Oh, you thought I meant tonight's Doctor Who was a lot. Well, yes, that too. When the various announcements as to what this condensed season would look like coalesced into a six-part serial with a single title, one that Martin Belam notices in his Guardian recap is the first on television since The Armageddon Factor in 1979, we still didn't really know what that meant, especially in a contemporary context which expects every episode to be an event, with newer audiences probably less tolerant of whole instalments set inside prison cells with very little action.
The Halloween Apocalypse is probably exactly what we should have expected. Like all serialised Who of old, it's fifty minutes of set up, introducing the range of characters we'll be interacting with over the subsequent five episodes, and the overall story. It's The Keys of Marinus, if the exploration of the planet in the opening episode had been intercut with brains in jars, a shaggy old trapper, the murder of Eprin and a few shots of the screaming jungle long before the OG TARDIS team arrived. It's Doctor Who but with a Game of Thrones structure.
Your mileage on this will depend on how accepting you are of ensemble pieces and hyperlink dramas in general. Having written a dissertation about them (have I mentioned?) I'm very much looking forward to seeing how all of these characters fit together and how many of them actually have anything to do with the Flux or were just part of a script which had already been prepared and jammed into this shorter season through some flimsy framing material. Hopefully in episode five, they'll all mime along to Aimee Mann's Save Me together like the denizens of PTA's Magnolia.
Does it work? Jonn Elledge has expressed it well on the Twitters, "Well, I have no idea if that was good but I really enjoyed it." Like all six parters, we won't know if any of this buzzy narrative has paid off for another five episodes. Chibbers is a known quantity when it comes to offering an interesting setup then squandering it by the end (season one of Broadchurch excepted) so no matter how spectacular the existence destroying capacity of the Flux looks now, in chapter six, we might well discover that it was simply Axos having a brain fart.
And I did enjoy it. Some of it's set on my home turf, so how could I not? Ok, so the TARDIS lands in front of the wrong football ground and what was supposed to be Lark Lane clearly wasn't (not even Linnet Lane round the corner has houses that big) but the spirit of the place breathed through in a way which could only be the product of someone relatively local. At least name dropping Lark Lane isn't something anyone with only a glancing knowledge of the geography would do. No recourse either to mentioning the city's other main, musical export. For a change.
Apart from the obvious alien intervention, the history of the Williamson Tunnels is completely accurate by the way. Although the wikipedia wavers on their purpose in its opening paragraph, if you visit the site, they're pretty certain that as depicted here Joseph Williamson was largely digging the vaults in order to give local people paid employment. They're currently re-excavating it because in the years since construction Liverpool Corporation filled it with rubble from demolitions and other detritus. Local people also tipped their household waste down there.
This year's Liverpool actor in the series, John Bishop, is fine. As Dan, he's not really given much to do other than be a Liverpudlian and he does this very well, especially when faced with a being imprisoned on a space craft, dog-faced aliens, someone from Sheffield and the TARDIS ("I had a mate who had one of these ... I think his was a bit bigger actually ..."). It'll be interesting to see if the writer gives Bishop more challenging material or stays within the actor's potential limits. Mum loved Bishop's stand-up, until it mostly became anecdotes about being a celebrity.
As I write this, I'm currently reading Paul Hayes's superb The Long Game: The Inside Story of How the BBC Brought Back Doctor Who about the internal BBC politics between the TV Movie and the announcement of this revival in 2003. Time and again, creatives and accountants across the hierarchy note that if Doctor Who were to return, it would have to have special effects which could compete with whatever was coming out of Hollywood and so implicitly not the wobbly sets and costumes that Extras belatedly made fun of when the show had returned to air.
To a large extent, The Halloween Apocalypse is the end result of that expectation or mentality. For the most part it looks extraordinary and presumably even more so on a 4K TV. There's a certainly ballsy ambition for a tv series on this budget to even attempt the three second shot of a civilisation being completely destroyed in a wave. The show now has the capacity to look like a feature film, to bring to the screen that which could only previous be described in Lawrence Miles novels or Nicholas Briggs audios.
The sheer number of locations and scenes, like Game of Thrones, will have been a result of some very clever scheduling in the production schedule, like a hyper-intensive version of the work done to pull of the various season length cameos in The Big Bang but with the characters appearing before we know who they are. Like that story, it gives Doctor Who a scale and a sense that we're properly watching a wanderer in the fourth dimension. If nothing else, they've truly turned the COVID restrictions into a virtue.
But, the most effective moments, the scariest moments, were also the most human moments, on the street and in bedrooms. From the grim reaping of the Ravagers (no not those ones) to the posh Dave Lister moaning about his job, as RTD has previously recognised, humanity is the best of narrative anchors in a sci-fi context. For me, it's Annabel Scholey's Claire which makes the most impact here, with her Sally Sparrow like non-sequential meeting with the Doctor and Yaz, clearly very versed in how to deal with a Weeping Angel. Who is she and where has she gone?
At the heart of all this is the Doctor and Yaz and finally, finally, they've slotted into the classic dynamic of interpersonal interdependency, of an obtuse Time Lord infuriating their human companion, of a deep, intense friendship which can only end with the two of them sharing a bed, as they literally do here, albeit for a few brief cherishable moments which don't mean anything. If Big Finish do nothing else with this ruddy franchise, they have to give us all of the adventures between these two leading up to Flux. You could fit a hundred stories in that gap.
With more screen time (sort of), we finally get a thirteenth Doctor with an agency comparable to her male colleagues, who doesn't simply exist to provide something for the dozen other characters in the TARDIS to react to. Admittedly, we have seen confronting the villain scenes before with her, but the moments in which she fervently swaps Northerns with the Karvanista hit harder, perhaps because the Doctor has a mission to discover more about her secret origins. But why exactly isn't she willing to tell Yaz everything. Aren't they friends?
Similarly, Yaz is a more rounded figure, flying the TARDIS, dealing with Dan's quizzing about the mysteries of the Doctor's life. We don't know how long they've been together now, but she's a new surety and its a joy to watch her and the adoptive Gallifreyan working in-sync. There's still a lot of character-based heavy lifting going on in throw away lines like about herself as being a former police officer. If she's now consumed by her life in the TARDIS, we might wonder how long it is since she visited her family. Cue Jackie's speech from Parting of the Ways.
All of which ends on a pretty nail-biting conclusion with massive intergalactic destruction intercut with shots of the characters with whom we've just been introduced (all Kuleshoving the end of the universe even though most of them probably don't know its happening given that they're in a completely different time zone). Jodie tries desperately not to end things on some cliffhanger acting but the edit doesn't do her any favours by cutting away in the final moments when clearly a Trial-like zoom up her nostrils seemed to be the ideal order of business.
Just one final thing before I go off and read the Gallifrey Base reaction (!). Is this the first time the title of the story has appeared with the title of the series in the main titles? I can't think of another. Even though Trial has its semi-official story titles, in the credits its listed as Parts One to Thirteen and The Key To Time doesn't appear anywhere in the credits of season 16. It makes sense, sticking Flux random at the top of the episode title page would have looked ridiculous. FLUX (colon) Chapter One (colon) The Halloween Apocalypse. A typeface apocalypse more like.
Except Flux has also been adopted as the title when this series of episodes is released on DVD which means we're more than like not going to get something with "The Complete Thirteenth Series" written on the side. Unless this and the subsequent three specials aren't going to be treated as one of those and after all of this, Russell first run back is going to be called that. Or Chibbers is of a suspicious nature and they're just going to skip over that particular number. Even though the present incarnation is incorrectly labelled just that ...
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