Azuma Yeonchi: "*OLD CONTENT REPOST* Logic ge…"

YeonchiDoctor Who Series 13 (Flux) Review Chapter Two: War of the SontaransAir date: 7 November 2021 I know I said in the prelude that I would try to get these reviews out by the Wednesday, but I’ve been distracted by a lot of things recently, particularly work as it is still quite full-on despite working from home. Contrary to what the head image may want you to think, most of this episode has been rather companion-lite, though Yaz and Dan still have significant involvement in this episode. A lot of threads were introduced in the last chapter, but in this chapter, it’s been refined to three threads as we focus on the Sontarans and the Temple of Atropos. My spoiler-free thought for this episode: “I’m starting to pick up on flaws I wouldn’t have picked up on before.” Spoilers continue after the break. Somewhere in time The Doctor, Yaz and Dan find themselves in 1855 Crimea during the war between the British and the Russians, but upon meeting Mary Seacole, they learn that the British Army aren’t fighting Russians, but Sontarans. As Mary takes the group back to her British Hotel, Dan and Yaz find themselves disappearing as they fall through time due to colliding with the Flux earlier. The Doctor tries to go back to the TARDIS, but she can’t find the door to open it, forcing her to return to the British Hotel as Sontarans approach. Back at the hotel, the Doctor learns that Lieutenant General Logan is planning to engage the Sontarans in battle and that Russia and China are non-existent (bwahahaha lol), instead being replaced by Sontar on the map. Failing to dissuade Logan, the Doctor learns that Mary has a Sontaran, Svild, in her care and tells him to inform his commander of her presence in Crimea. That evening, the Doctor and Mary follow Svild to the Sontaran base camp, which has been camouflaged. The Doctor has Mary stay and monitor the encampment while she goes back. The next morning, the Doctor parlays with Commander Skaak. She suspects the Sontarans to be the cause of the Flux, but Skaak denies it while also stating that they managed to invade Earth just as the Lupari shield was being put up. The Doctor fails to get Skaak to retreat and is escorted back to the British camp by Logan’s subordinate just as Logan sends his army into battle, resulting in a massacre. The Doctor manages to put Logan’s subordinate to sleep with her Venusian aikido while Logan manages to survive the massacre of his army. The Doctor meets up with Mary and takes her inside one of the Sontaran ships. She knocks a Sontaran out with her slingshot and manages to make contact with Dan while fiddling on the ship’s computer. Hearing Dan’s observations, the Doctor learns that the Sontarans are attempting to invade Earth’s history, reminiscent of Shocker’s plans with the History Modifying Machine in Super Hero Taisen GP. Later, the Doctor tells Mary and Logan about her plan to sabotage the Sontaran’s supplies, forcing them to return to the 21st century. They do so in the space of 7.5 minutes and the Doctor confronts Skaak soon after. Skaak orders a strategic withdrawal and leaves, proclaiming to return. The Doctor, Mary and Logan (minus his soldiers for some reason) prepare to leave as well, but Logan lights a match and blows up the Sontaran ships with barrels of gunpowder, destroying them. The TARDIS arrives nearby and the Doctor leaves to find her friends. I have a little bit of a problem with the last part of this stream because of the Doctor’s misguided moral objection to Logan blowing up the Sontaran ships. A major example I can compare it to is the Sycorax in The Christmas Invasion. The Tenth Doctor wins a sword duel against the leader and orders them to leave Earth as per the ancient rites of combat by which they follow. Harriet Jones orders Torchwood to destroy the ship and the Doctor says the six words that would bring down Harriet’s career as Prime Minister. With regard to this episode, the Sontarans would probably see Logan’s actions as cowardly and dishonourable, but on the other hand, they were about to launch a temporal offensive, Skaak said that the Sontarans would return and the Sontarans did kill most of Logan’s soldiers along with more people when they took over Russia and China. The Sontarans are only honourable in war because that is the only thing they know, so the Doctor should really stop trying to act like they can be better. This isn’t the first time that the Doctor has had such moral objections either - she has expressed them against Robertson in Arachnids in the UK and King James in The Witchfinders. The main difference is that the Doctor’s anger was somewhat unjustified in the former because the mother spider was dying as a result of its size, but mostly justified in the latter because the Doctor was sealing the Morax back in their prison and King James killed the Morax Queen because Becka Savage, who she was possessing, admitted to practising witchcraft. Also, the Doctor highlights the SJW agenda in the series when she says to Logan, “Sometimes men like you make me wonder why I bother with humanity.” It was good when the Doctor was criticising the officer/soldier dynamic that sends the latter to their deaths, but then that line puts the blame squarely on men because of course men are the villains of history. If Logan wasn’t an officer but instead a character manipulated by the Doctor into being her weapon ala the Tenth Doctor, her spiel at the end there would have been copium. The temporal offensive Dan finds himself back in Liverpool and finds that it has been taken over by the Sontarans as they chase him for breaching curfew. Dan’s parents, Neville and Eileen, find him and explain to him that after he vanished two days before (from their perspective), there was a three-minute eclipse before the Sontarans appeared. Already I’m seeing a problem with the logic here. If the Lupari ships shielded Earth then the “eclipse” should have been longer and there should be no daylight unless they were able to simulate the sun and the sky on the undersides of their ships like OLED screens. Neville and Eileen take Dan to the Liverpool docks, where the Sontarans first appeared and took over the waterfront. Taking a wok from his father, Dan infiltrates a Sontaran ship, passing by three people getting executed for spying on the Sontarans. Dan manages to make contact with the Doctor, but is cut off when Commander Ritskaw (from the previous episode) discovers them. Some Sontarans are sent to execute Dan, but Karvanista manages to rescue him as his race blamed him for this. Karvanista sets one of the ships to take off and ram into the other ships, creating a temporal reaction that takes the Sontarans and their ships out of existence. Like that won’t cause collateral damage or anything lol. They could just set the ships to self-destruct (by like, overloading a temporal reactor or something) and it would still have the same effect. Dan and Karvanista manage to escape the ship through the waste tube, falling into the Mersey just as the Doctor arrives in the TARDIS. Dan agrees to join the Doctor and they go to find Yaz. As the Doctor and Dan notice strange things growing in the TARDIS that shouldn’t be there, they suddenly find it being hijacked as they are taken to the Temple of Atropos. Keepers of time Yaz finds herself in the Temple of Atropos. She briefly meets Joseph Williamson, who doesn’t appear again in the rest of the episode. One of the Priest Triangles find Yaz and ask her if she can “repair”. After reminding herself of what the Doctor would do, Yaz offers her help and she meets Vinder, who had also found himself in the Temple after being hit by the Flux. The Flux had also affected the temple as well and the Priest Triangles are seeking help to repair the Mouri, who cannot be compromised as they control the flow of time. To be honest, I don’t see why time should have guardians like the Mouri given the premise of this show. It’s like having gods for abstract concepts. Speaking of which, there are polytheistic religions and cultures who do have gods of time, but it’s not like time travel (or science fiction for that matter) is at the centre of it. Also, I really need to call this out - why did Yaz feel the need to write WWTDD on her hand so she could remind herself of it? For someone who’s been travelling with the Doctor for this long, this phrase should be the first thing they think of when faced with a situation without the Doctor around to figure out what to do. The fact that Yaz had to write it down (on her hand no less) shows that she probably hasn’t learnt much from her time with the Doctor nor is she capable of retaining that knowledge in the long term. It’s even more telling when you realise that Yaz is a (former) police officer, potentially meaning that Yaz is so incompetent that she actually needed to remind herself of what to do instead of relying on her instincts and logic. OK, I suppose I’m not one to talk given that I frequently ask for help from my colleagues on problems that can be solved with simple solutions (eg. have you tried turning it off and on again?), but this is a main principle of being the Doctor’s companion that shouldn’t need reminding. If Yaz had a little thinking-out-loud moment where she asked herself “What would the Doctor do?”, I would be fine with it and the content of this paragraph would have been halved. So while attempting to repair the Mouri, Yaz and Vinder are confronted by Swarm and Azure, along with Passenger, another one of their kind whose face is literally a cheap airsoft mask, but hey, I’m not complaining. I’m yet to see tokusatsu take cheap costumes and masks seriously instead of reusing and repurposing old suits. Following a confrontation in which Swarm and Azure dodge Vinder’s gunshots, Swarm reduces two malfunctioning Mouri into ash before replacing them with Yaz and Vinder. The episode ends when the Doctor and Dan arrive and Swarm snaps his fingers to send the full force of time running through Yaz and Vinder. It is also revealed that the Temple of Atropos is on the planet Time, a planet that exists outside space and time that the Doctor claims should not exist, which makes you wonder how Joseph Williamson managed to get to the temple if it’s not a place he’s hiding beneath his tunnels. I can confirm that Swarm and Azure (and presumably Passenger) are the Ravagers that were mentioned in the series teaser. CultBox seemingly confirmed this after the last episode, but I didn’t want to say anything until I got confirmation from an official source, which we got in the form of a behind-the-scenes documentary posted on the official Doctor Who YouTube page. Honestly, if their identity was that important then it should have been revealed in the first episode instead of being kept under wraps until now. Heck, I didn’t know Anna was actually Azure (or that that was her name) until I discovered it online while doing research for my review of the last episode. OK, to be fair, Rochenda Sandall was credited as Azure in that episode, but I never heard her human name, Anna, being mentioned at any point, not even in the subtitles. It wouldn’t hurt anyone to drop some names here and there. The Sontaran deconstruction This episode is the first episode where the Sontarans have been a major threat in the story ever since their reintroduction in The Sontaran Stratagem and The Poison Sky back in Series 4. While the Sontarans have gone on to appear in later episodes, they are either of little consequence or reduced to being a butler in Victorian London. Dan Starkey reprises his role as a Sontaran, playing Kragar in the last episode and Svild in this episode, though he sounds more gruffer this time around compared to his previous roles as other Sontarans, including Strax. Jonathan Watson is the more prominent actor, playing both Ritskaw and Skaak in this episode. I must say, he does a pretty good job. I don’t know whether he was trying to channel Christopher Ryan (Staal/Stark) or not, but Watson is honestly a great alternative for Ryan. It has been stated that the Sontaran designs in this episode harken back to their appearance in the classic series. In fact, they harken back so much that they also homage Commander Linx from The Time Warrior, with the cross on their foreheads and Skaak referencing him by stating that they were asserting Linx’s claim on Earth that he made all those years ago. The Sontarans are shown acting more brutally than in previous episodes, with examples such as Skaak executing Svild for shamefully returning to his camp after being captured by the enemy or Ritskaw ordering three humans to be executed for spying on them. Thanks to their lack of appearance in the series, the Sontarans have essentially been reduced to being comic relief, particularly in several episodes in Series 6, 7 and 8 with Strax. As such, this episode does a good job at deconstructing the Sontarans and reminding us of their brutal warmongering ways. Other general thoughts So if Swarm and Azure are the Ravagers, then could the Flux be the same Ravagers in the namesake Big Finish anthology? I mean, given their description in the TARDIS Data Core, it still sort of fits: “The Ravagers were a name given to a species of creatures numbering in the billions that had an insatiable hunger to devour everything in the universe.” For all we know, the Flux could probably be trillions and trillions of parasitic creatures feeding on matter by disrupting their particles. This episode was ten minutes longer than the normal 50-minute duration. Looking ahead, it appears that Chapter Four (Village of the Angels) will be five minutes longer than normal. Where does Doctor Who get the timeslot for these episodes and how did the BBC allow them to have such uneven durations in the episodes for this series? I would suggest that the stuff with Vinder and Yaz be moved to the next episode, but given how we saw Williamson in this episode (which I suggested in my last review that his scenes be moved to his respective episode), I think it would have been better for the sake of balancing episode durations if the first few minutes of this episode (except the scenes with Vinder in the Temple of Atropos) were moved to the last episode, making the cliffhanger be when the Doctor tries to enter the TARDIS, but is forced to go back to the British encampment when she can’t get in. But again, I’m not one to talk given the state of my personal project either. Some of the early episodes I’ve written don’t have enough content to fill up a 45-minute timeslot (leading me to assume that the rest is taken up by filler) while some of the later episodes I’ve written may struggle to fit within 45 minutes because of the amount of detail I put into them. I guess that’s one of the pitfalls of writing an extended nightly series instead of keeping it as weekly episodes or heck, even cutting it down to 30-minute episodes. Right at the start of the episode, before the Doctor wakes up and finds herself in the Crimea, we see her reaching out to what appears to be a floating house. A few people on Twitter are theorising that this could be the House of Lungbarrow, which was featured in the namesake novel by Mark Platt that was to be the culmination of the Cartmel Masterplan that would have revealed the Doctor to be a Time Lord known as the Other, one of the founding fathers of Gallifrey. Honestly, I would have taken that instead of the Timeless Child, but we’ll just have to see how this transpires. In the meantime, here’s a comparison of how Lungbarrow compares to The Timeless Children… and I just realised that I went off into a spiel unrelated to this episode because of a very short scene that was probably only meant as a teaser. Mary Seacole: “Doctor is a man’s term.” The Doctor: “It’s fluid.” Bwahahahahaha lol. Neville and Eileen, and by extension Dan, should not know that the thing on the back of every Sontaran that acts as their weakness is called the “probic something”, let alone its actual term, “probic vent”, particularly given that the Sontarans have only been on Earth for two days. The only way that they could know this is if a Sontaran were stupid enough to reveal (the name of) his own weakness. This can be corrected by not having Eileen and Dan mention the word “probic” but still mention that it is their weakness before having the Doctor briefly explain to Dan that the weak spot is called the probic vent. When Yaz first meets Vinder, she introduces herself as “Serving Officer Khan” of the Hallamshire Police, implying that she is still working as a policewoman. Wait, so what does this mean? Given that Yaz introduced herself to Dan as a former PC, does that mean that she quit or she got promoted? If I find out that Yaz wasn’t dismissed from or never quit the police force, I’m demoting points from the episode. Swarm mentions that Vinder was “shamed, disgraced and rejected”. Could this be a reason why his people left him on Observation Outpost Rose and never responded to his status reports? Mary Seacole gets a gold star (and a sticker) from the Doctor. 10 points for her. Speaking of Mary Seacole, I feel like she is another forgotten historical hero like Nikola Tesla, who was featured in Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror, with Seacole’s equivalent of Thomas Edison being Florence Nightingale, who is only mentioned in this episode as someone who wouldn’t even come close to the front at Sevastopol. Needless to say, Seacole wasn’t featured in my fifth grade “night of the notables” while Nightingale was. Seacole’s recognition has been seen as controversial and there are sources that apparently cite a frosty relationship between Nightingale and Seacole. Also, it was only in recent years that there has been an interest in spreading awareness of Seacole’s achievements. In short, it can be said that Florence Nightingale was to Mary Seacole as Thomas Edison was to Nikola Tesla. When Karvanista opened the door on the Sontaran ship so that he and Dan could get to the escape pod, he just closes the door when he sees Sontarans shooting at them instead of shooting them with his weapon. Granted, there could potentially be more Sontarans looking for them, so I suppose that’s understandable. Summary and verdict In general, this episode was pretty good. However, I said that I would be holding this series to a higher standard than I did before, so I’m not going to excuse the flaws in this episode, especially the Doctor’s misguided moral outrage and Yaz writing WWTDD on her hand when she should already know it. Rating: 5/10 They’re lucky this episode wasn’t a 4/10. Stay tuned next week as I review the third chapter of Flux, Once, Upon Time.

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