Hello everyone, it’s the Classic Film Kid back again to talk about the most recent series of Doctor Who, titled Flux!

MILD SPOILER ALERT

In the weeks running up to Christmas, Whovians sat down to watch the final full series for the current doctor, Jodie Whittaker, and showrunner Chris Chibnall, and much like the last few years, it has proved to be incredibly divisive among the fandom. Naturally, there’s been the hate-filled keyboard warriors but thankfully we’re just leaving them to the side and actually dissecting what we’ve been given, constructively, and this has proved very difficult for me with Flux, hence why it’s taking me this long to write anything about it.

Flux is easily the most different series we’ve seen in the modern era of the show. It’s a six episode-long story arc, returning to the serialised storytelling of the classic series where stories would last typically four to six episodes (or in the case of Hartnell’s story The Daleks Master’s Plan, twelve). However, a full-season story arc was only attempted twice in this era, with Tom Baker’s The Key To Time and Colin Baker’s Trial of a Time Lord. These experiments had varying degrees of success – The Key To Time‘s idea of a quest through space didn’t connect as well as it seemed to on paper, and Trial Of A Time Lord tries some very brave things but utterly falls apart towards the end, thanks to some production issues that plagued that series. Overall, I would say that Flux is so far the best attempt that the show has done in successfully pulling off a season-long arc though it still has its own caveats and certain things sadly don’t hold together very well.

Flux continues in the same vein as Series 12, in its epic scale, many different locations and a plethora of villains. Series 12 was quite an inconsistent one but I have been coming back to it more than Series 11 as it is full of great ideas and fan service galore. Keeping this scale while streamlining it into an ongoing narrative is a wise decision considering the problem of the overstuffed episodes that has been a long-running issue with the new Who.

Despite having six episodes to play with Flux still feels like it’s given itself too much to do – we already had the baggage from Series 12 regarding the Division which needs several episodes to develop, but now on top of that, we have a universe-ending event to deal with, a new companion, a love story across space and time, two weird crystal aliens from the Doctor’s past, as well as the return of UNIT in the final two episodes. 

Having an overstuffed narrative has been this era’s biggest problem. There were duds in the Davies and Moffat years obviously, but I never felt like that was a result of putting too many ideas into one story – their problems were mainly filler scenes that never advanced the story so by the time the climax rolls around they’re in a panic for how to end it. Chibnall clearly has sound ideas, but he never had someone to stop him once he has enough, and that’s a shame as Flux has some fantastic stuff contained within it.

Karvanista is one of the Chibnall era’s best creations – the design is brilliant, he’s really funny but also has a genuinely interesting backstory that I wish was expanded on further. The scenes between him and Dan in the first two episodes are especially great, with really sharp dialogue between them that feels like the true escapist value of the show, something I feel the last two series had lost somewhat.

I also really enjoyed the presence of Dan, although I do think this is down to John Bishop more than the way the character is written. There are some great little moments of character development at the start, plus some more comedic touches that Bishop feels right at home in (him getting confused with the words ‘tempura’ and ‘temporal’ was one of the best gags of the whole series). However, he doesn’t really get much to do after Episode 3 and we don’t see enough of his interaction with Yaz and other incidental characters such as Jericho to fully sell their friendships. His lack of great moments with Yaz is also more frustrating, especially after what happens in Eve of the Daleks, where he apparently knows enough about her to confirm the widely-debated fan theory that she does in fact like the Doctor. 

The series undoubtedly looks beautiful – the temple of Atropos was a fantastic set, the foreign locations are gorgeously filmed, and even if it makes no sense whatsoever the entire sequence of the Doctor being forcibly turned into a Weeping Angel was utterly terrifying and I could not take my eyes off it. 

Where Flux stumbles is in the answering of the mysteries it sets up. Swarm and Azure were brilliant villains initially with a phenomenal design, and the initial hook that they knew the Doctor in a past Division life was thrilling to speculate – however we never found out what planet they were from, their past experiences, and they were unceremoniously killed in the last ten minutes. Again, this has been the biggest problem with this era – many great ideas that turn into so-so plotlines as they try doing them all at once.

I haven’t even brought up the Bel and Vinder angle of the series yet, but it’s honestly just another example of the one-great-idea-too-many problem for me. It’s a beautiful love story when we first see it, the flashback scenes are great but in the end, it doesn’t have a bearing on the overall plot. I do think the fans were wrong to expect too much out of this plotline, considering some of the theories were that Vinder was Romana and that Bel’s child would be the Doctor, but at the same time Chibnall announced Vinder with a lot of fanfare when in fact he’s just another unnecessary spoke in the wheel. 

And finally, the big one for many fans is the continued lack of clarity about the Division and the Doctor’s unknown past as the Timeless Child. We’ve been teased relentlessly about this ever since the Timeless Children and got flashbacks in Episode 3 of Flux where the amazing Jo Martin returns as her mysterious incarnation, but even now we still know very little, and that’s a shame as a lot of the speculation leading up to this series was hinting at further developments of this. I’m not saying that the Temple of Atropos needed to be ancient Gallifrey like everyone thought it would be, or that the Doctor needed to open the watch, but these things would have given us so much more clarity to mysteries that Chibnall seemingly wants to hold off revealing until the last episode this autumn. 

I’m sure that we will at least get answers to this – whether they’re satisfying or not is another matter – but I find it annoying how Flux had the chance to further develop this plotline and really enrich Doctor Who lore and instead chose to waste ideas for potentially great standalone episodes.

I want to conclude by talking about how Flux came to be in the way that we know it now. It’s clear that the planned Series 13 pre-Covid was not shortened, and it probably would have been a mix of standalone episodes with multi-parters, the same way that Series 12 was, and I do think that’s clear from the number of potential episode concepts that are in here – Sontarans in the Crimean War, a village full of Angels, and Joseph Williamson could all have been really solid standalone episodes. However, because of Covid, they’ve been jerry-rigged into an ongoing story that sadly feels thrown together. Flux wasn’t disappointing, per se, and I did have fun with a lot of it, but I am left frustrated that once again production issues (albeit ones that weren’t the team’s fault) have led to many great plot elements feeling undercooked and a lot of unnecessary baggage that means the era’s ongoing mysteries have not had room to breathe. I am still excited for the long-awaited return of the Sea Devils, as well as Jodie and Chibnall’s swansong later this year, but I am sad that their last full series wasn’t able to realise its full potential. 

Well, that does it for this review of Doctor Who: Flux. I hope you enjoyed this one, I did have to think good and hard about what I thought of this series so hopefully, it was worth the wait. I’m also really excited for the return of Russell T. Davies after this era is over. He was responsible for the rebirth of the show in the 2000s and considering his recent track record I hope he’ll be able to deliver something bold and new, so I am definitely looking forward to that!

My next review should be a look at my first time watching the Godfather trilogy, in commemoration of the first film’s 50th anniversary, but until then this is the Classic Film Kid signing off!

CLASSIC FILM KID ARCHIVE – DOCTOR WHO FLUX