Goddammit, that was ruddy delightful. In this concluding episodes, Chibbers finally seems to know what to do with his era of Doctor Who and has turned out another propulsive, rich episode chock full of spectacle, rich characterisation and honestly just fun. If only in the past couple of seasons he'd been able to tap into the impressive writing ability on show here rather than the RTD-lite approach which blighted so much of the past couple of seasons (
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This is also long. Until recently, an hour long episode was considered special and even called a special, but here we are on episode two of Doctor Who's Flux, after a fifty minute opener and a whole hour to play about with, the BBC One schedulers taking it in their stride. Perhaps there's a shorter "international" edit of the kind which used to be prepared for the likes of Spooks and the Upstairs Downstairs revival (some of which are still bouncing around on Netflix) but I'm not sure what you could possibly cut out.
After the initial cliffhanger resolution, the story bifurcates into three different eras and we're back to the classic model of splitting the Doctor and her companions so they can cover more story ground. The Chibnall era has tended to keep the fam together in a given situation which has led to some scenes feeling crowded with the companions barely getting a word in, and nothing much character defining. Not so here. Both the Doctor and Yaz benefit from their dislocation from each other, are much more clearly defined.
The promised Crimean war scenes are suitably spectacular, with a top down viewpoint of rival arms clashing into each other in a way which makes you wish the BBC would license someone to produce a real-time strategy game which allows you to pit various Who races against one another and historical armies (hopefully with less one sided outcomes than here). One professional reviewer labels this conflict "anaemic" (despite acknowledging the timeslot). Exceptthe point of the thing is to show the result, hundreds of pointless deaths, not some YA Battle of the Bastards.
This isn't the Doctor's first encounter with Mary Seacole. Perhaps as a result of time being out of joint, neither of them remember the events of the Twelfth Doctor's visit to the British Hotel as described in Big Finish's
The Charge of the Night Brigade by David Llewellyn. Interestingly, that was released in February last year, eight months before shooting began on this season. Did that inspire this? Great minds? Or did whoever's covering branding now not let Big Finish know about all her appearance here? I'm always fascinated as to how these things work.
If the Chibnall era has been excellent at something, it's in its representation of female scientists and Seacole is another example. Played by Sara Powell, Big Finish veteran (but isn't every actor these days?), she takes everything which should be beyond her understanding in her stride, even when led onto her first alien spacecraft albeit having already accepted the existence of aliens, then having already conquered half of the planet. For all the substitution of a sick Sontaran, the script is able to illustrate her obligation to preserve all life.
Which contrasts with the Liverpool scenes, were many, many Sontarans meet a warrior's death. Any of my reservations about John Bishop have melted away. he's great. These regular returns to my locality are just hilarious, and particularly this evening as we see Liverpool city centre (Liverpool city centre!) infested with tater technology, Sontaran banners unfurling on the Liver Buildings. The explanation for how Dan's father learnt how to dismantle the alien thanks to a discovery by a pissed-up gentleman from Birkenhead gave me a good solid belly laugh.
Managing these tonal shifts is at the core of Doctor Who's DNA. One minute were watching the massacre of an army due to their leader's misguided patriotism, on the other a bewildered Liverpudlian attempting to destroy an entire Sontaran invasion fleet with a wok (because a frying pan would be less funny somehow?) aided by a humanoid terrier with loyalty issues. Remember when we all laughed at the photo of the Karvanista? He's become one of the franchises best characters in a long time.
Meanwhile Yaz meets a few of the characters we were introduced to last week in a heretofore unknown place which seems to act as a kind of surge protector for the time stream. Why did she end up there and not Sheffield? This is something which otherwise seemed to be the job of the Matrix on Gallifrey, but with that decimated by the Master, perhaps this popped into existence to act as an alternative. The Doctor's never 'eard of it and I'm hoping a clearly explanation of what it is will be forthcoming next week.
The idea of the lone companion using the Doctor's example when they themselves are in danger resonates with me, especially now. When Mum died, and many of you will have sadly had a similar experience with this, there was a lot of administration to take care of, from the funeral to the organising the death certificate to wills to cancelling her various accounts and cards and throughout, after watching her deal with such things for decades, I always asked, "What would Mum do?" and took strength from that. Honestly she was amazing, right up until her final moments.
Mum also told me not to dwell, so I won't. But when the Fraction Pillarbox belittled Yaz for taking a similar strength from her friend, it cut me to the core. Up until now, this era's mostly been to me about surface elements and deconstruction, but now it's actually making me feel in a way it hasn't before, despite the tragedy on show. Perhaps if, god forbid, I'd gone through this experience sooner, Grace's death would have affected me more, but there's something more insidious about watching the pre-meditated psychological damage on Yaz. Bullying essentially.
Another strong cliff hanger this week albeit of the transmogrification variety, a "Donna Noble has been Saved" or Peri's bald now and English. We still don't really know what the Flux really is or what Swarm and Azure want exactly, although they both also have the names of cloud computing services (
here and
here) so perhaps they're simply looking for somewhere secure to store a back-up of their corporate data given the end of the universe and wotnot.
Just another four episodes left. Can Chibbers sustain things through to the 5th December? The fact that I'm interested enough to review these episodes suggests there's more to chew on than before but does he have a proper ending? In the week, I tweeted that this might end up looking like a group of scripts originally prepared for a longer season but with what amounted to TARDISodes tenuously threaded through them but this second chapter suggest Flux is going to be far more intricate than that. Phew.
