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.

I'll be honest. When I looked back at the blog to find that temporal grace line, what I came across were my words from over 18 months ago. They were my words on Chris Chibnall's Ascension Of The Cybermen, an episode I still maintain as the nadir of his time running the show thus far. After 9 episodes of being teased and anticipating the arc, hook after hook dangling, Ascension Of The Cybermen was one half Cyberman stompy death robot bullshit and one half cryptic nonsense that wouldn't make sense until a week later when we got context. I was fed up with Chibnall being all tease and refusing to put up something that actually cohered and didn't just pass the buck on to his future self to come up with something interesting. The Halloween Apocalypse, then, sees Chris Chibnall back to these old tricks. Being that it's a season premiere instead of the penultimate episode, I am far more patient with The Halloween Apocalypse than I was for Ascension Of The Cybermen. It's the same thing, though, but somehow also dialed up to 11 thanks to the format. What do I mean by that? Well, dig on in.

Flux is clearly an Event. A six-part story spanning multiple plotlines and planets and characters. This is the state of television these days, and you see this sort of Event plotting in stuff like Stranger Things. I'm sure there are many more examples one can think of, but that's the vibe I'm getting. As an Event, it has all these plotlines and characters and whatnot. The Halloween Apocalypse sets many of them up. Over its runtime we get (deep breath here) a man in Victorian Liverpool digging tunnels in the earth for some reason, canine aliens who we're unsure are friend or foe, psychic visions of a creepy antagonist who escapes his ancient prison to Thanos snaps people to dust, who has a female counterpart and remembers the Doctor from probably ancient times as his archnemesis or whatever, a lady who knows the Doctor and Yaz but whom they haven't met yet who promptly gets zapped by a Weeping Angel, a man on a space station watching a nebula before escaping a planet-destroying wave of something, and the Sontarans observing all of this and being pleased.

That's a lot of hooks. Like, holy shit, that is a lot of fucking hooks. That's all the episode is, though. Hooks. All hook, no bait. Well, one hook has a little wriggling worm on the line that I can actually talk about, but all in good time here. In a mad way, it's peak Chris Chibnall. Re-reading my thoughts on Ascension Of The Cybermen has sort of galaxy brained me. This is it. This is my personal summation of the Chibnall era. Setup. Endless endless setup which ends in a limp payoff. Not a straightforward payoff like RTD, or a subversive payoff like Moffat. A limp payoff. I've done this song and dance before. I feel like Charlie Brown and Chibnall's holding the payoff to all his hooks like that damn football. (Yes, I did watch It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown two days ago, what of it?) JUST FOLLOW ME FOR FIVE WEEKS GUYS AND BE REALLY EXCITED, I SWEAR IT'S GOING TO LAND THIS TIME, I'VE GOT A SIGNED CONTRACT!! If it's good, I'll call a spade a spade and admit I didn't know what I was talking about. If I sit here on December 6th and type out "I told you so", well, I did. I did tell you so. There are a few ways Chibnall can go about things, having started Flux off with all these hooks. The next four episodes or so could each focus on one of those hooks entirely. We know next week is the Sontaran one, for instance, but that admittedly was the weakest of the hooks in The Halloween Apocalypse. For my money, I think that The Halloween Apocalypse is how things are going to be. We focus on one of the hooks with the Doctor and friends, cut back to those other hooks and plotlines as they develop, and then the next episode has the Doctor and friends drop in on that plotline and get involved with its development as we go. That brings us neatly to actually talking about what happens in The Halloween Apocalypse.

Involving the Doctor and Yaz in the Karvanista plotline, as well as entangling the new companion Dan into it as the confused everyman. Dan's functionally fine, basically the Arthur Dent to lead us into the plotline as he gets captured by Karvanista for mysterious purposes. Confused Scouse intensifies. It should be noted that I've seen a take or two about Chibnall's over the top handling of Dan being poor and unable to afford food with literal bare cupboards, and the unfortunate optics of "OH NO HE CAN'T AFFORD THAT FANCY LAPTOP THIS IS A TRAP!". Which, sure, Chibnall stepped in it there, but nobody shilled for Space Amazon or mindwiped people against their consent so for Chibnall Who we're doing pretty good. Karvanista is kinda neat and has a fun accent, but they kind of lay on the references thick in his introduction. Not the cold open death trap the Doctor and Yaz find themselves in, which manages to have exposition so clunky you'd almost think Chibnall was taking the piss out of himself, but when Karvanista breaks into Dan's home by busting his door down with an axe like Jack Nicholson in The Shining before trying to Jedi mind trick Dan into trusting him? What? Chibnall, what? Huh? What are you doing??? Anyway Karvanista and his species, the Lupari (Note: Friend of the blog Christa Mactire has dabbled in Doctor Who fiction, and ages before this aired created a race of alien wolves called the Luparians, Chibnall confirmed for ripping off my friends :V ) are actually protecting humanity in their own weird way, by forcibly taking them offworld before the Mysterious Flux comes to destroy planet Earth. I'll give one to Chibnall. The idea of everyone on Earth having an designated Space Doggie Protector is kinda cute. It's a nice idea. I can praise the man.

Of course, Karvanista is also one of the last remaining members of the Division, those shadowy folks tied into the Timeless Children lore from last season. This is very weird, as I thought that the Division was ancient Gallifreyan in origin, why in the world would they hire a contemporary canine alien for their black ops? Regardless, this gives the Doctor extra motivation to pursue him through space; to inquire about the Division, those folks who stole countless memories of her past. This leads us to the relationship between the Doctor and Yaz, and... hmm. A friend of the blog is convinced someone ghost wrote this for Chibnall because Yaz actually has a character. I mean, we'll see how long it takes Chibnall to go for broke and focus on the new old white guy he shotgunned into the show while Bradley Walsh's chair was still warm, but Yaz in this episode feels like elements of Ace and Clara were thrown in. She likes travelling with the Doctor, though they get into dangerous hijinks, she's technically adept enough now to help out with alien tech hacking and stuff like that, and she's also unafraid to call the Doctor out as she sees it. This is another dangling hook, no doubt, as the Doctor is deliberately keeping secrets from Yaz about this Division bullshit she's investigating. Yaz knows she's not getting the whole story, and lets the Doctor know that. On the one hand, hey, Yaz has a character now! Maybe! Who'd have thought? On the other... this feels like leftovers. A referential rehash, if you will, to the Seventh Doctor and Ace. He, too, often kept secrets from his companion and she called him on his bullshit. There's even a cheeky nitro-9 reference in the cold open, so I know this is on Chibnall's mind. I like that Yaz has something to work with here, something I can latch on to in writing about her. On the other hand, if this just leads to miscommunication bullshit, I won't be so happy. Besides which, 7 and Ace stories are over 30 years old. The companion calling the Doctor on their bullshit was done masterfully with 12 and Clara, and there ain't no way in hell Chibnall is going to top that. A pale imitation at best. It worries me.

In the end, The Halloween Apocalypse is okay. Like most Chibnall episodes, it functions. It doesn't commit any major ethical or plotting errors, and is completely adequate Doctor Who. Still, it worries me. I worry that the rest of the episodes are going to be all setup with little payoff. Over the months of waiting, the lack of marketing and perceived spoilerphobia of Chibnall's Doctor Who has been brought up by many. A show afraid to even mention it exists, which only gave us an airdate a few weeks beforehand, which gave crumbs of promotion and arguably mismanaged its marketing and crossed wires. That it aired at all almost feels like a leak, but the episode itself kind of mirrors that in its own way. It's as if The Halloween Apocalypse is spoilerphobic towards the plot of the series it's a premiere episode of. All hook, no bait. All football, no kick. All setup and tease and anticipation with no payoff of its own. Will the next five weeks give us more of the same? We'll find out, you and I, together. I may yet yell at this show for its all-foreplay approach and demand that it shit or get off the pot. Time will tell. Until then, we know that we're going to Sontaran land next time, so let's see how that goes.