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DOCTOR WHO: FLUX – SURVIVORS OF THE FLUX

Written By:

Kieron Moore
Doctor Who Flux Survivors of the Flux

Three problems recurred throughout Chris Chibnall’s first two series as lead writer on Doctor Who.

Problem #1 – messy plotting. First draft stuff. Not necessarily major plot holes, but numerous little issues in each episode that surely wouldn’t have been too difficult to fix with a bit more time and attention put into the script.

Problem #2 – the Doctor being too passive. If you introduce a vile Trump-like businessman, you need to have the Doctor bring him down, not let him swan off into the sunset. Twice. This culminated in the Series 12 finale – finales should be about the Doctor being clever and active and taking down the villains, but here she stood around for almost a whole episode while the Master explained her own backstory to her.

Problem #3 – underwritten companions. With three of them on the TARDIS, the series struggled to give them all stuff to do, never mind giving them meaningful exploration as characters.

From the first couple of episodes, it looked like with Flux, we might have seen the end of those problems. The scripting felt more confident – very ambitious, but at the same time, more solid and thought-through. The Doctor was actively investigating her missing past, and heroically stood up to the Sontarans. Yaz got some proper development, having become a more confident, Doctor-like figure, and newcomer Dan seemed to have a well worked-out backstory.

And now we have Survivors of the Flux

An episode which wastes one of the best cliffhangers in years by needlessly resolving it within seconds. The Doctor losing her Angel form is an entirely pointless scene that serves only to dissipate tension and explain things that don’t need explaining. At least holding it back for a few scenes, or having her simply wake up in the Division with no idea how she got there, would be a much more satisfying development, with not much change required. So we’re back to Problem #1.

And then Problem #2 rears its head again – maddeningly, we have another episode in which the Doctor stands around for most of the run time while the villain explains backstory to her.

There’s lots that could be great here. Barbara Flynn is perfectly cast as Tecte’un, somehow at once motherly and sinister, at home in her gorgeously designed TARDIS-like arboretum. The idea of the Doctor confronting her childhood abuser – there’s a story in there for sure.

But it’s all so flat. Tecte’un explains things at length, and somehow it’s still all too much. Reveals that should be massive elicit not much more than a shrug. The problem is, perhaps, that Chibnall’s writing a Wikipedia page rather than a story – there’s no clear emotional angle. It’s more interested in getting a lot of information across than in exploring what this information means or how we should feel about it.

There’s a lot the Doctor should be angry about – the experimentation done to her, having her memories wiped, the damage Tecte’un is doing to the universe in the Doctor’s name – yet her biggest moment of anger is about having been found next to a wormhole (presumably because the script wants us to notice this information for when it becomes relevant next episode).

The memory wipe is a particularly dodgy ground, because Doctor Who has a history here. Back in Series 4, the Doctor wiped Donna Noble’s memory because of some plot gubbins, an ending which always felt unnecessary and unfair to the character. In Series 9, Steven Moffat interrogated this idea by having the Doctor and Clara face the need to forget each other, and the Doctor dealt his own medicine. And then in Series 12, Chibnall showed he’d entirely forgotten those lessons learned by having the Doctor very casually, and for no legible reason at all, wipe the memories of Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan. This turned out to be a particularly odd story decision given that that series’ arc would later introduce the fact that the Doctor herself has had many of her early memories stolen.

And now, the Doctor is offered the chance to get those memories back. Is the show intelligent enough, like Moffat was, to draw the comparison with the Doctor’s own thefts of memory, to acknowledge and interrogate this intrusive act? Of course not. Once again, it’s all data.

If you come out of Survivors of the Flux able to explain the plot, then well done. But if you come out of it able to explain the story – i.e. how the Doctor feels about what’s been done to her, and how we’re meant to feel – then you’re seeing something we’re missing. It’s all just a lot of information – a Wikipedia page.

Meanwhile…

Yaz, Dan, and Jericho are trapped in the 1900s. They’re given a warning by the Doctor that, shortly after the destruction of the universe which happened on October 31st 2021, the Earth is likely to be invaded by evil refugees.

(OK, side point – Problem #4 with Chibnall’s scripts is a political conservativeness at odds with the values the Doctor has previously espoused – remember when she sided with Space Amazon against the workers they were abusing, and let the Trump analogy guy get away with it twice? And here, while the real-world media continues to demonise immigrants, she warns Yaz that, because of a catastrophe, there are a lot of “displaced creatures” in need of a new home… and the Earth needs to be protected from them. Somehow, there are still idiots on the internet complaining that Doctor Who is “too woke” because it has a woman in.)

Anyway, seemingly having foreseen that the companions would get trapped in the 1900s and be in need of a tenuously relevant side quest to keep them busy, the Doctor sets them off travelling the world and speaking to psychics in order to find out the date that the Earth will be invaded shortly following the events of October 31st 2021. At one point they find out that this date will be December 5th, but they can’t work out which year.

They then get completely sidetracked and travel all the way to China, to paint a message on the floor of the forest, for someone over a hundred years in the future, and somehow the message survives and gets picked up at the right moment, but the receiver can’t do anything about it… and then it’s not mentioned again. Even if that does get picked up again in the following episode (surely it has to), it’s still a contender for the most bizarre and pointless bit of plotting Doctor Who’s ever had. Problem #1 at full force.

It’s a shame, because like with the Doctor, there’s definitely potential in this story. On an aesthetic level, having the three of them exploring tombs across the world in an Indiana Jones-esque adventure is great fun, and Yaz’s outfits – like Rachel Weisz in The Mummy crossed with her own desire to match the Doctor – are a style highlight of the series.

It’s also an opportunity to reflect on the companions’ emotional states at this point, which is picked up on well in the scene with Yaz watching the hologram Doctor; Mandip Gill subtly very good as she reveals how much her brave face is a cover for feeling the loss of her best friend. But that emotional edge isn’t followed through after this one scene, and it also draws attention to how little development Dan has been given since his promising start in Episode 1 – he’s barely had a scene with the Doctor, and we have zero idea how he’s feeling about the whole time travel thing. There’s Problem #3 again.

Elsewhere, there are plenty of sub-sub-plots going on. The highlight of these is the Grand Serpent slithering his way through the history of UNIT – yes, there’s yet more lore being explained, but it gets the references in without being reliant on continuity, Craig Parkinson’s slimy performance is a lot of fun, and it’s nice to see Kate Stewart return.

Vinder is captured by the baddies, Bel is whisked away to Earth, and Karvanista presses some buttons. Like with the 1904 storyline, there are some nice aesthetics, particularly Swarm and Azure’s spooky gothic space station, but like with the Doctor’s bits, it’s information more than story, chess pieces being moved around a board, set-up in need of a more substantial pay-off. But we’re five episodes in now, and the time remaining for that pay-off is getting very thin.

So… yeah. After a promising start, Flux has reverted to several of the key failings of Chris Chibnall’s era of Doctor Who. Yet, thanks to the ambition and mythic vastness of the storytelling and the pacing given to it by the many things going on, it’s still an entertaining enough watch, far from the worst Doctor Who has been. The ideas are there, which is what makes it so frustrating that the execution isn’t better.

Kieron Moore

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