It might have been nice if “Survivors of the Flux” actually focused a little on the survivors of the Flux. You know, if it had been a little more of a grounded look at what the ramifications of the Flux actually were across the universe, while Yaz, Dan, and Jericho work at getting back to their own time and Bel and Vinder continue their quest to find one another.
Realistically though, I suppose that was never in the cards given how much plot there’s been to Flux, and I would rather not the last episode be hyper-fixated on explaining the complexities and resolving everything. Still, there may have been a way to make it work, and there would be a great sense of overhanging tension about the Doctor being inactive. That’s not what Chibnall decided to do though and the moment the episode began with the Doctor breaking out of the Angel form she was encased in at the end of “Village of the Angels” I was preparing myself for disappointment.
I will say that where the Doctor winds up for the duration of the episode is one of its’ only throughlines that works, but there is a lot of fat that just continues to make Flux more needlessly dense -whether it be a new plot thread about the companions working from the early twentieth century to find a doomsday date or the return of the Grand Serpent from “Once, Upon Time”, seemingly just a powerful figure from Vinder’s past, now recast as yet another new mini-villain messing shit up in the time-stream. And there’s this house too, a Howl’s Moving Castle monstrosity that the Doctor glimpsed briefly at the start of “War of the Sontarans”, and speaking of, they’re back too! All the while, Bel and Vinder are still on their mission, Swarm and Azure are still mucking about with those people they’re entrapping from across space, Diane remains in their captivity, Karvanista’s Earth shield is waning in effectiveness, and that old geezer Williamson is still hanging around. I again find myself struggling to see how the show’s target demographic keeps up with it all, especially with so little humanity running through it. Five episodes in and the Doctor has yet to spend any substantial time with her new companion.
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He though at least has gotten to know Yaz. The pair have been together now alongside Professor Jericho (I’m delighted that Kevin McNally got to come back -he should be a new companion!) for three years at the dawn of the twentieth century -why they left behind the girl Peggy is anyone's guess. In that time they’ve been travelling the world looking for artifacts under the directive of the Doctor via a message she left with Yaz, recorded apparently somewhere between “Once, Upon Time” and “Village of the Angels” -though I’m not sure where there was time for it. Her thinking was that there’s going to be a power struggle for Earth in the aftermath of the Flux and so a doomsday is inevitable; but due to the fracturing of time a ripple effect should allow for clues as to its date to manifest through history -in relics and such things. It’s basically a convoluted device that allows for Yaz, Dan, and Jericho to play Indiana Jones for a little bit. In fact I’m sure that’s the excuse for why it’s in there -director Azhur Saleem and the actors are clearly having fun as they recreate set-pieces from Raiders of the Lost Ark. But aside from one comment each from Dan and Jericho, there’s no acknowledgement of what effect this displacement has had on them. Three years of Yaz’s life gone -away from her family, away from the Doctor, she’s had to adjust to a new world (you can only imagine the racism), as have her friends. Jericho notes how he knows personally the atrocities to come (i.e. two world wars) and struggles not to interfere. There’s a fascinating psychological impact to explore in characters we care about and yet the episode doesn’t allow any time to sit in this. Yaz looks sombre listening to the Doctors’ message, and in among the convoluted orders there’s a sweetness there -it might be the most genuine moment the two characters have shared this series and they’re not even in person. But other than that nothing seems to have phased the companions as they continue their globetrotting.
Eventually in the episodes’ lowest point, they reach a guru on a mountain in Nepal who winds up in a kind of comedy sketch with them about not bringing him anything from the outside world, that the actor plays as though he wants to be Jason Mantzoukas but lacks any of Mantzoukas’ fun. It’s a jarringly bad bit, goes on too long for an already compacted episode, and all that comes out of it is the clue “fetch your dog”, which the companions interpret as a way of getting Karvanista’s attention by laying the foundation for a message along the Great Wall of China -that actually does turn out funny when Karvanista notices it. After this, Williamson shows up again in their cabin, and finally they decide to figure out what is up with this guy, going back to Liverpool and to his tunnels where they find him and he explains himself. The excavation he was overseeing in 1821 it appears was a series of doors to different places in time and space -and that’s why he’s been showing up everywhere. He means his tunnels to be a kind of underground railroad for a coming apocalypse, but Flux has been altering their destinations. This is all certainly a lot for a single storyline, but it comes only in a series of bursts broken up by the rest of the episode. The script makes sure we don’t spend too much time with this trio, even if conceptually theirs should be the most interesting journey.
Elsewhere, neither Bel nor Vinder make much progress in this penultimate episode. Bel attempts to steal one of the Lupari ships in a curious reminder that Earth doesn’t actually mean much to her, but Karvanista won’t have it and the two are forced into a confrontation that’s pretty cool before it’s interrupted -like everyone who seems to come into conflict with Karvanista, it’s not long before they’re working together. Vinder meanwhile ends up on what appears to be an asteroid where Azure’s sacrifices have been brought and are being used as conduits, disintegrated systematically by the Ravagers. He winds up captured in one of those Passenger pods -a kind of pocket dimension where he finds Diane, who seems to think they can take on the Ravagers with Vinder’s weapons. There’s a hint that Vinder has some kind of plan here, but it’s just as likely he doesn’t. Both of these diversions so clearly serve just to get characters from point A to B and there’s almost no life to them. The pacing, like for the companions, is very hasty across these as well.
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I wish the episode would’ve spent as much time with Bel and Vinder as it does with the Grand Serpent, who turns up styling himself as Prentis in the late 1950s. Again, I don’t think this character is worth bringing back after “Once, Upon Time”, and certainly not as the secret founder of UNIT. Yeah, clearly taking a page out of Marvel’s playbook, it turns out UNIT has secretly been manipulated since it’s inception by an alien dictator who vaguely looks like Silvio Dante. He casually murders those who get in his way of increasing power (poor, wasted Robert Bathurst) via psycho-corporeal snake-like creatures. The episode checks in on him at a number of points in UNIT’s history (though never intersecting with OUR history of UNIT) and it’s implied this is all in very short order for him. Finally, in 2017 as the head of UNIT’s security council he is confronted by Kate Stewart (a returning Jemma Redgrave), not seen since “The Zygon Inversion” six years ago but very welcome back. It seems this might be the answer to that disbandment of UNIT referenced by Stephen Fry back in “Spyfall” as, onto his ruse, Kate threatens to expose Prentis, and for her troubles her house is blown up. The last we see of Prentis, he’s colluding with the Sontarans, ordering the lowering of global defence systems so they can invade across time and …didn’t we do this already? It’s unclear if this is a new invasion or simply the lead-in to “War of the Sontarans”. If it’s the latter, it seems pointless because we already know how that turns out, if it’s the former it’s an extremely unimaginative way to drag the Sontarans needlessly back into the picture. Almost it feels like the storyline of this miniseries is moving backwards.
It’s not however in the most important sector of the episode, and thankfully the most evenly paced, even if it too leaves much to be desired. At the end of “Village of the Angels”, the Doctor was told she was being “recalled to Division”, and essentially that Angel form was just that, a transport. And it is a historically cheap way to resolve a cliffhanger, having the Doctor get out of it in the opening scenes of the next episode. However, I probably shouldn’t complain because classic Doctor Who pulled that trick all the time. But it does lessen the severity of the Angels’ menace last episode, especially by placing them in this context as mere hired goons. Anyway, the Doctor finds herself on a spacecraft staffed by an Ood, which is nice to see (another great alien that’s been missing from the series for about ten years) and with that old woman the Doctor met at the end of “Once, Upon Time” and sure enough, she is very important.
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First, she explains Division, an organization that began on Gallifrey devoted to shepherding the universe, interfering in the development of planets and civilizations where they saw necessary. But the Doctor kept coming along and disrupting their work, purely through her influence and inspiration, in yet another instance of the Doctor being imbued with messianic qualities. Because of this, the Division created the Flux as a means of wiping the slate clean and starting over with another universe -the spacecraft they are on existing in some cosmic void between universes. So the Division has arranged for this craft to be the seed vault for the next universe, carrying remnants of various worlds and species to be built anew. Basically it’s a more severe, sinister take on the plot to the first Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy -fitting, given Douglas Adams was a Doctor Who writer. But it’s not enough that the Doctor went against their plans, she defected. She was a member of this Division and further has a personal history with this figurehead.
When said figurehead started teasing this relationship I was worried she was going to reveal yet another incarnation of the Master. Thankfully, it’s more interesting: she is Tecteun, the Gallifreyan woman who found the Timeless Child, raised her and experimented on her, giving her gift to what would become the Time Lords -as first revealed in “The Timeless Children”. That episode ended with one of several mysteries being who Tecteun was, if the Doctor would seek her out. Well, the Doctor has found her and sure enough, there are mummy issues. Barbara Flynn is very good, even with Chibnall’s worst dialogue where she has to denigrate the concept of morality and inspiring hope. Where she’s most effective though is where her arguments challenge the Doctor. The Doctor accuses Tecteun of stealing her as a child, blaming her for dictating her fate, entertaining a host of possibilities as to who she actually was, where she actually came from. And Tecteun coldly remarks by comparing it to what the Doctor does with companions. It’s certainly a flawed analogy, but there’s just enough truth there that it wounds the Doctor. Tecteun also reveals herself to be the caretaker of the Doctors’ lost memories, the one who wiped them in the first place and who carries on her ship the fob watch that contains them. Placing so much of this on the Doctors’ head -she is both centre of the universe and the reason for the Flux- is the sort of thing I’d rather Doctor Who avoid, but Tecteun makes for such a formidable source of this knowledge, and a compelling antagonist. She’s a great problem mother figure, and Flynn excellently shows the signs that she still has some lingering affection for the Doctor, bemused by her awe and captivated in the idea that they could start over together in a beat reminiscent of The Empire Strikes Back -tempting the Doctor with the promise of sparing her friends and showing her her past.
And then she’s carelessly disintegrated in the last moments of the episode by Swarm and Azure, who have a knack for showing up at the worst moments. Their human battery has managed to get them here to enact vengeance on Tecteun and the Doctor for imprisoning them -even though Tecteun is apparently the one who released them. Either way it’s dumb -this terribly bland series villain coming in at the last minute to kill and replace a truly exciting series villain. And it’s where the episode closes leading into the finale.
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“Survivors of the Flux” is a frustrating episode that’s about one-third very good, two-thirds mediocre to middling, and it keeps bouncing back and forth between these so as to create a discombobulated whole. It doesn’t help that the supporting characters we have emotional stakes in: Yaz, Dan, Bel, Vinder, Jericho, even Karvanista are either not given much to work with or simply made to move along plot. The companions’ storyline probably suffered the most for what should have been an emotionally thrilling drama. You get the sense that the side of the episode especially needed a lot more fleshing out -and that the Prentis one needed far less. As usual, character falls by the wayside so the narrative can get where it needs to go in the time it has. I’m definitely feeling now that Flux needed a larger series order as I don’t think the aspirations of the story itself are to blame. I do like some of what it’s doing: pairing Bel with Karvanista is a great idea, bringing Kate back is nice, and UNIT itself, and the Ood. Even some of the humour (barring that guru) worked well, and the talents of the actors and director can’t be overlooked (this is another quite pretty episode from Saleem). But that choice at the end to kill Tecteun seems like a very bad omen, not only for how it seems to rid the series of a fascinating character played by a sharp actress, but that it comes across so callously and without understanding what a figure like her could mean.
I don’t know, it’s all very clumsy, and though I know Chibnall knows where he’s going (he very clearly worked backwards in plotting this thing) I have renewed scepticism it can pay off. Going into the finale, there’s a lot that needs to happen, a lot of questions still in the air. Chibnall I have no doubt has answers for them, but I wonder if he has anything besides.
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