![]() Next week’s series finale, which airs on Sunday Decem– the date of the script’s fictional apocalypse – has left itself with a lot to do. The plot ate itself, burped loudly, then ate that too. This felt like it was many middles, welded clumsily together. Let’s hope he reintroduces stories with a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s still 18 months before the mighty Russell T Davies returns as showrunner. There were some witty one-liners and fan-pleasing callbacks but way too much going on. If the Doctor returned to Division, she could open it and be complete again. She’d stored the erased memories in a quantum-locked fob watch. Why destroy an entire universe when they could simply kill the Doctor, sacrilege as that might sound? Awsok duly unmasked herself as the Doctor’s ancient adoptive mother, Tecteun, who’d found the “Timeless Child”, raised her as a Time Lord and later wiped her memory. ![]() Division had engineered the Flux to protect itself from the Doctor. Verbose exchanges between the Doctor and Awsok tried to fill in the blanks. Secretly working for the Sontarans, he’d cleared the path for an invasion of Earth by the belligerent potato-heads. Long-serving scientific officer Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) – daughter of the Brigadier, of course – eventually stood up to him but it was too late. He seized control of UNIT by killing anyone in his path with a psychic snake. We flashed back to 1958 to see the taskforce being founded by General Farquhar (a typically classy cameo from Robert Bathurst) before it was infiltrated by slippery Prentis (Craig Parkinson), aka ageless interplanetary politician The Grand Serpent. Longtime Whovians would have been delighted to see the return of military organisation UNIT. So did scenery-chewing Ravager villains Swarm and Azure (Sam Spruell and Rochenda Sandall). Tunnel-building businessman Joseph Williamson (Steve Oram – or with his top hat and bushy sideburns, was it Noddy Holder?) continued to pop up in places he shouldn’t. Space captain Vinder (Jacob Anderson) was imprisoned alongside Dan’s missing girlfriend, Diane (Nadia Albina). Pregnant Bel (Thaddea Graham) teamed up with canine warrior Karnavista (Craige Els). Unfortunately, writer Chris Chibnall gave himself several more balls to juggle. Intertwining these two story threads would have been ample. As the narrative became increasingly convoluted, I found myself longing for more interludes with the intrepid trio and fewer in space.ĭe facto leader Yaz came into her own, telling her sidekicks: “There’s no use being squeamish, we’ve got the future to save.” There were further ambiguous hints that her relationship with the Doctor was more than purely platonic. These sequences were enormous fun – Indiana Jones meets Agatha Christie with a sci-fi twist. It was now 1904 and they were in Mexico, looking chic in period costume while searching for clues about the impending Flux cataclysm.Īfter escaping dynamite deathtraps and a homicidal waiter, they climbed a Tibetan mountain for a hilarious audience with a soothsaying hermit, before painting a giant SOS on the Great Wall of China. ![]() They transported her back to shadowy Gallifreyan organisation “The Division”, where she met a spaghetti-faced Ood and the enigmatic Awsok (Barbara Flynn).Ĭompanions Yaz (Mandip Gill) and Dan (John Bishop) had been marooned with Professor Eustacius Jericho (Kevin McNally) in a Devon village circa 1901. As we returned, she was stuck in a vast field of the deadly statues, who whispered a blend of sinister threats and plot exposition in her ear. We last saw the 13th Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) turned to stone by Weeping Angels. Far too much leaping around – I counted five planets across half-a-dozen different timelines – may have left viewers feeling queasy rather than entertained. Once again in this frustrating series, there were moments of brilliance buried in a pile of piffle. Six-part story Flux reached its penultimate chapter with a muddled tangle of an episode titled Survivors of the Flux. I’m just trying to make sense of this series of Doctor Who (BBC One). No, I’m not going down a pothole to do my homework. Pass me a head torch, a compass, a length of rope, marker pens, a stack of Post-Its, a spare pair of trousers and a bulging reference book.
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