OK, so we’ve reached the finale of the shortened event series that is Doctor Who Flux. Lots and lots of mysteries and questions have been raised throughout the run, but now it’s time for answers.
And we got none.
I was shocked watching the episode that when it finished I was left with more questions than when it started. This series set up big questions and just dodged or ignored all of them.
That isn’t to say there wasn’t anything to enjoy whilst watching this episode, or many of the others in the 6 episode run, because there was. But it was the type of surface enjoyment you might get from seeing some monsters and occasionally witty dialogue, but not from there being a complete or satisfying story. The performances were fine, the characters were good, but the story was broken with many missing parts. It was a confusing mess, and they had this final episode to make sense of it all and they didn’t.
Just in case you didn’t keep track of all of the plot threads here’s my list of unanswered questions following the finale:
Who were Swarm and Azure and what was their relationship to the Doctor?
Why was Swarm able to regenerate?
Why was Azure hidden as a human?
What was the tracking device (maybe) that the human version of Azure and her partner had and what did they know of it? And why did she destroy it?
If the Lupari (dog people) protect all humans where have they been every other time the Earth was attacked?
Who exactly is the entity ‘Time’ and why are they something of a villain?
When was the Doctor The Fugitive Doctor?
Who exactly are Bel and Vinder and ultimately why were they in the show?
Is Bel and Vinder’s unborn child the Timeless Child?
Why didn’t the Doctor restore their memories once they had the watch?
Why did Diane snub Dan at the end?
Why didn’t we learn anything more about the Timeless Children?
Why didn’t we learn more about Tecteun?
How did the Weeping Angel that knew the Doctor’s past know it?
Why was a Weeping Angel a baddie to other Weeping Angels?
What was with Swarm’s shoulder pads?
So there is a multiverse now…right?
Oh and here’s a big one…didn’t almost the entire universe get destroyed by the Flux? Isn’t the Doctor going to do anything about that!?!
There are more lingering questions, but you get the idea. This show was a huge mess. The stuff about the Timeless Child has been hanging since the end of the previous series and this gave no new information other than last week that Tecteun said it was true and not a lie by the Master. There are only three episodes left with the 13th Doctor, and whilst we only have to wait a few weeks to get the next one, who knows if there will be any answers.
A great, but wasted idea in this episode was that the Sontarans formed an alliance with the Daleks and Cybermen, and then betrayed them to wipe them all out. This was such a brilliant idea in that it showed that the Sontarans can defeat the most deadly of other monsters and outsmarted and out strategised them. This was by far the biggest accomplishment for the monster in the history of the show….but it lasted all of a few seconds. Karvinista, who found out that the Sontarans had killed his entire species, instantly got his revenge on the Sontarans and killed all of them before they could celebrate their victory.
This was so rushed and looking at the series I feel like this alliance between the Sontarans, Cybermen and Daleks should have been the focus of an entire episode just for the Sontarans to betray the others at the end of an episode to set them up as the ultimate threat to the Doctor. Then the entire next episode could have shown them in control until Karvinista got his revenge…I don’t know, that is probably better saved for fan fiction, but it was all such a mess it’s hard to not think of ways this could have been improved.
Karvinista by the end of the episode didn’t seem to care that he was the last of his species and was just engaging in silly banter, and that is a problem with the stakes in this episode and series. Because why should the dog man care his kind are all dead, when the Doctor and the others didn’t seem to care that the Flux still managed to wipe out most of the universe. It didn’t even give us a sense of the Doctor and companions setting off to fix what went wrong at the end.
Also did the human race not know that there was a worldwide battle? Or did they forget it? Because at the end Dan was just happily telling people at the Liverpool Museum the same trivia he was at the start of the first episode. Didn’t it matter to the world that it was almost wiped out?
And this episode further explored The Grand Serpent, and his working with the Sontarans and infiltration of Unit…but if I’m honest I don’t really know who he is or why he was there. He was mildly defeated in such a way that of course he can come back at some point.
Also the Doctor was split into three…although with Time taking the Doctor’s form at the end I guess we had four of her. This was a strange multi Doctor episode as other than when the Doctor met time, the various forms of the Doctor barely shared a screen together. They were in scenes at the same time, but they didn’t really do much green screen work to make them on screen at the same time, so keeping track of which was which wasn’t easy.
Yaz and Dan, like other companions of the Doctor before, spent years battling on behalf of the Doctor, but not by the Doctor’s side. We’ve seen this previously with the likes of Martha, Donna and Rose, and it always feels like there’s a big gap in the relationships because of this. Dan especially, has barely met the Doctor when it’s all said and done. So nope, we didn’t get any further development on the Yaz-Doctor relationship…or maybe that’s just fan ideas and never existed in the first place.
What we did get instead was an awful scene where a Sontaran was obsessed with chocolate and willing to betray their whole kind to get more chocolate…this was dumb and cringe.
I don’t mean to be so negative about the episode, as there was stuff to enjoy, but ultimately it didn’t deliver almost anything good. There was some fun dialogue and excitement and explosions, but the story was trash. I’ll probably mellow about the episode when things move on in the future of the show, but as a stand-alone episode or story this failed in almost every way. The series set up expectations and didn’t deliver on any of them.
Conclusion
This was bad. It was fun enough to watch in a mindless sense, but the show itself set up this story to be much more and left glaring holes. Characters didn’t really progress and we didn’t find out almost anything about the main storylines of Swarm/Azure, Time, Fugitive Doctor…the list goes on. We just have to pray that the next three episodes of the 13th Doctor actually give some answers and if not that Russell T Davies picks up where he left off and fixes this show, as Chris Chibnal’s writing has broken it.
