After four weeks of the show insisting Division mattered without telling me what Division actually was, “Survivors of the Flux” finally opens the box. The Doctor meets Tecteun, gets a version of the truth about where she came from, and is offered her stolen memories back. That’s the scene this run has been promising since chapter one, and it’s genuinely good when it arrives. It’s also sandwiched between about four other plots, which is the recurring problem with Flux.
Chapter five is a lot better than chapter three and not as good as chapter four, which is roughly where I expected it to land. It’s an episode that moves pieces into place and mostly knows that’s what it is. It moves briskly enough that I didn’t resent it, and after “Once, Upon Time” that counts for something. It was ok.
Tecteun, and the conversation this run needed
Barbara Flynn is very good in this. Tecteun is played as a scientist rather than a villain: measured, faintly regretful, and entirely convinced she was owed the thing she took. The scene where she explains that she found the Doctor as a child, experimented on her, and used what she learned to build the regeneration cycle that made the Time Lords what they are is delivered like a woman describing a research programme to a colleague. That’s far more chilling than gloating would have been.
What I liked is that the show doesn’t let the Doctor take the deal. She’s offered her memories back and she refuses, because accepting them on Tecteun’s terms would mean accepting Tecteun’s account of who she is and what was done to her. That’s a real character choice, and Whittaker plays the refusal with a flat, tired anger that’s the best work she’s done in the part. There’s no speech. She just says no, and means it.
What I liked less is how much is still being held back. We learn what Division did to her and almost nothing about what she did for Division, which is the far more interesting question and the one The Timeless Children actually raised in the first place. A Doctor who was an operative for an organisation that meddled across the universe, whose memories of doing it were taken, and who now has to decide whether she wants them back, is a genuinely rich position for this character. It rhymes with everything the show has ever said about her running from something. Chibnall clearly knows it’s the good idea, because it’s the one he keeps gesturing at, and he keeps declining to write the scene where somebody says out loud what she actually did.
Three plots and a serpent
Meanwhile Yaz, Dan and Jericho are stranded in 1901 and working their way toward 1967 the long way round, which is a lovely idea for about ten minutes before it turns into a montage. We get the Great Wall, a temple, a Nepalese mountainside and a stack of clues assembled off-screen. The three of them living together for years is the part I wish the show had actually shown me: Yaz, Dan and an Edwardian psychic researcher stuck in the wrong century, slowly becoming a family while they wait for a date they’ve worked out from a prophecy. That’s a premise. Squashing it into a photo album of exotic locations means the reunion at the far end has nothing behind it, and it wastes Kevin McNally, the best guest actor of the run, in the process.
Bel and Vinder finally get within touching distance of each other, and Thaddea Graham keeps carrying every scene she’s in. Her pregnancy is dropped in without ceremony, the way you’d mention the weather, which is entirely in keeping with how she’s played Bel from the start. Their reunion being repeatedly put off is the one piece of withholding in this whole run that actually works. It works because the show bothered to make me want it before it started denying it to me. That’s the difference between tension and stalling.
Then there’s the Grand Serpent, who has apparently been infiltrating UNIT across several decades in a subplot the series has barely touched until now. Craig Parkinson plays him with a nice quiet menace, and watching the organisation get hollowed out from the inside by a man nobody thought to check on is a decent idea that explains why UNIT wasn’t around for the last two series. It’s the fifth thing this episode is juggling, though, and it arrives with a single chapter left. Seeded from episode one in thirty-second slices, it could have paid off five weeks of unease. Introduced and resolved inside two episodes, it’s just more plot.
The problem with saving it all for the end
Here’s my honest frustration with Flux as it heads into the finale. It has spent five hours moving pieces into position, and the payoff for nearly all of it has been pushed into one sixty-minute episode. Karvanista, the Lupari fleet, Swarm and Azure, Division, Tecteun, the Grand Serpent, UNIT, Bel and Vinder, the Sontaran fleet and the Flux itself all still need resolving, and the clock is nearly out. That isn’t confidence, it’s putting things off and calling it confidence. Compare it to how The Stolen Earth handles an overcrowded board, where everything converges because everything was already pointed at the same place from the start.
Here the threads are still travelling in different directions, and so much of this hour’s work is admin rather than drama that I can’t see how they meet. I enjoyed watching it more than that makes it sound, mind. Karvanista gets a decent stretch, rounding up the Lupari and being insufferable about it, and the joke of a species bred to protect humans who can’t stand humans hasn’t worn thin yet. The Doctor ends it a captive with a fob watch she hasn’t opened, the Sontarans have taken Earth and the Flux is still coming. It’s a genuinely exciting place to leave things, and I went into the finale properly wanting to know how any of it resolved, which is more than I could say two weeks ago.
Rating: 3/5. It was ok, and it’s the arc episode this run needed about four weeks earlier than it got it. Tecteun is a strong antagonist, the refusal scene is Whittaker’s best moment in the role, and Bel remains the most likeable thing Flux has invented. It loses ground for being a corridor between two better episodes, and for stacking a preposterous amount of work onto the finale.
