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.
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.
