We’re about to get a lot more than we bargained for in the middle of a time storm.
Recap
This episode begins with “Bel’s Story,” a young woman (Thaddea Graham) making her way through the universe in the aftermath of the Flux’s destruction; she is searching for someone she loves, and comes across various sectors of space that have now been taken over by Daleks and Cybermen and Sontarans, all while trying to avoid swarms that devour matter left over from the Flux. Meanwhile, on Atropos, the Doctor makes a split second decision to launch herself into the time storm that Swarm is about unleash on her friends. She and the Mouri hide them in their own time streams to achieve this: Yaz, Dan, and Vinder all find themselves either reliving moments from their own lives, or caught up in moments that might happen in the future.
On Dan’s end, we see him in 1820 Liverpool with Joseph Williamson briefly, then bringing a coffee to Diane. She’s just been on a bad date and asks Dan why he’s not married; he admits that about fifteen years ago, he was engaged to a woman he loved very much, but his fiancée decided that she didn’t want to spend her life him two days before the wedding. Yaz finds herself on PC duty, eating lunch in a car—a Weeping Angel appears in her mirrors, and the Doctor keeps flashing in and out, replacing her coworker (Chantelle Pierre) in the car. When the Doctor collects her thoughts, she tries to explain to Yaz what’s happening, but she keeps getting pulled away and finding herself with her companions outside the Temple of Atropos. Only, they’re not behaving as themselves, they’re clearly stand-ins for other people.
Vinder plays through the history that led him to his stationing on Outpost Rose. His service in a military led him to serve as personal guard to the Grand Serpent (Craig Parkinson), some sort of political figurehead. The man was cruel, and also demanded that Vinder stop a recording of one of his diplomatic meetings so that he could give instructions to new political allies and get his opposition killed. Vinder insists on reporting this despite knowing that the Grand Serpent will see his report—he believes people need to know the truth. He’s promptly sent to the outpost as punishment, and knows he won’t be home for some time. Yaz is playing video games with her sister Sonya (Bhavnisha Parmar) only for the Doctor to arrive in her place and discover a Weeping Angel (now in the video game) that is tracking Yaz through her time stream. Yaz breaks the gaming system as the Doctor vanishes back to Atropos. She and her team have broken into the temple where the Ravagers—that’s Swarm (Matthew Needham) and Azure—have set up thrones. The Doctor looks into a reflective surface and sees the version of herself that worked for the Division (Jo Martin); these are her memories of stopping Swarm and Azure in the temple, ages ago.
The Doctor moves through this memory of how she stopped Swarm and Azure, using a “Passenger” (Jonny Mathers)—prisons that are housed inside a single being holding thousands of prisoners. They are outlawed in this universe, but Swarm and Azure smuggled several in and kill a few in front of the Doctor. What they don’t know is that the Division smuggled the Mouri into the temple inside one of their Passengers, and this allows the Doctor to overtake Swarm and Azure and imprison them. The Doctor realizes she can use a similar plan to disrupt them in the present. For a moment, Dan flickers out in this timeline and reveals himself to be Karvanista. The Doctor is pulled out of the time stream because the Mouri know she will die if she stays in this time storm much longer, but the Doctor begs them to put her back in, to let her see more of the past that she’s forgotten. Instead, she’s dropped into a new place to face Awsok (Barbara Flynn), who scolds her for messing about with this universe, and suggests that the Doctor might have something to do with the creation of the Flux. She dismisses the Doctor, who wakes in the Temple of Atropos begging to go back. Yaz tries to calm her to no avail.
Back on the TARDIS, the group drop Vinder at home only to find that the Flux has been through and everything is in ruins. He tells them he has to stay to look for someone; that someone is Bel, his partner, who is on the other side of the universe looking for him, and carrying his child. Yaz looks at her phone to find the Weeping Angel on it—it materializes inside the TARDIS. The Doctor tells Dan and Yaz to keep looking at it, but a few blinks let the Angel set the controls:
The Angel has the phone box.
Commentary
Okay, again, I have no idea what’s going on, but again, I’m not sure I care even a little?
We get to see Jo Martin again! She’s now been assigned a proper title, since she exists outside the numerical system within the show: Fugitive Doctor, which is appropriate because it sounds dangerous and also makes me swoon a little, just like her. She’s so damn good, and feels more competent than the entire lot of Doctors put together, which is fun to have running alongside Thirteen’s lovely bluster and distractibility.
This is all part of the fun of this show, seeing who brings what to the lead character, and I love the massive juxtaposition we’re getting between these two: if the Fugitive Doctor told you the Earth was under her protection, you’d be scared. She’s brusque and prepared and she doesn’t care about your grandstanding. Thirteen isn’t that kind of Doctor. I’ve said it before, but she has a lot more in common with Five (Peter Davison), and also really with Two (Patrick Troughton). Strength through kindness and a hefty dose of misdirection. They’re both the Doctor, but they come at it from different angles, and stories with multiple Doctors are always fun for finding those angles. The thing that makes this unique is that we’ve only done this exercise with a Doctor we barely knew once before—with the War Doctor (John Hurt) for the show’s 50th anniversary.
The problem with a story constructed this way is that you need to keep certain bits a mystery as you go, but that means it’s a lot easier for early sections to lose coherence. This episode is packed to the brim with ideas that might eventually get explained, but we can’t know that, and there’s genuinely too much to keep track of. It’s also possible that plenty of these elements won’t get explained at all—for example, if the Passengers are outlawed in their universe, then how did the Division get their hands on one that the Ravagers were lifting in order to port the Mouri over? There are a couple dozen little threads like this that will probably never be explained to satisfaction because they’re not relevant to the overall plot.
That being said, this episode gives us so much: background on Vinder and Dan, background on the Doctor, more information on the Ravagers, clues about the Flux, and the introduction of Bel, who is incredible and deserves her partner back as soon as humanly (galactically) possible. The only person who truly feels undeserved here is Yaz, who we’ve obviously gotten background on before, but there’s no reason not to give us more? (Though that scene with her sister was the cutest, and I would have paid the BBC a lot of money to allow Jodie Whittaker to keep going on that shop monologue.) Fingers crossed that they step that up sometime soon.
We’re having the concept of space-time reframed here by Swarm: in most of science fiction, these two concepts are treated as companions of a sort, and in Doctor Who especially. The TARDIS stands for “Time and Relative Dimension In Space,” marrying these things together as though they belong. But we’re now being told that Time is a detriment to space, that it wounds space through its effects. It’s unclear exactly what that has to do with who the Ravagers are—are they beings of pure Time, or do they just have the ability to manipulate it at will? Is this a power they have intrinsically, or was it learned/discovered/stolen?
But moreover, the section at the end with Aswok (as she’s named in the credits) is the real set up we’ve been waiting for. This woman snatches the Doctor out of the entire time storm to give her a sharp dressing down. Her scolding is vague, but it presents us with a whole spectrum of possibility regarding the Doctor’s place in our universe. Specifically, did she create the Flux herself, and if so, did she mean to? Conversely, is the Flux a naturally occurring result of her influence on our universe? Or was it created to cancel out her effect? Any of these possibilities could turn out to be true, and would completely reshape the very foundations of the show. What if it turns out that our universe was meant to die out eons ago, and the Doctor, through her very presence, is keeping it going? What if our universe was doing just fine, and her presence started calling unnatural predators here?
And, of course, who is Aswok? Is she another incarnation of the Doctor? Is she another one of the Doctor’s true species, from another universe? Could she be the Doctor’s actual mother, here to scold her kid for not cleaning her room frequently enough?
As always, this run of the show makes all of the big power players women, and it makes the whole story that much more riveting. The Mouri, the Fugitive Doctor, Aswok, all of these women on every side of Thirteen, knowing and shaping what’s to come.
But we’ll have to wait a bit to get back to all that because, in a truly brilliant callback to “Blink,” a Weeping Angel now has their hands on a TARDIS and we’re probably in a lot of trouble.
Buy the Book
A Marvellous Light
Stuff and Things
- Love the inverse version of Thirteen’s coat as she lives through unknown history—like looking at the negative of a photograph, which feels very apropos.
- The Passengers are super reminiscent of the Ark used to store the Daleks at the end of season two’s “Army of Ghosts” and “Doomsday.”
- So, uh, there’s a different actor playing “old” Swarm in this episode, which makes me wonder if this wasn’t a scheduling/pandemic issue? Because I can’t think of a reason they would need a different actor when they didn’t recast Azure here, too. He looks different (as in, the prosthetics are a different design entirely), but that was true of Swarm at the start of the season, so that doesn’t factor in.
- Vinder wins “first reaction to a TARDIS” by a mile.
- Very curious as to whether one of the other folks on the Doctor’s previous mission could be Gat? If so, my money’s on the person Vinder was standing in for.
See you next week for “Village of the Angels.” Yikes.
Emmet Asher-Perrin is like Yaz and very much wants to know what their supposed to call “video games” now. You can bug them on Twitter, and read more of their work here and elsewhere.
I’m having a hard time connecting emotionally, too. It’s all so, so clever, instead. Bel is lovely, though. From Swarm’s comment about ruling in Hell, he’s in it just for the lovely, lovely destruction. A let the world burn kind of monster. How about Aswok being the earliest version of the Master? It’s cliche enough for it to be true.
The Angels live off displaced time. What if they want to be an ally when time is at risk? Another interesting thought.
I really don’t wanna be one of the complainers but…
This is making me so sad, you guys!
I’ve loved every single season since the reboot started. Sure, there were occasional lower episodes. Something about a devil held prisoner at the bottom of a gravity well? Clara sticking around too long. Not enough River Song.
But this? It’s just nonsense. So many scenes in that episode could have happened in any order. Some of them could even have happened backwards and they would have made about as much sense. The cardinal rule is that in a scene something must have changed by the time it’s done; if not, the scene should be axed or changed.
I feel like that episode needed to be axed or changed.
I say that though I’ve loved Chibnall and Whittaker ever since Broadchurch.
I’m really hoping they fix this, because I’m almost hate-watching at this moment.
I actually said to my wife and son last night, “Well, maybe we can just give up on the season and hope the specials are back up to form…”
I hate feeling this way.
I’m also having trouble connecting with what’s going on. It’s fun enough watching the Doctor doing Doctor things and there are some other good moments but I don’t see how I’m supposed to care about the Flex or our fancy new villains. Interesting to know it’s not just me.
Well, we’ve got a few plot threads being picked up. We finally knows what’s happened to Diane (being held inside one of the Passengers) and it looks as though next episode will pick up Claire. The people I was watching with seemed convinced that meant there was something special about Dan: I’m not convinced and think that would undermine his everyman persona, although pooh-poohing theories often makes me look stupid.
I accept this was all a bit incoherent but at least it was probably incoherent by design. We could guess that the Doctor met Swarm during her Ruth incarnation (I’m still slightly resisting the whole “Fugitive Doctor” thing, especially since it seems rather random when this episode reveals she was in that form before becoming a fugitive). And that Bel was Vintner’s significant other. It’s not clear what happened in between Vintner’s scenes: Did his commander throw out his report and transfer him to keep him quiet, or was the report filed and caused a scandal?
Oh, and we get cameos from the Daleks and (slightly more prominently) the Cybermen, seemingly out of contractual obligation.
I’ve also only just discovered Joseph Williamson actually existed. Need to look him up.
It’s not that I don’t care what happens to these people. It’s just when something happens to the, I don’t care about it.
@@.-@ Not only did he exist, so do his tunnels. You can even go on guided tours. Definitely on my list for the next time I visit Liverpool. There’s a good potted history on the Friends of Williamson’s Tunnels website here: https://williamsontunnels.com/history-2/williamsons-story/
If I were in a charitable mood, I’d say that Doctor Who: Flux is a tribute to the non-linear narrative style of the great Michael Moorcock and his New Wave SF pals of the 1960s-70s, especially the Jerry Cornelius novels where we flip between different times and parallel universes in no apparent order, with the same people taking different roles in different realities.
But to be honest it feels more like Chibnall is just throwing everything at the wall and hoping some of it sticks.
When we first see the Flux in ep 1 it’s flying through space at high speed, completely destroying whole planets in no time, so how can there be anything left?.
I feel like this series would be better if I had waited and binged it. It is so disjointed so far that the week between episodes is making it seem like a chore to tune back in.
Sounds a right mess.
Personally I noped out of Doctor 13 in her first season. I didn’t want to but the stories were so terrible and she was such a disappointment. I wanted somebody like Doctor Ruth, a visibly formidable middle aged women with a snappy dress sense. Sure the Doctor has been young, blond, and a bit flighty before and I might have gotten to like it with better stories.
Then Timeless Child happened. And that is just so wrong! Can we all just pretend Doctor 13 never happened?
It’s possible there are real-world issues behind the Swarm casting, but he looks different because, as the first episode established, he apparently regenerates. Which suggests Possibilities w/r/t the Timeless Child plotline.
Also, I’d say “Aswok” is almost certainly another incarnation of Tecteun, the abusive scientist/mother figure/Other to the Timeless Child from last season’s flashbacks. Decent chance she’s also Claire Bloom’s “The Woman” from The End of Time (though I’d rather they not make that explicit…)
Every time the scripts try to insist that Jo Martin is from the Doctor’s past I get more annoyed. Martin is the most interesting performer in the Chibnall era, and absolutely deserves/d a proper era. (also the optics of the first black doctor only ever being a guest star are…not great). I’d love having her as 14, but only if it was not as a “revisiting old faces” sort of thing, and though that wasn’t ever likely, it seems increasingly foreclosed upon.
Ruth’s original companions on Atropos are Karavanista (Dan, which we see explicitly), Gat (Yaz, who is holding the same gun as Ruth uses in Fugitive of the Judoon that she took off of Gat and rewired to backfire), and Lee (Vinder, who takes the Doctor aside and reminds her that “they” (i.e., Division) promised this is the last mission. There’s also a moment at 39:06 of the episode (for me, at least; it’s a flash as the Mouri are showing the Doctor the last bits before she lands at Aswok’s location), where it looks like Gat (Ritu Arya) in Yaz’s modern outfit.