#doctor who: flux

[intuitive-revelations]

Rewatched Heaven Sent a couple weeks ago (I was flying back from a research conference in San Francisco, and British Airways had it available to watch, which was a pleasant surprise) and man, I've got to ramble a bit...

Something-something about how the Confession Dial is clearly pulling elements from the Doctor's childhood. This has been said before of course, but when you really pull everything together, it sure does paint a picture.

It's unclear whether this was the original intent for the soul-catching ritual (which is presumably what the dials are used for, making them a sort of Matrix data slice like Nethersphere), or something added by the Time Lords in corrupting it into a torture chamber, but it's there.

From the teleportation chamber loom...

...to the night sky being a 'burnt orange'...

...to the lilies flowers of remembrance for the lost dead...

...to sentient buildings...

...to that internal soup parallel, both alone in the dial and surrounded by their cousins at the barn...

...to the jars of dust.

And speaking of that "tall woman" in a "grey shawl", who is also oddly oversized, as if putting the Doctor in the perspective of a child,

and is explicitly a nightmare from the Doctor's childhood:

a woman who died, but seemingly passed away far quicker than anyone around her expected (and all the implications relating to that and connecting to the identity of the Hybrid)...

Finally, and this is definitely a stretch, but think back to the room numbers. The Doctor has to find room 12.

Fittingly. But if 12 corresponds to the Twelfth Doctor, then what about those other rooms...?

They must also correspond to incarnations, right? It's not like the God Complex - there was only ever one prisoner in the confession dial, after all.

Incarnations, numbering "a bit confused", in a fascimile of the Doctor's childhood home? Huh...

"Illogical house, a construction that makes no sense..."

[thirteenthdoctorscreencaps]

[darkestimmortal]

Ok, while the Whittaker era has been an EXTREMELY mixed bag to watch unfold, I’m completely enthralled with Doctor Who: Flux. Particularly Village of the Angels and Survivors of the Flux. It’s a very good sign when an episode makes me want to read a novelization or comic because I just want more. I adore Yaz/Dan/Jericho almost much as I do Vastra/Jenny/Strax.

[cynicalclassicist]

On realising the religious allusions going on in Doctor Who: Flux, suddenly it takes on a new level to me! I was thinking today about how 13 getting turned into an Angel and taken up by the Angels to meet a Founder figure felt like a parody of ascension... and then it snowballed out!

[readingoodbooks]

[COLLEZIONISMO] Doctor Who: Flux - The Complete Thirteenth Series

[dwimpossblog]

War of the Sontarans

The Sontarans are fighting the British in the Crimean War - something has definitely gone wrong with time! War of the Sontarans is this week's #TBT!

[esonetwork]

Timestamp #303: Flux – The Halloween Apocalypse

New Post has been published on https://esonetwork.com/timestamp-303-flux-the-halloween-apocalypse/

Timestamp #303: Flux – The Halloween Apocalypse

Doctor Who: Flux Chapter One – The Halloween Apocalypse (1 episode, s13e01, 2021)

He’s not quite Dan’s best friend.

Of all the odd places, Yaz and the Doctor are trapped, upside down, dangling over an ocean of acid.  As an alternative to the locks releasing their ankles in 79 seconds, a supernova is about to consume the planet. As an alternative to that, Karvanista’s kill disks will blast them into oblivion.

The death trap is reminiscent of something from Batman ’66.

After some shenanigans including voice-activated restraints and a well-placed mattress in the TARDIS, the Doctor and Yaz escape and set a course for Karvanista’s next target: Earth.

In Liverpool, 1820, Joseph Williamson digs a tunnel in preparation for the “cataclysmic”, reasoning that would supposedly drive anyone else mad. Two centuries later, Dan Lewis leads a tour group around the Museum of Liverpool. He’s not a real tour guide, however, and a museum employee named Diane escorts him out. Dan just wants to make people happy. The pair make plans for Halloween drinks later that night.

En route to Earth, the TARDIS refuses to land. The Doctor receives a psychic vision of two agents on a planetoid checking on a prisoner named Swarm. The prisoner has been contained in the Burnished Rage battleground since the dawn of the universe, but today is when he breaks free, restoring his vitality by consuming their life forces. The two women were apparently agents of the Division. When the vision ends, Yaz tells the Doctor about a black fluid leaking from the TARDIS. The Doctor scans it and sets their new course for October 31st.

Dan volunteers at the Jenning Street Food Bank, turning down a food box for himself. As he and Wilma lock up, a device scans them. Dan goes home and gives out candy for Halloween, though he refuses a man holding a carton of eggs. He later regrets not taking food from Wilma since his fridge and cupboard are bare, but his lament is short-lived as Karvanista breaks down his door and reveals his canine-like Lupar visage. Dan soon ends up in a cage.

The Doctor and Yaz follow Karvanista to Dan’s house and find evidence of a Lupari fleet waiting to invade Earth. They spring a trap and escape just as Dan’s house is miniaturized. Meanwhile, Dan wakes up in an electrified cage on Karvanista’s ship. Unfortunately for him, the hunter explains that he’s totally irrelevant.

Jumping to the Arctic, two researchers named Jón and Anna hear an alert from a glowing device in their garage. They seem to recognize it, but Anna smashes the device and ignores the warning.

In Liverpool, the Doctor investigates the house. Yaz and the Doctor meet a woman named Claire who claims to know them from the past. The Doctor rushes off at a signal from the Lupari, but the TARDIS seems to have some dimensional issues. Together, the Doctor and Yaz pilot the temperamental TARDIS to find the fleet. Yaz berates the Doctor for keeping secrets from her, but the argument is interrupted by a temporal field around Karvanista’s ship.

Claire returns to her house and finds a Weeping Angel. She seems to know something is coming for her, and the Angel eventually sends Claire back in time.

Next up, we visit Observation Station Rose in the depths of the universe. Observation Officer Inston-Vee Vinder makes (yet) another status report, finding the beauty of the universe a balm to his otherwise overwhelming boredom. He detects an error and watches as a dark cloud consumes Thoribus Minor.

Jón and Anna receive a visit from Swarm. Jón is consumed, but Anna is revealed as Swarm’s sister Azure.

The Doctor and Yaz land on Karvanista’s ship. The Doctor rushes off to confront Karvanista while Yaz seeks out Dan. It turns out that the invasion fleet is a recall fleet, bonded to humanity as guardians to rescue them in an ultimate crisis. Dan is the designated human to which Karvanista was bonded. Also, Karvanista is the only living Division operative left and the Doctor wants answers about her past. Instead, Karvanista tells the Doctor about the Flux.

The Flux, the ever-consuming cloud, bears down on Vinder’s station. With only a few minutes to survive, he launches an escape pod.

The Doctor, Yaz, and Dan escape from Karvanista’s ship on the TARDIS (which having more dimensional issues). They head to the edge of the solar system as, thirty trillion lightyears away, Sontaran Commander Ritskaw and Psychic Surveyor Kragar prepare to take advantage of the pending destruction. The Cloister Bell sounds as the Doctor receives another vision, this time of planets and entire civilizations being destroyed. She also sees Swarm on a desolate landscape, who reveals himself as her nemesis from the Doctor’s Division days.

The Flux changes direction and pursues the TARDIS, forcing the Doctor to set course for Earth. On the planet below, Azure lures Diane into a trap, but the planet is saved as the Lupari encase the Earth in a protective formation. Unfortunately, the TARDIS is unable to escape the Flux, even as the Doctor uses pure vortex energy as a weapon.

The Doctor stares down the end of the universe as the Flux rushes toward the TARDIS.

The vibe of this introduction is creepy and frantic. It does the job of setting up the game board and building tension as the Flux bears down on Earth, but the stakes are all too familiar in modern science fiction. How do you come back from demolishing the entire universe?

The relationship between Yaz and the Doctor has obviously strengthened since Graham and Ryan left the TARDIS. Yaz has learned to pilot the TARDIS (like Donna and Nardole before her, as well as several others in the audio universe) and has no problem calling the Doctor on her bluffs. It’s a welcome reprieve from being in the backseat for many of the previous adventures.

It’s definitely a good start and plays well into Chibnall’s strengths with long-form television. The only question that remains: What’s up with the well-placed mattress?

Rating: 4/5 – “Would you care for a jelly baby?”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Flux – War of the Sontarans

The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.

[onetrueartform]

I love that we are not getting any larger context to Joseph Williamson just randomly popping up 😂

Time really is going mad

[flynnandsteel]

I have not been the same since Zheng Yi Sao became a character in our flag means death. It means so much to me that pirate-related media is representing her more because I never would have known about her and she is too cool to be forgotten.

For years pop culture either portrayed her as the racist "submissive asian woman" stereotype or ignored her completely. It's infuriating. Now though we have a strong portrayal of her in both doctor who and our flag means death!! Let me tell you a few things about the rightfully named "Pirate queen".

On average, most pirates died 2 years after starting piracy. Edward Teach died after two years, Stede Bonnet died after one and Israel Hands impressively died around 8 years after starting, all executed. Our pirate queen died at 68 after a successful 9 year career. In fact, she only stopped because she was made to surrender and lived the rest of her years in effective retirement.

She inherited her late husbands pirate fleets and at one point commanded around 1,800 ships. Blackbeard is believed to have a maximum of 5- likely because he didn't get along with people well enough to amass enough crews to run them. She had the largest fleet in history.

Zheng Yi Sao was a leader and undoubtedly one of the most successful pirates ever and yet we dare to forget her.

[cynicalclassicist]

And people say there aren't any moments for 13...

The unflinching defiance in Thirteen when Tecteun tried to bargain her stolen memories for the universe, despite the pain of a loss she can’t even feel fully and all the time she’s spent trying to get those lives back, was incredible.

[bnxxshthealien]

yknow i’m just happy to know that the oodsphere survived the flux

[intuitive-revelations]

Cute continuity detail i hadn't noticed before, but did just now while researching something. The TARDIS lantern lights up blue in the exact same way when both Thirteen and Fourteen reset the interior (without changing theme).

After what happened last time, Fourteen at least had the forethought to activate the reset system from outside the TARDIS, rather than run out of it in the few seconds while it starts reforming!

[thirteenthdoctorscreencaps]

[dooweeedooguy]

it's said in Hell Bent that it's out of the pocket universe, and at the very end of the universe (give or take a few star systems) ...i think the bit where the master says its in a "bubble universe" was just the writers being as lost as we were 😭

Can a Whovian answer this for me?

Where is Gallifrey now after the events of the Flux?

Because tbh, my brains don't have the capacity to remember the different timelines. One minute, Gallifrey is in a painting. Next, it's god knows where???

Please someone provide answer.

[cynicalclassicist]

Thoughts on Flux and Trump-Ukraine scandal...

It occurred to me a while ago and this may be the first time I put it down but... could the Grand Serpent and Vinder trying to expose them be based on the Trump-Ukraine scandal? The whole in a secret meeting with a politician from another power asking them to target relatives of a political rival does feel like an invocation of it. This must have been written while this scandal was in the news and it was a very serious scandal, even if some people try to brush it away as minor or just usual tit for tat politics it was worse than Watergate!  A President can be impeached, according to the constitution, for ��treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Which this most certainly comes under.

The Grand Serpent isn’t quite an overt Trump caricature in the way that Jack Robertson is. In fact, his infiltration of the British establishment with the Sontarans more invokes Russian infiltration that has goes on for some years. But comments like Vinder referring to loyalty to their constitution does certainly invoke American culture. And while this scandal didn’t really topple Trump, as we knew it likely wouldn’t, there is an implicit praise of those who call out this sort of establishment misconduct, even though they know it likely won’t really achieve anything.

[sparrowlucero]

ik you were joking but I would be genuinely interested to hear about the flux cowriting credits strife if you feel like going into detail on it

So I have a big conspiracy theory about season 13 of Doctor Who ("Flux"), namely that there's a lost episode was scripted and even possibly filmed in near entirety, but ended up being cut and cannibalized in post production due to behind the scenes issues, and the fandom has yet to pick up on it.

For anyone who doesn't watch the show: Flux is a miniseries of Doctor Who; a full season was not commissioned because it was produced during Covid. The most important stuff about it for the purposes of this post are:

It's 6 episodes long (¹). The episodes are all directly continuous and could not be shuffled around. (I should clarify here that, no, the showrunner can't simply choose on a whim to make 10 episodes, or only make 4; they had to stick to 6, as that was the amount they were picked up and scheduled for)

The showrunner, Chris Chibnall , wrote every episode apart from episode 4 (Village of the Angels) which he has a co-writing credit on.

(More subjectively but perhaps relevant) The season is largely considered to be kind of a structural mess and (less subjectively) there appears to some abnormal and consistent production issues (²)

So the first thing I need to evidence here is that Chris Chibnall, aforementioned showrunner and writer of the entire season, was late. Like, really late.

Word of mouth gossip had been circulating for a while that there was some sort of on-set problem involving filming having to be paused because he was still finishing scripts: (³)

This would later be confirmed at a Gallifrey One panel (⁴) with Matt Strevens, the executive producer, who suggests that filming stopped to allow Chris Chibnall to finish scripts; he further implies that large swathes of episode 5/Block 2 weren't written until Episode 4/Block 1 (in which Kevin McNally debuts) was filming:

So with that context, let's talk about that Episode 4, "Village of the Angels", the only episode not attributed solely to Chris Chibnall. Co written by Maxine Alderton.

The filming pics reveal an interesting bit of trivia for Village: namely, the clapperboards show that the story was actually filmed as episode 5, not 4:

As the above tweet suggests, this doesn't make much sense. The miniseries is, again, a single continuous plot. It's not like they flipped Village and the current episode 5, Survivors of the Flux; the latter explicitly takes place chronologically after it. And yet, Village having been intended as the penultimate episode 5 is further evidenced by the original trailer for it, in which a character states that the story takes place on the 28th of November. This line is dubbed over in the final episode and subsequent trailers to instead say the 21st:

Why is this line important enough to dub? Because that's meant to line up with the air date of the episode. Episode 4 aired on the 21st and 5 on the 28th. But something happened in post production, and now it's episode 4 on the 21st instead (⁵):

So if none of these episodes were moved around but it does seem like Village was meant to be episode 5, where and what is the original episode 4?

I have a theory.

Flux has a recurring subplot involving two side characters, a married couple (Bel and Vinder) who have been separated by the titular disaster and are traveling the universe to reunite with each other. This story is told through segments sprinkled throughout the episodes. These have a different writing style (including a diary-esque narration only present in these scenes) and an internally consistent visual style that looks somewhat different to the other parts of the season.

Village of the Angels, for instance, is a moody, dark episode set in a village in the 1960s:

However, Bel and Vinder's segments in the episode have a somewhat different look:

On top of this, they never intersect with the episode's A plot (literally or in any clear thematic way), and the majority of these segments piece together into one single scene that seems to have been cut up.

So, what I think is that the bel and vinder scenes across the middle of the season were originally a single full story, an episode 4 that took a breather from the main plot and characters to follow the lives of these two side characters; the differing visual and writing style is due to it originally having been filmed separately and with a somewhat different artistic intent. I believe Chris Chibnall's cowriting credit on Angels exists because these specific scenes are from a script he wrote, but that otherwise the Angel script can be credited solely to Maxine Alderton by normal cowriting standards.

"But wait," you might say, "I thought there were already 6 episodes that are all plot relevant? If no episodes existing right now can be cut, how could this 7th episode exist?"

Remember this tidbit:

The adventures in question comprise a large amount of the next episode (Episode 5: Survivors of the Flux), nearly 20 minutes of a 50ish minute runtime (and frankly, much of the rest of the episode is somewhat fluffy build up that feels like it's taking advantage of an extended runtime). A version without this added plot would, in my opinion, only warrant one final episode rather than two.

I think the showrunner, still scrambling to finish scripts as the episodes were being filmed, and making a snap decision to include a new major subplot (⁶), wrote a finale script so long and with so many plot threads that the only way to keep all this material of was to split it into two episodes, 5 and 6. And because they only could only make 6, he had to get rid of one of the previous 5 episodes - the already scripted and filmed ones - to make room for this new episode 5. A tough order when it's a plot-heavy miniseries... if not for episode 4 being a standalone divergence from the main plot about the lives of two side characters, one that could, in theory, be cut up and dispersed throughout the season without continuity issues for the main story.

(Some notes and clarifications under the cut)

(1) some sources initially reported the episode count as 8; this wasn't inaccurate - the 2022 new years/easter special were part of the episode order. Flux itself was always meant to be 6 episodes long. (2) A few of the production issues include: - episodes filming without a second draft:

- the fx team that had been on the show since 2005 abruptly leaving midseason (because they "didn't feel like part of the team anymore") and returning as soon as the creative team changed, including the head of the studio implying they weren't properly credited (mild vfx body horror warning in link):

- people working on additional projects such as books not receiving clear information on the characters they were assigned to write:

- and likely a director who was put on hold due to a script being rewritten:

Among other things I can't directly cite at the moment, including vfx artists having to do whole episodes solo in crunch time and writers not being told their work was massively overhauled until it aired due to major changes being extremely late in production.

While I don't wish to pontificate too much here and many of these things are pretty normal by themselves, I do think it could paint a picture of a production where an episode well into filming may genuinely be cut on a whim and without consideration for the crew, artists, etc. working on the show. (3) This reddit post comes from a leaker who was known to be consistently accurate. (4) Gallifrey One does not allow filming of panels. I know Kevin's livetweets of panels to be accurate. (5) It's very, very unlikely the entire season was moved back a week, as the premier is a Halloween special that was certainly always intended to air on Oct. 31st. (6) I don't wish to insinuate Chris Chibnall is, throughout his career, an inherently poor showrunner, but I do think that maybe his jump from police procedural - a genre that doesn't involve quite as much concept art, vfx work, marketing, convention panels, set building, episodic storytelling, and keeping in touch with expanded universe producers - to flagship science fiction adventure show may have contributed to some of these issues, especially when he was already in the mindset that things could be changed on a whim (perhaps not such a major issue when it's broadchurch and no new sets need be built)

(source) Basically I don't really think this is "the showrunner's fault" or anything; more that a perfect storm of a showrunner who was habitually late on scripts, used to writing lowkey cop dramas, covid, an entirely serialized season, etc. may have led to these issues