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Karvanista

The Vanquishers: Too Many Plates, Not Enough Hands

by Hutch Morzaria December 13, 2021

written by Hutch Morzaria

Flux spent five chapters setting up far more than any single episode could reasonably finish, and “The Vanquishers” is the bill arriving. It has to deal with Swarm and Azure, Division and Tecteun, the Grand Serpent, the Sontaran occupation of Earth, the Lupari fleet, Bel and Vinder, Karvanista, a Dalek and Cyberman ambush, Kate Stewart, Jericho, Peggy, and the small matter of a wave of unmaking that has already eaten most of the universe. It gets through all of it. It doesn’t land much of it, and I came away disappointed.

There’s a version of this finale that works, and you can see it flickering at the edges of this one. An hour this stuffed can only give each thread about four minutes, though, and four minutes isn’t enough to end anything properly. What you get instead is a series of plots being switched off one after another. Not my favourite.

Three Doctors is a fix, not an idea

The episode splits the Doctor into three, running in parallel across different locations, which is presented as a consequence of the fob watch business and is really a way of getting one actor into three plots at once. Whittaker is good at it, and there’s a decent running gag about the three of them being slightly out of sync and increasingly irritated with each other. She’s always been strongest playing brisk competence under pressure, and having three of her at once gives her plenty of that to do. It’s a scheduling solution dressed up as an idea, though. The three Doctors never disagree about anything that matters, never share a scene that means something, and are put back together at the end without cost or consequence.

Compare it to The Almost People, where a duplicate Doctor exists specifically so the show can ask whether a copy is a person and then make you sit with the answer. Here it’s a convenience, and once you notice that, the trick stops being fun and starts being a workaround. It also means the Doctor spends her own finale being efficient rather than being present. She’s in three places solving three problems, which is precisely the opposite of what a climax needs from its lead. There’s no moment where she has to choose, because she never has to be in one place.

The Vanquishers, the Doctor Who Flux finale

Villains dispatched at speed

Swarm and Azure have been the most striking thing in Flux to look at, and they’re beaten by Time itself turning up as a figure in a cloak and unmaking them, more or less off-handedly, in about ninety seconds. Five chapters of buildup end with something else deciding they’re finished. Sam Spruell deserved a great deal better than that, and so did whoever designed that flaking crystalline skin. The Grand Serpent fares slightly better, mostly because Craig Parkinson is enjoyable and Kate Stewart gets to be the one who deals with him. Jemma Redgrave has been badly underused across this whole era, so watching her get an actual win, exiling him to an empty rock to sit there indefinitely, is a small real pleasure.

The Sontarans go out on a genuinely nasty beat, tricked into massing at a fuel depot and destroyed wholesale by the Daleks and Cybermen. It’s a cold, funny idea and easily the best plotting in the hour. It’s also the third time this run has dealt with a threat by arranging for somebody else to kill it, and that’s starting to look less like a pattern and more like a habit the show hasn’t noticed. Across six chapters this Doctor talks a species into extinction by proxy, stands by while a fleet is destroyed after surrendering, and watches a cloaked figure unmake her two main enemies. She’s present at a great deal of killing and responsible for almost none of it, which lets her keep her hands clean while the plot gets tidied up around her. A Town Called Mercy put a version of that problem to a previous Doctor directly and made him answer for it, and nobody asks this one anything.

What does work

Bel and Vinder finally reach each other, and the reunion is played simply and quietly and earns its moment completely. There’s no last-minute obstacle and no cruel twist, just two people who’ve been walking toward each other for six weeks arriving at the same place. Thaddea Graham and Jacob Anderson have been the best-served new characters in the whole run, and giving them a straightforward happy ending is exactly the right call. Dan telling Di how he feels, having crossed the universe and back to get to her, is the other thing that works. John Bishop has been the best part of Flux since his first scene in a cage in his own living room, and the show is smart enough to end his chapter on something small and human.

Jericho’s death, off-screen and unfussy and reported rather than shown, is more affecting than most of the deliberate emotional beats in the hour. The show is better at these small moments than the enormous ones, and that’s really the lesson of the whole run. It’s why Village of the Angels stands so far above everything around it. Give this production one location, a handful of people and a monster with rules, and it turns in something excellent. Give it six plots, four villains and the end of the universe, and you get something you can admire the ambition of while checking how long is left.

The thing that annoys me most is Yaz. Three years of Mandip Gill being handed almost nothing, one genuinely good episode where she was finally allowed to lead, and now a finale where she’s back to standing beside the Doctor asking the questions somebody has to ask. Division ends the run more or less where it started, too: the Doctor still has the fob watch, still hasn’t opened it, and still doesn’t know what she did. After six chapters of withholding, closing on another deferral is a hard sell. The whole thing is enormously ambitious and shaky when it counts, and I respect the first part far more than I enjoyed the second.

Rating: 2.5/5. Not my favourite. It’s busy and competent and occasionally very funny, and it resolves its plots mainly in the sense that it stops them happening. Bel and Vinder land, Dan lands, Kate gets a win, and nearly everything else is waved through at speed. Flux swung big and I respect the swing, but this is the chapter where it finally collapses under everything it was carrying.

December 13, 2021 0 comments

Survivors of the Flux: The Answer Arrives, Sort Of

by Hutch Morzaria December 8, 2021

written by Hutch Morzaria

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.

Survivors of the Flux, Doctor Who Flux chapter five

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.

December 8, 2021 0 comments

Doctor Who Television

The Halloween Apocalypse: Everything, All at Once, Immediately

by Hutch Morzaria November 9, 2021

written by Hutch Morzaria

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.

Dan Lewis meets Karvanista in The Halloween Apocalypse

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.

November 9, 2021 0 comments