TV There's a genre of Doctor Who story which can best be described as "It's all gone fucking mental!" (best said in your strongest Torchwood accent) in which the rules of characterisation, narrative and structure become irrelevant. True to form, Who ran headlong into this in only its third story with The Edge of Destruction and there were other examples as the classic series went on, The Mind Robber or whatever the sodding hell is going on in episodes five to eight of The Trial of a Time Lord. But it really found form in the spin-off media, especially in the Wilderness Years when writers wanting to stretch themselves or the franchise would present their story in the style of a history text book, the biography of a journalist or it turned out all the regular actors were actually playing giant insect aliens.
Every now and then the revival has a go and not for the first time the Chibnall era runs headlong into the surrealist thickets just to see if it can make it out the other side. Sadly, with Once, Upon Time, it found itself trapped, its jumper caught on the thorns, unable to stand up because its feet are wrapped around about a hundred vines (I speak from experience). There was a decent idea in there but as is often the case with this writer, his attention was so distracted by all of the expositional stuff he wanted to include that it just felt like having established a beginning and ending he wasn't quite sure how to execute the middle. So we had some pretty good bits of character work that he couldn't seem to fit elsewhere thrown together with the framing device of the Doctor floating around against a green screen talking to herself.
Village of the Angels reversed the polarity of that neutron flow (hah!) with an a thunderous episode filled with eyewatering images, solid old-school characterisation, edge of the seat scares and one hell of a cliffhanger. If Flux is anything, it's the Torchwood's Children of Earth of this era, the astonishingly good rejoinder to a previous middling couple of years. As I've said about the rest of this series, almost everything which was wrong with Jodie's first couple of season has been fixed, from a Doctor with agency and a need, to Yaz remembers she was once a police officer to a rich cast of supporting characters and a propulsive storytelling that's willing to take a few risks (even if last week that led to Alejandro Jodorowsky having a cheese dream after nodding off in front of DW Griffith's Intolerance).
The extent to whether in this episode it's as a result of Maxine Alderton or Chibbers we may never know, although you might suspect that anything in the village is hers and everything else is his. Although with his name in front of hers in the credits, perhaps his was more than a light polish. My guess is this was the only "guest" script nearing completion for the version of this series envisioned pre-COVID or even as a hold over from last year with the various Flux elements incorporated and Claire brought forward to appear in the opening and later instalments for extra continuity. Either way, when RTD is working on his next full series, he'd be silly not to engage the talents of Alderton in some capacity.
So The Division isn't some black ops operation working with the Time Lord's CIA as implied last season, but a intergalactic organisation along the lines of the Shadow Proclamation but with a much greater reach and the Doctor worked for them in some time before her increasingly shakily described first incarnation. Perhaps due to the Flux, she's being recalled, her new Weeping Angels form merely a type of stasis so they can transport her to who knows were. Whatever any of that means, it's a stonking cliffhanger which can't be resolved as easily as some with her friends trapped in another time period and as the trailer for next week's episode indicates for quite a while.
It's nearly a decade since the Weeping Angels had an episode title to themselves and all of the mythology established back then is utilised although its notable that it expects its audience to remember Amy's trauma in The Time of Angels and the result of her and Rory being zapped backward in The Angels Take Manhattan. With every episode available on the iPlayer seemingly in-perpetuity, there's assumption the audience will already know this stuff. That's some swagger. But, look, new stuff. The Doctor being able to communicate with an angel trapped within the mind of a human, have an actual conversation with them and without immediate loss of life. Give me a few months and I might have an answer as to how this ties in with the final episode of Class.
Leaving aside the continuing ludicrousness of the TARDIS team not taking it in turns to blink (a flaw pointed out by Steven Moffat himself in one of the episode commentaries), the notion of these creatures moving even in the darkness created by an eye movement is extremely troubling, especially when its deployed on someone who isn't aware of their power and doesn't know what to expect. Director Jamie Magnus Stone (bit of normative determination in the hiring there) wrings everything he can out of the darkness, making the most of the potential lighting possibilities of digital shooting by upping the blacks within the tunnels and around the village so that the angels are shrouded in complete darkness until they're not.
There was some chatter at the start of the season that in a casting reveal to end them all, Annabel Scholey's Claire would turn out to be Jodie's replacement such was the confidence of her performance and likeability within her opening few scenes. Once again we're presented with a character who we'd be comfortable spending a whole spin-off series with, a 2020s woman trapped in the 60s a time of huge cultural change perhaps investigating scientific mysteries sometimes caused by aliens aided by Kevin McNally's aging scientist scarred by war. She's cheeky, clever but also compassionate and I hope she makes it out of this alive enough to appear in several dozen boxsets for Big Finish.
If last week's episode suggested we'd reached the upper limits of John Bishop's acting parameters, he was on much firmer ground here, Dan swapping barbs with Yaz as she continued her WWTDD journey, even snapping at him when she'd heard quite enough of his expositing. Judging by the bits of interviews and set reports in the parish circular and elsewhere, it sounds as though Dan's not going to be appearing further than the Flux, either because he makes the kinds of sacrifices the Doctor's mates often do these days or he decides he'd rather return to his Liverpool home, or at least the plot of land where it used to be.
But it's the images which we'll be taking away with us. The Virgin New Adventures were supposed to offer stories, "Too Broad and Deep for the Small Screen" which was probably true in the early 90s. Now we have the Doctor negotiating for her memories on a pebbled jetty of the mind, her companions standing on the edge of a village floating in the cosmos and pensioners turning into stone then dust at the hands of living statues. There's a version of this which could have been shot using 80s or even 70s production techniques but there's clearly an attempt here to produce something which would work on Disney+ and even if the process shots containing Azure's head didn't quite come off (late additions?), we're Doctor Who fans. We have our megabyte-sized suspension of disbelief implanted at birth.
The only side characters tonight were the end credits shattering star-crossed lovers, with Thaddea Graham’s Bel (a descendant of the inventor of the telephone) (sorry) adding to the list of strong, adventurous women in this series in what amounted to a Short Trip, pitching up on a planet, sniffing out a fraud and saving at least single life. At one point I wondered if it's Bel who'll be revealed to be the next Doctor, but as far as we know RTD has had nothing to do with this era and it seems more likely he'd want to work from a clean plate (not to mention Jodie's said she doesn't know who her successor is going to be). Plus it would be a disservice to suggest the Doctor is the only person in the universe capable of this kind of deductive reasoning and extreme bravery when we know that's not true.
Next week looks just as exciting with the return of Kate Stewart in her first television appearance in six years. Big Finish'll be having a sale on UNIT stories next week then. Has UNIT been resurrected? Will Osgood be back too? How is she talking to the Grand Serpent and what's the TARDIS doing there? Freelancers are already turning out whole articles for websites on this subject as we speak but only those with access to preview streamers will know the answers before next week. In the meantime, let's all bask once again the special glow which comes a better than half decent episode being broadcast, hoping against hope that when Lizo tweets the viewing figures in the morning a few people watched it during broadcast as nature intended.
