Azuma Yeonchi: "*OLD CONTENT REPOST* The dest…"

YeonchiDoctor Who Series 13 (Flux) Review Chapter Five: Survivors of the FluxAir date: 28 November 2021 Well everyone, it’s finally happened. Chibnall has officially doubled down on the Timeless Child. Forget my spoiler-free thought for this episode, we all knew this was coming despite our efforts at coping in the hope that things would turn out differently. Frankly, if that were the case, fans (including myself) would still be blaming Chibnall for making us believe the Timeless Child stuff and keeping us hanging for nearly two years, so the only way he could really go is down, like celebrities who pander to China while trying to appease the mainstream population. At least Chibnall didn’t go with the fanwank route of having the Master be the Timeless Child because that’d probably be just as bad. The only other thing we need is that final link with Ruth and her place in the Doctor’s timeline. I’m planning a rant about the Timeless Child and why I don’t like that story arc for the review of the final chapter or the Series 13 epilogue post, but for now, let’s just focus on this episode as I type on a new computer and keyboard (which I’ll talk about another day). You know the drill - spoilers continue after the break. May God have mercy on us all. The Timeless Child double-down Continuing from where we left off, the Doctor examines the Weeping Angels around her before she finds herself on a ship. After having a conversion plate placed on her by an Ood, the Doctor is led inside, where she encounters Awsok, who we last saw in Once, Upon Time. Following some to-ing and fro-ing, Awsok tells the Doctor that she is essentially the current leader of the Division and proceeds to give her a brief history of it; the Division began on Gallifrey as a small group to ensure the safety of the galaxy, but as Gallifrey grew, the Division began recruiting from other dimensions and species, guiding and shaping events on many civilisations. Despite it growing so big, the Doctor was unable to find the Division because they are not in the universe; she and Awsok are on what is probably the Division’s control outpost, situated between two universes. The outpost is moving into the next universe, with Awsok having kept a seed vault of genetic traces from the previous universe to import into the next. The Doctor insists that her universe isn’t going anywhere, but Awsok explains that it has been over since they let a virus into their experiment - the Doctor left the Division and did her own interfering all over the universe. In order to protect the secrecy of their existence, the Division engineered the Flux to destroy the universe and the Doctor with it. The Doctor asks Awsok who she is; she reveals herself to be the one who found her, brought her to Gallifrey, raised her and did all sorts of experiments on her. By this point you’re probably wondering why Awsok hasn’t addressed herself by name yet, and that’s because Awsok is, in fact, Tecteun. Tecteun had the Weeping Angels bring the Doctor to Division so that she wouldn’t be in the universe to save it. The Doctor asks Tecteun if what the Master told her in The Timeless Children was true (because she somehow knew that the Master would get a hold of the information in the Matrix, though the Doctor could have said to Tecteun, “So, that stuff the Master told me, that you left in the Matrix, was that true?”) and she confirms this. The Doctor tells Tecteun that she denied her her life; Tecteun says that everything the Doctor is is because of her, though she understands that she thinks that she could have been someone else, to which the Doctor says that she may never know. Tecteun points out the Doctor’s judgement of her for giving her the journey of a lifetime when her travels involving her companions were just as experimental to the Doctor as she was to herself. Tecteun also reveals that she was the one who ordered her memories erased before she leaves. The Doctor convinces the Ood to show her the universe and she notices that the projection isn’t centred correctly, as if the Flux is centring in towards Earth. The Doctor hears voices in her head and sees the Lungbarrow-esque house again; it is then that the Doctor notices a fob watch, containing the memories of her time as the Timeless Child which was transferred from the Weeping Angel in Claire’s mind. Tecteun gives the Doctor a choice; she can return to her universe and attempt to defend it from the Flux, or she can rejoin her and the Division in the other universe and regain her memories, adding that that universe is where the other end of the wormhole was. The Doctor proclaims to Tecteun that she will save her friends and the universe while destroying the Division in the process. It is then that Swarm and Azure board the outpost using a psycho-temporal bridge powered by the energy they harvested from the lifeforms of the universe. Swarm, crediting Tecteun for releasing him, proceeds to “release” her by turning her into ash before advancing on the Doctor… So, the double-down has happened and the Master’s words are confirmed straight from the horse’s mouth - the Doctor is the Timeless Child. At this point, you’d think that Ruth’s place in the timeline wouldn’t matter, but honestly, it still does because we still need to know where Ruth fits in the timeline and if she is the incarnation where she gets her memories erased. Don’t expect the doubling-down to let up next week. Killing off Tecteun was the second worst move of this episode next to the double-down. Her potential in the series finale was wasted when we could have seen a final showdown or even a last-minute redemption. Forging a way back Oh yes, other things are still things in this episode. In 1904, Dan, Yaz and Professor Jericho are in Mexico, having already been in the era for three years. After Dan dodges a trap, the group take an offering pot which apparently has the exact day that the world is going to end. They take it to someone in Constantinople to decipher, but when Jericho smells burning in the tent (or something) they are in, the group quickly evacuate before some dynamite, placed by a mysterious figure, blows it up. They only get a partial date - 5 December - but no year. Given that the Flux is happening in 2021 and Dan was kidnapped by Karvanista on Halloween night, they should have been able to deduce that that is the date and try to get back there; even if it’s only some time away, at least they can prepare. For some reason, Dan, Yaz and Jericho are dumb in this episode and that’s not the only example of it. On a ship, the group are attacked by a waiter with a serpent tattoo on his forearm. They fend him off and try to interrogate him, but he bites a poison capsule lodged in his tooth and kills himself. Later, as Dan and Jericho dump the waiter’s body overboard, Yaz listens to an adaptive hologram message the Doctor left her that activated two weeks after she disappeared; the Flux has caused creatures to be displaced and their first target is probably going to be Earth as it seems to be safe for the time being, but it would cause a battle for the ownership of the Earth, so their task is to figure out the date and help the Earth; the Flux created ripples through time so there are people who will have foreseen it. Like I said, the group should have deduced the year by this point, making any further efforts redundant. The group eventually get to Nepal, where they meet a seer on a mountain. The seer only says “Fetch your dog”, which confounds Jericho, but leads Dan and Yaz to realise something. They head to the Great Wall of China and paint a message on the ground there for Karvanista to find (yeah, like the CCP will just leave it alone for 120 years lol, not to mention the weather or vegetation). Back on the ship, the group get no response from Karvanista or the Doctor (what did you expect?), but they are visited by Joseph Williamson, who just comes into their cabin talking about shifting doorways before disappearing back through the door. Dan realises that if Williamson keeps turning up before him and Yaz, then they need to find him, so they head back to Liverpool and go down into the Williamson Tunnels, which have stopped construction since Williamson’s death (in 1840). After six and a half hours of walking through the tunnels, the group encounter Williamson. At this point, Yaz has the fucking gall to ask Dan if he is from Liverpool. Surely she should have worked it out already in the short time they were together with the Doctor. Yaz explains their situation to Williamson; having finally found someone able to sympathise with his problem, Williamson takes the group to the heart of his tunnels, namely a chamber intended as a defence for humanity against the Flux. Around it, there are doorways leading to different worlds, but in the past few days, they now lead to unknown places, particularly Doorway 9 which is apparently deadly. Suddenly, they hear knocks on the doorways… A king mingles among the people (of another world) In 1958 England, the Grand Serpent, going by the name of Prentis, connects with someone known as Farquhar about threats originating from beyond the Earth. When Farquhar states that he is tasked with setting up the British division of a new taskforce funded by the United Nations, Prentis offers his help. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the origin of UNIT. Nearly a decade later, in 1967, Farquhar brought in Corporal Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, after having missed the events of The War Machines and despite the fact that he was yet to meet the Doctor in an encounter with the Yeti in The Web of Fear. Yeah, there’s a whole saga of inaccuracies in UNIT’s timeline that I’m not going to bother going through. Frankly, we can just say that things like the Time War or the Flux caused all these inconsistencies to happen in time. It’s become a good excuse to explain away inconsistencies in my personal project. So anyway, Farquhar brings the Grand Serpent, who seemingly hasn’t aged a day, into his office, where the TARDIS has been brought in from Medderton (so I guess the Weeping Angels just put the two timezones back in their original place in space and time, lol ok), which they are converting into a training facility (probably would have been better if it wasn’t UNIT, but whatever, it’s not like it matters a lot). Farquhar shows a machine designed to detect non-terrestrial lifeforms and discovers that the Grand Serpent is not human. The Grand Serpent chokes Farquhar from the inside and a serpent comes out of his mouth and back to its master. In 1987, the Grand Serpent wishes Millington a happy retirement and offers to be his successor as chair of the UNIT Oversight Committee, but he refuses due to his prolonged absences. As Millington goes back to his unusually hot car, he is assassinated by the Grand Serpent in the same way as he did Farquhar. In 2017, the Grand Serpent tells Kate Stewart that he is winding down all UNIT operations. Kate tells him that she knows of his true identity before revealing that he can’t suffocate her the same way he did Farquhar and Millington as she is wearing a psychic manifest shield and leaving. That night, when Kate returns home, she discovers a bomb behind her door and manages to escape as it detonates. She then calls Osgood to tell her that she is going dark before breaking her phone and leaving. Well, at least that explains what happened in Resolution. Other threads again Two other threads have a minor focus in this episode. Since the first episode, we’ve gone from 8-9 threads to 3 threads to 5 threads to 3 threads and back to 5 threads again. If this series was a big Spanish Inquisition then I totally didn’t expect that. In 2021, one of the Lupari ships falls out of formation, leading Karvanista to search for the one ship that didn’t respond to the species recall. The ship was stolen by Bel and is about to arrive on a monolith when it is remotely taken over and brought to Earth. Meanwhile, Vinder arrives on the monolith. He sees Swarm and Azure using people taken by the Passengers to power their psycho-temporal bridge to the Doctor and tries to evade them, but is soon confronted by Swarm and two Passengers, one of which transports Vinder inside himself and it is in there that he encounters Diane. Karvanista boards the ship Bel is on and they engage in combat when they learn that the Lupari ships are being attacked. As the Grand Serpent orders a woman with a serpent tattoo on her forearm to lower Earth’s defences and aim all their missiles inwards at the target cities, the Sontarans, led by Commander Stenck, appear above Earth (as revenge for their previous defeat) and begin attacking the Lupari ships, even going back to attack Yaz and the others in the Williamson Tunnels… Other general thoughts I’ve noticed that the Doctor has spent most of this series separated from Yaz and Dan and that the Doctor is the only person who hears about the Timeless Child stuff; even when Ryan asked her about it in Revolution of the Daleks, she only alluded a bit of it to him, meaning that Yaz still doesn’t know what the Doctor discovered on Gallifrey. Chibnall carried Professor Jericho over to this episode just so we could have three companions, didn’t he? At this point I’m honestly wondering how this series would have turned out if Graham and Ryan hadn’t left. Frankly, it would have been better that way given what Dan’s gone through on his first adventure. With Captain Jack’s appearance last year and Kate Stewart’s appearance in this episode and the next episode, this means that Chibnall has brought back a prominent character from both the first RTD and Moffat eras. Say what you will about this era, Chibnall bringing back the memberberries has been a positive of his era. In the RTD era, Sarah Jane Smith was brought back followed by the Brigadier and Jo Grant/Jones in The Sarah Jane Adventures. In the Moffat era, Charles Dickens was brought back in The Wedding of River Song, but he was just a minor character and historical figure; the major memberberry would come in the form of the Tenth Doctor in The Day of the Doctor. If the Grand Serpent was only seen in scenes from 1958 onwards, then what was all that stuff happening in 1904, particularly the waiter with the serpent tattoo? Is it possible that he was on Earth before 1958? I’m presuming that the Doctor only left a message for Yaz, so did Dan get anything? Talk about Yaz favouritism lol. Also, how did it take Yaz, Dan and Jericho three years to work out that the offering pot was what they were supposed to look for when the Doctor’s message only activated two weeks after her disappearance? Again, no tokusatsu references in this episode. Frankly, trying to find references is hard when you’ve got a lot of stuff going on. As for SJW red flags, there are a couple. On one hand, now that we know that the Doctor is the Timeless Child, this means that Chibnall diversified the Doctor and whitewashed the Timeless Child and we should never forget that. On another hand, my prediction for this whole thing being a metaphor for colonialism (that I mentioned in the prelude) did come true. Summary and verdict Initially, I thought that this episode was just okay, but after some rewatches, it honestly wasn’t that good as I thought. Aside from the Timeless Child double-down, Yaz, Dan and Jericho are fucking stupid (Yaz in particular) and Tecteun was killed off even though there is some potential for her in the next episode. Normally, I would give this episode a 4 or 5 out of 10, but since I said that I would be holding this series to a higher standard and taking off points for destroying canon, I am going to uphold my promise and give this episode the verdict it deserves. Rating: -10/10 Stay tuned next week as I review the sixth and final chapter of Flux, The Vanquishers. If this episode is any indication then it’ll probably end up being another -10/10 for me. The epilogue post will follow that and, as always, I will be reviewing the New Year’s Special as well.

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