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After two months of delaying plans, my reviews of Doctor Who Flux have come to an end. In this epilogue to my Doctor Who Series 13 reviews, I look back on the elements of the whole series, address some missed points and elaborate on why the Timeless Child arc is damaging to the legacy of the series.
https://yeonchi.tumblr.com/post/670904739020619776/doctor-who-series-13-flux-review-epilogue
YeonchiDoctor Who Series 13 (Flux) Review: EpilogueAnd so, after nearly two years of waiting, a special six-part series of Doctor Who has finished airing, with potentially one or two years until we get to see a new series again under a new showrunner and Doctor. Despite being produced during the coronavirus pandemic, this was promoted by the production team as “the biggest story ever told”, but was it really reflected in the episodes? Well, yes and no. Let’s dive in to the epilogue and see my thoughts on the series as a whole.
Final series rating and verdict
In the prelude, I stated that I would be holding the series to a higher standard than I did before, particularly after my red-pilling at the end of Series 12. This included holding points back or even giving negative scores for the episodes. Sure enough, the latter has happened for the final two episodes.
I will be listing my scores for the episodes, but in the final two episodes, I will also be listing the scores I would have given if I hadn’t decided to give negative scores. From there, I will do three types of totalling - the actual totalling that reflects the actual scores, the conservative totalling where I add the points I would have given to the respective episodes to reduce the negative score, and the hypothetical totalling where the negative scores don’t count into the equation. Without further ado, let’s get right into it.
Chapter One: 6/10
Chapter Two: 5/10
Chapter Three: 5/10
Chapter Four: 7/10
Chapter Five: -10/10 (hypothetical score 5/10, conservative score -5/10)
Chapter Six: -10/10 (hypothetical score 4/10, conservative score -6/10)
Hypothetical total: 32/60 (53%)
Conservative total: 12/60 (20%)
Final series total: 3/60 (5%)
I honestly hoped that these scores would bring down my totals for the last two series, but I guess there were some good things in the episode that kept it from dropping any more than it needed to.
Look, I’m sorry, but people need to stop deluding themselves and face the facts; this series was just shit, especially when compared to previous series. I’m not kidding; this series is basically Chibnall doing too much and achieving so little as a result. We keep jumping between plot threads frequently in episodes (which is saying something when I’ve done this in my personal project). There’s a disproportionate balance of involvement or plot relevance with certain characters in this series, like Joseph Williamson, Diane or the Grand Serpent. At the end, Chibnall seems to have forgotten that the Ravagers are the main villains of the series. The Flux just ends up being a boring old anti-matter wave. And worst of all, Chibnall doubles-down on the Doctor being the Timeless Child, then pussies out of it in the one episode where it mattered. Forget about wokeness and SJW red flags, there’s already enough problems plot-wise as it is. Frankly, wokeness just feels like a symptom of the bad writing in this era rather than the cause. It feels like this series has done more to highlight the flaws in my own writing than tell a coherent story or even not disrespect a legacy.
If this series was actually ten episodes long, or even eight episodes long, as we initially thought with the announcement last year, then maybe the story could have had a bit more space to breathe. The finale could be spread out to a two-parter and we could have an extra episode for something else, like Joseph Williamson having an adventure with the Doctor, Yaz and Dan. And I have to complain about this - why is every second episode extended by 5-10 minutes but every other episode is 50 minutes long, as is the standard for stories in the Chibnall era? I can understand having an extended episode for the series premiere and/or finale, but why couldn’t they be consistent with the durations for the episodes in this series?
Despite my complaints about this series, there were a few gems here and there. We saw the Sontarans deconstructed and returned to their classic series roots with their new design. We got to see Ruth return for an actual adventure, even if most of it was hidden behind the image of the Doctor. We had an episode that was actually good because it wasn’t written by Chris Chibnall alone. We had Kate Stewart returning towards the end. And best of all, we can finally count down the days until Jodie Whittaker’s final episode.
Why I hate the Timeless Child storyline
I’ve stated this before, but here’s the tl;dr; the Timeless Child overcomplicates the Doctor’s past and makes her “the special one of the special ones”, meaning that she has been elevated above the Time Lords as a sort of god for the series. It disrespects the legacy of the Doctor as a character (because the First Doctor is not the first incarnation of the Doctor, as it were) and personally, it kind of ruins my future rewatches of previous episodes knowing that the Doctor is more special than he already is.
I took a brief look at the novel Lungbarrow by Marc Platt, which was originally intended to be the culmination of the Cartmel Masterplan in the Seventh Doctor era; the Cartmel Masterplan would have revealed that the Doctor was actually the reincarnation of the Other, one of the Founding Fathers of Gallifrey alongside Rassilon and Omega. Spoilers if you haven’t read Lungbarrow, but in the novel, the Other became concerned at Rassilon become more and more of a dictator and so, he saved his granddaughter, Susan, and attempted to send her off to Tersurus before committing suicide by hurling himself into the Prime Distributor of the Looms. Thousands or millions of years later, the Other was reloomed into the Time Lord who became known as the Doctor. After being disowned by the House of Lungbarrow, the Doctor’s family illegally loomed another cousin and reported them to the Prydonian Chapter. However, when Cousin Glospin revealed that he had evidence of the Doctor not originally being loomed, he decided to steal a TARDIS and leave Gallifrey. The Hand of Omega came to help the Doctor, allowing him to go back into Gallifrey’s past and collect Susan, who had spent a year wandering the streets after Rassilon sealed the spaceports.
Although I’m not a fan of this whole reincarnation/identity change thing for the Doctor, I would honestly prefer the scenario in Lungbarrow instead of what we got because for one, the Other is just another Time Lord (who probably had one life at most or whatever) instead of being someone from another universe who was repeatedly experimented on (and killed in the process) to give the Time Lords their power of regeneration.
There are a few reasons why there are so many contradictory plotlines in the Doctor Who extended universe. Over the course of both the classic and revived series, there have been many producers and showrunners heading the show with the many different directions they had for the story, but they neither set nor followed any rules so that the story would continue to be coherent. With prose and comic works being published yearly, they reflected a snapshot of the TV universe at the time the works were published while also establishing their own universes with their own rules. The wilderness years caused by the cancellation of the classic series in 1989 and fanned by the failed revival of the series in the form of a TV movie pilot in 1996 just allowed things to keep running wild. This enabled the birth of Big Finish in 1996 and the establishment of their own audio drama universe in 1998.
Taking the TV series at face value, the Moffat era cemented the Doctors we knew up to the Eleventh Doctor thanks to The Name of the Doctor and The Day of the Doctor. But those stories had another canon-changing retcon in the form of the War Doctor, you say. Well, yes, it is a canon-changing retcon, but it’s not as severe as the Timeless Child. The War Doctor was the result of a perfect storm; we had never seen the Eighth Doctor regenerate into the Ninth Doctor, Christopher Eccleston refused to reprise his role partly due to previous bad blood with the BBC and partly because the script Moffat wrote didn’t do him justice (according to a panel at New York Comic Con and not Rose City Comic Con as some sources state) and the Eighth Doctor didn’t really seem the type to be fighting in the Time War, much as I (and many others) would have liked to see. Together with the Tenth Doctor’s aborted regeneration in The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End, it allowed Moffat to explore what would happen to the Doctor at the end of his regenerative cycle with all his regenerations used up. With the Doctor getting another regenerative cycle in The Time of the Doctor, the Timeless Child ruins the story opportunities presented by this and makes the whole thing meaningless. If this hadn’t happened, we’d probably be dealing with something different for the Thirteenth Doctor’s regeneration. In short, the Timeless Child arc as it stands would probably have been better if it was done before Series 7.
My view regarding the Doctor’s past incarnations is simple. The First Doctor never had any previous incarnations; he is the original incarnation, always was and always will be. Ruth, the “incarnations” from The Brain of Morbius and the Timeless Child’s incarnations (possibly among other undocumented incarnations) do not count as the Doctor’s incarnations and they should have been left ambiguous or not confirmed to be the Doctor.
As I’ve also stated before, the Timeless Child storyline isn’t necessarily bad and it could still work; just don’t have it be the Doctor. The Timeless Child should have been an unknown kid who Tecteun and the Shobogans were exploiting for their regeneration powers. People have said that it should be the Master or even Susan, but I don’t like retconning classic established characters like this because their pasts could be just as complicated as the Doctor’s. People have also said that Vinder and Bel’s child could be the Timeless Child, which honestly just sounds contrived given that we don’t know much about their home planet. Since Ruth and the Doctor have been established to be the same being, I could buy that the Doctor is in fact a clone of the Timeless Child.
I was honestly counting on this series to reveal that the Master was lying about the Timeless Child, but it doesn’t surprise me to know that the double-down was going to happen from a mile away. What I totally didn’t expect, however, was for Chibnall to pussy out of the double-down and have the Doctor just dump the fob watch in the TARDIS when we’ve been waiting nearly two years for it. Maybe it might get addressed again in the three specials, but so far, the Doctor has barely developed as a character regardless of this revelation.
If I could compare the Timeless Child saga to my experience with English dubbing in Koei Warriors games - Jodie Whittaker’s debut as the Thirteenth Doctor was like Warriors Orochi 3 when I sensed something wrong but didn’t think much of it because it wasn’t that much of a problem to me at the time; the Timeless Child reveal and double-down was like Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate, Samurai Warriors 4 and Dynasty Warriors 8 Empires when Koei Tecmo made it clear to their fans that they were doubling down on not dubbing their games; while Chibnall pussying out after the double-down was like Dynasty Warriors 9 when Koei Tecmo tried to give us fans our cake by dubbing the game, but it wasn’t really a cake because the characters weren’t voiced by the voice actors we had known and loved for years - in fact it was an entirely different thing altogether because they went with a new studio and a completely new cast - and as a result I left the Koei Tecmo fanbase because enough damage had been done by that point anyway and it was clear that Koei Tecmo never listened to the concerns of their fans, nor were their fanbase willing to accept that there were people who preferred English dubbing among them.
A few days after the final episode aired, the BBC released a video featuring Chris Chibnall and Jodie Whittaker trying to break down the story of the whole series and put it into context with the Timeless Child arc from Series 12, which is honestly sad as it is yet another testament to the state of Doctor Who in the Chibnall era. In that video, Chibnall justifies pussying out of the double-down as the Doctor asking herself, “Do you really want to know that?” and realising that she is happy with her identity for the moment without knowing what she has lost. That’s all well and good, but aside from the Doctor still being in denial of her past as I detailed in my review for that episode, we’ve waited two years for something to come out of that revelation and all we got was essentially nothing except the double-down with the confirmation that the Master wasn’t lying to the Doctor about the Timeless Child.
I remember when Moffat did this whole thing about “the name of the Doctor” in 2013 and we never really got to saw what came of it except Clara saying that “The Doctor” is the only name he needs. Honestly, revealing that wouldn’t have been that damaging compared to the Timeless Child, plus we can stop caring about it by the time we get newer stories. I’ve known all I needed to know about the Doctor’s past and origins from the RTD and Moffat eras and I didn’t need everything I know being ruined in the Chibnall era by a plot point that disrespects nearly 60 years of Doctor Who history and barely makes any sense in the first place. Besides, the show is called Doctor Who, after all.
Personally, I like to think of Doctor Who canon as an ever-expanding piece of land. Every so often, a new owner comes along and develops a part of that land however they see fit. They might also hire tenants to contribute to that development with their own ideas. At some point, the owner decides they’re done developing the land and hands it over to the next owner, who continues to develop the land as they see fit. The new owner and their tenants may choose to expand on the development of the previous owner and their tenants, but there is an unspoken rule that the owner and their tenants ensure that their development does not infringe on the development of others. The Timeless Child retcon not only did just that, it destroyed an immeasurable amount of development that might have been key to other developments, leaving the land broken only to be repaired eventually, but it won’t be the same land they knew before.
Remember when I said at the start that people should stop deluding themselves? If you liked this series or still believe that the Timeless Child adds to the Doctor’s character or the Doctor Who universe as a whole, I’m not going to blame you entirely because you might not have a deep knowledge of the extended universe or an understanding as to why things are what they are. It is entirely your choice to like or believe these things, just as it is also your choice to not like these things or express your criticisms of them. The only thing keeping me from calling these people dumb is the fact that this is a TV show and not the Koei Warriors series or the dub-sub debate. The dub-sub debate and the concept of video games means that there can be more than one way to enjoy an anime or video game, while there is seemingly only one way to enjoy a TV show, namely by watching it. Sub fans and dub haters can’t seem to grasp the fact that people prefer dubs and that they may want to choose between dubs and subs if they were given a choice. The things you take out of media are different to how you enjoy media, and if that’s what you decide to take out of it, then it’s your choice. Besides, I believe that gatekeeping is bullshit and that there is no such thing as “fake fans” - a fan is a fan no matter what they believe.
Some things I forgot to mention in the reviews
I promised that the reviews would be out by the Wednesday after the episode came out, but things have gotten so busy what with the working from home and having to go back to work during the second half of the series, so the reviews have had to be delayed to the Thursday or Friday. Despite my desire to cover as much as I can in these reviews, there is a chance that I might have forgotten things in each episode because I may have had to rush a few things to get each review out before the premiere of the next episode. In this section, I’ll be going back through each episode and listing one important thing I forgot to include in the review, or maybe one thing I want to expand on if there isn’t anything I’ve forgotten.
Episode 1: Why did Diane agree to meet Dan on the corner of a dark alley at night where she would be kidnapped by Azure instead of say, near a bar or a well-lit/populated place?
Episode 2: I didn’t take this into consideration when I wrote the review for the episode, but apparently there are people who believe that Mary Seacole doesn’t really deserve the credit she gets when compared to Florence Nightingale because racial reasons aside, she wasn’t really a nurse nor a pioneer; at most, she was a carer and a barkeep at best. I’m not British so I can’t really say for sure, but I believe Seacole and Nightingale should just be applauded for whatever good deeds they did.
Episode 3: We never learnt about what happened to the Time Force, did we? Did it just get sucked up by the Passenger and then forgotten as if nothing happened without a resolution as to whether anything was restored like the Flux was?
Episode 4: In the Next Time trailer for the episode, the story was apparently meant to be set on 28 November, but it was actually changed to be 21 November in the final episode, with the version of the Next Time trailer on the BBC Doctor Who YouTube channel reflecting this. Also, we don’t hear from Peggy after this episode.
Episode 5: Apparently the origin of UNIT in this episode is another retcon of the origin of UNIT which was already elaborated on in external media. Frankly, I don’t care about this retcon compared to the Timeless Child because as I said in that review, UNIT has its own stack of issues regarding the dating of events. Additionally, this episode seems to introduce some sort of multiverse by showing the Division plotting to pass into another universe while destroying the one they leave behind, forgetting that Doctor Who has explored parallel universes before in Inferno, Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel and Turn Left. Honestly, it would be funny if we see the Doctor crossing into other parallel universes in the second RTD era given that the first RTD era stated that it only became difficult without the Time Lords to manage it.
Episode 6: Despite it being stated that the fob watch contains the Doctor’s memories of her time in the Division and as the Timeless Child, nothing is mentioned about the Timeless Child’s regenerative abilities because after all, the Chameleon Arch was meant to rewrite the cellular biology of a Time Lord. If the Doctor is limited to a regenerative cycle of 12 regenerations, then would the Doctor opening the fob watch just grant her unlimited regenerations again, making the new regenerative cycle granted in The Time of the Doctor utterly pointless? Also, the Doctor just lets the Daleks, Cybermen and Sontarans get genocided by the Flux, which is honestly telling given how she scowls at Logan for blowing up the Sontarans when they were leaving. Honestly, the Doctor needs to stop so uppity over the “genocide” of warmongering races when there are probably more of them hidden in other unknown corners of the universe. At the same time, we as fans need to stop acting like this form of genocide is bad or that the Doctor is a hypocrite for excusing it for that same reason.
One more thing common to all the episodes but exclusive to my viewing experience; I noticed that the subtitles on the ABC broadcasts and on iView are different to the actual subtitles used in the BBC subtitles, which were in turn used in the videos they post to YouTube and social media. Honestly, couldn’t the BBC just send the subtitles to the ABC and other broadcasting partners with the episodes so they don’t have to transcribe the episode themselves? That way they could get less things wrong because it’s not a secondhand transcription.
Summarising the elements of the series
So we’ve followed quite a few threads during this series. Let’s talk about my thoughts on them.
Dan: I quite like Dan’s character. Given that this entire series is basically his first adventure with the Doctor and Yaz, there are some moments where he doesn’t know what is going on, which is standard for first-time companions. At home, he’s basically a hybrid of Eiji Hino and Gentaro Kisaragi, helping people and wanting others to be happy while also giving unsolicited tours of the Museum of Liverpool despite having a trade. Outside of the show, YouTuber Doctor Who Poop created a video edit called Evil Dan and it became a meme.
Karvanista and the Lupari: The Lupari are a warrior race species-bonded with humanity, tasked with protecting the particular human that they are bonded to. Karvanista is bonded to Dan, which leads Karvanista to kidnap him when their race decided to head to Earth to rescue humanity from the Flux (but was ahead of them due to a wave of temporal energy hitting his ship). Additionally, the Doctor was trying to track Karvanista down because he was the only surviving member of the Division, but when the Doctor is finally alone with him in the final episode, he reveals that he cannot say anything about the Division because he would die in three seconds if he did. We also learn that Karvanista was the Doctor’s companion during her time in the Division (as Ruth) and he began resenting the Doctor after she left him, which only got worse when she returned like nothing had ever happened (because the Doctor doesn’t have those memories). All the Lupari get killed in the final episode for no reason at all other than to make them look weak (or even morally superior) compared to the Sontarans, leaving Karvanista the final remaining member of his race.
Vinder and Bel: Vinder and Bel are lovers from an unspecified species and unspecified planet. After getting married and being deployed separately, Vinder becomes a pilot and is commended for saving three of his colleagues, leading him to be posted as the guardian of the Grand Serpent, the leader of his planet. Following a meeting in which the Grand Serpent asked the Alforia to ensure that the family members of his opponent were caught up in an accident, Vinder made a report and was immediately reposted to Observation Outpost Rose, where he saw the Flux destroying several planets before being forced to abandon his post. After an adventure in the Temple of Atropos where he meets the Doctor, Yaz and Dan, he decides to get himself trapped inside of a Passenger in the hope that he could find Bel, but ends up finding Diane instead. Bel, on the other hand, was jumping planets after her planet was ravaged by the Flux. On Puzano, she saved someone from being taken by a Passenger, much to his scorn, before trying to find the people taken by the Passenger, only for the Lupari ship she stole to be hyper-jacked by Karvanista as it did not respond to the species recall. In the end, she does manage to reunite with Vinder and reveal to him that she is pregnant, but despite this, she had less significance in the story compared to Vinder. After seeing Vinder in promotional images, I thought that he was one of the Timeless Child’s incarnations working for the Division, but it didn’t end up being the case.
Joseph Williamson: Joseph Williamson, the Mad Mole of Edge Hill, is introduced in the first episode overseeing the excavation of what would be known as the Williamson Tunnels. Williamson encounters Yaz and Dan on separate occasions, the former at the Temple of Atropos and the latter inside his tunnels, before seeing him again alongside Jericho on a ship, leading them to head to Liverpool to find him. In the end, he just serves as the source to a deus ex machina by getting the three back to the present as his tunnels contain doorways to different locations and times, which he built in the hope of sheltering people from the Flux. He doesn’t even help with the final plan because the Doctor just sends him home to the 19th century.
Diane: Diane only served as a damsel-in-distress character with questionable adaptation skills and knowledge. In the first episode, she chides Dan for being late to their “dates”, then in the final episode, she holds Dan being late against him even though he was kidnapped by Karvanista and all this stuff happened, then turns him down for a date because of it. When Diane was taken into the Passenger, she just manages to learn about the Passenger, its internal systems and how they are full of matter which is kind of sus to me for some reason. Honestly, Diane is a shallow woman and Dan doesn’t deserve someone like her. I’d make a joke about her being ‘armless, but the disability representation is done good with her because the focus is not placed on her deformity, namely her missing right hand and forearm. Then again, her actor, Nadia Albina is Vice Chair of the Act for Change project, so she probably wouldn’t have taken up the role if she knew it was going to make fun of her or other people with disabilities.
Eustacius Jericho: Professor Jericho was an academic who was unwilling to face himself and his life of failures always losing to better men, but he also didn’t let that get to him as he was unwilling to surrender in the face of psychological confrontation. Personally, I think the only reason why he was included in the last two episodes was because Chibnall couldn’t resist writing for three companions after Bradley Walsh and Tosin Cole left the series. On a side note, I’m beginning to think that’s the reason why Vinder was in this series as well with prominent roles in the second and third episodes. In the end, he faced his death with dignity even though it was a total waste; the death was written in for seemingly no reason at all and there was totally another door Jericho could have escaped the chamber from, given that the door that Stenck (or maybe it was Senstarg, I dunno, all Sontarans look the same lol) was seemingly functional. But hey, you can’t blame me for not wanting unnecessary deaths in a story because the last few Kamen Rider series have revived their dead characters (mostly post-series) and reformed them in the case of the villains.
Claire Brown: When we first saw Claire in the first episode, I thought the Doctor and Yaz would end up meeting her past self later, but no, it’s more complicated than that. A rogue Weeping Angel either entered her mind or just began existing there when she saw an image of it. She is sent back to 1967 where the Doctor finds her after a Weeping Angel takes control of her TARDIS, where she is then embroiled in a plot by the Division to recall the Doctor. After the Weeping Angel in Claire’s mind is removed and imprisoned, Claire is left in 1967 before the Doctor comes back with Jericho to retrieve her to help with the Sontarans’ plot, ending up being their key to finding out the space-time coordinates of the final Flux event. In the end, once everything goes back to normal (kind of), Claire is returned to 2021, making her an insult to all previous victims of Weeping Angels, but then they were never seen to be feeding on her potential time energy either. Claire is a testament as to how the Weeping Angels are overpowered in the series thanks to Moffat writing them as they are (any statue can be an Angel, the image of an Angel is itself an Angel etc).
The Flux: Before the series premiered, the BBC made an effort to promote this series by hyping up the Flux as some kind of epic universe-destroying thing, but it turned out to be an ordinary anti-matter wave; even worse, we never really got to see a proper resolution to the Flux, such as the effects it had on other planets or whether the planets it destroyed can be restored. The Flux could have been done differently in this series and here’s how - when I first heard of the Flux, I immediately recalled the term “time flux”, so why not make the Flux a “don’t give a shit” or “anything’s possible” wave where canon becomes meaningless and anything can be canon or not if you want it to be? It’s not quite the retcon of the Timeless Child people might be hoping for, but at least it’s a way of saying that all plot points are valid and all plot holes are valid as well.
Tecteun: A carryover from the previous series, Tecteun spends this series outside the universe in the Division outpost ship as its current leader. After Tecteun became aware of the Master telling the Doctor about the Timeless Child, she set about creating the Flux to destroy the universe and the Doctor with it while taking some genetic material into a new universe to establish a new Division. She played a part in Swarm’s release and engineered a plan to have the Weeping Angels bring the Doctor to Division before Swarm kills her and takes over the Division and the Flux. Tecteun comes off as a mad scientist kind of character and given how she is a central character in the Timeless Child arc, she deserved more time in the spotlight or even a redemption arc. Instead, she just gets killed off wastefully for seemingly no reason at all. My idea of a redemption arc would probably be Tecteun seeing reason and minimising the final Flux event just like the Ood did in the finale. If Tecteun was killed after that, it would have been better than what we got now, but if she is still alive, then props to Chibnall.
UNIT, Kate Stewart and the Grand Serpent: The Grand Serpent was a prominent figure in Vinder’s past as he was the reason why he was exiled to Observation Outpost Rose. He presumably came to Earth after being removed from power and became influential in the establishment of UNIT over the years while also being absent for numerous years at a time presumably due to his ability to time travel. After killing two prominent individuals due to discovering his true nature or not being given a prominent position himself, he is exposed by Kate Stewart in 2017, but the Grand Serpent fails to assassinate her and in the next few years, he winds down UNIT operations after cutting their funding. In 2021, he makes a deal with the Sontarans and works with them while ordering a woman with a serpent tattoo to fire some missiles, but we don’t know what’s up with that or the waiter with the serpent tattoo in 1904. Failing to find out Kate’s whereabouts from the Doctor, he goes to Earth just as the Sontarans launch their Flux offensive and finds Kate’s whereabouts from some kid. By the time the Grand Serpent manages to find Kate, the Sontarans have been eliminated and he is also confronted by Vinder as well. The Grand Serpent is left exiled on an asteroid with no means of escape. You’ll notice that I haven’t mentioned Kate that much in this section and that’s because like the Grand Serpent, she barely had any relevance or involvement. Instead of helping the Doctor with the final plan, she just hides from the Grand Serpent in the Williamson Tunnels because it’s not like that kid would know that Kate would be in the TARDIS with the Doctor. Who wants to bet that the only reason why Kate’s in this episode is because Chibnall was going to get Captain Jack back until his actor, John Barrowman, got cancelled again for things he already apologised for years ago?
The Ravagers (Swarm and Azure): The main motivation of Swarm and Azure is to allow Time to run rampant instead of being bound by the Mouri in the Temple of Atropos. Their attempt to do so during the Founding Conflict resulted in Swarm being imprisoned and Azure being sealed as a human while also ending the Dark Times on Gallifrey. After being released, Swarm and Azure attempted to break time again, though they were partially thwarted by the Doctor. Their end goal was to get revenge on the universe by letting the Flux destroy it, then finishing it off on Atropos to unleash time. However, they were distracted by a splinter of the Doctor, who they brought to Atropos to offer to Time, but ended up being disintegrated themselves for failing in their mission - also, by that point, they were irrelevant as villains anyway since the Sontarans took most of the spotlight. When I first heard of the Ravagers, I thought they were the creatures from the seemingly-namesake Ninth Doctor Big Finish audio anthology, but it turns out they were completely different. In my review of War of the Sontarans, I suggested that the Flux could be trillions and trillions of parasitic creatures that Swarm and Azure controlled, or even lesser forms of their own kind. Having the Flux be that or failing that, actually be caused by Swarm and Azure at the very least, would have been another way to improve the series.
Yaz: Despite my expectation that Yaz would be getting more character development this series, this hasn’t been the case. In fact, I’d go so far to say that Yaz has in fact regressed as a character. First of all, we hear in the first episode that Yaz is a former police officer, which is good because we’ve barely touched on that throughout the entire Chibnall era (whether she quit or was fired we still don’t know). In the second episode, we see that Yaz has WWTDD - “What Would The Doctor Do?” - written on her hand, which is absolutely stupid because she has been with the Doctor for so long that she should know it off by heart without having to write it somewhere, let alone on her hand like a kid. A Weeping Angel (Claire’s Angel in fact) stalks Yaz through her timeline for some reason in the third episode. In the fourth episode, Yaz shows off some of her skills she learnt during her time in the force and yet, she and Dan seem more competent than everyone else looking for Peggy in 1967. The fifth episode gives us more of that trademark Yaz favouritism by the Doctor (we see them landing on a bed in the TARDIS in the first episode, so that was a thing as well) when it is revealed that the Doctor left a message for her with instructions on what to do. The same episode also reveals that Yaz is fucking dumb because she couldn’t figure out what year to go back to after getting the day and month for the final Flux event and she has to ask Dan if he is from Liverpool even though they’ve been travelling with each other (and Jericho) for three years at this point, not to mention his accent or even the fact that he supports Liverpool FC (I know that you don’t have to live in Liverpool to support them, but still). She only gets reined in after she reunites with the Doctor in the final episode and even then she barely contributes anything except commentary to plot points.
The Doctor: This series has been about exploring a certain aspect of the Doctor’s past, namely her past as the Timeless Child. Because Chibnall somehow needed to protect Yaz and Dan from all the disrespect happening to the Doctor Who legacy, the Doctor spends most of this series separated from them. She even hides from Yaz the fact that she was going after Karvanista because she was looking for information on her time in the Division, which causes a bit of tension between which is only resolved when she finally tells Yaz about it at the very end of the final episode. Over the course of the series, she learns that her Ruth incarnation was involved in stopping the Siege of Atropos and gets confirmation that what the Master told her about the Timeless Child was true. She becomes desperate to find out about her past to the point that she gets angry when she is denied the chance to find out more, yet when Swarm and Azure get the fob watch and give the Doctor a chance to find out, she refuses. After stopping the Flux, the Doctor retrieves the fob watch and has the TARDIS hide it somewhere for the time being, possibly because she is still in denial about her past, which was probably made worse upon learning from Karvanista that he resented her when she left him and returned like nothing happened even though it wasn’t really her fault. The Doctor’s conflict with Tecteun also has some symbolism when you compare how much they care about the current universe. She also wonders what would have happened if Tecteun hadn’t found her and made her into what she is now, which likely also contributed to the denial of her past. As for character, the Doctor, like Yaz, has barely developed since the start of the Chibnall era as if the Timeless Child revelation did nothing to her character except make her more desperate to find out about her past and then getting depressed and going into denial when she realises that what she found out isn’t as good as she hoped it would be.
The path to the end
So in summary, Doctor Who Flux did too much and achieved so little in many aspects, such as the plot, character development, or the Timeless Child story arc, and as a result, it didn’t end up living to the hype that the BBC tried too hard to promote. Chibnall is a bad writer who can’t write coherent stories for shit (I won’t go so far as to call him a hack) and destroyed the nearly 60-year legacy of Doctor Who because he thought the show “could have been a lot better” back in the 80s and he wanted to adapt some fanfiction he had when he was a kid. At least my fanfiction, egotistical and cringeworthy as it was, didn’t make the Doctor more special than he already was as a renegade Time Lord by making him some kid from another universe who was repeatedly killed by some woman in order to become the origin of the Time Lord race and their regeneration abilities. While people are entitled to their own opinions, I personally think that people need to stop lauding the Chibnall era as something profound or revolutionary when it honestly isn’t that good in hindsight.
In other news, Jodie Whittaker was featured in an episode of The Dengineers where she has a Zoom interview with a kid in a TARDIS-themed den and in the end, she recites the First Doctor’s parting speech to Susan Foreman, but it ends up not being as emotional as the original because she sounds like she’s reading off a script. Also, two women have accused Chris Noth, who played Jack Robertson, of sexual assault incidents that happened to them years ago. What an ironic turn of events. Who would have thought that the Democrat-wannabe Trump-expy would get #MeToo’d? (For context, Chris Noth has liberal political views, which makes his portrayal of Jack Robertson and these accusations doubly hilarious in hindsight.)
With Jodie Whittaker’s third series done and dusted, there are three more specials to come in 2022 before these reviews come to an end. The three specials have already been filmed this year, which gives Russell T Davies more time to prepare for Series 14 given that the final episodes of the RTD and Moffat eras finished filming 6-7 months prior to broadcast. I truly hope we get a full series before the 60th Anniversary Special, otherwise it would be a wasted opportunity.
As for me, it’ll be nice to finally get back to focusing on my personal project because I’ve been neglecting it a bit over the last two months in order to write this review series. Seriously, I’ve found that it’s taken me a bit more effort to write out the reviews for this series this time around. I hope to finally get around to doing Doctor Who 10 for 10 some time after the Easter Special but before the Centenary Special.
I’ve noticed that I’ve gotten a bit more interaction in terms of likes during this series of reviews compared to previous series, which is good because it shows that the Tumblr algorithm is doing its job. I would like to thank the people who have read and liked my reviews, along with people like Bowlestrek, Nerdrotic, Heel vs Babyface and NoelZone for redpilling me about Doctor Who, helping me see this latest series more critically than before and giving me more things to talk about throughout this series of reviews.
Stay tuned after New Year’s Day when I review the 2022 New Year’s Special, Eve of the Daleks.