A trippy Doctor Who travels up its own timestream

After the overstuffed premiere of the Doctor Who: Flux miniseries, I assumed we’d be in for smoother sailing. Surely introducing all the season’s main players in one go would reduce the need for week-to-week exposition and set-up, right? Apparently not! After last week’s relatively straightforward Sontaran romp, “Once, Upon Time” ramps up the mysterious plotting to warp speed. The first half of this episode toes the line between being enjoyably manic and just plain overstuffed. And while, in the end, “Once, Upon Time” is actually a little more straightforward than it initially seems like it’s going to be, it also turns out to be less substantial than I wanted as well.

After a brief prologue that introduces us to Thaddea Graham’s delightfully optimistic survivor Bel (more on her later), the episode picks up right where last week’s cliffhanger left off. With Yaz and Vinder about to be fried by the full force of time, the Doctor makes a desperate plea to stall for time. She leaps onto the broken Mouri platform with Dan, sonics the hell out of it, and transports the team to a swirling ether she refers to as the “heart of the timestorm.” They’re only there for a few moments before they’re zapped off to parts unknown. And while it eventually becomes clear that Yaz, Dan, Vinder, and the Doctor are pulled into various moments from their own timestreams (past, present, and future), one of the things “Once, Upon Time” does best is evoke a dream-like sense of confusion.

We have to figure things out along with the Doctor and her companions as they find themselves in worlds that are both familiar and deeply confusing. The Doctor is leading a siege on Atropos alongside a hardened team of Yaz, Dan, and Vinder. Dan is on a trippy date with Diane. Vinder is applying for a prestigious military position with a space captain version of Yaz. And Yaz finds herself on a police shift with the Doctor—or is it her old co-worker? “Once, Upon Time” effectively captures the jumbled way that dreams come together with a mixture of confusion and recognition. (The whole thing has big “And then you forgot” energy from “Forest Of The Dead.”) And, best of all, it does so while doling out some meaningful character backstory too.

Well, kind of. Poor Yaz doesn’t really get anything to do this week, other than setting up next week’s big Weeping Angels episode. But Dan and Vinder fair better. We get to see more of Dan and Diane’s sweet will-they-won’t-they friendship, and learn that Dan was engaged 15 years ago only to be left heartbroken when his fiancée ended things two days before their wedding. (The way John Bishop quietly delivers the line “God I loved her” is pretty devastating.) Vinder, meanwhile, has a love story of his own—one that helps him emerge as the tragic heart of this episode.

The basic gist is that he was a moral military man who earned a prestigious promotion only to discover murderous corruption at the highest ranks of government. And it was Vinder’s decision to blow the whistle that led to him being banished to the remote Outpost Rose where we met him in the season premiere. In a fitting nod to that outpost’s name, it turns out spunky, sparky Flux survivor Bel is ready to take down whole battalions of Cybermen to get back to the man she loves (and whose baby she’s carrying). Like Jacob Anderson, Thaddea Graham is an immediately winning presence who you’re ready to root for before you even really know her. The duo provide a welcome bit of human emotionality to an episode that sometimes gets bogged down in clunky exposition and slapdash CGI.

Indeed, the visual lowpoint are the scenes of the Doctor talking to giant Mouri in a swirling purple “timestorm” that reeks of cheap green screen work. But, hey, Jo Martin is back and that’s fun! Like Dan and Vinder (and I guess Yaz?), the Doctor is thrust back into a fragmented, modulated experience from her past. Only hers is one she doesn’t remember because it took place when she was in her Jo Martin “Doctor Ruth” form, working for the Division. The soldier represented by Dan is actually Karvanista, who apparently fought alongside her. And the Doctor gets to live out the moment she captured Swarm and Azure (a.k.a “the Ravagers”) after their first attack on the Planet Time.

Yet while the Doctor’s throughline starts strong, it unfortunately devolves into some frustratingly confusing Chris Chibnall-era overexposition. The subplot works best when it has a clear emotional center, like when Swarm calls out the hypocrisy of the fact that the Division seeks to end killing by executing those who kill. But the more abstract it gets, the harder it is to connect to. As far as I can tell, Flux is gearing up to be a story that pits space against time because that’s apparently the “founding conflict” of the universe. Swarm hints that the Division created the Planet Time in order to control an uncontrollable force and end the “Dark Times.” And since the planet takes up physical space, that makes the Division the pro-space camp to the pro-time camp of Swarm and Azure? Maybe?

And that’s not even getting into all the stuff about Passengers keeping hundreds of thousands of prisoners inside of them or the deadly “particles of the timeforce” mites or that extremely mysterious scene where a Time Lord-y woman billed as Awsok (Barbara Flynn) casually informs the Doctor that it’s time for this universe to end. Awsok also reveals that the Ravagers have a crucial role to play in all of this, and the Flux was apparently made and placed because of the Doctor. “I’m sorry, I’m normally very good at keeping up with things, but you lost me quite early on,” the Doctor notes. I know exactly how she feels.

For an episode that starts with such mysteriously intriguing promise, the climax of “Once, Upon Time” is frustratingly muddled—both in the past and the present. Thankfully, it’s just about saved by a cliffhanger that sees a Weeping Angel break onto the TARDIS and start piloting it somewhere. Now that’s the kind of concrete yet intriguing storytelling beat that I can follow. “Once, Upon Time” is an episode that toes the line between being entertaining and confusing, and just about stays on the right side of it. Hopefully next week will get the balance even better.

Stray observations

• It’s some fun worldbuilding that after the Flux hit, the Daleks, Cybermen, and Sontarans immediately started a turf war over who would get to rule the end of the universe.
• Yet another mysterious sequence in this episode: The scene where Dan finds himself with a laser-gun-totting Mr. Williamson in one of his tunnels. Since Dan is theoretically stuck in his own timestream at that point, is that a hint towards a future adventure he’s yet to have?
• The Division Doctor tells Swarm and Azure that their punishments will be either “isolation prison terms for the infinite duration of the universe” or “erasure of identity,” which I think is supposed to explain how Azure wound up living as a human in the Arctic Circle.
• Why did Swarm’s face look different in this episode? Was it supposed to indicate that he was younger?
• Vinder knowing what a TARDIS is but thinking they weren’t real is a nice riff on the classic “It’s bigger on the inside” scene.
• Jodie Whittaker has so much fun with that brief scene where she gets to play Yaz’s satsuma-neutral partner! More of that please!