mock Yaz (‘What does The Doctor see in you? What does she in any of you?’) and paint some lines on her face. That’s it, that’s the grand total of their villainy. Yaz is there simply as a trap to get hold of The Doctor. But if these baddies have the power to zap Yaz from Crimea then why not just get hold of The Doctor directly? What is the point?

The result, then, is a muddle. A better more enjoyable muddle than four of the other five episodes this year admittedly, with some very good individual pieces like The Sontarons on horseback fighting a mass CGI army and coming off worst or Dan running round with a wok. But it’s still a muddle. These different pieces all serve different functions and don’t mirror each other at all and there seems no rhyme or reason why these characters end up where they do except ‘it’s the Flux, innit?’ which isn’t really an answer at all (not least because this episode entirely dodges the rather good cliffhanger of last week when Flux has zapped our heroes, which has meant certain death for everyone else – but apparently not them. If Swarm and Azure have the powers to control it, which isn’t what they actually come out and say, then why even keep Yaz and Dan alive? They only want The Doctor and killing her playmates would upset her more than any other thing they could do). The randomness of Flux only mitigates the problems with Chibnall too, that he has some truly brilliant ideas but lacks having someone to bounce off to make the most of them. For instance, we never properly stop to linger on what it means for all of time to unravel. Had this story been a Russell T Davies arc it would be full of people sobbing for the loved ones who have been wiped from history and the agony of an eternity of not existing getting nearer. If this was Moffat we’d have had some complicated timey-wimey reason why Flux is doing what it does and an equally complicated way The Doctor can evade death at the last minute (If you want to go back further David Whittaker would have looked in great detail at the impact of The Sontarons changing established history and the ripples till now, Terrance Dicks would have streamlined the Flux idea into a bitesize story, Eric Saward would have had a hundred battle sequences rather than having it happen largely off-camera, Andrew Cartmel would have used the idea to take down the government and Dennis Spooner would have had the general fall off his horse). Chibnall just tells a story and tells it the ‘long’ multi-setting way round because that’s how he thinks that’s how you give a script depth, but it just makes it wider and longer, not deeper. For instance I always wanted to see the Crimean war in a Dr Who and still don’t feel as if I’ve seen it properly (despite the title there’s relatively little war, just lots of planning). I always wanted a story set in Liverpool but hoped to see more of it than one street and a few cars. I always wanted a story where the whole universe was at stake but hoped that the characters would actually acknowledge it rather than simply getting on with stuff.

Just because you never imagined something turning out quite the way you see it, though, doesn’t make it bad. This is definitely one of the more enjoyable 13th Dr episodes. Yaz and Dan get more to do and feel like proper characters at last rather than feeds for the Doctor’s psychobabble. The dialogue is often surprisingly biting and clever (‘Who found out?’ asks a shocked Dan about how to knock out a Sontaron. ‘Drunken bloke in Birkenhead with a mallet’ his dad replies ‘Figures’ he replies, while The Sontarons go from bloodcurdlingly nasty to silly within a line (‘Your blood shall soak our uniforms! Your bodies shall soften our steps!...I always wanted to ride a horse’). Yaz feels more like a real life character rather than just a Dr worshipper too as she moans about needing a universal GPS so she can work out where she is as ‘this keeps happening’, while having the acronym ‘WWTDD’, ‘What Would The Doctor Do?’ on her palm). The plot is decidedly weird but functional, with less of Flux’s annoying habit of cutting away just as things are getting interesting and at least it feels as if the plot strands are tied together with more than string and sticking tape. Youy’re certainly never bored when watching it as there’s quite often something happening, which is more than a lot of 13^th Doctor stories it has to be said. There are some nice little touches that didn’t really need to be there but really ‘make’ the episode, such as seeing inside the Doctor’s mind (it’s black and white! Were those early episodes from her point of view?), the Tardis without doors so there isn’t an easy escape and Dan and Kornavista bickering over a wok while the universe burns (exactly the sort of banal mundane way it would end). There’s even some impressive continuity, with the Sontaron flag copied from the diamond logo seen in ‘The Sontaron Experiment’ (itself a sort of cheeky variation on the Pertwee era Who logo!) – although that said the Humans are walking round with pistols that seem a good deal too old for use in the Crimean War (a single flintlock pistol in an era of double-barrelled ones. Budget cuts? Or did The Sontarons have a raid and nicked all the best guns for themselves?) They could have done more with the gags too, such as having people fighting the battle of Balaclavas in Balaclavas (which the Sontaron helmets do slightly resemble, after all). Certainly this episode is made with more care than many and this episode and ‘Village Of The Angels’ are by far the best two in ‘Flux’, telling an actual story rather than incidents and feel as if we’re leading somewhere (though we never quite do before the end), feeling more like the source material ‘The War Games’ (that also starts off a historical before pulling away to show a bigger picture and as if it was building up to something) rather than a scatterbrained mess where the series ends up going sideways. I wouldn’t say this story restored my flagging faith in a dying series single-handedly but along with ‘Village Of The Angels’ it gave me hope again – and hope, as Dr Who fans say, is worth a cartload of certainties. Especially when a Sontaron is riding the horse. A lot of the Chibnall era is nowhere near the rest but this one is maybe only half a league behind the best of it. It’s the Flux overall that’s the problem and gets in the way of what would have been a better standalone story. In other words Chibnall wins this battle, but he loses the war.      

POSITIVES + The idea that the Merseyside tunnels are (until the timelines are restored a few episodes later at least) gateways to different timezones, each with their different doors, is such a strong Dr Who concept. It’s a clever way of a local lad using local knowledge to tell a story and move us outside the usual London or (nowadays) Welsh settings. There are, you see, more paranormal sightings around Merseyside than almost anywhere else, including a number of real life time slip stories (including a street where lots of people have ‘travelled’ to an alternate Liverpool where Hitler won WWII and everyone is speaking German and one where a Liverpool graveyard is a time portal to a fairy universe. Sadly neither have worked for me. Author Tom Slemen is up to volume thirty-six of ‘Haunted Liverpool’, a series featuring ghost and UFO tales sent in by locals, for a reason!)

NEGATIVES - It’s a problem in all of Flux but particularly here in an otherwise strong episode: the story slows to a crawl whenever The Swarm and Azure are on screen. They were delivered to us at the end of the last one as the big bad, people we needed to know more about but they don’t even bother to turn up until fifty minutes into this one. Even when they do there’s no reason to: they’re the blandest thing here by a country mile so it feels wrong that they’re supposedly the masterminds in charge of everything and more powerful than other Dr Who races we know are pretty strong. Sadly the big finale is full of moments like the weakest elements of this episode. The masks look weirdly cheap too, even the ones that aren’t Star wars leftovers.

BEST QUOTE: Svild: ‘May death rain down on you both!’ Dr: ‘Well, it's nice to meet you, too’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS:  ‘The Charge Of the Night Brigade’ (2020) is a ‘12^th Doctor Chronicles’ adventure from Big Finish also set in the Crimean war and released to coincide with this Sontarons. It once again stars Mary Seacole as the tough but fair nurse as she bumps into The Doctor one night, on the trail of a ‘space rat’ from another planet. Mary’s sceptical, far more so than on TV (the 12^th Doctor squabbles with Mary even more than the 13^th did!) but The Doctor asks her to get a sample tested to prove its alien and when it is the test-tube it’s in explodes. The Doctor allows himself to be bitten so he can talk to the animal and finds out that it’s the atomised remnants of a race destroyed in the time wars, the ‘Grathnol Zavak’. There’s a very weird sequence where the rats stand on each other and turn into a ‘man’ (or at least the shape of one) to have one last showdown with The Doctor, but he’s guessed that the Zavak find Earth sunlight poisonous and has timed it so that they grow into human form just in time to did. This is definitely one of those audio adventures you need to keep the light on for, a gruesome story unlike anything else in this book and a long way from the comedy of the TV episode, simultaneously brutally real and weirdly surreal. There are, alas, no Sontarons on horseback. 

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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