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?

The answer is "they just do.". We're just... in the Crimean War setting for the A plot of the episode now. On some level, this is disappointing. There's a real chef's kiss level bad media literacy take from the Radio Times of all things that dropped after this episode, complaining that the next time trailers deflate the question of if Doctor Who and her friends are going to get out of this one. Of course they are. It's Doctor Who. They're not going to be killed by the Flux or, to pull from the end of this episode, Yaz and Vinder aren't going to be Thanos snapped and killed instantly in the opening to next week's episode. The temporal grace cliffhanger game is not wondering if they'll get out of this one, but how. The flip side to all this is that if your answer to how is "they just do", it does deflate a little bit. That's the whole fun of cliffhangers, seeing if the resolution is interesting and inventive. "They just do" isn't either. It just is. Rant aside, we're in the Crimean War and there's a Sontaran on a horse. Chibnall's very in love with this image, even making a fun joke about it later, and as a writer I can really see that being one of the setpieces in his head he was excited about while crafting the seeds of the story. Let's talk about Sontarans, then.

I mean, it's the fucking Sontarans. Has anyone in the history of this show taken the Sontarans even a little seriously since, oh, let's be really generous and say 1975? They're the Ferengi of Doctor Who, introduced as a credible threat but remaining around as "legacy potato alien monster". They're a joke. A punchline. One that Moffat used to great effect with Strax in his tenure, but nowhere near the threat of a Dalek or something. Yet, here we are. A big serious Sontaran story involving the invasion of Earth and the meddling of its history. Just what you need to rile up the Doctor. Actually, let's go into that scheme a bit, because some disturbing parallels present themselves. The Sontarans are taking the opportunity of the incoming Flux to land in Liverpool in 2021, start building ships, and then going back in time to fuck with Earth's history to eventually have taken over the planet for all of time, starting with the Crimean War. First off, who do you fuckers think you are with this scheme, the Silence? At least we were in on the joke during that time and we knew the eyepatch girl and her Edvard Munch posse were reality-destroying buffoons (Brief aside, when Yaz and Dan faded away, I thought we were doing Back To The Future "oh no history's been changed and they're erased" bullshit. Then when Dan is in Liverpool 2021 with Sontarans everywhere I thought we were doing Back To The Future 2 bad timeline stuff). Secondly, let me put it this way: Our space-travelling heroes return to Earth to find an alien race messing around with a war in the past as part of a bid to change history and take over the planet. Chris Chibnall is doing "Storm Front", the opener to Season 4 of Enterprise and the closing shot of that show's Temporal Cold War arc. The phrase "Chris Chibnall's Temporal Cold War" arc fills me with an existential dread that would stretch this paragraph out for far longer than is necessary. Just picture some screaming in your head and let's move on.

We also have Mary Seacole in the mix. A historical figure and person of color who interacts with the Doctor, has her own agency and vibrancy, whose assistance in the story via her recon mission gives the Doctor the clues she needs to piece together how to defeat the Sontarans, and she doesn't get her memory erased at the end to preserve the sacrosanct Arc Of History As It Should Be? Are we sure Chris Chibnall wrote this one? You've also got the army general guy, who fills everyone's favorite niche of Writer's Gotta Eat. Opposes the Doctor at first, stops her from resolving anything with the Sontarans before a big battle happens, ends up blowing them all up as they retreat Christmas Invasion style so the Doctor can get real mad at him and then swan off without doing much in retaliation other than being disdainful of the darker side of humanity. Talking of the defeat of the Sontarans, and tying it in to Dan's exploits in 2021... boy howdy Chibnall really ran with the "probic vent" thing. Like I know it's a reference to some Sontaran adventure in the past, but for the life of me I cannot tell you which one invented it. I'd hesitantly guess the very first, but that's one of those stories where I'm pretty sure I've seen it but couldn't tell you a goddamned thing that happens past Part 1. Anyway, now we're probic vent obsessed. The plan at the end is all about stopping their gas exchange or whatever, Dan gets to whack a bunch of Sontarans with a wok, Karvanista is there for more fun buddy cop shenanigans... it's fun. It also gives us the "tempura command" joke and holy fuck did I love that. If we simply must have a new old white man companion I demand he be written as a clueless himbo like this. 

Then there's our B plot, and.... hoo boy. It's here where Chris Chibnall flirts with the edge of the precipice he plummeted into during Ascension Of The Cybermen. Most of this entire thing is getting certain players and hooks all together in this hiterto-unseen, unreferenced location called the Temple Of Atropos with some spooky guardians called the Mouri in need of repair. Yaz meets Vinder, that Victorian era dude is here for one scene again, and then we end with Swarm and Azure and a third new guy? Followed by a shitload of lore about the planet Time or something and it just all went over my head. This is Chibnall falling into the trap I was wary of in last week's writeup, wherein we pile more mysteries on for every one we solve. Given that this planet is called Time and the next episode's title, I have some faith that we will get something. It's not as infuriating as Ascension was, mostly because it still actually makes some sort of sense as an advance of Swarm's master plan and it's only two weeks in, but the anxious part of me worries. I do hope Chibnall learned something from the reception to Ascension and Timeless Children, and how you cannot pass the buck of paying off your setup to the final part without making it all filler, no killer. We can only hope for some actual payoff to what's happening. Oh, and Yaz and Vinder are in mortal danger. We touched on that in our cliffhanger discussion. How, not if. We're not doing a bullshit non-subverted Face The Raven where Yaz dies for her hubris of being more Doctorish. We're just not, in part 3 of 6. Final thoughts? This is again okay. An improvement for Chibnall in some aspects, a worrying possibility of being up to his old tricks in others. We'll be watching you, Chibnall. Explain something next time. Explain.