Doctor Who’s Flux finale falls flat

Photo: BBC America

“Can you not say things like we’re supposed to know what they are?”

It’s funny when writer/showrunner Chris Chibnall gives his characters lines that feel like a meta critique of his own writing. Going into this six-part serialized Flux event, my hope was that it would give Chibnall a chance to course correct some of his writing pitfalls; to space out the overexposition he’s so fond of and make more room for the sort of character development he doesn’t usually prioritize. And for a while, at least, it seemed like that might be the case. There were definitely high points across Flux, including a welcome new confidence for Yaz, the fun addition of Dan, and that stellar Weeping Angels episode.

In the end, though, what stands out most about Flux is how little any of it mattered. Last week, the Doctor learned that her abusive adoptive mother had engineered the Flux only to watch mommy dearest get vaporized right in front of her. This week, that doesn’t even get a passing mention. As far as I can tell, by the end of the episode the Doctor has done absolutely nothing about the fact that the entire universe (except for Earth) was drastically decimated by the Flux. In retrospect, there are whole characters and subplots that could’ve been written out of the season entirely, not just because they had so little effect on the narrative but because they had so little emotional impact as well.

Of course, there’s always the caveat that we’ve still got three specials left to wrap up Jodie Whittaker’s tenure as the Doctor (including a New Year’s Day special in just a few weeks), so any of the events and characters from Flux could theoretically come back into play there. But at some point, you can’t just keep kicking the can down the road anymore. Flux set out to tell a six-part serialized story, and on that level I’d say it failed.

Which isn’t to say there haven’t been high points too, even within this overstuffed, choppily edited finale. “The Vanquishers” actually starts with a really fun premise: In trying to escape the Division ship parked between universes, the Doctor somehow manages to “trisect” herself into three different forms across three different places. One stays at Division HQ to grapple with Swarm and Azure; one joins Bel and Karvanista on a Lupari ship; and the third reunites with Yaz, Dan, Jericho, Joseph Williamson, and Kate Stewart in the Williamson tunnels. As the various splinter groups start to come together, I’m not sure Jodie Whittaker has ever had more fun than she does playing the Doctor’s enthralled, flirtatious relationship with herself.

Yet instead of putting that character stuff front and center, Chibnall becomes obsessed with expositional details and tangents; including a whole unnecessarily detailed subplot about Diane showing Vinder how the inside of a Passenger ship works. And because there’s so much going on plot-wise, the moments that do hit emotionally—like the Doctor’s sorrowful reaction to learning that Yaz has been separated from her for years or Professor Jericho’s moving death scene—wind up feeling like side dishes when they should probably be the meat of the meal.

I mean, I suppose it’s not not payoff to have this whole story boil down to the Sontarans trying to double cross the Daleks and Cybermen, and the Doctor giving the militant potatoes a taste of their own medicine—with a triple genocidal-level of death along the way. But given how much this season was built around questions of the Flux and its origins, having it defeated in such a mechanical way is fairly anticlimactic. (Plus if matter is the thing that stops its anti-matter properties, how was the Flux able to wipe out whole planets during its initial swipe through the universe?)

Yet I think the single biggest weakness of this finale is the bizarrely casual way it dispatches Swarm and Azure after building them up as our Big Bads. Given the abstracted way they speak (they’re rooting for “the end of all spatial objects,” for instance), I always struggle to figure out when something they’re saying is new information vs. something we’ve heard before. Regardless, this was the first time I really understood that they literally worship Time as a god and plan to sacrifice the Doctor to it as part of a half religious ceremony, half revenge scheme. Yet instead of doing anything interesting with that idea, the episode just has Personified Time casually kill them because they failed to bring about the Final Flux event. So… a win for Space I guess?

In the end, Flux feels less like one unified miniseries than like Chibnall threw several dozen ideas into a hat and worked each week based on whichever handful of them he happened to draw out. There’s little consistency or cohesion to what happens. (The last time we saw Claire, she was a prisoner of the Weeping Angels, here she’s just casually wandering around 1967.) Even the order in which the characters were introduced this season is odd. Though Diane was crucial to the premiere and this finale, she was barely a presence during the rest of the season. Jericho and Bel, meanwhile, seem like characters we should’ve met earlier. And I’m wondering if it would’ve made sense to use Swarm and Azure as smaller mid-season obstacles rather than presenting them as such important players throughout the whole season

What’s especially strange is that when Chibnall puts his mind to it, he can actually write really solid character scenes. The reveal that Karvanista used to be the Doctor’s companion is quietly devastating. (Between that and his entire species dying, the guy sure had a hell of a week, huh?) And the final scene where the Doctor apologizes to Yaz for keeping things from her is maybe the single best character scene in Chibnall’s entire run. It has that nice undercurrent of romantic tension that has often characterized the Doctor’s relationship with their companions during the NuWho era. Plus it’s one of the few moments where it feels like the events of Flux actually did something to substantially change our heroes, rather than just provide them with obstacles to breeze past.

My hope for Whittaker’s final trio of specials is that Chibnall focuses on simplifying things. The pieces are there and the actors are certainly more than capable. Chibnall just needs to trust that he won’t lose his audience by slowing things down and letting his characters talk to each other about something other than technobabble. While frenetic can sometimes be a tone that Doctor Who does well, heartfelt is even better.

Stray observations

• So U.N.I.T. picked up the TARDIS after the Doctor left it in Medderton in 1967, but how did it wind up in the Williamson Tunnels? Did Kate transport it there?
• I wouldn’t mind if the show brought back Craig Parkinson’s Grand Serpent mostly because he really seemed to bring out the best in Whittaker. Their chemistry together was great.
• Given that they spent the past three years living and working with him, it feels like Yaz and Dan should’ve been more broken up when Jericho died. That’s at least as much time as Yaz spent with Graham and Ryan!
• So the floating black and white house really added up to nothing, huh?
• The personification of Time warns the Doctor that her time is coming to an end before advising her, “Beware of the forces that amass against you, and their master.” Or is that… Master?
• As I mentioned above, Doctor Who will be back on New Year’s Day with the first of three specials. The other two are supposed to air in the spring and fall, respectively. You can find me back here then or on Twitter in the meantime.