Doctor Who Series 13 First Impressions: Episode 5 (Flux Chapter Five: Survivors Of The Flux)

Survivors Of The Flux? More like SURVIVORS OF THE FUCKING GARBAGE CHIBNALL ERA LORE BOMBS!

I did not enjoy this. I very much did not enjoy this. Given that it invokes, repeats, and doubles down on the Shocking Revelations Of The Timeless Children, it invites direct comparison with that particular episode. That episode, as your reminder, was a hot mess that made even a hot mess like The Rise Of Skywalker look good by comparison. They were both running on similar registers of Shocking Revelations About The Protagonist's Origins, and seemingly rejecting those origins at the end in favor of some other ideal the protagonist believed in strongly. At the time, I found The Timeless Children hilarious. Reaching So Bad It's Good levels, both in how brazen and unbelievable its sincerity was and the complete joke it made out of the Cybermen with stuff like "I want to turn the Cybermen into Just Robots" and the fucking Cyber Time Lords. It was funny. I was laughing. Other people weren't, and I respect that because I understand now. Survivors Of The Flux has aired, and I'm not laughing either. Okay, that's partially a lie, some of the Shocking Revelations got the laughs out of me, but in general I'm not laughing. This isn't funny. It's dire.

Doctor Who Series 13 First Impressions: Episode 4 (Flux Chapter Four: Village Of The Angels)

Two kind of gonzo episodes of Doctor Who in a row in the Chibnall era? What, did they hear me or something? We're 2/3rds of the way through Flux now, and that dreaded shit I keep mentioning is starting to come into play now. Chibnall passing the buck and delaying answering things in order to raise more intrigue and keep the viewer on the hook. At this point, the delayed narrative tactic is Chibnall Who's equivalent of a magical girl betrayal arc for me; it's a storytelling element that, done poorly, makes me wary of any flirtation with it in subsequent media. Unlike the rest of Flux, Chapter Four here actually has a cowrite with Maxine Alderton. As we did back in Series 12, one has to be careful not to fall into the biased trap of stating sincerely "every strength in the episode was due to Alderton and every weakness was due to Chibnall". It's extra tricky this week because... well, get me out of this pitfall, because it feels kind of true. You can feel Chibnall's fingerprints on key parts of the episode, and those are the parts that don't hold up. Before we get into those, let's get into what does work. Let's get into the Angels.

Doctor Who Series 13 First Impressions: Episode 3 (Flux Chapter Three: Once, Upon Time)

Chibnall is still Chibnall, but I do appreciate the freshness of him giving us a different flavor of Chibnall. With Chapter 3 of Flux, God help us, we can add the phrase "Gonzo Chibnall" to our lexicon. A strange, ethereal dream of a nonlinear episode that floats fractured in time, delving into the realm of memory and premonition, expositing and teasing and explaining in equal measure while also dropping a whopper of crackling metaphysical concepts. What's not to like? Well, it's a Chibnall, so it doesn't quite hit the highest of highs and actually pokes some unfortunate lows. The strange ethereal dreamlike quality feels like it reflects Chibnall's writing process up to this point, as he cribs so much half-remembered detritus from the driftwood of memory of the RTD years. This time, at least, he seems to have half-remembered Steven Moffat had some good driftwood in the past. Again, I appreciate the freshness of that, if nothing else. Of course, as so many of the Moffat fans who form my little corner of the Internet have pointed out, a Moffat-penned episode would have been good.

Doctor Who Series 13 First Impressions: Episode 2 (Flux Chapter Two: War Of The Sontarans)

Welcome back to part two of the grandiose adventure Flux has laid out for us! War Of The Sontarans is, in a lot of ways, very telling in what it is. With a few tweaks, it could be its own standalone episode. One can easily imagine a version of this with some stuff shuffled around and the B plot replaced with some other B plot that tied into the whole Sontaran thing. Last time I mentioned the numerous hooks dangling about waiting to be tugged on, and they are less tugged on in this episode than left mildly dangling in the breeze as another hook is added to one line. There's a real danger there, but we'll get to that when we get to the B plot. Why don't we kick off by talking about the resolution to that intense cliffhanger from last week, where the Flux was rampaging straight for the TARDIS? The question lingering over our heads in temporal grace for the last week was, how will Doctor Who and her friends get out of this one?

Doctor Who Series 13 First Impressions: Episode 1 (Flux Chapter One: The Halloween Apocalypse)

I suggest a new strategy, Doctor: let the Lupari win.

Well, here we are again. For the next six weeks I get to talk about the newest season of Doctor Who. Chris Chibnall's last full season, even. Well, as full as a six-week miniseries Event can be. Really, we can be sympathetic to that because of corona. I'm less annoyed than I was in 2012 when we got five weeks of The Amy And Rory Farewell Show as our series for the year. Hell, 2/5ths of that was Chibnall, even. It's almost prescient. Well, a new episode has aired, the first chapter of the Flux storyline/subtitle/what have you. I now have to try and make sense of it, in my usual way, but as I so often like to say.... Wait, how do I put it? (It is at this point that I went back to look at the Series 12 First Impressions to see how I put it.) Ah yes. I call it "a period of temporal grace", a brief snapshot I capture in text like a fly in amber of a moment in time where I don't know shit about shit with this show. Let us see, then, what we've got. Let's see Chapter One: The Halloween Apocalypse.