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*OLD CONTENT REPOST*
Power levels are through the roof as I review the fourth chapter of Flux, Village of the Angels.
https://yeonchi.tumblr.com/post/668915992480579584/doctor-who-series-13-flux-review-chapter-four
YeonchiDoctor Who Series 13 (Flux) Review Chapter Four: Village of the AngelsAir date: 21 November 2021
The stakes just keep getting higher and higher. I won’t lie to you, this episode was a repeat of The Haunting of Villa Diodati; there’s nothing much in the first half, but then it gets interesting in the second half.
Once again, where last week’s episode kept jumping between plot streams, this episode just focuses on two, with the third only getting minimal focus this time around.
My spoiler-free thought for this episode: “At least Chris Chibnall remembered what Steven Moffat established with the Weeping Angels.”
Spoilers continue after the break. At this point I shouldn’t need to tell you that you should be up to date on the episodes before you continue reading.
The forgotten Angel encounter
Before I talk about this episode, I want to talk about a time where the Weeping Angels appeared in a spinoff, teasing something epic involving them, but was never followed up on. I’m talking about the short-lived spinoff series Class, which premiered in 2016 during the Moffat era (between Series 9 and 10) and was written by Patrick Ness. Basically, a Weeping Angel appeared in the final episode, The Lost, where it was seen killing the replacement headteacher of Coal Hill School (aka Academy), Dorothea Ames. The Weeping Angels were also seen to be working with the Governors, who were installed by the school’s sponsor, EverUpwardReach Ltd, to assist the Angels in preparing for something called “the Arrival”. Sadly, we never really got to see what happened after that because the series was cancelled after a series of only eight episodes and the extended media never bothered to elaborate on what happened after.
I felt that the series was okay, but if it wasn’t cancelled, I probably would have liked it more. Personally, the “renovation” of Coal Hill School was a waste of time given what transpired and there is no way a whole school can be built in under a year without significant interruptions. I’ve seen individual buildings being built during my time in school, but not every building. I don’t think Chibnall would have had any intention to follow up on the finale of Class, which I completely understand because frankly, it’d be better if we just pretended that the series never existed and Coal Hill School was never renovated. Also, it’d be hilarious if we got to the 60th Anniversary Special and it turns out that the school was just the same as it was in The Day of the Doctor.
Claire
Four episodes into the series, we finally pick up on a plot thread introduced in The Halloween Apocalypse that didn’t need follow-up scenes in the two episodes after that. Given how Claire was introduced, I expected a Blink-like situation where the past version of Claire would meet the Doctor before meeting her again, albeit earlier in her timeline, in the series premiere. Astonishingly, this wasn’t the case.
So the Weeping Angel sent Claire Brown back in time to 1965 and by 21 November 1967, she ended up in the village of Medderton in Devon, where the people were helping Gerald and Jean find their 10-year-old great-niece, Peggy.
Meanwhile, a Weeping Angel has commandeered the TARDIS, but the Doctor manages to purge it out by taking two things from the door that shouldn’t be put together and putting them together, thereby rebooting the TARDIS. Upon landing, the Doctor gets out and suddenly detects something on her sonic screwdriver. As she follows it, Dan and Yaz join the villagers in the search for Peggy, but they encounter a Weeping Angel in a field and get sent back in time. We’ll come back to them later.
The Doctor follows her screwdriver to the house of Professor Eustacius Jericho, where he happens to be performing psychic observations on Claire, who also happens to be the source of the sonic screwdriver’s readings. She discovers a drawing of the TARDIS on the table, which is explained to be a sketch of Claire’s premonitions. She then discovers a drawing of a Weeping Angel and becomes alarmed as she rips it up because the image of an Angel is itself an Angel.
The Doctor and Jericho discover Weeping Angels surrounding the house and they quickly lock the doors and head back into the basement. The Doctor learns from Claire that she was having premonitions before she met her. According to Claire, everyone in the village disappears on this day, 21 November 1967, and something similar also happened in 1901.
Down in the basement, the Doctor has Jericho monitor the entrance of the house through a television screen and something she rigged back upstairs. The sketch angel comes to life from the torn pieces of paper; setting it on fire only sets the Angel on fire as well - it is only suppressed when the Doctor extinguishes the fireplace. Claire tells the Doctor that the Angels are looking for her because she is one of them; when she had a premonition of an Angel in her mind, it began living there.
While Jericho sets his equipment to record and keeps an eye on the Angels in the screen, the Doctor makes psychic contact with Claire and confronts the Angel in her mind, who just so happens to be the one who stalked Yaz in her time stream and hijacked the TARDIS. However, this Angel wasn’t the one who sent Claire back to 1965; it is, in fact, hiding from the other Angels who were also looking for it, as they are an extraction squad working for the Division, and so the Angel in Claire’s mind was trying to ask the Doctor for help. The Doctor learns that the Angel was also part of the Division, like she apparently was, and that it knows everything about the Division, including the memories that were removed from the Doctor’s mind.
It is then that Jericho snaps the Doctor and Claire out of it by throwing a cup at them. The Doctor gets the idea to escape through a secret tunnel under the house to a secret meeting place. As they get to the end of the tunnel, Claire and the Doctor make it through, but Jericho is sent to the past. For some reason, the Angels don’t attack the Doctor despite turning her back to them or blinking…
Peggy
Meanwhile, Dan and Yaz find themselves in 1901 (but they don’t know this until later). Heading back into the village, they find no one there except for a little girl, who is revealed to be Peggy. She takes them to the edge of the village, which is revealed to be in the middle of space due to quantum extraction.
Returning to the village, Dan, Yaz and Peggy encounter Gerald and Jean, who had also discovered that the village is in the middle of space and were sent back in time as well by an Angel, despite Gerald’s flat earth-esque disbelief. Dan, Yaz and Peggy try to get them to stay away from another Angel, but they get disintegrated when they touch it. I guess that’s what happens when an Angel touches you for the second time, but then that kind of contradicts Winter Quay in The Angels Take Manhattan. I honestly wondered why the Weeping Angels in The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone snapped people’s necks instead of sending them back in time, but it was actually because the Byzantium’s engine radiation was food for them.
Peggy takes Dan and Yaz to what she thought was a Stone Age burial site that was excavated in 1901, but it wasn’t there the day before when there were still people in the village. At the site, there is a barrier splitting 1967 from 1901, with the site on the other side of the barrier. Mrs Hayward, who had earlier tried to warn the villages to get out but to no avail, arrives and explains to Peggy that she is her future self. She also explains that the burial site is not a burial site, but it is made of stone, which was probably how the Weeping Angels came to the village.
After Jericho gets sent back to 1901 and the Doctor and Claire come out of the tunnel, the Doctor meets with her companions again and learns that the Angels extracted the village out of space and time to isolate and extract the target, namely the Angel in Claire’s mind. However, in a twist, the Angel has negotiated with the other Angels for them to take the Doctor instead of it, because she is the only thing that the Division wants more. This was apparently its plan all along, which makes me wonder if the other Angels were in on it as well. The Doctor is recalled to Division and the Angels turn her into one of them; it happens faster than the ordeal that Amy Pond had with the Angel in her mind.
As I stated in the last review, I honestly feel that the Weeping Angels have become too overpowered over the years, mostly because of Steven Moffat. So we can’t blink when we see an Angel because it moves when unobserved, even by themselves. However, it can drain and feed off electricity, which can cause the lights to flicked because people won’t know if they are looking at an Angel or not. Then we learn that an image of an Angel is itself an Angel, but an Angel can also be trapped by having it look at itself in the mirror. Premonitions of Angels are also Angels as well, so does that mean that memories of Angels can also be Angels as well? Did that rogue Angel transfer itself into Claire’s mind or cause itself to be created through Claire’s premonition? If any statue can be an Angel, how do we know what statues are Angels and what statues aren’t? How many Weeping Angels were there originally and is the population overcrowded due to images of Angels being Angels or any statue possibly being an Angel as well? Finally, we see that victims of Weeping Angels can be turned into dust if they are touched a second time (or more likely, they touch it), but they were able to continually send people who tried to escape Winter Quay further back into the past. All this has made the Weeping Angels one of the most uncontrolled and overpowered villains in the franchise.
In regards to the Division, I’ve noticed that there has been no mention of the Timeless Child so far since The Timeless Children, yet we have managed to confirm that Ruth is the Doctor’s past incarnation. As I said, we only have that episode to prove how Ruth and the Doctor fit into the Timeless Child and the only thing that would cement that link is to see Ruth in a scene that matches the flashbacks in that episode. Until that link is proven, I’m inclined to believe that the Timeless Child and the Doctor aren’t the same being and that the Master was lying to the Doctor in the Matrix. On another note, is the Division still active? I thought they were part of Gallifrey’s past.
Bel
Yeah, this thread is still a thing.
Bel arrives on the planet Puzano, where she and Vinder were planning to spend their honeymoon before they had to be deployed separately. She meets a man named Namaca, who has been waiting for a chance to be transported somewhere safe from the Flux. Azure arrives with the Passenger and transports everyone into it, but Bel, who had previously heard of the Passenger, manages to dodge it with Namaca, much to his dismay.
Later, in a mid-credits scene, Namaca, who had refused to leave with Bel, meets Vinder, who asks him if he saw Bel. Namaca tells Vinder that he did and shows him to where Bel left a message for him, asking him to thank her for saving his life. Vinder watches Bel’s message, but she was unable to give him her coordinates because the capacity ran out and she couldn’t rerecord her message.
Other general thoughts
This episode marks the first time where we don’t see Karvanista, Swarm or Joseph Williamson. Frankly, it was time for a break sooner or later.
I don’t think Vinder’s scene deserves the mid-credits treatment. Before the credits, okay, but not in the middle of the credits. If anyone is more deserving of a mid-credits appearance, it’s Kate Stewart, who is teased in the Next Time trailer for the next episode. Why not throw in the Grand Serpent, since he’s also appearing in the next episode? By the way, the scene happens halfway into the crew credits, way after Vinder’s credit, so it kind of spoils his appearance if we didn’t know that he was going to be a main character in the series. If my suggestion were to be followed, Kate and the Grand Serpent’s credits could be purposefully moved to the end so that their appearances wouldn’t be spoiled by the cast credits.
The credits also feature a distorted variation of the theme, possibly to represent the distortion of time caused by the Angels.
This is the only episode of the series to not be solely written by Chris Chibnall, with this episode being co-written by Maxine Alderton, who also wrote The Haunting of Villa Diodati.
In the Next Time trailer, Dan mentions that he and Yaz have been in the 1900′s for three years. This must be one hell of a hard first trip for Dan. First he gets kidnapped by Karvanista, then the TARDIS gets swallowed up by the Flux and ends up in the Crimea, then he ends up back in Liverpool where he officially joins the Doctor. After that, he gets taken to the Temple of Atropos, then back to Liverpool in some flashbacks, then a Weeping Angel hijacks the TARDIS and takes him to 1967 and then another Weeping Angel sends him and Yaz to 1901, where he presumably doesn’t have contact with the Doctor for three years. And you thought Amelia Pond waiting for twelve years was long. Given these trips all over the place, it would probably have been better if Graham or Ryan had remained with the Doctor because they’re more used to the shenanigans, but hey, we have to have more than one companion even though we were meant to see character development on the one companion that never got a lot of it since her debut.
No SJW red flags in this episode, but sadly, no tokusatsu references in this episode either.
Gerald and Jean are probably the Vilma and Benni of this series. Gerald acts like pretty much every other elderly person (boomer) of his era; unable to see reason and domineering/neglectful
to his loved ones, but not up to the point of outright abuse. Jean doesn’t seem like your usual victim of domestic violence either as we hear her talking back to her husband a couple of times. Also, when Gerald and Jean get disintegrated by the Angel, Dan and Yaz act in shock, but Peggy just comments “He was never nice to me” in the straightest face possible. I swear, Peggy shows as much shock/guilt/remorse to her guardians’ death as Chris-chan shows in regard to essentially anything, such as having his girlfriends/dates/love interests cuckolded from him or hearing about the death of anyone except his beloved dog, Patti, or his father, and that was before certain people manipulated him into a downward spiral of coping without any introspection or reflection whatsoever. The only main difference between them is that Peggy tried to help her guardians despite their flat-earther mentality.
The Halloween Apocalypse was set on 31 October 2021, while this episode was set on 21 November 1967. The two days coincide with the airing of the episodes. I honestly have to wonder how far the production team gets the airdates in advance (so the writers can probably set the dates of their stories to coincide with the airdates) when fans like us have to wait until three weeks before the premiere without a timeframe.
Summary and verdict
Like I said, this episode is similar to The Haunting of Villa Diodati; there doesn’t seem to be anything going for it in the first half, but then we get to the second part and it starts to get good. This is honestly one of the better episodes of the series so far, assuming that we end up doubling down on the Timeless Child in the next two episodes.
Rating: 7/10
Stay tuned next week as I review the fifth chapter of Flux, Survivors of the Flux.