Doctor Who #1031: The Halloween Apocalypse

"The end of the universe! I always wondered what it would feel like?"

TECHNICAL SPECS: Flux Part 1. First aired Oct.31 2021 (the day on which it takes place).

IN THIS ONE... The Flux starts destroying the universe and humanity's best friends come running to Earth, and to new companion Dan Lewis.

FLUX PREFACE: Despite all the arcs and memes (Bad Wolf, etc.), we haven't actually had a season focused on a single story since Trial of a Time Lord. Though the finished result isn't flawless, I will say up-front that it's the best Chibnall has produced, and that it's what he should have been doing all along. When he was announced as the new showrunner, and that he would be changing everything, I had hoped he would ride the wave of his popular Broadchurch, which was, like most modern television, a giant story told over many episodes. His Doctor Who one-offs were, for the most part, retro and a little dull; his Torchwood is still better than Series 11 and 12, in my opinion. So Flux comes just as Chibs is about to leave, but he goes out on a bang (though he can ruin the feeling by screwing up next year's three specials, obviously). In the past few years, I reviewed each episode as it came out, but I decided to treat Flux as one big story that couldn't possibly be reviewed week to week like that. There were too many moving parts that didn't seem immediately relevant, and it would just have been me slinging theories around only to see them contradicted a few days later. Now that Flux is over, we can proceed with more assurance.

One common complaint about Flux is that the accents are getting quite difficult to parse for non-British citizens. As this episode introduces John Bishop as a new Liverpudlian companion, a performer I only really know from his self-deprecating humor ABOUT his accent on the Graham Norton Show, I thought it would make sense to address this here. I really don't think Bishop is hard to understand, but between what's left of the Sheffield fam, the people of Liverpool, and an equally accented humanoid dog (among others across the series), I would say it's not so much that people have regional accents, but that the foreign ear can't tune itself quickly enough to each one. I often found myself catching up to one of the Doctor's jokes a second or two after she said it, and by then, things had moved on. It all leads to a disconnect with the text, especially on the first watch. This effect is much less pronounced on repeat viewings, thankfully. But enough p

REVIEW: The series opens on a wild SF-action sequence with slightly dodgy green screen, one that ends with the Doctor and Yaz falling into bed together... Cough, cough. They can't or won't go much further, but I've felt for a long time than Yaz was one of those lovestruck companions à la Rose, Martha, et al. and that the Doctor wasn't oblivious to it. It's an action gag, and a little strange that anyone would sleep in the console room (given that episode 6 mentions a suite of bedrooms), but perhaps the TARDIS threw that in there for the purposes of a softer landing (as it did with River's in Day of the Moon using the pool). Pool or not here, we're thrown into the deep end, and though this confrontation with Karvanista feels like a James Bond opening, it IS connected to the Flux storyline.

Karvanista happens to be a Lupari, a race bonded to humanity (and who look like big dogs, cue all the jokes about Man's Best Friend, etc.), who have sworn an oath to protect us if we're ever threatened with the worst. That worst is the destruction of the universe by the Flux, a destructive space-time event that occurs in non-linear terms (as far as I can tell, both in space and time), and the Lupari apparently have the technology to survive it (as we'll see, they won't be the only ones). It's a little crazy (not to say silly), but they have as many ships as there are humans, and we're all going to be taken away on Halloween night and forced to live in a super-structure made up of all the ships. In the end, the Dyson sphere surrounds the Earth, which seems a better solution than the original, but it's not going to be without its problems. And though the Lupari evidently operate under some kind of honor code, Karvanista seems to be a villain of sorts, introducing himself as the "Vanquisher of a Thousand Worlds" and mistreating his human, not to mention his attempt to kill the Doctor and Yaz on an acid planet (Marinus in blazing color?). And the Doctor has tracked him down because he was a member of Division, the shadowy Time Lord organization that used to employ her in another life, according to the Timeless Child lore. And she wants answers. Well, okay!

I suppose whoever was Karvanista's human would have been fated to become a companion. It just happens to be likeable Dan Lewis, a Liverpool superfan who likes to help people at his own detriment, and who is about to be banned from the local museum for posing as a tour guide there, simply out of city pride. He has a timid romance brewing with Diane, an actual museum employee whose disability isn't remarked on to the point where it took three viewings to notice it after seeing it vaguely mentioned somewhere. He's down on his luck - his fridge is empty but he refuses charity - AND loses his house to a silly shrink trap, so he's a shoe-in for recruitment. After one episode, he's got a dry wit, is kind of dense when it comes to this science fiction stuff, but still smart enough to know Karvanista is more bluster than threat. We could have done much worse.

In the sequence of things, a new villain called Swarm seems to be responsible for the Flux. A prisoner of the Division, he escapes, rejuvenates himself (to look like a skull-faced Master, albeit with encrusted crystals, but that turned out to be a red herring), and immediately starts sending psychic visions to the Doctor. We do learn that he and the Jo Martin Doctor (and potentially, other incarnations involved in Division) were archenemies, and he seems happy about the Flux and the universe's impending destruction. Naturally, we pegged him as the Flux's originator. Stay tuned. His other priority is rescuing his sister Azure from... what... she's trapped in human form in the Arctic Circle, in some kind of marriage... It's a lot like the Jo Martin Doctor's fobwatched identity from Prisoner of the Judoon. If Swarm was imprisoned for millennia, how does Azure's "prison" work? If she's like her brother, why didn't she share a similar fate? I don't think the series really justifies the difference, unless I missed a line of dialog that comes later.

As of this first episode, however, there are a lot of things that don't yet make sense. All the stuff with the Williamson tunnels under Liverpool. The Doctor and Yaz meeting Claire out of sequence and the woman's subsequent encounter with a Weeping Angel. Sontarans acting on their psychic surveyor's word and reveling in the opportunities offered by the Flux crisis (more on their redesign next time). The character of Vinder, first to see the Flux in action from Observation Outpost Rose (an eyebrow-raising name, perhaps orphaned from a time when Captain Jack was supposed to be in the series, who knows). And Diane being stood up by Dan, then lured into a creepy old house by Azure. We'll catch up with these subplots in due time.

Definitely a big set-up episode, one that makes you wonder who all these people are, how they are important, and whether six episodes is enough to pay off everything. A lot to introduce, but they don't neglect the Doctor and Yaz. They have that opening action scene, and work together to save Dan, then Earth. The TARDIS acting weird and putting the door in the wrong spot, no doubt due to the fabric of space-time collapsing in on itself. The Timeless Child/Division stuff is brewing in the mid-ground, dangling tantalizing answers in front of our faces. And Yaz is showing so wear and tear from the Doctor not letting her into this secret, with the two of them actively arguing in a way they never have before. No easy answers, the Flux more than able to take whatever the Doctor's got, even a shot of direct vortex energy (you know, the thing that turned Rose into a space-time goddess). It's exciting, even if it's a little confusing.

THEORIES: So why didn't the Lupari help when humanity was threatened with extinction in the past? Or were they on their way to Davros' base in the Medusa Cascade when he almost wiped reality out in Journey's End? Were they on stand-by in Logopolis when the Master destroyed a large proportion of the universe? Maybe. What about The Pandorica Opens? Or was that too sudden? There's also the question as to how they were ever paired with humanity, and from the dialog, the question of whether other species have twin civilizations somewhere. How does this work, who makes you swear the oath, etc.? It's possible they never appeared before because they're a quirk of the rebooted universe created in The Big Bang. In a bit of recursive logic, there might be a future story (televised or not) in which the Doctor makes the Lupari swear an oath to humanity, ensuring these events come to pass. It might even be a PAST story that the Doctor has forgotten along with all her pre-Hartnell lives.

VERSIONS: In the lead-up to Flux, the minisode "Welcome to the TARDIS..." was released, giving us a bonus scene with Dan, in which his horoscope promises an exciting year for him. One of Flux's red herrings is embedded into the scene by the casting of Craige Els as his unnamed friend... the same Craige Els who goes on to play Karvanista. So the thought that someone Dan knows gets TRANSFORMED into a dog started here. (Lest you think it wasn't on purpose, the actor claims his shirt in the short is designed to be the same color as Karvanista's battle armor.)

REWATCHABILITY: Medium-High: REwatchability really is the word, because it's easy to miss or forget things on a first go-round. You don't want to miss the set-up, though there's honestly too much going on.