Chibnall’s last full series is one six-part serial instead of ten standalone episodes, and you can feel the ambition in that decision straight away. “The Halloween Apocalypse” has to introduce a new companion, a new pair of villains, a returning alien race, a woman in a Victorian house, a soldier at an outpost and a wave of destruction eating the universe, all in fifty minutes. It gets through all of it. Whether it does any of it well is another matter, and my honest answer is that it was ok. It’s never dull, but it’s so relentlessly busy that it kept me at arm’s length from everything it wanted me to care about.
I wanted to love this. A serialised Doctor Who that trusts people to hold six episodes in their heads is exactly the swing the show needed after the tidy standalone run of Series 12. There’s a difference between a story that unfolds and a story that simply won’t sit still, though, and this opener lands on the wrong side of it more often than not. By the halfway mark I’d stopped trying to track who everybody was. I was just waiting to be told which of these people I was supposed to follow.
Dan Lewis is the best thing here
John Bishop turns up and immediately makes the show warmer. Dan is a Liverpool bloke who gives museum tours he isn’t employed to give, volunteers at a food bank and then quietly queues at it himself on the way home, and takes being abducted by a dog-faced alien with the weary good humour of a man whose week was already going badly. That’s a proper companion introduction, and it works because Bishop plays him as a grown-up rather than a wide-eyed tourist. He isn’t dazzled. He’s mildly put out. The food bank detail is dropped in without comment and it tells you everything about him, which is exactly how this show used to handle its companions before it started explaining them.
When Karvanista bundles him into a cage in his own living room, Dan’s response is irritation rather than terror, and that’s funnier and more human than fear would have been. His flat being lifted into orbit with him still in it, complaining, is the single best gag of the hour. Karvanista himself is a good joke stretched into a good character: a Lupari warrior who despises the Doctor, has been assigned to protect one specific human, and resents every second of it. The reveal that every Lupari ship in the fleet is shielding one person on Earth is the kind of enormous, silly, generous idea this programme does better than anything else on television. I just wish the hour had given me thirty more seconds to enjoy it before moving on.
Swarm, Azure, and a very crowded fifty minutes
Swarm and Azure look tremendous. The crystalline, flaking skin is a genuinely unsettling design, and Sam Spruell plays Swarm as something ancient and amused rather than snarling, which is the right instinct for a villain who’s supposed to predate most of the universe. Their opening scene, where Swarm pulls himself back together out of a containment facility and turns a guard to dust with a touch, promises real weight behind him. Then the episode goes somewhere else, and then somewhere else again. We get Vinder alone at an observation post, Claire meeting the Doctor in a Liverpool street and knowing things she shouldn’t, Sontarans on a horizon in the past, a house in 1820, the Flux boiling toward the solar system, and Yaz and the Doctor being chased through corridors on a chain.
Every one of those threads is fine on its own. None of them gets long enough to become interesting, because the hour keeps cutting away at the exact moment something starts to land. I don’t mind being confused in episode one of six, since confusion is the engine of a serial and a story that hands you everything up front has nothing left for week four. What I mind is that the confusion here comes from volume rather than mystery. A mystery makes me lean in, a traffic jam makes me check how long is left, and far too much of this hour is spent setting things up instead of letting anything happen.
The Doctor still won’t talk about herself
The thread I actually care about is Division, and it gets maybe four minutes. After The Timeless Children rewrote the Doctor’s entire history, and she then spent Revolution of the Daleks doing very little about it, I want to see what that knowledge has done to her. There’s a flash of it when she admits to Yaz that she’s been chasing answers behind her back, and Whittaker plays the evasion nicely, all bright deflection with something tight underneath. But the show keeps flinching. Yaz asks direct questions and gets brushed off, which would be a fine dynamic if the episode gave it any room, and instead it’s one more plate to keep spinning.
That’s the clearest symptom of what’s wrong here. Yaz has been travelling with this Doctor for three years, she’s the longest-serving companion of the era, and she has the most obvious unresolved thread, yet the show’s answer is to have her ask a question and get changed the subject on. Mandip Gill has spent those three years being handed this exact material and never quite being allowed to do anything with it. There’s a version of this opener that starts on that conversation and lets it play for five uninterrupted minutes, and it would have given the whole run a spine to hang the mystery on. Instead the argument gets rationed out in fragments and never builds into anything.
Claire is the more intriguing note. She recognises the Doctor from a meeting that hasn’t happened yet, apologises for it, and then a Weeping Angel takes her off the street in the fog. That’s a properly good hook. It’s the one moment where the episode’s chaos feels deliberate rather than accidental, and it’s the thread I most wanted the run to pull on next.
As a first chapter, this is a lot of promises and not much payment. The Flux arrives at the end, the Lupari shield goes up and the universe starts coming apart, which is a decent cliffhanger even if the wave itself looks a bit weightless on screen. That weightlessness is a problem this whole run is going to have. I’m told the universe is ending roughly once an episode, and it never once feels like it. An opener should make me want the next one because I’m invested rather than because I’m owed an explanation, and this one mostly manages the second.
Rating: 3/5. It was ok. Busy, good-looking, occasionally very funny, and so determined to set up six episodes at once that it forgets to be one episode first. Bishop is the reason to watch, and the Angel in the fog is the reason to come back.
