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.

Before ripping into the main bit, I will work on the side bits. Yaz, Dan, and Jericho stranded at the start of the 20th century and trying to find their way home is... ehhh. It's clear these are supposed to be the funny bits, with the temple exploration and the hermit in Nepal clearly comedic beats. It's a little juvenile, but like... fine. Doctor Who can do jokes, and these aren't the funniest, but they don't actively offend. Their plotline also ties into Joseph Williamson again, and finally we get something from his hook of repeatedly showing up. His mystery tunnels were time tunnels and the Flux has fucked with them? Okay. Really, I said I'd work on the side bits, but there's little meat here. I kind of liked Yaz wistfully listening to the Doctor's hologram again, but it reminded me of, of all things, an episode of RWBY. Chibnall, honey, you're not coming off good with that comparison. There's also some more mild piece-placing involving Bel, Vinder, Dan's lady friend whose name I'm completely blanking on (Diane? Anne?), and Karvanista. Again, okay. The biggest B-plot, then, is some real bullshit. The Grand Serpent's back, he's on Earth, and he's working throughout the creation of UNIT to take it over from the inside? A couple things here. First, admittedly choking people with CGI snakes is kind of gnarly. Secondly, all of this long plan over 60 years of history turns out to be a plot to help... the Sontarans re-invade Earth. Oh my God we're still taking these potato fuckers seriously, and will be next week too judging by the trailer. Lastly, to do this, Chibnall has waded into fucking UNIT dating and cut the Gordian Knot there once and for all. Wow. Chris Chibnall actively doubling down on Massive Changes To Doctor Who Canon Forever? Perish the thought!

No really, perish the thought, don't make me talk about this. God. Fine, I will. Back into the Lore Bomb, friends. Back into hell. Once again, we're right back to where we were in March 2020. Doctor Who is stuck in a little room while the antagonist exposits Sweeping Changes To The Lore to her. I'll admit, I expected Chibnall to pass the buck one last time and save all this for the final episode and drop the ball. He subverted my expectations and dropped the ball here instead. Well done, great improvement, gold star. All of these hooks, all of this teasing and speculation, and what we get is the most obvious shit imaginable. The leader of the Division is Tecteun, the Doctor's abusive mom, and she's ending the universe and moving on to a new one because the Doctor ruined this one by being a paragon of hope or some shit. It's bog standard. It's boring. There's no majesty or mystery to it. It sounds like a bad copy of Matt Smith's Silence arc, where the baddies are so scared of what the Doctor might do that they walk backwards into hell and become even worse than what they're afraid the Doctor might become. I became fascinated by the Silence arc, both back in the day and on a rewatch of the Smith years a few years ago. The implications and retroactive knowledge of the arc lived and do live in my head rent-free. This Division shit has none of that for me. Certainly, I could almost see it, wondering just what black ops shadow cabal bullshit the Division feels entitled to get up to... but there's none of that crackling mystery behind it because so much other stuff is explained flatly. It doesn't feel like a mystery being cultivated. It feels like an oversight. I'll make a point that I want to come back to in the climax of the post before I move on tangents here. Tecteun's plan of abandoning this fucked universe to destroy it and hunker down in another one to start again has been compared to ultra-billionaires who could fix the planet's problems but are instead funding rockets and space travel and shit so they can get off this doomed rock and exploit another one instead of fixing the fucking planet they live on. There's a great Doctor Who story in that analogy, but this story is more concerned with Lore Bombs. We'll come back to that, but now to the shit that really makes me fed up with this episode.

Hoo boy. Where do I start? How about with muddled politics? 13's biggest objection to the literal universe-spanning shadow cabal puppetmastering all things for their evil plot is that... they interfere with things, and also hire The Bad Aliens like Weeping Angels. Having this Doctor think interference is the Division's biggest sin is Chibnall telling on himself. Even going into this Division shit, I was worried about how it would be stopped because it's way too big. This Doctor couldn't even stop Space Amazon in a satisfying manner, how the fuck is she supposed to stand up to a universal system of exploitation? We'll get into how the Division is "stopped", so to speak, but here's some more ethical fuckery. Tecteun actually tries pulling the "actually you're just as bad as me, Doctor" card by comparing Tecteun taking the young Doctor from outside a wormhole without knowing a thing about her, before experimenting on her like a lab rat for years, making her into a black ops shadow cabal agent, and then wiping her mind of god knows how many memories of the whole thing... God. What she compares it to is the Doctor taking on companions of her own, showing them around the universe, using them as "reassurance and company". What the fuck. What in the actual fuck. In the first place, this boneless spineless fucking attempt at dragging the Doctor down to the antagonist's level made me yell OH FUCK OFF at the screen for how goddamn idiotic it was. To properly detail how fucked up comparing the companion/Doctor relationship to a fucking exploitative science experiment would take me an essay on its own and I'm not writing that shit so, for brevity, it's a pathetic attempt at trying to go "WE'RE NOT SO DIFFERENT YOU AND I, DOCTOR, ACTUALLY YOU'RE A BADDIE TOO!". Even more ethically fucked is how, you know, the writing is trying to needle the Doctor, a sufferer of abuse at the hands of her abusive Division mom, as perpetuating the cycle of abuse in taking on companions. That is incredibly offensive and tone-deaf, especially for actual sufferers of abuse to hear. Sitting there watching, I just thought it was trite "you are the bad guy actually!" nonsense, but in the context of abuse and abuser it's literal gaslighting bullshit and can fuck right off. I'll leave this line of thought with a thread by friend of the blog, Christa Mactire, on how morally bankrupt this cheap "gotcha" attempt by the writing is.

Oh yeah, and speaking of trite overplayed bullshit, Tecteun pulls some Darth Vader shit. She's got all the Doctor's old memories in a fob watch (because Of Course) and basically says JOIN ME IN TAKING OVER THE NEW UNIVERSE AND I'LL GIVE THEM ALL BACK TO YOU. It was at this point I realized that the Doctor's season-long insistence on these memories can only end in her rejecting them at the end because she's the Doctor and those 14 lives are who she is. Once again, Chibnall's trying for that Rise Of Skywalker thing of "I am who I choose to be, not what my legacy is" but completely dropping the ball just like that movie. More so than that movie, because at least that point kind of hit with me in Rise Of Skywalker. The trailer next week shows that watch being opened right in front of her, so we're threatening the narrative collapse of getting them back, thus she's going to reject them at the end. We'll see in a week. As for the ending itself... Good god. So, given this Doctor's particular... shall we say, moral and ethical stances on oppressive systems and hegemonies, the Division poses a problem. It's too big. As I said up above, it's too big and there's no way in hell this Doctor would stop it... except, well, she does threaten to stop Tecteun to save the universe. Except then, Chibnall's consistency rears its ugly head. The last two series have had an unfortunate tendency to take proactivity out of the Doctor's hands when it comes to stopping her foes. Either she lets them go because of her muddled centrist views (Kerblam!, Jack Robertson) or some guest character shows up at the last minute to defeat the villain for her (King James I, Ko Sharmus). Surely given the sheer scope and magnitude of the Lore Bombs and the Doctor's relationship with Tecteun, the abusive mother and architect and mastermind of her entire personal history, one of these wouldn't be on the table? YOU'D BE WRONG! SWARM AND AZURE SHOW UP AND JUST DUST TECTEUN IN SECONDS! SHE'S FUCKING DEAD! KILLED CONVENIENTLY SO THE DOCTOR CAN GET NO CATHARSIS AND NOT HAVE TO DEAL WITH ANY ETHICAL RAMIFICATIONS OF STOPPING HER! FUCK! GOD DAMN IT! FUCKING GOD DAMN SHIT, CHIBNALL! This doesn't even stop her plan, and now the Sugar Skull Gang are going to menace the universe, I guess, and they need to be stopped. BOY I CAN'T WAIT FOR KARVANISTA TO SACRIFICE HIMSELF TO BLOW THOSE TWO UP SO THE DOCTOR DOESN'T NEED TO DO SHIT, WE WOULDN'T WANT THE PROTAGONIST OF THE SHOW TO BE FUCKING COMPETENT NOW WOULD WE?

Readers of the blog, I will be honest with you. If it were not for this blog, or the podcast I do on this show with my friends Kat and Rain, or the fact that Chibnall's out in a year and four episodes anyway... this would be where I'd quit. I soldier on for the sake of obligation to you and my friends, but know that I am broken and defeated by this. Know that the passion I felt for Doctor Who has been diminished by these times, by one Mr. Chris Chibnall. The show I fell in love with had intriguing characters and great sci-fi concepts which also had allegories for concerns in the real world. Chibnall's Doctor Who, especially Flux, has none of that. This story has the seeds of something really great and relevant to our world today. Tecteun's machinations, her abandoning of this universe for a new one to ruin and rule over instead of trying to save it, could say something about the ultra-wealthy and climate crisis and their own self-preservation instincts. The Division's mass manipulation of the galaxy, and Tecteun's entitlement, could say something about imperalism and national entitlement and shadowy government agencies and their own black ops programs. Even the Grand Serpent's long con of infiltrating UNIT from the very beginning could parallel and mirror with this! That's not the concern of this episode. That's not the concern of the Chibnall era. Chibnall has become the modern Ian Levine with this story. A Doctor Who not concerned with saying anything about the world, or resonating with anything personal and lovely and utopic. A Doctor Who which is only concerned with Doctor Who, its lore, and dropping all sorts of Lore Bombs to shake up that lore. No feeling. No political or social relevance. Only pedantic reference to itself.

To quote another nerd from very long ago: What has happened to the magic of Doctor Who?