My instant reaction to this episode is that it was the best episode of Doctor Who since Jodie Whitaker became the Doctor. This was also perhaps the best episode with the Weeping Angels since Flesh and Stone back in season 5.
This episode saw the Doctor catch up with Claire, who we had met in episode 1 of Flux and we also had Yaz and Dan separated from the Doctor for the most part so we were able to see their dynamic develop more.
The episode began where the last one ended, with a Weeping Angel in control of the Tardis and cornering our heroes. The Doctor pulls a trick which dispatched of the Angel and the Tardis landed itself in the 1960s. Upon arriving there, Yaz, Dan and the Doctor get roped into helping to find a missing child.
It feels a little weird with the Flux and Swarm out there that they’d waste time searching for a single child, but that does kind of sum up the universe view of the Doctor, who has always been one to save the individual as well as the masses.
Yaz and get fall prey to an Angel and get zapped back in time to 1901, because I’m sure you’ll all remember, the Weeping Angels kill you nicely by sending you back in time and absorbing your potential time energy.
Once back in time, Yaz and Dan find the missing girl, Peggy and it’s not long before they learn that an older lady they had met in the 1960s is the same girl who never found a way back home. They learn this with some weird time rift which is basically a split screen effect where half the screen is one time period in the 19060s at night and the other half is 1901 during the day.
The better half of the episode came from the Doctor meeting a Professor Jericho who is studying Claire to learn of her issues. She sees visions of herself as having Angel wings and dust pours from her eye just as it had with Amy Pond back in season 5. Unlike with Amy where these were symptoms of an Angel being an image just in her mind, it would seem Claire truly is y]turning into a Weeping Angel and the Doctor has to psychically connect with her to speak with the Angel in Claire’s mind to make a deal to save her.
The reason that The Doctor would agree to make a deal with the Angel is that it reveals that this rogue Angel is being pursued by the Division, and that it can reveal everything about the Doctors own past relating back to the timeless children story.
This episode by far does the best job in years to make the Angels as scary as they’ve ever been. They attempt to enter the house at various points and really seem like an unstoppable threat here more than ever. We see more than a few references to zombie behaviour even down to a army of Angel arms coming through walls like you would expect to see zombie arms breaking through boarded up windows.
This escape from the Angels leads the Doctor to the time rift where Yaz and Dan are and we then get one of the best Doctor Who cliffhangers in many a year. It turns out the rogue Angel is betraying the Doctor and that the one person the Division more than itself is the Doctor.
We then get this amazing sequence where an army of Weeping Angels transform the Doctor into a Weeping Angel. This evokes some Hans Solo carbonite vibes, but seeing the Doctor changed into a stone Angel was a great visual.
Could this mean that all Weeping Angels were once Time Lords? There is certainly previous evidence to this effect as Rassilon had referred to time lords he wasn’t favourable to as the Weeping Angels of old in the final episode before the 10th Doctor regenerated. We know little about the Angels origin and in one sense the extra mystery adds a lot to them. But this said, the Angels being linked to time lords does give a lot of potential to future story telling as if every Angel was a time lord that could mean there are lots of past time lords who could be revived in some way for the future.
The episode also gave us some more of Bel and we see that she helps one guy avoid being captured in a Passenger vessel, whilst thousands of others are taken and we still need to learn more about what Swarm’s plan for these taken people is exactly. We don’t catch up with Vinder until a rare mid end credits sequence where we see that he is only just behind her. And she leaves him a message which gets cut off. This was maybe the silliest part of the episode as Be, acknowledged
Conclusion
This was by far the best episode of Doctor Who Flux, and what I’d consider the best of Jodie Whitaker’s run as the 13th Doctor. This episode really added more to a favourite villain and this far didn’t hurt their legacy at all. It also gave a great cliffhanger and will be interesting to see how the Doctor escapes her Stone form. Roll on next week!
