Table of Contents

Title Page

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

THE HALLOWEEN APOCALYPSE

WAR OF THE SONTARANS

ONCE, UPON TIME

VILLAGE OF THE ANGELS

SURVIVORS OF THE FLUX

THE VANQUISHERS

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Black Archive #63

FLUX

Edited by Paul Driscoll

Essays by Alasdair Stuart, James Cooray Smith, Emma Reed, Philip Purser-Hallard, Oliver Tomkins, James Mortimer and Matt Hills

Published February 2023 by Obverse Books

Cover Design © Cody Schell

All essays are copyright of their respective writers.

Editors: Paul Driscoll, Philip Purser-Hallard

Paul Driscoll, Alasdair Stuart, James Cooray Smith, Emma Reed, Philip Purser-Hallard, Oliver Tomkins, James Mortimer and Matt Hills have asserted their right to be identified as the authors of their chapters in this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding, cover or e-book other than which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

CONTENTS

Foreword – Paul Driscoll

Introduction – Alasdair Stuart

1. The Halloween Apocalypse

Overview

Synopsis

Apocalypse? Now! – James Cooray Smith

2. War of the Sontarans

Overview

Synopsis

A History in Flux – Emma Reed

3. Once, Upon Time

Overview

Synopsis

The Primordial Division – Philip Purser-Hallard

4. Village of the Angels

Overview

Synopsis

The Angels have the Gogglebox – Oliver Tomkins

5. Survivors of the Flux

Overview

Synopsis

Doctor Who’s Mother – James Mortimer

6. The Vanquishers

Overview

Synopsis

The Three Doctors… And a Sontaran Stratagem – Matt Hills

Conclusion – Alasdair Stuart

Bibliography

FOREWORD

Chris Chibnall began the 13th Doctor’s era with an unashamed eschewal of Doctor Who’s long history. Whilst his predecessors used the series’ past in various ways in order to smooth the transition into the new[1], Chibnall resisted any urge to soften the shock of both the first female Doctor and the replacement of key creative personnel.

Even the TARDIS is missing at first, as if it had chosen to set the new Doctor free from its own attachment to the series’ history by evicting her. This strategy brought about a lightness of touch and a sense of freedom through the widening of the narrative world, an ethos well reflected in the personality of the Doctor.

The Eccleston, Tennant, Smith and Capaldi Doctors all carried heavy emotional burdens, even after the clean slate that the outcome of The Day of the Doctor (2013) offered.

By contrast, Whittaker’s Doctor started out secure in herself, accepting her flaws and never getting too hung up about them. She had been freed from the weight of her personal history, content to carry memories of her lost family in her heart[2], and even able to make jokey asides about her past[3].

Yet even back then, before the script for The Woman Who Fell to Earth (2018) had been signed off, plans were afoot to tackle some of the biggest mysteries of the series head-on. There was never any doubt that the fan producer, once he felt he had sufficiently stamped his own mark on the series and Jodie Whittaker had established herself as the Doctor, would revisit old ground and delve into his favoured aspects of Doctor Who lore. The unavoidably oppressive burden of over 50 years of storytelling would take the form of the ‘Timeless Child’ arc and the Doctor’s quest to uncover the truth about her origins. In the process, the Doctor herself would become as secretive as Division, undermining what had started out as a refreshing new focus on family and friendship and restoring a hierarchy with herself very much at the top.

The Timeless Child thread is introduced as early as the second episode of Whittaker’s first season, but there it comes as an unwanted interruption, feeling out of place like a remnant of the old guard, as if shoehorned in because that’s what Doctor Who had become under Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat. It’s no coincidence that the first revelation is made by a race of aliens known as the Remnants (The Ghost Monument (2018)). The Doctor’s response is to demand these divergent voices ‘get out of my head’. The scene also makes clear she sees herself as the 13th Doctor, when she offers them the fears of ‘a dozen lifetimes’. The episode ends with a reunion with the TARDIS which the Doctor admits she’d ‘left […] in a bit of a mess’; again, another covert way for the showrunner to signal the clearing out of the old. But the striking visual of the Timeless Child ensures that the audience cannot completely dismiss the mystery, knowing that the showrunner fully intends to return to it. For now, it can be pushed out of mind and sight and the adventures of the 13th Doctor can truly begin, unencumbered by either the known or unknown past.

Flux (2021) represents the culmination of the movement away from that naive, in-the-present-moment simplicity, as instead of asking the nagging questions about the past to ‘get out of my head’, the Doctor actively searches for the truth. She even gets to re-enact a Division mission as if experiencing it for the first time (‘Once, Upon Time’). It is fascinating to see how Flux’s culmination in the Doctor’s surprising, and not altogether logical, decision to put the closed fob watch in storage is followed by a series of specials in which she gradually returns to the carefree personality of her earliest adventures. The Power of the Doctor (2022) deliberately alludes to The Woman Who Fell to Earth, for instance in her unbridled joy at fixing Vinder’s ship in full-on Heath Robinson mode. This is more than a producer wanting to neatly bookend his time at the helm, it is both an admission that the grand narrative was always going to end up as a cul-de-sac, and a projection of his own need to let go and pass on the baton to the next showrunner.

Because it is positioned after Chibnall had strategically asserted his identity onto the series, and before he could treat the dedicated fan base to a series of parting gifts (e.g. the shipping of Yaz and the Doctor, and the Easter eggs of The Power of the Doctor) and in so doing indulge his own fannish sensibilities (Legend of the Sea Devils (2022)), Flux should be seen as this era’s definitive season. It should come as no surprise then, given Chibnall’s success with the serialised Broadchurch (2013-17), that Flux is written and produced as a single, multi-episode story. Flux is the most undiluted example of Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who. This serialised format to a season was the direction many had expected Chibnall to take from the outset[4], and indeed with the exception of a co-credit for Maxine Alderton on ‘Village of the Angels’, all six episodes of Flux are scripted by the showrunner.

The Black Archive’s distinctive approach to analysing a single story per volume is challenged by Flux – more so than even The Trial of a Time Lord season (1986). Only two of its six episodes (‘War of the Sontarans’ and ‘Village of the Angels’) could reasonably work as standalone stories. Structurally, ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ makes little sense on its own, functioning largely as a trailer for the next five chapters with a series of teases (the Sontarans’ unannounced appearance for Chapter 2, Vinder’s desertion of Outpost Rose for Chapter 3, Claire’s encounter with a Weeping Angel for Chapter 4, Diane’s abduction for Chapter 5, and Swarm’s imprisonment and escape for Chapter 6). Judged in isolation, ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ is rather like the film Love Actually (2003). but without the nativity and closing airport scenes to bring all the separate story strands together. Whilst most of the pieces do eventually fit together by the time we get to ‘The Vanquishers’, there is still a hefty amount of ambiguity that leaves the viewer having to rely on guesswork and supposition. Even the first script is somewhat tenuous in this respect, directly equating the deaths of the Division officers with the mass execution of the refugees in ‘Survivors of the Flux’[5].

Yet Flux includes chapters rich in individual content, making it entirely possible to write a substantial Black Archive on, say, ‘Once, Upon Time’ or ‘Village of the Angels’. Without ruling out such work in the future, this special volume departs from the norm by treating these six episodes as a single story, honouring the unique status of the source material. The editorial team decided at an early stage to commission a different writer for each episode. Not only does this add variety and a range of insights into the study of Flux, it also symbolises the communal, shared experience of watching Doctor Who, something that came to the fore in the hugely popular lockdown tweetalongs, and before that the Twitch marathons.

Alasdair Stuart begins our enquiry with an overview of Flux, looking in particular at the unique challenges of producing a show under the budgetary and logistical limits of the COVID-19 lockdowns. That there was no lack of ambition due to the harsh circumstances is clear from the remarkable three-minute pre-credits scene of ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’, where Chibnall admits he was ‘writing to the very edge – and probably past the edge – of what you think the production can actually do’[6]. Short cuts would have to be taken, larger plans curtailed, and storylines merged, but in Flux we can see how some of the challenges were turned into creative opportunities. Change, whether enforced or out of choice, is at the heart of Doctor Who’s longevity, and ‘flux’, though sounding odd as a title for both a series and a destructive phenomenon, is an appropriate word to describe the history and even the ethos of Doctor Who.

James Cooray Smith’s essay on ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ looks at how Chibnall establishes a sense of place in the Liverpool setting and the ways in which this contrasts with his previous focus on Sheffield. Cooray Smith shows how Chibnall’s non-Doctor Who work, Broadchurch in particular, helps us to understand some of the creative choices that shape series 13. Though there is an epic scale to the narrative, spanning multiple time zones and places, deeply personal connections to the showrunner’s past and present context add authenticity and groundedness to the Doctor’s quest.

For Emma Reed, ‘War of the Sontarans’ offers a window into how Doctor Who has dealt with both our history and its own. Her essay asks searching questions about how we write our past, and highlights the need for positive revisionism not only to correct the record, but to change who we are today and how we see the world. A connection is made between how societies construct their histories and how we as individuals fictionalise our own pasts using shared and established storytelling techniques. What happens when accepted narratives are exposed as false is a key part of the Doctor’s journey in Flux. Reed also brings to the table how Doctor Who uber-narratives are created and moderated within fandom, and what happens when the series veers off-road into new and uncharted territory, taking alternative routes back to previous destinations and offering different viewpoints to challenge established facts.

‘Once, Upon Time’ is the most atypical episode in the series, taking a daringly non-linear approach to storytelling and using characters as stand-ins for others in a clever budget-saving conceit. Philip Purser-Hallard focuses on the portrayal of the Doctor by examining her many analogues in Flux. As the only episode of Flux to feature Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor, ‘Once, Upon Time’ provides the clearest insights into the Doctor’s time as a Division operative, and in so doing brings out the sharp contrasts between the personalities of the Fugitive and 13th Doctors. Drawing upon the insights of Carl Jung, Purser-Hallard considers how the Fugitive can be seen as the embodiment of the 13th Doctor’s shadow self. ‘Once, Upon Time’ also leans heavily on mythology, and Purser-Hallard’s essay examines the various Christian and ancient Greek resonances, with Flux including its very own creation story.

Oliver Tomkins discusses the unique qualities of the Weeping Angels in his essay on ‘Village of the Angels’, with their capacity to break out of the screens through which we view them, both literally and figuratively. By structuring his piece around key images from the episode, Tomkins shows how the Angels build and diverge from their own established rules to become ‘the natural climax of the idea of a Doctor Who monster’. Glitching, cliffhangers, and the repeated breaking of the fourth wall, are all features the Weeping Angels have in common with what their creator, Steven Moffat, describes as ‘techno-farce’. Tomkins also considers the role of digital media and marketing, and how the Angels sell the series.

In ‘Survivors of the Flux’ the series gets to be its most personal, with the crucial and tragic showdown between the Doctor and her adoptive mother Tecteun at Division. Meanwhile, her friends are having to work without her in a series of Indiana Jones-inspired adventures in the early 1900s, a separation that exposes Yaz’s love for the Doctor. James Mortimer’s essay focuses on the Doctor’s mother, comparing the treatment of Tecteun with both Davies’ ‘Woman in White’ (The End of Time (2009-10)) and Moffat’s ‘Woman’ in Hell Bent (2015), as well as with the wider theme of parenthood and parental absence throughout Chibnall’s run.

Matt Hills explores ‘The Vanquishers’ repeated deferment of narrative resolutions, with several opportunities to reveal the Doctor’s hidden past missed, and ultimately denied. On the one hand this commonly used technique keeps the audience guessing, adds pace and creates dramatic and unexpected moments, yet on the other it frustrates and gives the impression the writer has been playing with our emotions for the hell of it. Soap opera fans often complain about a storyline being dragged on long past its sell-by date, and in this respect Doctor Who is no different. But crucially, and unlike most soap opera plots, when it comes to the Doctor’s time in Division we are as much in the dark as the Doctor. Without dramatic irony, deferred resolutions could go on indefinitely, and we might become suspicious that the writer isn’t working towards a pre-planned end game and is likely to change the goalposts whenever he likes. Hills describes the interplay between the writer and his audience as a game, with Chibnall wanting to constantly outwit the fans with moments of surprise.

Those moments are made all the more dramatic and frustrating by the fact that Chibnall also panders to what Hills calls ‘fan sensibility’, in this instance, a shared understanding of what kind of hero the Doctor is required to be and how a series finale ought to be played out. The Doctor, like the Mouri and the Weeping Angels before her, is glitching, in her case between three iterations of herself. Hills examines how, in this process, the Doctor, perhaps in response to criticisms about her passivity throughout Chibnall’s run, takes on almost superheroic agency.

Flux ends without any definitive resolution of either the Doctor’s quest for knowledge and identity, or the impact of Time’s release and the Flux’s near-total destruction of the universe. Perhaps a glorious death is the only true ending, a privilege afforded only to Swarm and Azure. But as for Doctor Who, Flux creates new narrative possibilities, introduces a number of characters who may or may not feature again, and as Alasdair Stuart argues in his concluding piece, shows how change is crucial to both our survival and the ongoing future of Doctor Who itself.

Paul Driscoll

[1] Such as bringing back iconic villains (Rose (2005), Into the Dalek (2014)), retaining companions (The Christmas Invasion (2005), Deep Breath (2014)), and using visual montages or cameos from past Doctors (The Eleventh Hour (2010), Deep Breath). Even Moffat’s ‘reset’ season included in its first episode (the ironically titled The Pilot (2017)), a number of deliberate reminders of the past with the use of Clara’s theme, photographs of Susan and River, and the collection of sonic screwdrivers.

[2] ‘I carry them with me. What they would’ve thought and said and done. I make them a part of who I am. So even though they’re gone from the world, they’re never gone from me’ (The Woman Who Fell to Earth (2018)).

[3] ‘Sisters. I used to have sisters. I used to be a sister, in an aqua-hospital. Actually, turned out to be a training camp for the Quiston Calcium Assassins.’ (Arachnids in the UK (2018)).

[4] Chibnall teased as much himself shortly after being announced as Steven Moffat’s successor (see ‘Doctor Who Season 11 May Just Have A Single Storyline’). Although unwilling to be drawn on where he thought Chibnall might take the series, Moffat himself admitted ‘He’ll have, I would think, a quite different approach […] beautiful dialogue. And beautiful plotting.’ (quoted in Cook, Benjamin, ‘The DWM Interview’, Doctor Who Magazine (DWM) #502, p17).

[5] Chibnall, Chris, ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’, p19.

[6] Cook, Emily, Marcus Hearn and Paul Kirkley, ‘The Sea of Death’, The 2022 Yearbook, DWM special edition #59, p21.

INTRODUCTION

Alasdair Stuart

‘I Never Stopped’

Adversity and what we do in the face of it are at the centre of Doctor Who, as a cultural artefact and a story. The show has been built, from the first day, on a foundation made of ingenuity, determination, compassion and compromise. Or perhaps more accurately from the second story. Verity Lambert and Sydney Newman’s creation was originally sold as being educational, with the time travel element only a lens to view the past through. With The Daleks (1963-64), the second serial produced, that changed, but only reluctantly. To quote Lambert:

‘We didn’t have a lot of choice – we only had the Dalek serial to go [...] We had a bit of a crisis of confidence because Donald [Wilson] was so adamant that we shouldn’t make it. Had we had anything else ready we would have made that.’[1]

It was what they had, so it’s what they made, because doing something is always better than doing nothing. The show survived, kept moving and found itself powered by something new; the unexpected popularity of its reluctantly accepted monsters and the merchandising boom that went with them. Adversity becomes opportunity. Survival becomes victory. Life finds a way, and the Doctor always finds a loophole. Success in the face of adversity is a great foundation and the show has spent decades building on it and, at times, being forced to lean on it. In this introduction, I’ll examine how that adversity has shaped the show, shaped its stories and how lockdown brought all that to the fore.

The hiatus Doctor Who was placed on after Season 22 in 1985-86 is a classic example of the adversity the show has faced as a cultural artefact. Parked and effectively ordered to be retooled by then BBC Director-General Michael Grade, the show found itself in a similar position to the sudden pivot from educational to science fictional. Discussing Grade, his motives, his position as the show’s greatest metafictional monster and more isn’t the purview of this book, but there is a quote from an interview he gave the Evening Standard that provides an interesting bookend to the Lambert quote above:

‘I hated Doctor Who. I said to the producer, ‘Do you go to the cinema much? Have you seen Star Wars or ET?’ He said yes. I said, ‘I’ve got news for you, so has our audience. What we were serving up as science fiction was garbage’’[2]

A case could be made that Doctor Who had become less mutable than the environment in which it was produced. More pertinently to this book, it led directly to the series’ next major change in response to external pressures. Season 23 was parked for 18 months and completely retooled, with The Trial of a Time Lord season as the replacement with longer episodes and a stronger arc. Doctor Who, again, was forced to adapt. Determining whether it did so successfully isn’t the job of this book. But it’s worthy of note that, again, this was a moment where the series, and its lead character, both faced down remarkable adversity and emerged, not unscathed, but definitively victorious. Season 23 has its detractors, and undeniable weak spots, but the show felt different when it returned and it’s hard not to be swept up in those early episodes. It often juggles too many plates, and manages to smash a lot of them as the season concludes, but that, in and of itself, is also true to the hearts of the series. Doctor Who is a series that’s made do and mended its whole life, which is ironically part of the reason Grade hated it. But that spirit of invention also enfolded its viewers in a benevolent conspiracy of nostalgia to see and embrace its faults and its occasional defeats.

The same is true of the show’s functional cancellation in 1989. The conclusion of Survival (1989) is both a definitive ending and a resolutely defiant promise of more to come. Scriptwriter Andrew Cartmel has the Doctor and Ace walk off into the sunset, but gifts the seventh Doctor his finest dialogue as they go, promising much, much more to come. Even in the face of apparent defeat, the Doctor survives. The very process of regeneration speaks to this. The show, and its lead, are remarkable survivors, even though the scars on the collective psyche of its fandom most definitively remain. Make do and mend becomes ‘Do It Yourself’ – or perhaps ‘Why Don’t You?’ given the previous work of Russell T Davies, himself a newly regenerated showrunner.

Speaking of regeneration, the show’s twin heartbeats remain necessity and invention, and there’s no better example than fourth Doctor story Shada, lost to industrial action halfway through filming in 1979. Moments from Shada were used in The Five Doctors, and the story itself has been adapted many times for future audiences, across different mediums. That willingness to make do with what there is and build something new out of it has defined modern Doctor Who. The vast success of audio drama producers Big Finish, the various arrays of novels, comics and games – time and again, life has risen out of the show’s darkest moments. Cancellation, budget cuts, attempted reboots: the Doctor has survived it all and continues to do so. The oncoming storm, in this instance, is not the Doctor, but time itself. Nothing ever slows down, nothing ever stops and the Doctor just keeps going, pecking away at the diamond in front of them. A hell of a bird, and a hell of a show. When the COVID-19 pandemic began that twin heartbeat of necessity and invention needed to be stronger than ever.

The adversity the series had survived in was, and is, dwarfed by the pandemic, but that served to only bring the show into sharper relief. The toxic nostalgia that all long-running fandoms must contend with became less a problem and more a tool, beaten into a new and infinitely more helpful shape in response to a profound global trauma. Suddenly, hiding behind the sofa from the Daleks became more refreshing, and reassuring, than masking up to take your single allowed walk for the day.

The unifying nature of the lockdown programming was such that it transcended multiple boundaries. Time zones didn’t matter, the episodes being watched didn’t matter, and whether you were a professional who’d worked on the show or a fan didn’t matter either. The unifying trauma of the lockdown rendered everything, to quote one of the 13th Doctor’s companions, into a remarkably flat team structure. Mini-episodes were written and performed by cast and crew, the tweetalongs were led by guest appearances and became the core of a constellation of fan events of their own. Fan films and content were produced and, for a time, hosted on an official website. Doctor Who Magazine (DWM) referred to it as ‘The Lockdown season of Doctor Who’[3]. The reach of the events was immense, and recently Russell T Davies has confirmed that participating in them was the catalyst for his, David Tennant’s and Catherine Tate’s return to the show[4]. All of which gave viewers the chance to interact with the show, not just as an artefact of culture but as a communal experience. To continue the metaphor, the ‘lockdown season’ became a sofa large enough for anyone who wanted to hide behind it.

That visceral connection was also reflected in Adventures in Lockdown (2020). This official Doctor Who anthology included several of the short stories penned for the lockdown events and, like them, was used as a means of raising money for charity. These pieces all speak to the adversity that they were created in, and that flattened team structure. The Steven Moffat piece ‘The Terror of the Umpty Ums’ in particular does an excellent job of putting the show in the context of its time and its place; a coping mechanism for terror, a route across territory we all share but all travel alone. The Doctor present in every way but the physical; an idea, one that was here to help.

These stories have remarkably raw emotion to them even now. Their honesty, and raw quality, feel like the show stripped to its bones, distilled into something remarkably powerful because of its fragility, not despite of it. That is particularly true of the videos released at the time by Jodie Whitaker. In character, in costume, in her wardrobe and so clearly as frightened as the rest of us, she was the embodiment of the kindness that defines the 13th Doctor, reaching out of the screen not to threaten us but to tell us it’s okay to be scared and we won’t be scared forever. Even years later, with the pandemic ongoing even if lockdown is not, this quote especially has huge emotional impact:

‘Three, be kind. Even kinder than you were yesterday – and I know you were super kind yesterday. Look out for each other, you won’t be the only one worried. Talking will help, sharing will help. Look out for your friends, your neighbours, people you hardly know – and family, because in the end, we’re all family.

‘Four, listen to science and listen to doctors, right? They’ve got your back.’[5]

Doctor Who was, and is, uniquely equipped to be a pandemic coping mechanism. A series about someone who wants to help, is as frightened as us but does it anyway, is a handhold anyone can grip and one that, crucially, also reset the expectations of the show somewhat.

The one piece of adversity I’ve not talked about here, and should, is the hostile response to a female Doctor. That, like the rest, fell away as the lockdown proceeded and by the time Flux was announced, that flat team structure had become a blank slate of sorts.

Doctor Who has always been the embodiment of its lead; brilliant, eccentric, embattled. A show and a character trying everything until something sticks, or at least until something sticks enough. That process, and the adversity on and off-screen that’s shaped it, mean the series is uniquely suited to adapt and regenerate. Flux by name, flux by nature, a show defined by change, struggling to adapt to the latest wave of that change. Struggling, but, as it has so many times in the past, continuing.

[1] Quoted in Tribe, Steve, and James Goss, The Dalek Handbook, p9.

[2] Shapland, Mark, ‘Business Interview: Michael Grade talks glory days, Brexit and Fiddler on the Roof’.

[3] O’Brien, Steve, ‘Lockdown Viewing’, DWM #554.

[4] ‘Catherine [Tate] texted me to say how much she’d enjoyed [The Runaway Bride Tweetalong]. I texted back: “God, let’s get David to do some more Doctor and Donna, I loved it so much!”’ (DWM #584, p11).

[5] Doctor Who Official Twitter account, tweet posted 12:00 noon, 25 March 2020, ‘Incoming Transmission’.

THE HALLOWEEN APOCALYPSE

OVERVIEW

Writer: Chris Chibnall

Director: Jamie Magnus Stone

Original UK Transmission Date: 31 October 2021

Running Time: 49m 55s

UK Viewing Figures: 5.81 million

Regular Cast: Jodie Whittaker (the Doctor), Mandip Gill (Yasmin Khan), John Bishop (Dan Lewis)

Guest Cast: Craige Els (Karvanista), Steve Oram (Joseph Williamson), Nadia Albina (Diane), Sam Spruell (Swarm), Rochenda Sandall (Azure / Anna), Jacob Anderson (Vinder), Annabel Scholey (Claire), Jonathan Watson (Ritskaw), Dan Starkey (Kragar), Matthew Needham (Old Swarm), Sarah Amankwah (En Sentac), Charlie Oscar (K-Toscs), Richard Tate (Wilder), Paul Leonard (James Stonehouse), Heather Bleasdale (Wilma), John May (Kev), Gunnar Kauthery (Jón), Barbara Fadden (Weeping Angel)

Antagonists: Swarm and Azure

Responses:

‘“The Halloween Apocalypse” delights in dangling a multiplicity of disparate plot threads – an approach that leans into Doctor Who’s patented fantastic-domestic mix by turning on a dime from boiling acid oceans and scorched astral planes to a Liverpool food bank.’

[Paul Kirkley, Doctor Who Magazine]

‘Did the episode work to set up the series and as a standalone story? The jury is out. It felt like quite a slight story about Karvanista, interspersed with what could have been the cold openers for five or six other episodes.’

[Martin Belam, The Guardian]

SYNOPSIS

The Doctor and Yaz are handcuffed to a gravity bar above a sea of acid. Via a hologram, their captor, the Luparian Karvanista, tells them he is on route to the final days of planet Earth. They escape using the TARDIS and immediately make plans to find him. The Doctor is secretly hunting down Karvanista because, as a former Division operative, he is a link to her hidden past.

In Liverpool in 1820, Joseph Williamson is building a network of tunnels in readiness for what he calls ‘the Cataclysmic, the impossible.’ 201 years later, Dan Lewis is pretending to be a tour guide in the Museum of Liverpool. He is stopped by his friend and staff member, Diane, and they arrange to go out for drinks later.

A series of explosions are preventing the TARDIS from landing on Earth. The Doctor sees a vision of two Division operatives cautiously approaching an alien trapped in a containment chamber. Swarm has been held captive there since the dawn of time and they have come to check the prison is still secure. He disintegrates them and his body is regenerated. The Doctor’s vision ends with Swarm addressing her directly – ‘Trick or treat’. She programmes the TARDIS to arrive on Earth at Halloween in 2021.

After leaving the food bank he volunteers at, Dan arrives home to get ready for his date with Diane. He greets some trick-or-treaters, but the last caller is Karvanista. The Luparian takes Dan hostage. It transpires that the Luparians are on a mercy mission to evacuate the planet. The Earth is about to be hit by the Flux, a cosmic phenomenon that has been obliterating everything in its path.

The Doctor and Yaz track Karvanista to Dan’s home, where, having just missed him, they narrowly escape being miniaturised inside the booby trapped house. En route back to the TARDIS they meet Claire, who claims she already knows them. The Doctor and Yaz leave for Karvanista’s ship while, returning to her home, Claire encounters a Weeping Angel. Despite knowing not to blink, she is sent back in time.

Swarm’s first act after his escape is to free his sister Azure, who had been given a false identity as the human Anna, living in Iceland with her husband Jón. Meanwhile Vinder, a fighter pilot barred from active duty by his superiors, is manning the distant space outpost, Rose, and is forced to leave his post when the Flux arrives.

On Karvanista’s ship, Yaz frees Dan while the Doctor confronts Karvanista. With the Flux about to consume the Earth, there is no time to find out about her past. Instead, she gets the Lupari to form a shield around the planet with their ships.

Waiting for her date with Dan, Diane is lured into a house by Azure, who takes her hostage.

As a Sontaran fleet prepares to invade the Earth, using the Flux to their advantage, back in the TARDIS the Doctor makes a desperate attempt to destroy the phenomenon with the Time Vortex, leaving the TARDIS vulnerable as the Flux approaches.

APOCALYPSE? NOW!

James Cooray Smith

‘It’s Already Begun’

As he prepared to leave Doctor Who, Steven Moffat suggested that the imminent reinvention of the programme overseen by his appointed successor Chris Chibnall would surprise even the most observant members of the series’ fan audience. There were not, he thought, likely to be clues as to how Chibnall would approach the series in his five prior episodes as a guest writer.

‘What’s exciting about Chris is, I don’t think people have seen his Doctor Who yet. He’s done Russell’s Doctor Who, and he’s done my Doctor Who […] I don’t think we’ve seen Chris’ authorial [emphasis added] take on Doctor Who, and I’ll be very, very excited to see what that it is.’[1]

There’s an implication in Moffat’s point, although he did not seek to clarify it; that while Chibnall’s earlier Doctor Who episodes were not examples of his authorial take on the series, as a maker of authorial television, he would have one. It would logically follow then, that someone looking to divine, in the year before the transmission of Doctor Who’s 2018 series, what Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who might be like[2] would have a greater chance of success if they studied Chibnall’s non-Doctor Who work. Programmes such as Chibnall’s passion project, the ITV crime series Broadchurch[3], his football drama United (2011) and perhaps the UK version of NBC’s Law & Order franchise, which Chibnall had showrun for Wolf Entertainment, the company of Law & Order creator Dick Wolf.

This immediately proved to be true in the (relatively) shallow arena of casting. Two of Chibnall’s initial four leads, his Doctor Jodie Whittaker, and companion Graham O’Brien (Bradley Walsh) had had starring roles in previous Chibnall television projects – Broadchurch and Law & Order: UK (2009-14) respectively. That made sense. Many Doctors have been cast by, or at the suggestion, of someone with whom they had previously worked[4]. However, while there were significant structural and aesthetic changes to Doctor Who for its 11th 21st-century production block, including a switch of standard episode length to 50 minutes[5], a change in the equipment used to shoot and record it[6], and Segun Akinola replacing Murray Gold as the series’ composer (marking the first such change in Doctor Who this century), little about them is traceable to Chibnall’s non-Doctor Who work.

Despite several episodes partially set and filmed in Sheffield, Broadchurch’s strong sense of place was absent. Ongoing plots were minimal, in keeping with the light serialisation established by Davies in 2005, implicitly rejecting attempts by Moffat[7] to increase it during his own time running the programme. 2018’s complete absence of returning villains, for only the fourth time in the series’ history[8] offered some distinctiveness, as did the arguable diversification[9] of the regular cast. This was a commitment Chibnall made publicly, and it may be because the casting of a woman to play the Doctor was potentially such a huge shift in public perceptions of the programme, that under these highly visible changes, storytelling bases remained intact. The 2018 series even begins with a Russell T Davies style ‘opening trilogy’, where new characters are introduced in a relatively contemporary first episode, which is then followed by a ‘celebrity historical’ and a far-flung ‘outer space’ SF story[10], and continues to feature members of companions’ immediate families after their introductory episode. An innovation of Davies’ from 2005, this idea was now 15 years old.

In fact, had someone tried to work out what Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who would be like based on his non-Doctor Who work, they would probably not have ended up imagining something like the 2018 series. Instead, they might have landed on something rather more like Flux. Flux is not only heavily serialised, it contains visual allusions to Nordic noir[11], and concerns itself with family dynamics and family secrets, and at least initially with evil in a grounded domestic setting in England. One commentator suggested, in 2016, that Broadchurch in particular and Chibnall’s work more generally were ‘less about plot, and more about the emotional effects of plot on a diverse, interconnected community’[12]. That could not really be said to be a description of anything in the first two Chibnall series of Doctor Who. The aforementioned Sheffield setting never quite coheres into anything meaningful, anything more than a frequent location. Flux, starting with ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ but continuing throughout, makes a second attempt at something along these lines, with the community in question being the northern English city of Liverpool.

Chibnall’s Coming Home

‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ establishes early-21st-century Liverpool as a kind of ‘home’ location for the series, much as the early seasons Russell T Davies produced had done with South Wales in general, and Cardiff in particular. (This is in part, of course, a function of the series being made there, but great care is taken to ensure the city becomes a setting as well as an outdoor set.) The strings used for the incidental music in the first shot of the Museum of Liverpool have a grandiose quality, reminiscent of John Barry’s James Bond scores[13], and how they set out a location as glamorous as part of that series’ globe-trotting remit. Akinola’s score, like his predecessor Murray Gold’s for (the Cardiff-set) Boom Town (2005), calls attention to a neglected city close to the showrunner’s heart. This, they insist, is an exciting place, one of both contemporary relevance and of deep history.

The contemporary Liverpool section begins in the city’s museum, with a character played by a famous Liverpudlian comedian and actor extolling the city’s virtues in a manner as suggestive of his own media persona as the character he is playing. Even before he had appeared on screen, Bishop had ostensibly been reprimanded by the BBC for revealing ‘too much’ about his character, by telling a group of drama students that Dan was, like him, a proud Liverpudlian. As Bishop himself explained in April 2021 on The Graham Norton Show (2007-):

‘I went: “Well, where do you think he comes from? Have a guess!” You know what I mean, I’m not Tom Cruise. I can act as long as the character happens to look and sound a lot like me… Then the BBC phoned me up and said: “You’ve broke the cardinal sin. You’ve told them something about Doctor Who...” and I went, “I haven’t told them anything! Anybody who looks at me knows he’s from Liverpool, let’s be honest!”’[14]

While the attitude to publicity and the disclosure of information about upcoming programmes of the Doctor Who production office from 2018 to 2022 are a source of bafflement, at least to Doctor Who fans, it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that the centrality of Liverpool to the then-untransmitted Flux was the source of the BBC ire. Bishop could, after all, have been playing a Scouser who is resident in another part of the UK, or the world, or even on the Moon (this being Doctor Who). But, no, it is in his home city where we first meet Dan, and he is enthusing about it with words which are worth quoting in full here:

‘Doesn’t matter where you go in the world. It could be the greatest museums in the biggest cities, none of them have got what we’ve got right here. Nobody has got a top floor like the Museum of Liverpool, cos nobody has got our history. Over there, we’ve got the writers. Over there, the musicians. And over there, the footballers. These are massive. They’re the pinnacle of this building and this city. These define us. These make Liverpool.’[15]

One might be forgiven for noticing that writers are placed first and foremost on that list. While Liverpool has produced great writers, its most famous sons are The Beatles, its most famous daughter arguably Cilla Black[16]. Its eponymous football team with its 19 domestic league titles and six European cups would surely enter most people’s heads before, say, Beryl Bainbridge or Jimmy McGovern, to pick two almost entirely at random. But then ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ is not a hit single or a penalty shootout in Istanbul: Chris Chibnall was brought up near Liverpool, in Formby, a Liverpool commuter town that, while not part of the city, has been incorporated into Merseyside and is part of the Liverpool postal district. It’s an entirely forgivable, and obviously self-aware, moment of authorial vanity. It’s also of a piece with how the Russell T Davies era placed writers, albeit strictly canonical ones[17] at the centre of its view of history. This ‘coming home’ immediately makes ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ feel more personal and authored than Chibnall’s earlier Doctor Who work. How could it not? It also sets up a curious, and surely intentional, parallel with the Doctor. Dan is an unofficial guide to history, to time and space, who looks to inspire people by connecting them with famous figures.

This parallel is further increased by giving the Doctor a hitherto unsuspected passion for Liverpool Football Club[18]; ‘Liverpool. Anfield. Klopp era. Classic. Ooh, Yaz, maybe we could take in a game. I’ve seen the Barcelona match nine times. I was a ball boy for Trent, once,’ she enthuses as the TARDIS lands in Dan’s street[19]. Interestingly it is Yaz, not the Doctor, who intuits that the occupant of Dan’s house as ‘Single bloke, definitely a red’, in one of the few occasions in the series in which she sounds like someone with police training[20]. This is odd, as later in this episode it is implied she’s since given up life in the force, presumably to travel with the Doctor ‘full-time’. It is wisely only implied why a Liverpudlian of Dan’s age would have an instinctive distrust of Sheffield police; the Hillsborough disaster of 19 April 1989, in which disproportionate and incompetent actions by Sheffield police directly led to the deaths of at least 97 Liverpool supporters, including 22 children[21]. These actions were then covered up by the same police force[22], requiring a decades-long legal battle to establish the truth in court.

By the time we meet Dan, even the most ignorant member of the audience already has some idea of the truth of his words about Liverpool. Because it is not just contemporary Liverpool which features in the opening scenes of ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’. The second scene of the episode, the first after the opening titles, takes us to the city in the early 19th-century, in a brief but intriguing scene featuring Joseph Williamson constructing an elaborate tunnel system beneath the city and seemingly to no purpose. Williamson’s initial scene here establishes some of that aforementioned deep history, and suggests a complexity to the unfolding mystery of the Flux that would not be quite so striking were it not present.

Williamson, with his gruff demeanour and grand schemes, might be seen as initially presenting as a villain. After all, in Doctor Who, the people with elaborate plans are usually ranged against the series lead. This is, in later episodes of Flux, shown not to be the case. Nevertheless, it is both understandable and regrettable that the tobacco and snuff baron Williamson’s fortune, in part deriving from the labour of enslaved people[23], is not touched upon early in Flux. This is not an aspect of the city’s history that National Museums Liverpool, the body which operates the Museum of Liverpool, could be accused of shying away from, running as it does the International Slavery Museum, which is also based in the city.

The Williamson scenes also briefly feature the relatively obscure James Stonehouse (1809-90), author of Recollections of Old Liverpool (1863), a seminal work of history on the city and the basis for most writings about Williamson’s eccentric project. Stonehouse is presented here as Williamson’s senior, but the historical Stonehouse was only 11 when this scene takes place. We might assume that this Stonehouse is the author’s father. But in 1820 the Stonehouse family lived in Wandsworth Road, Vauxhall[24], and did not move to Liverpool until 1833.

Stonehouse’s Recollections of Old Liverpool, which is enthusiastic, unreliable and based on multiple sources, affected to be the reminiscences of a single, elderly Liverpudlian who had lived through all the historical events the book describes. So it seems that Doctor Who’s fictional version of Joseph Williamson is, either by accident or design, talking to the fictional version of Stonehouse. It is also notable that one of the things they discuss is Williamson’s desire for soldiers returning from the Napoleonic Wars, and the otherwise unemployed, to work on his tunnels. In his own era, Williamson was known as much for charitable work as his business. One interpretation of the tunnels is that the project was in part a way of circulating money in the local community without asking people to accept charity.

This forms a nice parallel with contemporary scenes featuring Dan. Dan volunteers at a food bank, despite being unemployed himself, and refuses to accept food from the organisation he’s volunteering for, despite having empty cupboards at home. Dan is the kind of man who might have accepted a seemingly pointless job from Joseph Williamson, but been reluctant to accept his charity. These scenes establish Dan as someone who gives more than he really should or can, just as his tentative romance with Diane marks him out as neither forceful nor shallow, despite his bluster. Nevertheless, his quick sarcastic rejection of the adult trick-or-treater establishes that he’s not foolish, he’s kind – something his playfulness with children (‘You scared me there’) has already reinforced. Dan might seem to be a ‘too good to be true nice guy’. Surely he must have a dark secret? But Bishop’s innate likeability as a performer banishes any such suspicions.

The scene with the food bank received press attention, both positive and negative[25]. It is arguably political in a way Doctor Who had never quite been before. It is addressing social issues absolutely literally. Not through metaphor or analogy. That’s not to say that Doctor Who has not been political – the counterexamples are too many to even list – but it’s notable that the earliest known complaint about Doctor Who becoming too political was published in 1973 and written by an otherwise enthusiastic viewer of the series, Patrick Cosgrove[26]. The episode’s engagement with social issues, as distinct from politics, is the thematic equivalent of the change of camera equipment and aspect ratio for The Woman Who Fell to Earth (2018), in that it is an attempt to bring the series ‘up to date’. Both find their dramatic equivalent in this episode in the moment when Swarm talks to the camera, directly addressing the audience. Here Chibnall is making use of a technique used numerous times before in Doctor Who[27], but repurposing it to make the audience feel unsafe – drawing on its use in, for example, acclaimed ostensible comedy series such as BBC Three’s Fleabag (2016-19). All are an overt appeal to the contemporary. But then, as we’ll explore in our next section, the contemporary is what this episode is concerned with.

Tonight’s the Night

‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ stands as part of a small sub-genre of Doctor Who stories that are set, in whole or in part, on the exact day on which they are transmitted. This, curiously, does not include Doctor Who’s many Christmas specials, which are usually set on Christmas Eve and/or a year ahead of transmission[28]. Examples of this subgenre do include the original Christmas episode, ‘The Feast of Steven’ and the following week’s New Year’s Day instalment ‘Volcano’[29], but ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ is an example of a subtly different tradition. In episode one of The War Machines (1966), ‘C-Day’, the day on which WOTAN’s proto-internet[30] will activate, is said to be 16 July 1966, which was also the date on which episode 4 of the story was due to be transmitted. This is not an accident[31]. The War Machines was Doctor Who’s first fully contemporary adventure[32], and a decision was clearly taken to make it absolutely contemporary. It is part of the story’s attempts, also evidenced by director Michael Ferguson’s documentary-influenced direction and extensive location filming, to create a verisimilitude then unprecedented in Doctor Who. This absolute contemporaneousness is also the objective of Silver Nemesis (1988)[33]. This has a first instalment both transmitted and set on 23 November 1988, Doctor Who’s 25th anniversary. The date is mentioned multiple times in the episode, in relation to the possibility that the world might end on the date that the serial’s initial audience are watching the episode.

This trick offers a strange, albeit illusory, urgency to an episode’s proceedings, one Steven Moffat took full advantage of when scheduling the end of the universe as depicted in the 2010 series for the transmission date of his series finale The Big Bang[34]. It’s obvious that Chibnall enjoys this conceit. At least two of his three of his New Year’s Day Dalek episodes are set in whole or in part on the day of broadcast, if not necessarily the same year[35]. But more significantly, he decides to play it again for the final episode of Flux, in which one of Joseph Williamson’s tunnels, which leads to the ‘present’ section of the storyline, is labelled ‘December 5th far future two thousand and twenty one!!’

While Chibnall’s engagement in this tradition is interesting in dramaturgical terms, it’s also an indication of something else. Like his two predecessors as 21st-century ‘showrunner’ (for both of whom he scripted episodes[36]), Chibnall has been a Doctor Who fan since childhood. While his first season, as noted, avoided engaging with the series’ past, by his third, appearances of old monsters and verbal references to continuity touchstones are commonplace. For example, Swarm’s mention of being ‘renewed’ feels like a continuity reference to The Power of the Daleks (1966), where what is now more commonly called ‘regeneration’ is described as such[37]. This reference feels like fan continuity in the same way that Vinder’s observation post being called Rose does. It is not necessarily a reference to the first episode of the revived series of Doctor Who, let alone a meaningful one, but is clearly made by someone who has heard of them.

This is even more true of, for example, the phrase ‘in the gravest emergencies’ used when Jón and Anna are startled by the appearance of a beacon. This is a direct quote from The Five Doctors (1983), which is perhaps being invoked for its importance in the history of television Doctor Who. The same is true of the phrase ‘final (few) hours of planet Earth’ used here more than once, which seems like a reference to a line of dialogue in The Poison Sky (2008), ‘the last days of planet Earth’, which was later the intended title for what became The End of Time episode 1 (2009), and which got as far as being on the opening titles of edited copies of the episode seen by the series’ then executive producers before being spiked[38].

This habit, or technique, is of course not limited to Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who. Steven Moffat’s script for The Day of the Doctor gives the 10th Doctor lines which mimic some he has already spoken onscreen in Voyage of the Damned (2007)[39]. School Reunion (2006), produced if not written by Russell T Davies, manages to allude to dialogue from the final episodes of The Hand of Fear (1976) and Survival in its own final scene. The Age of Steel later in 2006 has the Doctor invoke the phrase ‘Above, between, below’ from The Five Doctors, to no response from the characters he’s with, but to audience recognition. All these cases (and there are many others) are indications of how immersed in Doctor Who itself its 21st-century showrunners have been. It’s the pop-cultural equivalent of the ease with which much English Renaissance drama is able to allude to biblical verses without providing context, in the knowledge that its entire audience are weekly churchgoers. It’s the invocation of a common cultural inheritance.

The smallest, but also perhaps the most meaningful, continuity reference in the story is in the title itself. The Deadly Assassin (1977) contains the line ‘Rassilon found the Eye of Harmony, which balances all things, that they may neither flux nor wither nor change their state in any measure’. Here we have, in the deep lore of the Time Lords, and indeed of 20th-century Doctor Who, an explicit reference to Time Lord technology being used to prevent ‘flux’. Now, clearly in that episode the word is being used as a verb, rather than a noun as it is in the 2021 series, but the former would seem to be an obvious inspiration for the latter. While it is not revealed in ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ itself, we will later discover that the Flux is a Time Lord weapon.

This would also seem to be connected, albeit not entirely clearly, to how the Flux’s destructive effect on Earth at the end of ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ is disrupted by energy being unleashed from the TARDIS’s interior. This is itself a reference to the events of Boom Town, which in turn referred to The Edge of Destruction (1964). So, while the first Chibnall / Whittaker series began with a lo-fi experiment in contemporary SF thriller Doctor Who, the third opens with an episode that delves into Time Lord history and the Doctor’s own recently revealed forgotten past, features multiple returning and recurring villains, and ends with the outer planets of Earth’s solar system being destroyed[40].

This is a process that will continue for the rest of its production block, every single episode of which features at least one returning antagonist, and which concludes with a multi-Doctor regeneration story in which the Doctor(s) face off against the Master, the Daleks and the Cybermen, alongside UNIT and two returning 1980s companions in major supporting roles[41]. Whether this reflects a shift in the creative ambitions of Doctor Who’s production team, perhaps a movement from what they felt the programme needed to a more self-indulgent form of expression, or a response to a perceived audience, is hard to say in the absence of definitive comment from Chris Chibnall, who has been more circumspect about his creative processes than either Russell T Davies or Steven Moffat, or indeed most of Doctor Who’s writers.

Where we can see the production team responding, almost in real time, to the way the audience engaged with this era of Doctor Who is with regard to the internet fan discourse known as ‘Thasmin’. This portmanteau of ‘Thirteen / Yasmin’ implies a sexual and/or romantic relationship between the characters which is not indicated on screen[42]. This tradition of ‘shipping’ or ‘slash fiction’ can be traced back at least as far as the nascent US Star Trek fandom of the late 1960s, although Doctor Who fandom was (largely) uninterested in it before the series’ 21st-century revival[43].

‘I didn’t know what Thasmin was,’ noted Matt Strevens, Chris Chibnall’s Co-Executive Producer on Doctor Who, and the non-writing half of the senior production team. ‘Jodie said after the first season, “Oh there’s speculation out there,” but we hadn’t really thought about it. A couple of screengrabs went around that could be misinterpreted… and then we sort of forgot about it.’[44] At what point that forgetting transitioned to a desire to engage with this fan, well, desire, is hard to pinpoint. Yaz and Captain Jack Harkness’ conversation in Revolution of the Daleks (2021), in which the two of them compare their respective abandonments by the Doctor, certainly nods at it. Given that that episode was made immediately after Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (2020), that all three were written by Chibnall, and that Jack’s return had long been planned, it seems more likely than not that Yaz’s time away from the Doctor was in part conceived in order to facilitate this conversation, and move the idea of this relationship to the forefront of the series following the departure of companions Graham and Ryan at the end of that production block.

However, the introduction of John Bishop’s Dan, and perhaps the nature of the Flux season as a whole, truncated as it was by COVID-19[45], means that ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ is the first, perhaps the only, episode in which only Yaz plays the main companion’s role[46]. It’s in keeping with this that the Doctor refers to Yaz as her ‘co-pilot’ and Yaz calls out the Doctor by asking ‘You being mardy?’ when she considers she’s being unreasonable. The Doctor also asks Yaz, not without exasperation, ‘Have we not had a good time together? Since Ryan and Graham left, have I not taken you to amazing places? I thought I was showing you experiences of a lifetime’. Advocates of Thasmin were no doubt thrilled by the presence of a double bed in the TARDIS console room, and would have found implications and/or innuendo in the duo’s carrying handcuffs and their mutual attendance of a high-gravity circus workshop.

But while this episode, and later ones in its production block, engage more fully with the Thasmin idea, they do not do so in the way that its exponents most enjoyed, and which seems to be teased by ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’, namely that there is an active sexual and romantic relationship taking place between these characters which is hidden from the audience and/or other characters. Instead, the audience is presented with a small number of conversations which acknowledge that there is an unrealised potential relationship between the two characters. There is no clarity over what Yaz describes as something ‘I’ve never told anyone. Not even myself.’ Is it her attraction to the Doctor specifically, or a more general failure to acknowledge her capacity for same-sex desire? This is not to criticise the story as it played out, the potential ways it could have and didn’t, or the audiences for either. It is simply to note that this kind of lack of specificity, which seems distinct from strategic ambiguity, is not atypical of the Doctor Who of this period and its long-term storytelling.

It also relates to a recurring issue for Doctor Who in this period: story elements that resemble each other, but which are never quite connected at a script level – they just happen to be occurring at the same time. For instance, in The Power of the Doctor there are two entirely separate reasons why the fifth and seventh Doctors appear onscreen. The 13th Doctor meets ‘vestiges of our consciousness’ after having been forcibly regenerated, and a hologram recreation of her, which has been programmed with ‘thousands of years’ of her experiences, responds to the ‘emotional memory’ of Tegan and then Ace to briefly resemble their Doctors. These are two separate mechanisms, which separately offer reasons for Peter Davison and Sylvester McCoy to appear. They do not require each other to work. They are linked only by proximity.

This tendency to play out multiple stories as if they are one, with the connection between them coincidental, is especially noticeable in ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’. The Doctor is tracking down a single Lupari at the exact point that we discover that the Lupari are sworn to protect the Earth from the Flux. In a fortnight’s time, it will turn out that a Lupari was the Doctor’s companion at a point in her past she can no longer remember, which is relevant to her hunt for him but not the ‘species link’ over the Flux. Two weeks later, we’ll discover that their mutual employers of that time are responsible for the Flux. Which is not quite relevant to either. Or if it is, it’s never quite expressed. Which brings us to our final section on this episode.

‘The end of the universe. I always wondered what it’d feel like.’

‘It’s really interesting that Chris is doing it long-form because he’s a real master of long-form. I wondered when I handed it over to him, because I was starting to fret in terms of Doctor Who, because everything in television is now very much more in the form of an uncompromising serial. Line of Duty makes no concession to the fact that you might have a scaled memory. You are supposed to know what’s going on. And I thought maybe Doctor Who should be moving in that direction. But I wasn’t sure, so I’m really, really interested and excited that Chris is pushing it that way, that’s really interesting. It gets us more cliffhangers as well and Doctor Who is very good at cliffhangers.’[47]

That remarkable cliffhanger which concludes ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ seals its nature as the most entertaining and engaging series opener of the Chris Chibnall era; perhaps, on transmission, the best episode of Doctor Who which had been credited solely to Chibnall as a writer. But its dynamism and fixation on the moment seem to come at the cost of entirely satisfactory engagement with its many elements in subsequent episodes of the series. ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ isn’t a story, it’s a chapter. Its function is to set up. It leaves so many things dangling because it’s meant to. Whether they are dealt with satisfactorily afterwards is not necessarily a problem with ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’… or at least, ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ as an hour of television.

Which raises the question: to what extent is Flux really a serial at all? It is arguable that the first three episodes of Flux constitute an example of Davies-style ‘opening trilogy’. ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ is the contemporary story that introduces a new companion. ‘War of the Sontarans’ is the ‘celebrity historical’, and ‘Once, Upon Time’ the futuristic SF story. What’s different is that, just as the in-fiction Flux breaks up time and space, all three episodes mingle the episodic styles of Davies’ opening trilogy concept.

But is this effective serialisation? The scene with Claire Brown, who will be a major character in ‘Village of the Angels’, is a good case in point. To recap, a woman walking home through Liverpool seems to recognise the Doctor and Yaz, she reassures them in a cryptic manner that ‘in the past […] if it’s true [...] It’s okay, we’ll see each other again,’ and departs. We later see her stalked and sent to the past by a Weeping Angel. That Weeping Angel scene is genuinely brilliant, a proper Halloween horror moment[48] of the kind promised by the title but otherwise not really delivered. But the implications of her earlier conversation are odd.

On transmission there was fan speculation, prompted by Claire’s observation that she is ‘taking the long way home’[49], that the first scene with Claire takes place, from her point of view, after the second. That the Claire the audience first sees has already experienced the events of the then forthcoming fourth episode, and been returned to her own time, a little before she left, and the Claire we later see captured by a Weeping Angel has yet to experience these events.

Instead something simpler, but somehow also not as coherent, is the case. Claire recognises the Doctor and Yaz because of her precognitive powers. Her ‘long way home’ comment is irrelevant.

This is indicative of how ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ works as well as it does, by deferring answering difficult questions. This is a benefit of its nature as the first part of a serial of nearly six hours in duration. But the result is arguably a shell game. This episode initially sets up Karvanista and Lupari as the threat of the overarching serial and the implication is that Dan is being captured for a specific reason because of who he is. These assumptions are then turned upside down. Dan’s capture is generic, and Karvanista is not the villain, he’s trying to save Dan and working against the Flux.

These are obligations later episodes show Karvanista taking extremely seriously. In ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ he refers to ‘species recall’ as a’ universal pattern’ and a ‘genetic obligation’ to ‘protect when called upon,’ and he is shown to be willing to repeatedly risk his own life to honour these things.

So why does he repeatedly threaten to kill Dan with lines such as ‘Be silent. Or face execution at the hands of Karvanista, Vanquisher of the Thousand Civilisations. Submit or die.’?[50] Unless it’s to confuse an audience he doesn’t know is there.

This disconnect equally applies to his multiple attempts to kill the Doctor and Yaz in order to stop them pursuing him for information in the episode’s opening scenes. Later episodes of Flux will reveal him to be a former companion of the Doctor’s, who cares deeply about her. Is Karvanista not actually trying to kill anyone? Given his relationship with the Doctor, and his inability to answer the questions she is asking[51], that’s the logical extrapolation; the problem is, the way these red herrings, these false implications, are conveyed is often too substantially contradictory to work in retrospect or on a second viewing, when the audience has greater knowledge of what follows. As with this production team’s use of ‘Thasmin’, this can be seen to be indicative of a methodology of keeping as many story options as possible open for as long as possible before settling on one, but in a way that results in incoherence over what are on the face of it relatively straightforward plot motions.

Another example: this episode features scenes in which a couple living in the Arctic Circle[52], Jón and Anna, are sent a warning beacon which Anna destroys in Jón’s presence. They are clearly aware they are not simply a couple in a lonely house. They both know what the beacon is and that it is some kind of warning, without either of them quite acknowledging it (‘They promised this would never happen’; then after destroying the beacon ‘We didn’t receive the warning.’) But their next scene shows that neither are aware that Anna is Azure in disguise as a human[53].

That Azure seems to be in some form of ‘witness protection’ could be a reference to actor Rochenda Sandall’s most notable role, that of organised crime gang operative Lisa McQueen in Line of Duty (2012-) who is left in exactly such a state at the end of the fifth series. But it also potentially sets up a dynamic between Swarm and Azure, with one having betrayed the other, that does not play out. As it stands though, the audience is entitled to ask what Jón and Anna think is happening. Why do they act as they do? The implication is that they condemn themselves by destroying the warning beacon. Is the beacon a warning from Division? Who else could it be? But Division are responsible for the Flux. So who is warning them? Who is Jón? A Time Lord? A human? Who does he think he is? Who does Anna think she is?

Perhaps a story in which Anna is an ordinary person on Earth who discovers she’s secretly an alien who lost her memory would be too close to that of the Fugitive Doctor, as seen in Fugitive of the Judoon (2019). But nevertheless none of what happens in these two scenes connects to the rest of the episode or the rest of Flux, and none of it is referred to in any way after Anna turns into Azure. Perhaps Jón is, and Anna believes herself to be, a member of Division? Perhaps they are, like those murdered by Swarm upon his release, not a party to Tecteun’s plans? We simply don’t know. Perhaps the author does. But the information is never conveyed. Perhaps it does not exist.

Early in ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ it is suggested that construction without design inevitably creates problems. When Stonehouse is demanding Williamson explain his tunnel system, he asks ‘Why can I see no rational plan at work here? The designs are eccentric, the work is random […] without purpose’. Just as the real-life Joseph Williamson died leaving no record of his own reasons for his extraordinary project, the Chibnall era ends without fulfilling exploitation or explanation of the Flux. Is that parallel deliberate? As with many things about Flux as a whole, it’s very hard to say. On Halloween night 2021, however, and like the fictionalised Joseph Williamson stalking his tunnels, at this point the audience have hope, and the possible destinations seem endless.

[1] Interviewed by Benjamin Cook, DWM #502, p17.

[2] A few did, e.g. Harrison, Mark, ‘Doctor Who: Looking Back at Chris Chibnall’s Episodes’.

[3] Which Chibnall created and wrote (most of); it won a BAFTA for Best Drama Series of 2014.

[4] Patrick Troughton, although formally cast by Innes Lloyd, was put forward by BBC Head of Drama Serials Shaun Sutton, of whose unofficial television repertory company Troughton had been a key member. Tom Baker was suggested to producer Barry Letts by Sutton’s successor Bill Slater, who had directed Baker in Bernard Shaw’s The Millionairess (1972). Both Peter Davison and Colin Baker had worked with John Nathan-Turner before being cast as the Doctor, and both David Tennant and Christopher Eccleston had starred in series written and produced by Russell T Davies. Even Peter Cushing had already worked with Dr Who and the Daleks’ writer-producer Milton Subotsky.

[5] The previous assumption was 45 minutes; in practice even ‘standard’ episode lengths before and after 2018 vary wildly.

[6] For its 11th and subsequent production blocks, Doctor Who has used Cooke anamorphic Prime lenses and Angenieux Optimo anamorphic zooms, fitted to Arri Alexa XT and Alex Mini 4K capable cameras.

[7] Chiefly in 2011 and 2014, although other years are arguable.

[8] After the 1970, 1975-76 and 1978-79 seasons.

[9] After all, Doctor Who’s 2017 regular cast consisted of a gay Jewish man, a bisexual woman from a multi-ethnic background and a Scottish actor of Italian descent.

[10] In practice, either the SF story or the historical can come second, with the other following third.

[11] The zeitgeist dominating early 2010s phenomenon in UK television viewing, building on a longer literary history, of crime drama set in northern Europe. Broadchurch is seen as an attempt to make a UK-originated example of this genre, although Chibnall has often noted that he had been trying to get the series’ main story made for a decade. Nevertheless, the setting, visual style and even costuming choices of the Anna and Jón scenes are obvious allusions to the form.

[12] Burt, Kayti, ‘Doctor Who: What Will the Post-Moffat Era Look Like?’

[13] In which context it is worth noting that ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’s lengthy pre-credits sequence, beginning in medias res, with the leads involved in an unseen adventure of initially uncertain connection to the main story, is clearly patterned after those of the James Bond film series.

[14] ‘John Bishop Broke Doctor Who’s Cardinal Rule’.

[15] All quotes in this book come from the relevant episode of Flux, unless otherwise stated.

[16] Black’s version of ‘Anyone Who Had A Heart’ was the UK’s largest selling single by a female artist of the entire 1960s, and her later television programmes such as Surprise Surprise (1984-2001) and Blind Date (1985-2003) routinely drew huge viewing figures.

[17] Dickens in The Unquiet Dead (2005), Shakespeare in The Shakespeare Code (2007), even the somewhat less strictly canonical Agatha Christie in The Unicorn and the Wasp (2008).

[18] Presumably developed at some point since the 11th Doctor discovered the game in The Lodger (2010).

[19] The Doctor is referring to the Liverpool fullback Trent Alexander-Arnold, and a home Champions League match against Barcelona on 7 May 2019, where a ballboy and Alexander-Arnold played a critical role in Liverpool’s win.

[20] Bishop himself is also ‘a red’, and that fandom is very public, which is almost certainly why his house is near Anfield, the home of Liverpool FC. Curiously, just as the creation of a sense of place using Liverpool feels like a second attempt at something that didn’t quite work with Sheffield, Dan’s football fandom seems connected to how Graham wears a (modified) West Ham United badge, designed as an in-joke by actor Bradley Walsh (so it reads WHO not WHU), but the character’s team allegiance is never mentioned in dialogue.

[21] A coroner’s inquest held from 1 April 2014 to 26 April 2016 formally ruled that the supporters were ‘unlawfully killed owing to grossly negligent failures by police’.

[22] Which also began a concerted smear campaign against Liverpool supporters attending the game that day in order to shift blame away from its own failings; literally victim-blaming.

[23] Williamson’s business was in part inherited from his father-in-law, and he later bought out his brother-in-law’s share. There is insufficient historical research on the topic of when in the 19th century the company ceased to use enslaved labour, but certainly the company Williamson acquired had profited from slavery in the previous century. For more on Williamson and Stonehouse see Murden, Jon, ‘Williamson, Joseph’, and Hand, Charles R, ‘Joseph Williamson “The King of Edgehill”’.

[24] Then the Surrey countryside, not a part of London.

[25] Axford, Beth, ‘Doctor Who: Flux is Helping to Smash the Stigma of Food Banks’.

[26] Cosgrove, Patrick, ‘Dr Who’s Politics’.

[27] E.g. The Invasion of Time (1978), The Caves of Androzani (1984), Before the Flood (2015), Sleep No More (2015).

[28] A probable exception is The End of Time Part One.

[29] The Daleks’ Master Plan episodes 7 (1965) and 8 (1966),

[30] In 1966, the internet was theoretical. ARPANET, the US military’s proto-internet, began development that year and became operational in 1969.

[31] That the day in question is said in dialogue to be a Monday when it was in real life a Saturday, presumably is.

[32] Exceptions are the brief scenes in the aforementioned ‘The Feast of Steven’ and ‘Volcano’, plus one in ‘Bell of Doom’ (The Massacre episode 4 1966), and much of the series’ opening episode ‘An Unearthly Child (An Unearthly Child episode 1, 1963), none of which constitute a ‘full adventure’. Planet of Giants (1964) has a 1960s setting, but as the TARDIS crew have been reduced in height to approximately 2cm, they do not interact with contemporary society.

[33] This debt is perhaps acknowledged in ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ by the pre-credit scene’s mention of Nitro Nine, an explosive used by companion Ace in several 1980s stories.

[34] The shooting of (a Teselecta pretending to be) the Doctor at the fixed point in time at Lake Silencio is established to take place on 21 April 2011, the day the episode was broadcast, only retrospectively, later in the 2011 season.

[35] Revolution of the Daleks (2021) is set ‘a year’ after Resolution (2019). Which would make it set a year before broadcast, or Resolution set a year after.

[36] As a writer of episodes for the 2007, 2010 and 2012 series of Doctor Who, and the showrunner of Torchwood (2006-08), Chibnall had been working on Doctor Who periodically for 15 years when Flux aired. To put that into context, Terrance Dicks’ association with television Doctor Who lasted almost exactly 15 years.

[37] The term is also referenced in The Twin Dilemma (1984) when the Doctor says ‘I call it a renewal’.

[38] ‘Toby Hadoke’s Who Round: 150: Russell T Davies Part 7’.

[39] The Day of the Doctor: ‘I’m the Doctor. I’m nine hundred and four years old. I’m from the planet Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterborous. I am the Oncoming Storm, the Bringer of Darkness, and you are basically just a rabbit, aren’t you? Okay, carry on. Just a general warning.’ Quoting Voyage of the Damned: ‘I’m the Doctor. I’m a Time Lord. I’m from the planet Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterborous. I’m nine hundred and three years old and I’m the man who’s going to save your lives and all six billion people on the planet below. You got a problem with that?’

[40] This is not followed up or reversed later in Flux, but genuinely does seem to be what happens onscreen this week.

[41] With momentary cameos from three others in the penultimate scene.

[42] Or not explicitly. Your mileage may vary.

[43] It’s a measure of the turnaround in this kind of fan engagement that ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ spawned another ship of its own: ‘Danvanista’, which became sufficiently prominent on the internet that John Bishop discussed it on his chat show The John Bishop Show (2022-) on 8 January 2022, showing fan art of the two characters to a largely flabbergasted mainstream audience. Some of the key indications for ‘Danvanista’ are Dan’s use of the word ‘cute’ and him noting that Karvanista’s fur ‘looks dead soft’ by the way.

[44] Craig, David, ‘Doctor Who’s Thasmin Romance Wasn’t Originally Planned Says Producer’.

[45] Davies, Caroline, ‘Pandemic Nearly Made Me Quit Doctor Who, Says Showrunner Chris Chibnall’.

[46] A strong argument can also be made for The Power of the Doctor.

[47] Steven Moffat, quoted in Griffin, Louise, ‘Doctor Who Needs to Break Rules: Steven Moffat on Series 13, his Hopes for Sherlock, and Why He’s Returning to Comedy’.

[48] In keeping with the episode’s unsettling fourth wall breaking: who is looking at the angel in its final flash after it has captured Claire? The audience is. We are.

[49] Itself surely a reference to the final line of The Day of the Doctor and its reprise in Heaven Sent and Hell Bent (both 2015).

[50] Similarly, the title of the final episode of Flux is ‘The Vanquishers’, but this is not connected with Karvanista’s claim. It just seems to be a word floating around the head of the author of both episodes.

[51] We will later learn that Karvanista literally can’t answer questions about Division without dying (‘The Vanquishers’).

[52] The script specifies the setting as ‘Iceland’, while the caption calls it ‘The Arctic Circle’. This narrows down the location to the island of Grímsey off the north Icelandic coast, the only part of the country that falls within the Arctic Circle. In 2018 it had 61 inhabitants. The setting recalls the Nordic noir of which Broadchurch is seen as an example.

[53] Azure’s design, as well as her transformation from a young woman ignorant of her true identity into her supercriminal self as a result of pain, strongly resemble a subplot about the Red Skull’s daughter Sin being ‘rescued’ from her ordinary life in Ed Brubaker’s 2006 Captain America story ‘Red is the Darkest Color’ (Captain America vol 5 #15).

WAR OF THE SONTARANS

OVERVIEW

Writer: Chris Chibnall

Director: Jamie Magnus Stone

Original UK Transmission Date: 7 November 2021

Running Time: 59m 24s

UK Viewing Figures: 5.13 million

Regular Cast: Jodie Whittaker (the Doctor), Mandip Gill (Yasmin Khan), John Bishop (Dan Lewis)

Guest Cast: Jonathan Watson (Skaak / Sontaran Commander Riskaw[1]), Sarah Powell (Mary Seacole), Jacob Anderson (Vinder), Sue Jenkins (Eileen Lewis), Paul Broughton (Neville Lewis), Steve Oram (Joseph Williamson), Gerald Kyd (General Logan), Dan Starkey (Svild), Sam Spruell (Swarm), Rochenda Sandall (Azure), Craige Els (Karvanista), Jonny Mathers (Passenger), Nigel Richard Lambert (Priest Triangle)

Antagonists: The Sontarans, Swarm, Azure

Responses:

‘It’s a fine, if familiar, Sontaran story, filled with all the requisite comedy and commentary about the pointlessness of war. And it’s both aided and in some ways overshadowed by the ongoing Flux mystery.’

[Caroline Siede, AV Club]

‘[L]ooking at the ingredients in play in the episode and the potentially interesting ways to develop those ideas, [‘War of the Sontarans’] does feel somewhat underwhelming.’

[Darren Mooney, The Movie Blog]

SYNOPSIS

With the Flux having breached the TARDIS, the Doctor sees another vision, this time of a dilapidated house. She wakes up to find herself with Dan and Yaz in the middle of the Crimean War, near Sevastopol in 1855. But history has been changed, with the Sontarans taking the place of the Russian forces. And on a map of the world, Russia and China are now labelled ‘Sontar’. The first living person they meet is Mary Seacole, who takes them to ‘the British Hotel.

Yaz and Dan are transported away in space and time, which the Doctor reasons must be a side-effect of the Flux colliding with the Time Vortex. Yaz is taken to the Temple of Atropos where she meets Vinder, who has also been taken there, and, briefly, Joseph Williamson who has stumbled across it through his tunnel system.

Dan is back in his own time and place, but Liverpool is now under Sontaran rule, with their base of operations at the Docks. He finds out he is breaking a curfew, and fleeing from the Sontarans, meets his parents, Eileen and Neville, who have been fighting back – with a wok. Armed only with the wok, Dan plans to infiltrate the Sontaran base.

In the Temple of Atropos, a floating Priest Triangle asks Vinder, and later Yaz, if they can ‘repair’ the temple. In the inner chamber, six plinths house the Mouri, who appear in human form when Vinder passes them. Two of the plinths are glitching.

Inside the British Hotel the Doctor meets General Logan, who is planning an offensive against the Sontarans. Seacole is using the building to tend to the wounded, including a Sontaran, Svild. The Doctor frees him on condition he tell his superiors she is there. She and Mary follow him and find the cloaked Sontaran fleet and base.

The Doctor holds parlay with the Sontaran commander Skaak. She offers the Sontarans safe passage out if they leave without further bloodshed, but her negotiations are interrupted by Logan, who refuses to retreat. Escorted away by a British soldier, the Doctor then knocks him out with Venusian Aikido. With the battle in full flow, she takes Mary with her to an unoccupied Sontaran ship. She makes contact with Dan, who has successfully infiltrated a ship of his own. Deducing the Sontarans are making an assault across time using 21st-century Liverpool as their launch point, the Doctor tells Dan he must stop the time ships from taking off, but he is found by the Sontarans.

The Doctor sets into motion a plan to empty the Sontarans’ feeding supplies while they are recharging. But when the Sontarans finally concede defeat and leave, Logan lights a fuse that destroys their ships, much to the Doctor’s disgust.

Yaz joins Vinder in the Temple, but they are met by Swarm, Azure and Passenger, a mysterious tall black-clad figure. The Ravagers destroy the Priest Triangles and with the same power Swarm used to escape his prison, Azure kills one of the remaining Mouri.

Dan is rescued by Karvanista, who had intercepted his communication with the Doctor. He pilots the Sontaran ship, using it to crash into and destroy the entire base. The Doctor picks up Dan, but the TARDIS, still under alien control, takes them to the Temple. Swarm leads Dan and the Doctor to the inner chamber, and clicking his fingers reveals that Vinder and Yaz have taken the place of two Mouri. With another click, Yaz will be destroyed.

A HISTORY IN FLUX

Emma Reed

The Silenced and Ignored: Writing Marginalised Figures Back Into History

Doctor Who has always had a fascination with history. From the first Doctor and his companions finding themselves in caveman times, or as uninvited guests to Marco Polo’s caravan, to the seventh Doctor and Ace encountering her own mother as a baby, it is a programme that has always been captivated by what has been and gone – and the Doctor’s role in that history[2]. While first envisioned as a programme with educative value[3], with historical engagement as a named element of this, this goal was somewhat lost as Doctor Who became progressively more popular in the mid-70s and early 80s[4]. Since the revival of the series in 2005, there has been a reworking of the historical episode, which has become a fixture of the format: the celebrity historical. Though it could be said that in previous eras of the show there was a similar focus (specifically during William Hartnell’s years as the Doctor)[5] on ‘famous’ historical figures, it was certainly representing an attitude towards history, as John Vohlidka puts it, ‘still very much influenced by a “classical” education that was proempire and was propounded in a lecture-type format’[6]. Post-2005, Doctor Who shifted away from the Great Man of History trope, widening the net of historical figures to include women[7], but also extending the focus. Where we once had Nero playing up to the historical myth and fiddling whilst Rome burned (The Romans (1965)), we now have Van Gogh and a nuanced exploration of mental illness (Vincent and the Doctor (2010)). In this new attitude towards history, the historical figures featured are more often than not characters in their own right, rather than embodying pages from a textbook[8]. It is not, perhaps, a new genre or new kind of episode, but more a shift in attitude that sees historical figures as characters, who have something to say about the world they live in, or even the world that we live in today.

This idea of reworking and reframing the ‘celebrity’ historical is especially clear to see in the stories made under the helm of Chris Chibnall. As Beth Axford noted in the Radio Times: ‘Jodie Whittaker and Chris Chibnall’s era of the BBC sci-fi series has broken barriers by centring female stories’, contrasting Chibnall’s evocation of the celebrity historical against the precedent of previous stories[9]. In Chibnall’s era, we have stories that focus upon the marginalised and the forgotten, and we meet historical figures such as Rosa Parks, Ada Lovelace and Mary Shelley[10]. This is important because, as Clarissa Jacob and Angus Dunican assert, ‘Science fiction has long been accused of being a male-dominated universe […] with female characters often restricted to being damsels in distress or sexy space babes’[11]. Doctor Who does not often break this mould, especially when we consider 20th-century companions like Victoria, Jo and Mel, whose main role was to run around and scream in terror, only to be saved by the male Doctor[12]. Since 2005 there has been a greater focus on the companions, who are often women, by giving them character development, depth and drive. And by 2018, this formula was inescapably changed with the casting of Jodie Whittaker as the first female Doctor, shortly followed by Jo Martin as the Fugitive Doctor in Fugitive of the Judoon. That this would accompany a glut of episodes focusing on marginalised historical figures who are mainly women helps the assertion that this era of Doctor Who is particularly focused on challenging the norm when it comes to sci-fi narratives.

And obviously, by the time we get to ‘War of the Sontarans’, the centring of female historical figures is a pattern that is solidified and recognisable. But not only is this era of Doctor Who interested in female historical figures, it also reframes and reworks the celebrity historical to include a diversity of race, beginning with Rosa (2018) – an episode that explicitly deals with racism in the past and present (through Yaz and Ryan’s reflections). At this point, the celebrity historical is not just about giving the historical figures depth and character, but about shining the spotlight on forgotten figures, whose race and/or gender has led to their marginalisation.

This spirit of positive revisionism pervades ‘War of the Sontarans’. Who is it the Doctor, Yaz and Dan meet on the battlefields of Sebastopol but Mary Seacole? Her status as a forgotten historical figure led the National Geographic Society to say: ‘Mary Seacole was a businesswoman, world traveller, popular author, and heroine of the Crimean War. Why haven’t you heard of her?’[13] Seacole, a Jamaican woman of mixed race, wished to help the war effort in the Crimea but was rejected from formal nursing positions and so travelled under her own steam to set up the British Hotel in Sebastopol. Though not a hotel in the modern-day sense of the term, Seacole’s business offered communal spaces and the opportunity to purchase supplies to soldiers. Seacole’s exploits in Crimea are often compared to that of a fellow historical figure, Florence Nightingale, who was part of the formal nursing corps from which Seacole was denied entry. Unlike the white, middle-class Nightingale, whose reputation as the kind and caring Lady of the Lamp has been long and mostly unchallenged[14], Seacole’s reputation fell into relative obscurity, before a recent resurgence in focus. As Samantha Pinto says, ‘Seacole went from British Victorian celebrity to a century of disappearance’[15].

In response to this ‘century of disappearance’, ‘War of the Sontarans’ attempts to correct the record by choosing to centre its story on Mary Seacole. The choice to focus on other such marginalised historical figures (marginalised either due to their gender, or race, or combination of both) like Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan (Spyfall (2020)) shows that Seacole’s inclusion has more of a restorative imperative. The inclusions of these figures represent a rewriting of the accepted, patriarchal history as it stands, to include more diverse voices. This idea of rewriting history is directly referenced in ‘War of Sontarans’ itself. When Dan questions the Doctor after they meet Seacole for the first time, the following exchange occurs:

DAN

Let me get this straight. She’s, like, a real person. From history.

THE DOCTOR

You just talked to her, didn’t you?

DAN

But those Sontaran things, they’re not part of history. Were they?!

THE DOCTOR

No. She should be here. They shouldn’t.

YAZ

Could this be connected to the Flux? Has history been rewritten?

Though Yaz’s question concerns the presence of the Sontarans, it is of course also representative of the wider way that the story treats history in general. It is something (to use the overarching title of the series as a whole) in flux. If we challenge history’s presence as an unchangeable monolith of accepted fact, inclusion and events, then we also question whose voices are allowed to be included. Pinto notes that the reclamation of Seacole as a historical figure[16] has made her ‘a celebrity in the current moment, where her celebrity is to be read as a […] a correction of the racist silence that omitted her from history heretofore’[17]. The inclusion of Seacole therefore is a specific choice, an act that privileges the events and deeds of a historical figure who has been written out of accepted, celebrated history.

Beth Axford says that the Chibnall era of Doctor Who, in particular, is ‘a beacon for representation, uncovering hidden stories and revisiting overlooked parts of history’[18]. We might ask why this is important or remarkable, but it seems self-explanatory. If sci-fi as a genre can be called a male-dominated space, then so can history. By shining a light on the fact that this is not necessarily true, ‘War of the Sontarans’ shows that history itself is not simply a static, unchangeable entity. As Jolie C Matthews says, ‘the historical episodes [of Doctor Who] are still constructions of the past with deliberate narrative choices.’[19] ‘War of the Sontarans’ deliberately chooses to focus on a marginalised and forgotten figure, placing her front and centre, and as such is passing comment as it does so on the fallacy of history as immutable[20]. This is a conscious choice to uplift certain voices in order to reframe who exactly the historical record reflects, and whose stories are privileged and are allowed to be heard. Though Doctor Who has long tended to shift away from its original format as a pedagogical vehicle[21], it would not be a stretch to say that under Chibnall’s guidance, there has been a re-emphasis on the educative power of the programme, especially when concerning the re-placing of marginalised figures into a history that has consistently erased them.

Time and Space: The Sontarans and the Temple

The question what, exactly, history is, and what it is for, would seem to be straightforward – at least at first glance. As Beverley Southgate puts it: ‘After all, history, as a supposedly straightforward and truthful representation of the past, is not meant to be for anything: history just is’[22]. And yet, we have already learned from the discussion of Mary Seacole that certain voices have been marginalised and silenced when it comes to the official historical record. What history is, really, is not insular or unaffected by outside forces. It is constructed, for a purpose. This is the idea that:

‘Despite numerous protestations to the contrary, the imposition of some element of self-interested ‘spin’ on the historicised past is inevitable: any narrative thread has to be spun from something, after all – and after the event; some sense of the evidential traces has to be made from one standpoint or another’.[23]

And so, if we follow this forward, there is nowhere clearer to see the construction of history (as a record that can be effected, influenced, rewritten and reshaped) than in narratives that explore the idea of alternative histories. Alternative histories – what Derek Thiess considers stories that ‘ask a counterfactual, subjunctive-conditional question about history: if we were to change one historical event, how would all subsequent events be different?’ – are a common presence in science fiction, never more so than in 21st-century Doctor Who[24].

Like 2017’s The Lie of the Land, as an alt-history text, ‘War of the Sontarans’ draws attention to the constructed nature of history. Both are narratives that strip away the protestations that history is an unbiased and indiscriminate tool of collective memory, by specifically showing false and rewritten history.

In ‘War of The Sontarans’, this falsehood lies in the presence of the Sontarans in Crimea. It’s self-evident that this runs counter to the facts, but the episode goes one step further. The impact of the Flux means that Earth’s history is especially vulnerable to being rewritten. As Dan notes at the start of the episode, ‘those Sontaran things, they’re not part of history’, and the Doctor shuts down his concerns about skipping a page in his school textbook by agreeing with him. Yet, when the Doctor questions Mary and General Logan later on, both of them are adamant that they cannot remember a time when the Sontarans have not been on Earth. General Logan goes as far as to say that the Sontarans ‘have always been here’. History, as we know it, has been explicitly rewritten, which is invoked when the Doctor asks them to ‘Trust me, I know your history and that’s not true’. The Doctor, here, is the arbiter of what is the true history. Sontarans shouldn’t be on Earth for as long as anyone can remember, and the moment the Doctor points this out, it becomes clear history has been overwritten with a new narrative. That this is made explicit when the Doctor unfurls the map to find Russia replaced by Sontar shows how history itself can no longer be trusted.

A similar set up is seen in the dystopian The Lie of the Land. After a series of complex events in the preceding episodes, Bill is now living alone in a grey flat, while the Doctor is making propaganda announcements on behalf of the supposedly benevolent Monks, who have ‘been with us from the beginning’[25]. People are sentenced to labour camps for being memory criminals if they assert that the Monks have only arrived recently or produce material that questions the ‘true history’. The 1984-esque[26] society depicted is seemingly accepted by the wider population, though Bill can see through the Monks’ deception.

Bill’s awareness of the lies that make up the Monks backstory on Earth is akin to the Doctor’s own insistence in ‘War of the Sontarans’ that the Sontarans have no place in Earth’s long history. In both episodes, the point at which history has diverged becomes important. Thiess states that this ‘nexus point is so important’ and as such, ‘the notion of a recognizable history itself becomes important’[27]. Both Bill and the Doctor invoke ‘recognisable history’ in their dismissal of the new realities they find themselves in and as such draw attention to the constructed nature of the history they are being told. And if history is something that can constructed, as is the case in these new, alternative histories, then it calls into question the veracity of what we consider to be ‘true’ history too.

By highlighting the way history can be manipulated, when we return to ‘true’ history we may be less willing to unflinchingly accept those things we have been brought up to believe about the past. Bill’s refusal could be seen as a lesson on resisting the power of fake news[28], but also as a rejection of the strict policing of rigid, selective, and biased history (that is necessary to keep a specific majority in power).

The Doctor’s questioning of the impact of the Sontarans’ temporal offensive fulfils a similar role, as she does not accept the supposedly ‘true’ history and once more reaffirms the rejection of what is passively accepted by the majority. What this comparison between ‘War of the Sontarans’ and The Lie of the Land also shows is that enquiries into what history is and how it can be rewritten are not a wholly new preoccupation for Doctor Who. The Sontarans’ overwriting of accepted history is an act that brings into sharp focus the way that history is not simply an immutable, unchangeable, unbiased reporting of facts and events. Like the inclusion of Mary Seacole, a historically forgotten figure, the episode is making a comment about what history is, who it is for, and who it can be manipulated and written by.

By demonstrating how alternative histories question the constructed nature of history itself, ‘War of the Sontarans’ is concerned with the same questions that haunt the Doctor throughout Flux, as her own history is a constructed narrative, with the truth hidden and unknown. This thematic concern is best expressed in ‘War of the Sontarans’ through the presentation of the Temple of Atropos and the planet Time. In a narrative that runs parallel to the Doctor’s involvement in the Sontarans’ temporal offensive, Yaz is transported to Atropos and finds the broken Mouri inside the temple. But also important are the other people who are present on Time: Vinder and Joseph Williamson. What these three characters have in common is their sense of dislocation – Williamson is from the 1800s, Yaz from contemporary Earth and Vinder from another 21st century civilisation, more advanced than our own[29]. Here it is worth exploring the fact that the Temple itself (and the Mouri within it) have names taken from Greek classical mythology, and the idea, put forward by Brett M Rogers and Benjamin Eldon Stevens, that there is an ‘intriguing similarity in how science fiction […] and classical antiquity all involve displacements from the world around us’[30]. Not only are Yaz, Vinder and Williamson dislocated in their temporal location (taken, as they are, out of their own time), but so are the very names of the place they find themselves. From this idea of dislocation, we can see history, not only as a constructed medium, but one that is a mix of all points of the past.

On the planet Time, at the Temple of Atropos, is the space of this cumulative history – the place where all of time is now, and therefore so is all of history. And if history has a specific site in which it is controlled and manipulated (though perhaps not in a negative sense; the Mouri certainly seem, at least, to be managing history like some sort of gigantic task manager for the past, the future and the present), then once more it is an entity that can be edited and changed. This can also be seen in the script’s introductory description of the temple:

‘And in this environment, every so often, it’s like a frame slips out of place, almost imperceptibly. Like time glitches back or forth, barely noticeably, occasionally. Whenever we’re here. On a close-up or wide. But something at the edge of vision is wrong.’[31]

Atropos, literally, is shifting and changing, even as Vinder first explores it. Time is malleable and therefore so is history. And if Atropos represents temporal dislocation, it isn’t much of a leap to say that it also represents the Doctor’s own dislocation from her personal history. The Doctor only reaches Atropos at the end of the episode and is physically dislocated from it for the majority of the run-time, saving Earth from the Sontarans. In the very next episode, Atropos is revealed to be the site of a historical event of significance in the Doctor’s past (and that is a lost memory), which highlights this dislocation once more. Atropos is the place where all of history (and time) is occurring, at once – and this includes the history that the Doctor cannot remember. History is in a constant state of writing and rewriting on Atropos, because it is where time is controlled.

The events that occur throughout the series as a result of the damage to the Mouri that is shown in ‘War of the Sontarans’ recall Claude Lévi-Strauss’ theory that ‘there can be no way in which history can ever correspond to any “reality” of the past: “a truly total history would confront [historians] with chaos”’[32]. His conclusion was that ‘history, […] is inevitably partial, incomplete, selective, “biased”’[33]. A history uncontrolled by the Mouri is, therefore, chaos – in a constant battle with the ‘incomplete, selective and “biased“’ history curated by the Mouri – which draws attention once more to the constructed nature of history itself.

An Identity in Crisis: Reconciling the Doctor with the Timeless Child

Doctor Who has always had a difficult relationship with its own history, which has led to claims of it ‘retconning’ its own history and disrespecting the canon of the programme[34]. This debate had been reawakened after the events of the previous series’ finale, The Timeless Children[35]. The reveal that the Doctor had a number of previous lives before the beginning of Doctor Who proper (that being the adventures shown on television, beginning with William Hartnell in 1963) is another act of rewriting history that hangs over ‘War of the Sontarans’ and Flux as a series in general. But this is not the first time Doctor Who has rewritten its own history – in fact, it seems to make a habit of it. In a programme that has stretched for, at this point, nearly 60 years of active continuity, it is no great surprise, especially when we consider the lack of repeats and access to old scripts that writers had to work with in the 60s and 70s (and to an extent the 80s as well). This means that what we, as modern viewers, might take as canonical, and therefore fixed and unchangeable, has not always been so.

Take, for example, the naming of the Doctor’s ship. It is, of course, the TARDIS. But who named it? Modern continuity has the TARDIS as the Gallifreyan, or at least common, name for the type of time-travel vehicle (the Doctor’s TARDIS being a Type 40), but this contradicts what Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter, says in the very first episode – which is that she made up the name from the initials. This is just one small example of the kind of things that have been rewritten over Doctor Who’s long run, but is nowhere near the most egregious, or substantial, change. The name ‘Gallifrey’ was only given to the Doctor’s home planet in 1973’s The Time Warrior. Robert Holmes, in writing The Deadly Assassin in 1976, introduced most of the ideas that underpin Gallifreyan society – the Panopticon, the ruling President, Rassilon as founder. These facts, however, are perhaps not true ‘retcons’, as they do not specifically undercut anything stated on screen previously. What is a ‘retcon’, however, are the events shown in Genesis of the Daleks (1975), which shows how Davros invented the deadly killing machines in order to rule the universe, in a move that directly contradicts the previous backstory provided in their first story, The Daleks. What this demonstrates is that not only is history being rewritten in stories such as ‘War of the Sontarans’, the history of Doctor Who itself is something that has always been in its own sort of flux, stretching back decades.

In short, the revelation that the Doctor is the Timeless Child is one recent example of a trend that can be traced back throughout Doctor Who’s history (one, of course, that is always being rewritten, as a programme written by multiple people with different visions and agendas, and no uniform, coherent and cohesive end goal). That the Timeless Child reveal is all about the rewriting of established history (that is, that the Doctor too is made aware that what she believes the past to be is wrong) is important too. On two levels it becomes apparent that what we accept, unblinkingly, as the ‘correct’ history (we could think, for a moment, about the Memory Police, and the ‘true’ history in The Lie of the Land) is not so – both for the audience and for the Doctor herself. The interesting thing here, though, is that the reveals in The Timeless Children are not ‘retcons’ in the dictionary sense, despite fans decrying them as such – nothing that is stated on screen contradicts anything, and in fact it reinforces some long-ignored lore (the Morbius Doctors, for example[36]). In fact, The Timeless Children gives the Doctor a prehistory that challenges the assumptions viewers have long held about the Doctor’s history.

And by questioning these assumptions of what that history is, the Doctor’s own identity begins to become structurally unsound, in much the same way as history itself is. The opening of ‘War of the Sontarans’ shows us this visually, with the Doctor’s vision of the floating house. It is a ‘visual contradiction’, according to the script, a landscape that is ‘empty, poetic’ with ‘a sense of a vast alien territory’ where a ‘huge HOUSE’ can also be found[37]. The intention here is to show a sight that doesn’t seem to make sense – the recognisably human (or Earthly) house, combined with the abstract alien landscape. This is the opening of the episode – in a place that is both familiar and unknown, one just as incongruous as Sontarans on the Crimean battlefield. It is the known being invaded by the unknown – it is history being rewritten (or overwritten) with something new, different and confusing. In this way, the clash of two cultures (earthly and alien) represents the clash between accepted history and its rewritten form – they are contradictory and cannot exist as one cohesive whole. We could go back to Strauss’ idea that ‘a truly total history would confront [historians] with chaos’ – that is what we are faced with here. And that this is represented (or perhaps thematically prefigured) to the audience in this initial opening scene, as a clash between the earthly and the alien is, if we drill down to the basics, what is at the heart of Doctor Who.

The Doctor is an unknown alien (unknown and different to us, the audience) and the planet they choose to (some might say obsessively) visit is Earth (which, again to us as the audience, is familiar, comfortable, known). The treatment of history in ‘War of the Sontarans’ is a similar dichotomy between what is known and what is unknown. The episode itself calls into question what exactly we mean by history – whether it is more than the assumptions we have about it, and what we ‘know’. History is not, clearly, the country of Sontar and a war in Crimea where the Sontarans are the aggressors – but it is, certainly, shifting and changing. It is less about history as a fixed entity that cannot be changed, and more about who has the power and privilege to rewrite it. Mary Seacole’s inclusion is an act of radical rewriting that shifts the act of history away from the oppressors and into the hands of the oppressed.

This is also important because it is an idea that pervades right up until Flux ends, and even afterwards, When, in ‘The Vanquishers’, the Doctor places the fob watch containing her lost memories into the TARDIS, we are effectively witnessing an explicit rejection of the idea that history cannot be rewritten. It is another example of the emphasis shifting towards those who are writing the history we accept. This is the Doctor’s turn to decide to curate her own personal history, rather than have it dictated by Tecteun and Division. As Bill says in 2017’s Twice Upon a Time (the 12th Doctor’s swansong): ‘What is anyone supposed to be except a bunch of memories? These are my memories, so this is me.’

This, in a way, is the 13th Doctor’s view at the end of ‘The Vanquishers’, that no matter what has happened in the past, the memories that she currently has are what make her the person she is. The new memories therefore belong to a new person. As such, the rejection of that history is an acceptance of the Doctor as she is now, as her existing memories have made her. This is a decision that treats history in much the same way as in ‘War of the Sontarans’, and is a natural progression from its presentation of history as in a state of flux, changeable – and easily rewritten.

[1] Riskaw’s name was spelled ‘Ritskaw’ in the previous episode’s credits.

[2] An Unearthly Child (1963), Marco Polo (1964), and The Curse of Fenric (1989), respectively.

[3] Gillian I Leitch calls it a programme that was ‘originally conceived’ as having ‘specific pedagogical goals’ (Leitch, Gillian I, ‘Doctor Who and History: Time Travel and the Historical Narrative’, in Ginn and Leitch, eds, Time-Travel Television: The Past from the Present, the Future from the Past, p116).

[4] For example, we begin to see so-called (in fan circles) ‘pseudo-historicals’, where period trappings, locations and characters are used to explore sci-fi ideas, in contrast to the ‘pure historical’ (once more a fan term) of earlier eras, where no such sci-fi elements were included. Examples include The Visitation (1982), set in 1666 and dealing with aliens causing the Great Fire of London, and The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977), where Victorian London is menaced by a giant rat and a time traveller, amongst other things.

[5] Where historical figures like Marco Polo, Wyatt Earp, Robespierre and Nero featured (Marco Polo, The Gunfighters (1966), The Reign of Terror (1964), The Romans (1965).

[6] Vohlidka, John, ‘Creating the Past Reason and Causal Relations in Doctor Who’, in Ginn and Leitch, eds, Time-Travel Television, p111.

[7] For example Madame de Pompadour in The Girl in the Fireplace (2006), and Agatha Christie in The Unicorn and the Wasp.

[8] The closest we get to this in pre-2005 Doctor Who might actually be in the first historical episode itself – Marco Polo musing on his wish to return to Italy is the most in-depth character work afforded a ‘celebrity’ figure for quite some time. Even so, it does not reach the introspection and depth afforded to figures like Charles Dickens (The Unquiet Dead), or William Shakespeare (The Shakespeare Code) – the key is also that this level of depth becomes the rule, rather than the exception.

[9] Axford, Beth, ‘Doctor Who Deserves Credit for its Centring of Female History’.

[10] In Rosa (2018), Spyfall (2020), and The Haunting of Villa Diodati (2020) respectively.

[11] Jacob, Clarissa, and Angus Dunican, ’10 Wonderful Women of Sci-Fi’.

[12] This is not to say that there weren’t female characters in these eras of Doctor Who who didn’t scream, as of course there were, but the main pattern was this. Ace for example was proactive and unfazed by her adventures with the Doctor, more in the style of Clara, or Donna. See McCormack, Una, The Black Archive #23: The Curse of Fenric for a discussion of how Ace could be considered a proto-21st-century companion.

[13] ‘Mary Seacole’.

[14] Nightingale’s heavily mythologised image has, however, come under increasing scrutiny in recent years; see, for instance ‘Angel of Mercy or Power Crazed Meddler?’

[15] Pinto, Samantha, ‘The Right Woman in the Right Place: Mary Seacole and Corrective Histories of Empire’, A Review of International English Literature #50.2-3, pp1-2.

[16] As seen by the fact the public voted her Number One Black Briton in a 2004 Poll, and also through the naming of such things as University Research Centres (De Monfort University, Leicester, 1999), the circulation of stamps with her image (2006) and statues erected in her honour (2016).

[17] Pinto, ‘The Right Woman in the Right Place’, p2.

[18] Axford, ‘Doctor Who Deserves Credit’.

[19] Matthews, Jolie C, ‘Dominant Narratives and Historical Perspective in Time Travel Stories: A Case Study of Doctor Who’, The Social Studies #112.2, p81.

[20] From its earliest days, Doctor Who has struggled with the idea of changing history (see The Aztecs (1964) for example), including whether it is morally correct to use time-travel to commit genocide (Genesis of the Daleks (1975)) but it is predominantly a post-2005 (and in some ways post-2018) idea to question history as an entity, outside story terms, that can be rewritten to reveal previously unknown events.

[21] As mentioned above, Leitch identifies the programme as having ‘specific pedagogical goals’ in the 60s (‘Doctor Who and History’).

[22] Southgate, Beverley, What Is History For?, pxi.

[23] Southgate, What is History For?, p62.

[24] Thiess, Derek, Relativism, Alternate History, and the Forgetful Reader: Reading Science Fiction and Historiography, p13.

[25] The Lie of the Land (2017).

[26] The depiction of the ‘Memory Police’ punishing similarly termed ‘memory criminals for questioning the true history is very reminiscent of the ‘Thought Police’ and the ‘thought criminals’ who question Big Brother’s benevolence in Orwell’s novel.

[27] Thiess, Relativism, Alternate History, and the Forgetful Reader, p13.

[28] ‘Fake news’ being, as defined by the Cambridge Dictionary, ‘false stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other media, usually created to influence political views or as a joke.’

[29] Although the Doctor takes Vinder to his home planet (‘Once, Upon Time’), it is never named. He describes himself as ‘Serving Commander Inston-Vee Vinder of Kasto-Winfer-Foxfell’ (‘The Halloween Apocalypse’).

[30] Rogers, Brett M, and Benjamin Eldon Stevens, Once and Future Antiquities in Science Fiction and Fantasy, pxi.

[31] The idea of time glitching when we are shown Atropos isn’t made explicit in the finished televised episode, but the intention is clear to see at scripting stage (Chibnall, Chris, ‘War of the Sontarans’, p9).

[32] Claude Lévi-Strauss quoted in Southgate, What Is History For? pxi.

[33] Southgate, What is History For? pxi.

[34] ‘Retcon’ being a literary term that, according to the Meriam-Webster dictionary, ‘refers to a literary device in which the form or content of a previously established narrative is changed’ but has generally come to be used to refer to moments when television and film series do not respect (in fans’ eyes) what has been established previously. Doctor Who has a long history of this, even from the 1960s. ‘Canon’ is, as the TV Tropes wiki puts it, ‘that which counts, in terms of continuity’.

[35] Leading former showrunner Steven Moffat to defend the finale’s reveal by arguing that ‘Doctor Who never fits!’ when it comes to continuity (Fullerton, Huw, ‘Ex-Doctor Who boss Steven Moffat Defends the Twists in Jodie Whittaker’s The Timeless Children’).

[36] The incarnations apparently preceding Hartnell’s who are glimpsed in The Brain of Morbius (1976).

[37] Chibnall, Chris, ‘War of the Sontarans’, p3.

ONCE, UPON TIME

OVERVIEW

Writer: Chris Chibnall

Director: Azhur Saleem

Original UK Transmission Date: 14 November 2021

Running Time: 49m 3s

UK Viewing Figures: 4.7 million

Regular Cast: Jodie Whittaker (the Doctor), Mandip Gill (Yasmin Khan), John Bishop (Dan Lewis)

Recurring Cast: Jo Martin (Fugitive Doctor), Bhavnisha Parmar (Sonya Khan)

Guest Cast: Thaddea Graham (Bel), Rochenda Sandall (Azure), Sam Spruell (Swarm), Jacob Anderson (Vinder), Nadia Albina (Diane), Steve Oram (Joseph Williamson), Craig Parkinson (the Grand Serpent), Matthew Needham (Old Swarm), Craige Els (Karvanista), Barbara Flynn (Awsok), Jonny Mathers (Passenger), Chantelle Pierre (Police Officer), Nicholas Briggs (Voice of the Cybermen), Amanda Drew (Voice of the Mouri), Nigel Richard Lambert (Priest Triangle)

Antagonists: Swarm, Azure, a rogue Weeping Angel

Responses:

‘As it stands, “Once, Upon Time” is an insightful and oft-times stylish chapter that gets back to the larger business at hand, offering plenty of reasons to keep us invested and serving up the right amount of answers to keep the wider story ticking along nicely.’

[Matt Dennis, Critical Popcorn]

‘“Once, Upon Time” is one of the most dizzying and blatantly confusing episodes of Doctor Who […] Viewers poised between Countryfile and the Strictly results show couldn’t be blamed for fretting that their BBC One signal is on scramble or for turning elsewhere.’

[Patrick Mulkern, Radio Times]

SYNOPSIS

On a planet ravaged by the Flux, Bel is hiding from the Daleks. Time and space have been corrupted and blue particles are hunting down survivors and disintegrating them. She is determined to find her lover, Vinder, and frequently talks to their unborn baby, via Tigmi – a baby monitor. After escaping from the Daleks in an abandoned Lupari ship, her journey brings her face to face with the Cybermen.

In the Temple, the Doctor pushes Dan with her onto the empty plinths, planning to hide her friends from Swarm inside their own time streams. The four companions find themselves floating in the middle of a time storm, until one by one they disappear. The Doctor sees a Weeping Angel shortly before becoming the last to go. She wakes up on a battlefield, outside the Temple with Yaz, Dan and Vinder, all dressed and armed as Division operatives.

Dan has also rematerialised back in Liverpool, where he keeps meeting Diane and teleporting from place to place. He realises he is reliving past moments. At one point he meets Williamson in the caves, surrounded by blue particles, fighting an unseen force.

Yaz is now in the front passenger seat of a police car next to her supervisor, who intermittently changes into the Doctor. She briefly sees a Weeping Angel in the car mirrors. Later, she is playing a video game with her sister Sonya, but the memory is wrong. An Angel attempts to break out of the game, and the Doctor, standing in for Sonya, begs Yaz to avoid it. Yaz destroys the console.

Vinder relives a memory of being awarded a military honour, with Yaz standing in for his supervisor, who she briefly morphs into. She warns him his next post is to be the Grand Serpent’s bodyguard. He later grows uneasy about the Grand Serpent’s duplicitous and murderous methods. After whistleblowing on him, Vinder is reallocated to Outpost Rose.

The Doctor encounters three Mouri in the Time Storm who warn her Time is playing games with her and she cannot save her friends. Returning to Atropos, she sees her alter ego, the Fugitive Doctor, in a mirror, and the two realise that their timestreams have been merged. They are leading a siege on Atropos, with Dan playing the role of Karvanista, and Yaz and Vinder other members of her team. Vinder tells her that once this job is done she will be free.

Inside the temple, the Doctor and her team confront the old Swarm and Azure, who reveal that the Passengers are prisons holding hundreds of thousands, but one belongs to Division and has been used to bring the Mouri into the temple. The team capture the Ravagers, leaving the Mouri to take control of time.

When the Doctor refuses to leave until she has uncovered more memories, the Mouri forcibly evict her. But instead of returning to the present, the Doctor arrives in a space station where she meets Awsok, who tells her the universe is over, and that it is all the Doctor’s fault. She warns the Doctor not to come looking for her. The Doctor wakes up back in the temple with her companions. Swarm and Azure claim victory and anger Dan by telling him that Diane is inside one of the Passengers. The Ravagers are in control of the blue particles and teleport out.

The Doctor takes Vinder home, but his planet has been ravaged by the Flux. Vinder insists on finding Bel alone. Back in the TARDIS, Yaz sees the image of an Angel in her phone. The Angel breaks out and claims control over the TARDIS.

THE PRIMORDIAL DIVISION

Philip Purser-Hallard

‘If there’s further death or bloodshed,’ the Doctor, speaking for the Division, tells Swarm and Azure during their original confrontation in the Temple of Atropos, ‘your punishments will be worse. Erasure of identity. Isolation prison terms for the infinite duration of the universe.’

She’s perfectly correct, as ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ has already shown: in the Ravagers’ introductions, Swarm was confined to a cylindrical energy shield, supposedly ‘since the dawn of the universe’, while Azure was reduced to ‘Anna’, a human woman living with her partner Jón in the far north of Iceland, without recollection of her extraterrestrial past.

Like several of the Doctor’s speeches during the Siege of Atropos strand of ‘Once, Upon Time’, the delivery of the line is shared between Jodie Whittaker’s 13th Doctor and Jo Martin’s version of the character, credited for the first time in this episode by the name popularly assigned to her, the ‘Fugitive Doctor’[1]. The words ‘Erasure of identity’ are spoken by Martin, whose first appearance in Fugitive of the Judoon saw her character in a situation very reminiscent of Anna’s. As ‘Ruth’, a human woman living with her husband Lee in Colchester, she has no recollection of her past existence until outside interference triggers the restoration of her identity. The punishment she promises Azure will be one we have already seen her voluntarily embracing, to escape the agency she serves. It might also describe her ultimate fate, when (we must assume) her memories are wiped and she begins life anew as the supposedly first Doctor.

Anna is not the only character in Flux who may be considered a close analogue of the Doctor. ‘War of the Sontarans’ features the historical Mary Seacole, a nurse working closely with the army. Her appearance arises from the Chris Chibnall era’s recurring preoccupation with foregrounding historical women of colour like Rosa Parks, Noor Inayat Khan and Madame Ching[2], but in this context the choice of a medical practitioner (rather than a civil rights campaigner, spy or pirate) is significant. Her combative relationship with gung-ho General Logan recalls the more turbulent moments of the third Doctor’s collaboration with Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, while her use of the description ‘doctoress’ highlights the anomaly in her period of a woman acting as a doctor, relating her to both the actors cast as the Doctor by Chibnall.

‘Village of the Angels’ revolves around a Weeping Angel who, like the Doctor, is a renegade from its people and has appropriated a vehicle – in the Rogue Angel’s case the human Claire – which allows it to operate disguised on Earth; at the end of ‘Once, Upon Time’ it steals the Doctor’s own TARDIS. The Doctor’s scenes in ‘Survivors of the Flux’ centre upon the character introduced in ‘Once, Upon Time’ as Awsok, and the revelation that she is actually the Time Lord founder Tecteun – the Doctor’s ‘mother’, an explorer and scientist like her, whose adoption of the Doctor is, she suggests, the model for the Doctor’s own relationship with their companions over the years.

Finally, ‘The Vanquishers’ introduces Time personified, a deity (for want of a better word) who takes on the appearance of those they deal with and who therefore, in their final conversation, is played by Whittaker herself. Time makes no personal appearance in ‘Once, Upon Time’, but their agency is repeatedly alluded to by the more knowledgeable characters. These references are somewhat obscured by the way not all the behaviours attributed to ‘time’ in the abstract seem to be those of the entity given that name – especially the line ‘Time’s correcting’, which apparently means that the entity’s agency is being suppressed rather than exercised. The fact that the planet created to imprison the personified Time is also called ‘Time’, and the script’s inevitable, but frequent, more casual uses of the word, add their own complications[3]. Nevertheless, the Priest Triangle’s claim in ‘War of the Sontarans’ (in dialogue reused in ‘Once, Upon Time’s introductory recap) that ‘Before Atropos, Time ran wild […] If the Mouri are broken, Time shall run unstoppable’, suggests activity on Time’s part; and when the Mouri tell the Doctor that ‘Time is playing games with you all […] Time resists, it pulls you back’, or Swarm maintains that ‘Time […] will not do as other beings bid […] Time will never surrender to Space’, it is reasonable to suppose that the word refers to some kind of person, rather than to a mere abstract concept.

All five of these characters – Anna/Azure, Seacole, the Rogue Angel, Tecteun and Time – have important functions in their own narratives, and the significance to the Doctor of the last two in particular goes well beyond their function as her conceptual doubles. Further, there are male characters in Flux who might similarly be argued to act as parallels to the Doctor: such a case could be made for Joseph Williamson, a mad time-traveller doing his best to fight evil, or Professor Jericho, a principled scientist with a young female assistant. Examining those who present as female, however (at least when dealing with the Doctor in these episodes[4]), raises some interesting points.

For instance, most of them intersect in ‘Once, Upon Time’. Azure plays a significant role in the episode as she does throughout Flux, while the Rogue Angel haunts Yaz’s strand of the episode, and Awsok/Tecteun appears for the first time in a flashforward. Time, as described by Swarm and the Mouri, is an agent in the plot, if not the action. Seacole, who appears only in ‘War of the Sontarans’, is the only one of Flux’s female Doctor-analogues who fails to make her presence felt in ‘Once, Upon Time’[5].

Interestingly, however, all of the female doubles listed have arguably more in common with the Fugitive Doctor – who appears in ‘Once, Upon Time’ but no other episodes of Flux – than with the 13th Doctor, the six-parter’s notional protagonist. As noted, Azure’s situation as Anna is a close parallel of the Fugitive Doctor’s as Ruth. In addition to sharing the Fugitive’s reluctant military connections, Seacole is visually reminiscent of her, being a black woman dressed in vivid colours by costume designer Ray Holman. The Rogue Angel is specifically on the run from the Division, the Fugitive’s employers, and holds within her memory the Fugitive’s experiences, of which the 13th Doctor has been deprived. Tecteun is the Division’s founder, and she continues to profess this affiliation as well as being, like the Fugitive Doctor, an emblem of the past that the current Doctor has lost. Finally, Time operates on a mythic and universal scale that tends to overwhelm the 13th Doctor, but where the Fugitive Doctor is shown in ‘Once, Upon Time’ as being thoroughly at home.

All this being the case, it is unsurprising that ‘Once, Upon Time’ – where the primary counterpart of the 13th Doctor, despite the appearance of these others, is the Fugitive Doctor herself – should be the key to understanding the prevalence of these female doubles across the other episodes of Flux.

‘Familiar, But Wrong’[6]

The first Siege of Atropos segment in ‘Once, Upon Time’ introduces a convention of ‘doubling’ in another sense, which sees this episode’s notional TARDIS crew – the Doctor, Yaz, Dan and Vinder – taking on other roles in one another’s flashbacks across the episode. In several cases we see some of the lines delivered by another actor, representing the ‘real’ character.

While this is presumably in part a response to the production restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, it adds to the basic narrative complexity created by the non-linear chronology, which arises from the plot device of four characters being hidden in a ‘timestorm’ of flashbacks and flashforwards. When we see ‘Yaz’, ‘Vinder’ and ‘Dan’ taking the place of the Fugitive Doctor’s team, for instance, John Bishop is playing Karvanista rather than Dan, but the Doctor, like us, sees him as ‘Dan’ rather than Karvanista. Similarly, Mandip Gill / Yaz appears in a dual role in Vinder’s flashbacks, as his commanding officer and a fellow guard to the Grand Serpent. Dan’s strand, in which he interacts primarily with Diane and briefly with Joseph Williamson, is the only one without such doubling.

Each of these strands is given a significant narrative function that is paid off at the end of the episode. Dan’s is the slightest, mostly fleshing out the complications of his relationship with Diane and hinting at her current predicament, which we finally see when her image is projected from the Passenger form in the Temple. (Dan’s flashforward, never paid off in the later episodes, reminds the viewer of Williamson and his tunnels, and promises more conventional laser battles to come.) Vinder’s strand gives him a more substantial backstory, identifying him as a man of principle and introducing the Grand Serpent, who will be a significant character in ‘Survivors of the Flux’. It eventually links up with Bel’s story – an entirely separate narrative strand not related to the timestorm – just before the cliffhanger scene. Yaz’s narrative reminds the viewer of the crucial element of Weeping Angel lore that enables them to manifest from electronic images[7], and thereby allows the Rogue Angel, seen menacing Claire in ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’, to infiltrate the main action. It leads crucially into the cliffhanger scene and ultimately ‘Village of the Angels’.

In these three plotlines, the Doctor is a marginal figure, haunting the background of the other characters’ stories. In the strands belonging to Dan and Vinder, who at this stage she knows only superficially, she is a hovering, ghostly presence, consigned to the literal margins of their scenes. In Yaz’s, she assumes the identities of a fellow police officer and Yaz’s sister Sonya, both substitutions that might illuminate the nature of their current relationship. The former suggests a working partnership in which the Doctor acts as mentor, while the latter suggests a sisterly friendship between them. Notably, given Yaz’s feelings for the Doctor as acknowledged in Eve of the Daleks (2022), both relationships are platonic.

In the Doctor’s own flashbacks to the original Siege of Atropos, this convention is further complicated by the Doctor’s own multifaceted character. Whittaker appears in a dark blue coat, similar in colour to that of the Fugitive Doctor, rather than her familiar dove-grey, and it becomes apparent that she is playing the Doctor as she existed in this distant past, rather than the episode’s current incarnation. Introducing this strand, the script directions call her ‘Less like 13 than we’ve ever seen her,’[8] and – except when ‘temporal hazing’ causes her to remember the 13th Doctor’s future experiences rather than her own current ones – what the viewer sees in these scenes is the Fugitive Doctor, as played by Whittaker rather than Jo Martin. Here, Martin’s Doctor is the marginal figure, appearing in mirrors so that Whittaker’s character can converse with her, and in brief snatches of dialogue intercut with Whittaker’s lines.

For Chibnall era’s of Doctor Who – let alone one of his own scripts – this is a remarkably complex set of narrative conventions for the reader to follow, comparable with some of the more sophisticated episodes of the Moffat era. Its success may make the viewer regret the lack of similar ambition elsewhere in the 2018 to 2022 run.

Despite the temporary recasting of the character, these segments offer the viewer the first opportunity to watch the Fugitive Doctor in what is presumably her normal mode of action, doing her job on behalf of the Division. On her first appearance, as written by Vinay Patel in Fugitive of the Judoon, her agenda was to escape her former employers, whereas the version of the character who appeared in The Timeless Children was of dubious ontological status, being ‘summoned’ from the 13th Doctor’s own mind to advise her. (Martin would reappear in The Power of the Doctor as one form taken by a hologram – albeit one with some degree of autonomy and a personality based on that of the Doctor themself – rather than as the character proper.) Nevertheless, it is clear in all of her appearances that the Fugitive Doctor can be arrogant, intolerant and – in what was surely the intention of the name first given to the character – ruthless. Her Ruth persona shows tenderness towards her husband Lee – in fact her companion, who is acting as her protector while she is unknowingly disguised – but after her true persona is restored the Fugitive Doctor shows little sign of distress at his violent death.

Accordingly, in ‘Once, Upon Time’, the Fugitive Doctor is carrying out a ‘Final attack’. Though it involves rescuing hostages, her ‘mission’ has been given to her by her handlers, and serves their agenda rather than being primarily humanitarian. Her own motivation is the promise, relayed by ‘Vinder’, that after this mission she will be ‘Clear […] free of all this,’ though the viewer already knows from Fugitive of the Judoon that the Division will not let her leave willingly. She leads a team of well-equipped soldiers – ‘Dan’, ‘Yaz’ and ‘Vinder’ are all uniformed, though the Doctor, in both her forms, wears something close to her usual clothes. As described in the script and played by Whittaker, this version of the Doctor is: ‘Calm. A steely commander’, ‘Tough commander’, ‘calm and magnificent’, ‘with the air of the Fugitive Doctor’, showing a ‘cold hard fury’[9]. She enters the Temple with a clear plan in mind and a strategy already formulated.

This contrasts sharply with the way the 13th Doctor spends the episode: taking grave risks to keep her friends safe, desperately making up her plans on the fly, and eventually winning the day only through a stratagem cribbed from her other self. She describes this approach explicitly in her opening voiceover:

‘I spend my life walking into new places and weighing things up fast. Who’s who, Who has the power. Who’s in danger. How fast danger is coming, also how likely my friends are to die. I’ve got good at figuring all of that out at speed.’

Not only is the 13th Doctor a freewheeling improviser, she is motivated by the wish to save others, and particularly her friends, from danger.

‘Her Fugitive Reflection’[10]

None of the elements displayed by the Fugitive Doctor in these sequences are outside the scope of the Doctor’s character across the incarnations seen on TV. For reasons one might seek in either reality or fiction, the 13th Doctor’s character forms a particularly strong contrast with her immediate predecessor’s as he was originally introduced[11], and many of the characteristics that were mellowed away from the 12th Doctor over the course of his three seasons – his irascibility, intolerance, rudeness and cynicism – are among those that also separate the Fugitive Doctor from the 13th. Previously, the seventh Doctor was depicted as a meticulous planner; the sixth was arrogant and impatient; the third, despite his frequent protestations, was an often violent collaborator with the military who was sent on missions by the Time Lords. The first Doctor, significantly given the Fugitive’s presumed chronological placement, was shown slowly developing the moral compass that characterises later incarnations.

None of these characteristics, however, could be reasonably ascribed to the 13th Doctor, who except under explicitly exceptional circumstances is portrayed as friendly, easygoing, idealistic, open-minded, democratic in her decision-making, and peaceable to a fault. Writing in 2019, a blogger whose primary concern was the Doctor’s pronouns suggested that:

‘Whittaker plays her as less of an insufferable know-it-all than almost any previous Doctor. She does not […] bully with her intellect or authority, or try to make the humans she travels with feel inadequate. (She is – and here, gendered language creeps into the conversation – much less patronising than almost any previous incarnation.) The 13th Doctor seems more prone to listen than her predecessors, less certain of her own rightness, and quicker to recognize and apologize when she is wrong. And she is far less distant and emotionally unavailable. […] Such an atmosphere of totally equal footing and openly mutual affection is all but unprecedented on Doctor Who.’[12]

All of which remains true, though it has been complicated by later depictions showing that this Doctor can be secretive about her past, and graceless and awkward at moments of emotional intimacy. However, the existence of a second female incarnation who does not share these qualities makes it seem less as if, as McDunnagh suggests, the 13th Doctor is being stereotyped based on her gender.

The strong contrast between the two characters, each with their own distinctive strengths, makes the way the 13th Doctor summons the Fugitive Doctor from her mind in The Timeless Children to lend her determination at her lowest ebb, and the way she becomes increasingly obsessed with recovering what she has lost along with this personality, particularly interesting[13].

The aspects of a person that they deny and repress, excluding them from the public persona that they project and consciously believe in, are called in Carl Jung’s theories of psychology ‘the Shadow’. When this complex manifests itself in a patient’s dreams and other imaginings, it generally appears as a mysterious person of the same gender, but often of a different ethnicity. It can seem sinister or threatening, because it represents all the patient refuses to accept about themself. However, confronting and reconciling with the Shadow is an essential stage in Jungian analysis. A divided self is inherently unhealthy, and the goal of analysis is individuation, the outcome of which is the creation of a whole and unified self[14].

Even before she appears in ‘Once, Upon Time’ in a mirror, literally as the Doctor’s dark reflection, the Fugitive’s qualifications for the role of Shadow, to the 13th Doctor specifically, are obvious. A black woman, consistently identified with mystery, she represents aspects of the Doctor’s multi-incarnational self that the 13th Doctor has visibly repressed. The very name attached to her emphasises her elusiveness, while she is so far from representing a unified self that the organisation she works for is called the Division.

Shadows, in the Jungian sense, have generally appeared in Doctor Who as villains – most literally in The Armageddon Factor (1979), where the character named ‘the Shadow’ shares the Doctor’s temporary goals and mission but not his methods or ethics, and the spinoff series Class (2016), whose Shadowkin are dark subconscious reflections of humanity itself[15]. Indeed, Jung’s writing suggests that an unhealthy mind can project the characteristics of the Shadow onto an out-group, creating an alien ‘other’ that can act as an archetypal enemy – a phenomenon that can be seen particularly clearly in the ninth Doctor’s unhinged response to the eponymous prisoner in Dalek (2005)[16].

The Master – who has much in common with the Doctor across all their incarnations, but whose contemporaneous personas mirror the third, eighth and 10th Doctors particularly closely – often acts as the Doctor’s Shadow. More explicit are the Valeyard, who is revealed in The Trial of a Time Lord (1986) as being, in an appropriately obscure sense, the Doctor’s evil future self[17]; and the Dream Lord in Amy’s Choice (2010), a manifestation of the Doctor’s subconscious who taunts him and his companions through their shared dreams.

The Fugitive Doctor, however, is a character who acts as the primary Doctor’s Shadow not by being a villain but through being a different kind of hero – a kind whose heroic qualities the 13th Doctor has largely suppressed. As the diversity of personalities the Doctor displays has demonstrated, heroes are not all cast from the same mould. Robin Hood, an anarchic outlaw who helps the poor and oppressed, may be classed as a hero; but so may James Bond, an enforcer who serves the interests of his country’s government. The Doctor has been both types, and others besides. The 13th Doctor has made a choice – not, perhaps, a conscious one – to be a hero whose qualities may (as McDunnagh observed) be read as conventionally ‘feminine’ ones, in contrast to the masculine predecessors she remembers. In doing so, she has set aside aspects of her heroism – her Doctorishness – that have not thereby lost their usefulness. However unpalatable they may seem to her, she would need to embrace these qualities in order to fulfil her potential as the Doctor.

The only real parallel for this is the War Doctor, who first appears in The Name of the Doctor (2013) as a shadowy figure in a similarly chaotic and psychodramatic version of the Doctor’s timestream. In both that episode and The Day of the Doctor it is clear that he represents aspects of the Doctor’s persona that the more recent Doctors have repressed, to the extent of denying him the title ‘Doctor’. Militant, ruthless and ultimately genocidal, he retrospectively personifies the Shadow that the ninth Doctor implicitly projects onto his perception of the captive Dalek. If anything, he shows more extremely than the Fugitive Doctor the various personality traits the 13th Doctor continues to deny in herself. The ending of The Day of the Doctor shows the 10th and 11th incarnations reconciled with their past, playing out the process of individuation.

The parallels are not precise, however. Both the 10th and 11th Doctors remember life as the War Doctor, and largely ignore his existence until it is presented to them directly. Though there is denial, it is not as extreme as the absolute erasure of the Fugitive Doctor, relegating her altogether to the 13th Doctor’s subconscious, nor is there the dynamic of obsession which drives the 13th Doctor from her discovery of her lost identity in Fugitive of the Judoon (an episode described by Chibnall in terms of her character arc as ‘where it pivots’[18]) to her surprising decision in ‘The Vanquishers’ to reject the opportunity to be reconciled with it.

If The Day of the Doctor ends with a fully individuated Doctor at ease with all aspects of his personality, Flux ends with a divided one who has chosen to remain that way, by continuing to repress her past. On the surface, this does not appear to trouble her, and in her final scene in The Power of the Doctor she seems content to meet her imminent regeneration in this state. That she faces it alone, however, shows that there are aspects of herself with which she is far from comfortable. Another personal trait of which recent Doctors have been shown to be capable – and which the Fugitive’s ‘Ruth’ persona, at least, demonstrates in her marriage to Lee – is engagement in romantic relationships. The 10th Doctor with Rose and Reinette, the 11th and 12th with River Song, and even the eighth with Grace, have all shown a willingness to become romantically involved with others[19].

The 13th Doctor consistently has not, and this continues explicitly beyond the end of Flux, culminating in her rejection of Yaz in Legend of the Sea Devils. The awkwardness of their conversation, and the disappointment it inflicts on Yaz, suggests that the Doctor has learned little from her failure to comfort Graham in their conversation about the latter’s cancer in Can You Hear Me? (2020). Their final scene together in The Power of the Doctor, in which the Doctor states that ‘I need to do this next bit alone,’ and Yaz suggests, ‘Let’s not say goodbye,’ continues this pattern of deferred resolution. While the holographic appearances of the fifth and seventh Doctors in The Power of the Doctor offer some measure of healing for their specific rifts with past companions Tegan and Ace, this new parting shows the Doctor repeating the same mistake and inflicting the same hurt.

Chibnall’s era thus ends with the 13th Doctor’s psychological fulfilment no further advanced. This is an interesting (if perhaps not a deliberate) twist on the 21st-century series’ tendency to give each incarnation their own character arc: while the ninth to 12th Doctors each ended their lives wiser, and to some extent better, than they began them, the 13th Doctor is offered the opportunity for similar growth and declines it. While Yaz goes on to find community among those former companions, the Doctor regenerates alone – and, far from progressing to a new life, regresses to a past form.

‘Magisterial, epic, mythic’[20]

As well as recalling the traditional opening of the fairy stories and folk tales that form much of the material of Jungian psychology, the title ‘Once, Upon Time’ echoes that of a relatively recent Doctor Who episode, Twice Upon a Time. The ending of that story introduced the 13th Doctor, but it also represents the most recent return of the supposed ‘first’ incarnation from 1963. To the 12th Doctor, the first Doctor represented his distant past, but the separation between the 13th Doctor and the Fugitive Doctor is presumed to be even greater.

In one of the tightest pieces of plotting in a six-parter that is – even by Doctor Who’s standards – staggeringly lax in this respect, the Fugitive Doctor’s plan relies on smuggling the Mouri into the Temple of Atropos inside the Ravagers’ own Passenger forms. This plotting staple is so conventionally referred to in English as a ‘trojan horse’ that even the knowledgeable viewer could be forgiven for forgetting that the 13th Doctor will not be the only incarnation to revive it: it is, in fact, the very stratagem the first Doctor will ‘later’ suggest to Ulysses for capturing Troy in The Myth Makers (1966).

‘Once, Upon Time’ courts its multiple mythic resonances. The most obvious example, again drawing from classical mythology, is its use of the name ‘Atropos’. In the fictional context, there are enough references to events occurring ‘on Atropos’ for it to be read as an alternative name of the planet (which is, perhaps, only renamed ‘Time’ after Time is imprisoned there). Nobody speaks of a deity by that name to whom the Temple of Atropos has been raised. However, Atropos is the name of one of the three Fates of Greek myth; specifically, she is responsible for cutting the thread of each individual’s life, after it has been spun by her sister Clotho and measured by her sister Lachesis. If she is equivalent to Time, then it is time as destroyer, bringing an end to all things – an appropriate aspect given the preoccupations of Flux. As Time observes in ‘The Vanquishers’, ‘Nothing is forever. No regeneration. No life.’ Although, given the immobility of the figures in the Temple, the name ‘Mouri’ may also recall the moai of Easter Island, its primary reference is clearly ‘Moirai’, the collective name of the Greek Fates, and the fact that the giant Mouri whom the Doctor meets in the timestream appear as a triad suggests that she is dealing with entities equivalent to these goddesses.

The threefold Mouri (or sixfold, based on their presence in the Temple) are unusual in the Chibnall era, where divinities and their equivalents normally appear in pairs[21]. Those directly personified include the Ux in The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos (2018), Zellin and Rakaya in Can You Hear Me?, and indeed Swarm and Azure. The war to which Swarm repeatedly refers, between ‘Space’ and ‘Time’, embodies another example, and the Division’s participation in it enshrines its role in imposing such dualities upon the universe, along with the structures and the conflicts that thereby ensue. As well as pointing to a fundamentally divided self, the name ‘Division’ suggests the primordial splitting that occurs in many creation myths, including the biblical – earth from the waters, darkness from light, male from female – and which can often lead to such dual divinities.

In my Black Archive on The Haunting of Villa Diodati (2020), I suggested that The Timeless Children represents a new and subversive version of Doctor Who’s traditional creation myth – a parallel with 19th-century works like Frankenstein (1818), Prometheus Unbound (1820) and Cain (1822), written by the authors present at the Villa Diodati, which worked to overturn the certainties of the Biblical creation narrative as culturally mediated by John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)[22]. Among those fundamentals of Doctor Who continuity that Chibnall similarly seeks to deconstruct are the Doctor’s Gallifreyan backstory, but also the origins of the Time Lords’ culture and their hegemony over the universe. In the 20th-century version of this origin story, laid down primarily by Robert Holmes in The Deadly Assassin and elaborated by his successors, that act of establishment was attributed to the Gallifreyan founding father Rassilon, with some assistance from the equally patriarchal Omega. In line with his overall drive towards gender equality in Doctor Who, Chibnall’s version makes the mother-figure Tecteun at least their equal in this enterprise[23].

In returning the current Doctor to this distant past, ‘Once, Upon Time’ directly presents an incident from this new foundation myth. The ‘Old Swarm’ who appears in this timeframe suggests that it is the Division’s belief that imprisoning Time (the deity) in the Temple ‘could bring the Dark Times to an end’, and thus establish the Time Lords’ control over time (the element). While on a mundane level the Siege of Atropos is an account of a special forces unit breaking into a place of worship where terrorists are holding prisoners hostage and rescuing them, the outcome is a mythic event that brings a temporary peace to the ancient war between Time and Space, and thus gives rise to the knowable history of the universe. In installing the Mouri, imprisoning Time and stabilising reality, the Fugitive Doctor herself is responsible for ending ‘the Dark Times’.

Thus, if Flux – which deals so explicitly with the end of the universe that its survival beyond ‘The Vanquishers’ remains difficult to justify in narrative terms – is Doctor Who’s equivalent of the biblical book of Revelation, then ‘Once, Upon Time’ represents a flashback to Genesis. The imagery of that account, as reproduced in Paradise Lost, is accordingly in evidence: though the tree in Awsok’s sanctum does not appear in the Doctor’s flashforward, the episode contains both an Angel and a Serpent. While the way the Weeping Angels are usually presented in Doctor Who lacks any religious resonance, the visual symbolism is inescapable, and the fact that the Angel that appears in ‘Once, Upon Time’ will prove to be a renegade makes for a parallel with Satan’s role in Paradise Lost. Meanwhile, the Grand Serpent’s title – which is used in this episode as if it were an arbitrary honorific, though ‘Survivors of the Flux’ will reveal that he harbours a somewhat snakelike symbiote that kills on his behalf – reflects his nature as a tempter. He is shown enlisting the Alforia to destroy his political enemies in return for his protection, and attempts to make Vinder complicit in his corruption. Vinder’s refusal of temptation ironically has the same outcome in exile as Adam and Eve’s acceptance. It leads to his posting to Observation Outpost Rose, separates him from his partner and places him in the path of the Flux. In this context, the scene of Dan and Diane in happier times, strolling through a garden in the remains of a bombed church, also takes on Edenic connotations.

This narrative makes the Doctor herself the notional creator of the universe – albeit with the help of the troops she commands, and at the bidding of the Division and Tecteun. Conversely, as Awsok tells the Doctor, the Flux that is now destroying it ‘was placed […] because of you.’ The Chibnall era has sought to identify the Doctor herself with the universe she prays to[24], and here its history, from creation to apocalypse, becomes her own. The colossal scale of this revelation is emphasised by the reference to ‘the infinite duration of the universe’, though it is somewhat compromised by the survival from the Siege of Atropos to the present timeframe of Flux of the Doctor, Karvanista, Azure and Swarm. While the Doctor and the Ravagers may be assumed to be immortal, and no information is given about Lupari life expectancy, Azure at least has supposedly been living as an ordinary human, who on the basis of her appearance in ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ can only be a few decades old.

If the Doctor is indeed the universe, however (as Lord Byron seemingly intuits in The Haunting of Villa Diodati, and Swarm states directly in ‘The Vanquishers’), then based on an earlier story of the Chibnall era, she too forms part of a divine dyad. Her partner in this is the Solitract, the anti-universe seen in It Takes You Away (2018), whose description by the Doctor both recalls the imposition of order that ends the Dark Times and makes it sound very like the universe’s own repressed Jungian Shadow:

‘[I]n the beginning – pre-time, pre-everything – all the laws and elements and nuts and bolts of the universe were there. Light, matter, maths, and so on. But they couldn’t fit together properly, because the Solitract was there. […] Our universe cannot work with the Solitract in it. […] So, what did our universe do? It managed to exile the Solitract to a separate, unreachable existence.’[25]

The Solitract, too, manifests itself as a black woman (when it is not appearing as a frog) – specifically Graham’s wife Grace, who, like Ruth, bears as her name an abstract noun suggesting compassion, reconciliation and forgiveness. Thematically perhaps, if not literally, the division of the universe and the division of the Doctor are one and the same.

‘Determined, Clear-Eyed, Adorable, Tough’[26]

Flux has one more Doctor-analogue available, introduced in ‘Once, Upon Time’: a woman who travels the imperilled universe in a stolen spaceship with her companion, escaping Daleks and battling Cybermen. ‘Bel’s Story’ is a separate, fifth strand to ‘Once, Upon Time’, additional to the narratives of the four central characters which begin the episode on Atropos and reunite there. A sprawling space-opera saga, it takes place against the background of the Flux and its progressive consumption of the universe, reminding the viewer of the present danger underlying the personal time-operas of the other characters. This is the universe against which Tecteun has unleashed the Ravagers, and against whose collapse both iterations of the Doctor are ultimately battling.

There is no direct intersection in ‘Once, Upon Time’ between Bel and any of the other characters, though she hears rumours of the events affecting them. However, the fact that she is searching for a partner whom she has lost, and the parallel awareness that Vinder has left behind at least one loved one (though this is phrased in terms of his ‘family’), click together satisfyingly in the scene where she watches the hologram he has been shown recording earlier[27]. Again, this twist is more reminiscent of Steven Moffat’s scriptwriting style than Chibnall’s, and shows the complexity the latter is capable of. This incomplete integration of the storylines emphasises the episode’s theme of division and separation: Bel and Vinder need to find one another and reunite their family, just as the 13th Doctor remains incomplete as long as she fails to embrace her Fugitive Shadow.

Bel, however, appears to be a complete person in herself. She is described in the script as ‘Determined, clear-eyed, adorable, tough’, and comes across as highly functional, able to reconcile her family responsibilities with the adventurous demands of her current lifestyle. She is accompanied by Tigmi, an interface reminiscent of Tamagotchi-style digital pets, which acts as a link with the unborn child she is carrying – a child with whom, unlike Flux’s other mother-figure, Tecteun, she already has a genuine and tender bond. (The implicit contrast between adoptive and biological motherhood may be significant, but this is complicated within the narrative by the Doctor’s refusal to seek her own birth parents, and outside it by the fact that Chibnall himself is adopted[28].) While Bel guns down Cybermen with abandon, she is also able to respond to Vinder’s holographic ‘I love you’ with ‘Love you, too’ – expressing romantic feeling in a way which, though prosaic and casual, eludes the socially awkward 13th Doctor.

While the 13th’s opening voiceover in Once, Upon Time emphasises, as always, her platonic connection with her ‘friends’ – elsewhere called her ‘fam’[29] – the Fugitive Doctor is shown as utterly focused on her ‘mission’. Bel, whose quest is to reunite her own family, reconciles these divided priorities into a unity in a way both Doctors fail to do.

As she tells the Cyberman she has killed: ‘Love is the only mission. Idiot.’

[1] The name was proposed on Twitter a few hours after the broadcast of Fugitive of the Judoon on 26 January 2020, and was used as the title of Wikipedia’s article on the character the same day (Bowen, Tom, tweet posted 10:03pm, 26 January 2020; ‘Fugitive Doctor’. Wikipedia, archived version dated 11:21pm 26 January 2020). A tweet from the official BBC Doctor Who Twitter account on the first anniversary of broadcast indicated its official acceptance (Doctor Who, tweet posted 12:00pm, 26 January 2021).

[2] In, respectively, Rosa, Spyfall and Legend of the Sea Devils.

[3] Including the episode’s title, the ‘Next time’ trailer and compounds such as ‘daytime’, ‘time stream’ and ‘time storm’, the word appears 92 times in the version of the script published online (Chibnall, Chris, ‘Once, Upon Time’).

[4] When speaking to Swarm, Time appears as an earlier iteration of Swarm, who like the current one is male; whereas Tecteun, though originally female, has a male incarnation in some of the flashback scenes in The Timeless Children (2020).

[5] It would be reasonable to ask which other episodes of Flux this might be true of. As noted, Azure appears in all of them, and the Rogue Angel is in four of the six. ‘Survivors of the Flux’ involves Azure, Tecteun and the Angel, though the last only very briefly, and Time is less obviously personified in the episode’s dialogue.

[6] All subheadings are taken from the shooting directions in Chibnall, ‘Once, Upon Time’; in this case, p18.

[7] First seen in The Time of Angels (2010).

[8] Chibnall, ‘Once, Upon Time’, p10.

[9] Chibnall, ‘Once, Upon Time’, pp10, 22, 39, 41.

[10] Chibnall, ‘Once, Upon Time’, p25.

[11] In Deep Breath and across the 2014 season.

[12] McDunnagh, Michael G, ‘Doctor He, She, or They? Changing Gender, and Language, in Doctor Who’.

[13] In The Power of the Doctor, too, the holographic Fugitive Doctor arrives when the 13th Doctor is vulnerable and saves the day through cocky assertiveness.

[14] See Stevens, Anthony, Jung: A Very Short Introduction, pp64-67. While Jung’s work is largely discredited in terms of the scientific discipline of psychology, it remains in practice a potent tool of analysis, both of individuals and of texts, and it thus continues to be widely used by therapists and critics alike.

[15] See Purser-Hallard, Philip, ‘Class Action! Class Season 1 Reviewed’.

[16] Since Jung was writing within a white European context, such projection explains why the Shadow is often associated with marginalised ethnicity. Jung was very much not immune to the racialised thinking common in his time, but his concept of the Shadow remains useful in explaining and studying racism in a modern context.

[17] The converse could be true, however: according to Twice Upon a Time, one of the Doctor’s ‘many names’ is ‘Shadow of the Valeyard’.

[18] Hearn, Marcus, and Emily Cook, ‘Setting the Story Straight’, Doctor Who Magazine #577, p23.

[19] See especially Doctor Who (1996), The Girl in the Fireplace (2006), Journey’s End (2008), and River’s appearances from Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead (2008) to The Husbands of River Song (2015).

[20] Chibnall, ‘Once, Upon Time’, p22.

[21] Six is twice three, of course, but ascribing numerological significance to this would seem excessive.

[22] Purser-Hallard, Philip, The Black Archive #56: The Haunting of Villa Diodati, pp122, 136-37. The works named are by Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron respectively.

[23] During the montage of Gallifrey’s foundation in The Timeless Children, Tecteun – who at this point is admittedly, and disappointingly, male – is seen with two others of whom the script specifies, ‘We can assume these might be Rassilon and Omega.’ (Chibnall, ‘The Timeless Children’, p32).

[24] See Purser-Hallard, The Haunting of Villa Diodati, pp84-85.

[25] It Takes You Away.

[26] Chibnall, ‘Once, Upon Time’, p4.

[27] Since Vinder does not learn that Bel is pregnant until ‘The Vanquishers’, the ‘family’ referred to by his superior must be his family of origin, but the message he records is for her.

[28] Hearn and Cook, ‘Setting the Story Straight’, p15.

[29] Originally in The Woman Who Fell to Earth.

VILLAGE OF THE ANGELS

OVERVIEW

Writers: Chris Chibnall, Maxine Alderton

Director: Jamie Magnus Stone

Original UK Transmission Date: 21 November 2021

Running Time: 56m 35s

UK Viewing Figures: 4.57 million

Regular Cast: Jodie Whittaker (the Doctor), Mandip Gill (Yasmin Khan), John Bishop (Dan Lewis)

Guest Cast: Kevin McNally (Professor Jericho), Annabel Scholey (Claire Brown), Alex Frost (Reverend Shaw), Vincent Brimble (Gerald), Jemma Churchill (Jean), Penelope McGhie (Mrs Haywood), Thaddea Graham (Bel), Blake Harrison (Namaca), Jacob Anderson (Vinder), Poppy Polivnicki (Peggy), Rochenda Sandall (Azure), Barbara Fadden, Isla Moody, Lowrie Brown (Weeping Angels), Jonny Mathers (Passenger)

Antagonists: The Weeping Angels, Azure

Responses:

‘[A] high point in a so-far tepid, and often chaotic, series. In its most focused moments, it has the feel of a classic standalone Who story, with Jodie Whittaker’s energetic performance chivvying the plot along.’

[Isobel Lewis, The Independent]

‘“Village of the Angels” could have been a fun, creepy standalone episode that restored the Weeping Angels to their former glory. But instead, it’s a bland retread of previous Weeping Angel stories that introduces even more needless retcons to detract from the Angels’ mystique.’

[Barratt Edwards Smith, Game Rant]

SYNOPSIS

The year is 1967 and Professor Jericho, a parapsychologist, is testing his lie detector on Claire Brown. When she says that her year of birth is 1985, the test suggests she is telling the truth. She also knows that the Weeping Angel has taken control of the TARDIS.

The Doctor ejects the Weeping Angel by rebooting the TARDIS, but not before it has programmed the ship to land in Medderton, the Devonshire village where Jericho is based. The process involved a full shutdown of the systems and an unknown period of time to reset, so the Doctor, Dan and Yaz decide to explore.

The villagers are looking for a missing child called Peggy, including her adoptive parents Gerald and Jean (her great-uncle and great-aunt), and the village priest, Reverend Shaw, who has been receiving disturbing messages from an elderly parishioner, Mrs Hayward. She is warning everyone to leave the village, and tells the reverend to count the gravestones. He is surprised to find an extra one – a Weeping Angel that sends him back in time.

Dan and Yaz join the search party, while the Doctor heads off to Jericho’s house after the sonic screwdriver alerts her to a temporal disturbance there. She is surprised to see Claire, having first met her in Liverpool in 2021. Claire has sketched some of her visions, including a Weeping Angel, which the Doctor quickly rips up. Through a bathroom mirror, Claire notices Angel wings on her back.

Yaz and Dan encounter a Weeping Angel and are transported back in time to 1901. The village is deserted, but they find Peggy inside a house. She tells them that she hears the Angels speaking to her, including a warning not to travel past the edge of the village.

Gerard and Jean reach the village boundary, which now drops off into space. An Angel standing guard sends them back in time, where they meet Dan and Yaz, and are briefly reunited with Peggy. The boundary is shrinking, and between them stands an Angel. Ignoring Dan and Yaz’s warnings, they approach it and are destroyed. Peggy coldly observes that no one survives an Angel twice. Dan, Yaz and Peggy later find a window between 1901 and 1967, with Mrs Hayward on the other side, who reveals that she is an older Peggy.

Meanwhile, Jericho’s lab has been surrounded by Weeping Angels. The Doctor builds a makeshift CCTV system, only to discover that they have already infiltrated the building. Claire believes they have come for her, so the Doctor enters her mind. The Angel inside Claire is the one who controlled the TARDIS and it claims the others are working on behalf of Division to extract it. It also tells the Doctor that it has knowledge of her forgotten time in Division, and will divulge all if she helps it escape.

The Doctor, Jericho and Claire try to evacuate the overrun house through a secret passage. Jericho is caught and sent back in time to 1901, but an Angel lets the Doctor go. She arrives at the other side of the window in time where Claire is now with the Angels. Speaking through Claire, the Rogue Angel announces ‘You are recalled to Division,’ and the Doctor is transformed into a Weeping Angel.

Elsewhere, Bel’s search for Vinder had taken her to the desolate Pozuna, whose refugees are being promised safe passage off world by Azure through a Passenger. She goes to find out where they are being taken, leaving behind a message for Vinder. Namaca, a refugee who had refused to leave with Bel, leads Vinder to it, but the message stops just as Bel is about to reveal her coordinates.

THE ANGELS HAVE THE GOGGLE BOX

Oliver Tomkins

An Introduction to the Angels Becomes Itself an Angel

The Weeping Angels have changed since we last saw them, which is very appropriate. There are further changes in their paradigmatic rules, an entirely new real-world and televisual context, and physical resculpting of their stone faces by new prosthetics company Square Peg. All these are all small instances of adaptation in television, of the reimagining of now-classic iconography in a new environment by new creatives. Or, from another point of view, the actual evolution of the Weeping Angels.

While seeing no full appearance since The Angels Take Manhattan (2012), the Angels have had quite a storied career in their own absence. In expanded media, especially the audio drama medium that so contradicts their basic principles, from Big Finish to Redacted (2022), the Angels have been iterated independently of their original inventor, Steven Moffat. On TV, there have been blink-and-you-miss-it glimpses of the Weeping Angels in this time, from The Lie of the Land to Revolution of the Daleks, never entirely out of sight, but never visible for much more than a glimpse[1].

The most substantial of these small appearances outside of their three headline stories take the form of short set-pieces, in Hell Bent, The Time of the Doctor (2013), and The God Complex (2011), which make use of the monsters’ unique functionality (the rules that this essay will begin by investigating) to reflect related ideas in stories otherwise divorced from the Angels[2]. And this is exactly how they appear in the first episodes of Flux, creeping into the show in cameos and possessing other plotlines.

As such, despite this long hiatus, ‘Village of the Angels’ simultaneously and paradoxically represented both grand return and steady continuation. These teases and short action sequences in earlier episodes are a steady reminder of the Angels, but swell in intensity until they hijack the narrative in the cliffhanger at the end of ’Once, Upon Time’. And this swerve into a new secluded location, a new Gothic tone, and for all intents a new story – Maxine Alderton’s being the single other writer credit on the series – sets up the chapter most distinct and most distant from the overarching story of Flux.

Notably, that cliffhanger, the episode’s opening recap of ‘Once, Upon Time’, and then the cold open moments after, repeatedly paraquote ‘the Angels have the phone box’[3], which sets the stage for a story where the monsters get what they want and, more significantly, references the original context of the line that was so quotable that a character in Blink (2007) had it ‘on a T-shirt’. The irresistible meta-narrative symmetry here spawned real-world clothes sporting the dialogue[4], as Moffat had predicted it would[5], a manifestation of the actually existing phenomenon of a fictional object that made it off the screen and manifested in reality. This is the idea that ‘Village of the Angels’ sets its sights on from the very beginning; the power of an image to breach such boundaries.

In the following sections we consider those transgressions, taking in turn the episode’s four most powerful images to highlight the various ways in which the Angels break out of the narrative world.

The Weeping Angels’ Rule: In Flux or Carved in Stone?

In Doctor Who, ‘monsters’ aren’t narrative agents; they are defined and driven by a concept, and expressly lack individuality or interiority, and the Weeping Angels are the prime example. Every monster since Dalekmania is some small piece of iconography, and the Angels, have ‘snuck in at number three’ of the most recognisable images of monster-hood in the show[6].

And they represent ground untrod by those other canonised villains; for the most part, Doctor Who monsters are nonsensically masculine[7], as typified by the warlike Sontarans, and the Angels, in the inverse, are the definitive example of the monstrous feminine. Even the visual design of the Angels engages with ‘a more feminine perspective,’ as the UK’s first female-run prosthetics company gently give them ‘a softer, longer, more feminine face shape,’ which Square Peg’s Danny Marie Elias says sums to ‘a slightly more modern look’[8]. And the unique Rogue Angel represents further deviation from the design, sporting a literal crack in the façade, its image projecting a vulnerability that is key to the story.

Down to the ‘teeth [and] jagged rocks’[9] that Barbara Creed underlines as key aesthetic motifs, and that in the Weeping Angels are one feature, the Angels are heavily coded with the imagery of uncanny femininity evolved within visual and narrative media, while, as silent stones, actually having no gender to speak of. That this so describes the Angels despite their eldritch epicene minimises the relevance of more genital and gender-essentialist feminist horror theory, and instead amplifies the more holistic petrifying horror of the gaze as control; observational objectification, or scopophilia, which is born of ‘the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time and […] of space,’ or in other words, is the summation of the role of the author in curating a story for an audience[10].

Alderton’s previous Doctor Who episode, another basement-based time-travel Gothic horror, reintroduced and re-adapted a definitive monster to such success that ‘the Lone Cyberman’ was cloned, and his image resurrected, for the 13th Doctor’s finale[11]. But for the Angels, in the public perception which holds the power of any piece of TV iconography, this is tried up in the paratextual contradiction of that Lovecraftian principle that ‘the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown’[12], and the more we see of them, commentators say, the more we ‘diminish their effectiveness’[13]. Naturally, the more powerful they are, the more we see of them, and the more we see, the more we know, and the more we know, the less powerful their image.

But this suggestion in fandom that the Angels have become ‘overcomplicated’[14] relies on the idea that the eldritch laws and lore explored in ‘Village of the Angels’ were not inherent from their very first appearance. The writers do, however, employ features that had already been established:

- They’re stone when you see them, and they move when you don’t.

- Their touch sends you backwards in time.

- The image of an Angel becomes itself an Angel.

Describing Dracula in an adjacent program, Moffat’s Van Helsing says that the three rules of the beast ‘must be one thing. Much tidier’[15]. So, what, then, is that one rule of these monsters? ‘Village of the Angels’ captures it in the first key image:

Claire is a clairvoyant, thrown backwards in time, and so, with twice the foreknowledge, she foresees the events of this story. But that premonition is possessed: the image of an Angel in her mind’s eye, that foresight of the incident becomes the inciting incident.

James Cooray Smith detailed earlier the scene of Claire’s which teases this episode in ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’, and which feints toward the non-linear narrative structure that Angels stories ‘have been doing since Blink’[16]. By seemingly reintroducing the Angels by their most basic original principles, Flux restates the original connection between observation and time travel; time, like the Angels themselves, is something that you have to watch, otherwise it will vanish from sight and, faster than you can imagine, catch up with you and finish you off. In other words, blink and you’ll miss it, which is the whole threat of the Angels. The Doctor says they ‘kill you nicely,’ but the Angels very specifically let you live[17]. But they take your time, and they take you from your time.

More specifically, Claire is sent from 2021 back to 1965, and in 1967, victims of the Angels are sent back to 1901. While these aren’t precise timespans, they are consistently generational – the distance the characters are sent back in time was chosen for Blink specifically ‘to allow one character, Billy, to age into an old man by the present day’[18] – which accommodates the big writerly trick of time travel writing. Characters cast back in time bring to pass the events of the plot that lead to them being cast back in time in the first place, in a causal loop. Mechanically, this kind of story requires time travel within the temporal reach of a human lifespan, but at such an edge that the characters’ ability to impact the narrative is reduced to almost nothing. In the terminology of quantum mechanics, then, we’re on the bounds of the principle of locality, which states that ‘causing an effect on an object or energy requires touching the thing affected’, again tying in with those rules[19].

The real threat of the Angels, then, is that they rob you of agency, control over the narrative of your own life. Characters are transported out of the story and, more fundamentally, to somewhen that means, in the present, their lives have already happened, and to a relatively recent enough past that evidence of that lived life can create those first conditions and circle round the causal loop. We see this with Yaz and Dan, who aren’t going to factor enormously into the rest of this essay for exactly this reason; by being cast back in time, they are cast out of the plot, and reduced to narrative non-agents[20]. The agency of the companions, especially Yaz, is a central concern for the whole of Flux.

By The Angels Take Manhattan, the last of their original three stories, the main threat of the Weeping Angel story is renegotiated entirely into the danger of foreknowledge, where observing the future sets it in stone. It’s a metanarrative threat, one in which the characters are made artistic representations of themselves, as the statues are representations of Angels. The reveal that Claire’s asynchronous first scene in ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ is actually the result of (genre-appropriate, but otherwise unexplained) clairvoyance, draws together the rule of images with that of the observational causal loop. The Angel in her mind’s eye brings about the events she is foreseeing by animating that very foresight, the possession of images here working with exactly the same logic as the Angels’ other causal loops. Because prescience is, of course, just the time travel of images. If the Angels take others’ agency by making their future past, they must also be non-agents by belonging to a causal loop.

And while the cute nameplay of ‘Claire the clairvoyant’ here may not be a deliberate evocation of a kind of nominative determinism that reflects the narrative determinism that defines the rest of the story, Alan Barnes draws a similar connection between Jericho’s basement under siege and the biblical city of the same name and fate[21]. It’s notable, too, that ‘Hayward,’ the presumably chosen pseudonym of the mysterious old woman of Medderton, is the Old Saxon word for one who keeps enclosures and secures cattle[22]. This is the role she is herself penned into by the agency-limiting impact of foreknowledge; her warning to Reverend Shaw is what dooms him.

Here ‘Village of the Angels’ builds on the rules behind Amy Pond’s fully psychological, traumatic possession in Flesh and Stone (2010) by making Claire’s transformation literal and physical, which, as well as setting up the episode cliffhanger, bridges the metaphorical gap regarding how trauma changes a person, and further underlines something that had really been literal all along: ideas are physical, existing, dangerous things, and they will change you. The violation of agency and the objectification (or de-subjectification) of characters meets with the Angels’ image as they transgress ‘the boundary between self and other’[23].

Here, especially in the image of climbing out of screens throughout Flux and before it in The Time of Angels (2010), this feminine-coded hauntology of media is heavily reminiscent of the Japanese horror film Ringu (1998), in which the trauma of a murdered girl impresses on (or possesses) a videotape, in a parapsychic process called thoughtography (or the Japanese ‘nensha’), where an idea proves so powerful as to manifest measurably in media[24]. This might, too, offer an answer to a question so obvious that nobody has thought to ask it: why do the Angels look like angels?

Any causal loop defies diegetic explanation, and so any story that is one must include some prime mover, be that God or author, and as such, monsters made in causal loops like these are the representation of that creator. According to the theology of Thomas Aquinas, ‘angelic agency [fulfils] the designs of divine wisdom, although creativity cannot belong to them,’[25] and in stories as metatextual as those centred on the Weeping Angels, this translates to the hand of the author directly, which we see in the logic of their casual loops. These questions of the Angels, determinism and free will, are less cosmic than cosmological; the image of the Angels works the same as those of Aquinas’s actual angels[26] who ‘are not bodies [but] sometimes assume bodies’[27].

It’s notable, too, that in ‘killing you kindly’, sending you back in time to live out the rest of your life, the image of the Angel survives, in their victims’ minds, and is propagated, through time and space, like a successful gene[28]. They are an image so powerful as to conjure their own creation, climbing from inside Claire’s imagination and into the actually existing diegetic world. Beth Singler argues that this phenomenon – what we call a ‘basilisk,’ a concept literally dangerous to think about; a hypothetical which enacts real power on the world – is itself a kind of religiosity[29], again reinforcing the image. The pop-culture meme of ‘biblically accurate angels’ and seraphic rings ‘full of eyes’ (Ezekiel 1.18), spreads because of, not in spite of, the ‘mind-melting’ unknowability of their image, perpetuating itself with the logic all horror does[30].

Like the role of the screen in Ringu, the apparent passivity of a stone statue, as representation, is the prevailing image in horror of a ‘feminine imagination’[31]. And as Angels are representative of God / the author, their statues, one step further representative, are the definition of ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’, which Laura Mulvey describes as the fundamental purpose of the feminine onscreen. That ‘paradox’ of scopophilic observation, where voyeurism and representation in film have historically controlled the feminine, but now become ‘threatening in content,’ is the trap of the Angels as the definitive image of the monstrous feminine[32].

One rule, then. What is one thing that can transport you to different times and places, that you must watch, but that will sneak into your mind unnoticed when you do?

Despite the hide-behind-the-sofa cliché of Doctor Who, fictional monsters can’t really climb out of television screens. The only thing that can breach that thin glass barrier between the unreal and real is an idea.

Gaze Too Long: The Windows of the Soul and the Proscenium Arch

The Angels as dangerous ideas is just the text, by the way. Much of the writing on them extrapolates the image of the Weeping Angels as meta-threats from the voyeur logic of television and the principles of the cut, but it’s worth noting that this is also explicit. We’re told outright, in The Time of Angels, quoting the same ‘definitive work’ that introduces the eponymous ‘image’ idea: ‘What if we had ideas that could think for themselves? What if one day our dreams no longer needed us?’

This line again echoes Aquinas’s reasoning that an angel is an intellectual entity, or idea, that ‘exists outside the person beholding it,’[33] which is itself a description of any fictional thing with a life of its own.

In this way, it’s no surprise that the Weeping Angels became definitive Doctor Who monsters, because their logic plays precisely on the logic of the Doctor Who monster. Elizabeth Sandifer describes it as a ‘gleefully dark joke’ that Weeping Angels weaponise ‘hiding behind the sofa’ against the audience[34]. But this isn’t unique to the Angels; rather they represent a literalised version of the core logic of horror – the paradox of watching in horror, what Barbra Creed calls ‘masochistic viewing’, reaches its self-contradictory climax when the audience ‘is forced to look away’ from the scene, which is when the Angels get you[35].

This is the basic truth of the screen, of course, from cinema to social media, where every app on our phone milks us for engagement, and which the Weeping Angels haunt in the alternate reality game The Lonely Assassins[36] – and it’s notable that it is first through the interactive medium of a console game, and then later from Yaz’s phone screen, that the hijacking of the narrative begins. But it is true of no screen more than the television, whose defining appeal is the promise of more. Of coming back next week. Not just of the momentary inability to look away, but by making appointments with, scheduling and ritualising the media.

So here is our second image:

While the Doctor climbs inside the mind of a psychic to consort with a renegade Angel, Eustacius Jericho watches the army of Angels above through a 60s TV-set… until they begin to climb out.

In the same way that the Angels time travel generationally, ‘Village of the Angels’ is largely set within the lifetime of Doctor Who. Framing the Angels on the 60s black-and-white TV set where Doctor Who was born retro-canonises the monsters as an immediate runner up to the Daleks and Cybermen, in that their histories began in 1963 and 1966 respectively and this image is placed in 1967, as if to retrofit a metanarrative origin for the Angels in the same way, in a kind of real-world causal loop. Putting the televisual Angels in the 60s TV set of Doctor Who’s birthplace is such an inevitable combination of images that fans have paired the two together already[37].

A staple character in the genre of eldritch horror, Eustacius Jericho, post-war scientist, ‘just wants to understand what’s beyond his comprehension’, embracing the contradiction of these dangerous ideas. His comparison between the Angels’ siege and his memory of the camp at Belsen nods to the understanding of fascism as a context-specific ‘manifestation’[38] of an eternal, murderous idea, the observation and understanding of which might stop it recurring generationally[39].

Conforming to Creed’s view of the genre, Jericho says objective observation is his ‘power over’ the monsters, but the TV set which, like all screens, ‘attempted to freeze the horrific image through fetishisation or control it by maintaining a voyeuristic distance,’ is a box containing a paradox. His observation is also their power over him, and through the curved lens of its screen, evoking his trauma, taunting him with his own voice, they can reach him the same way that they reach the audience.

The Angels have been coded with meta-televisuality right from the next-time trailer for Blink, where the Doctor talks directly to the camera out of DVD extras, and so the possession of the basement TV set, though which Jericho both watches and is watched, is an iteration on Moffat’s tradition of ‘techno-farce’[40], where the unknowable corners of digitality conspire into unlikely and frightening scenarios.

In Blink, the Angels’ mode of movement, and everything about them, is already televisual; the statues don’t actually move on the characters’ blinking, but instead in the instant the camera cuts. They have always been monsters of the screen, as Sandifer says in her essay on Blink, ‘structured around the act of watching’[41].

And the cut, the base unit of representative screen media, is itself time and space travel[42]. With every juxtaposition of two images, the moment of transference from the first to the second is, by definition, either a change in the location of the camera or the timeline of the scenes. This is the base principal of ‘association montage’ as Sergei Eisenstein describes it in the definitive Film Form, where meaning is derived from that difference between two images, at the incisive point, that infinitesimal moment, where one image becomes another as if by magic, and we are cast through time and space to somewhere new[43].

And as the cut takes two moments in time and makes them simultaneous, the structure of stories like ‘Village of the Angels’ take temporally separate moments and stack them together diegetically to create meaning. The moment in this story where Peggy, the lost little girl, loses everything, is the moment she comes face-to-face with her own fate in Mrs Hayward, the basic technique of the film-editing author being used to cut up lives. The whole episode is structured around three time zones, decades apart, intercut as if synchronous. And from the characters’ perspectives, they are, given that this episode sits as an interruptive detour in the ongoing Flux narrative.

See in this episode the image of a field, with daytime, 1901, on one side, and night, 1967, on the other, referred to in the script and dialogue in exactly those terms: ‘Mrs Hayward, you appear to be… at night.’[44] The visual effect implies a portal, or a rift, but the script itself plays the moment as if day and night are just happening on top of one another.

The division that runs between them like a massive pane of glass, through which Yaz and Dan and Professor Jericho are helpless but to watch the Doctor reduced to a depiction, is, of course, itself a screen. A proscenium, like that boundary through which viewers have no ‘right nor the obligation to participate,’ divides the present experience of the audience from the representational narrative on stage, which is by definition placed in the past, having already happened[45]. So that screen separates events into ‘before’ and ‘after’ as every screen does, and harkening back to the split-screen effect at the opening of the episode.

Causality here is inverted. Although 1967 does come, strictly speaking, after 1901, the events in the future precede those in the past: to everybody present, Jericho, Dan, Yaz, Peggy, the future is past and the past is the present. The Angels’ quirk of linearity thus inverts the screen, and inverts causality, too.

Through this metaphysical ‘lens’ that stretches between the time zones and across the field, these current, present events of the unfolding ‘now’ of the Doctor are made historical, and thus pre-written, and thus inevitable. And if you take the word as the sum image of its constituent parts, ‘proscenium’ actually means ‘before the scene’. Because the difference between the presentational experience of life and the representation of fiction is just a matter of time. Clairvoyance is seeing through the fourth wall.

And with this reversal, where the characters are all ousted from the narrative, comes the Angels’ ultimate victory: an act of agency and of division.

In this moment, Peggy/Hayward’s life is fenced in to one town in one century in between inevitable bookends in the same field, where the cruel twist of time travel means she lives in the orbit of a controlling patriarch well into old age[46]. Medderton floating alone in space literalises the closed nature of the causal loop the characters are all stuck in, like the classic horror trope of the village so isolated that its roads all loop back on themselves, and like the generational cycles of abuse that women like Hayward are unable to escape.

The phrase ‘quantum extraction’ is passed from Hayward to Peggy, her younger self, and then remembered by Hayward from being told when she was Peggy, apparently never having been originally created, only planted by the authorial Angels, reducing her being to the ‘bearer […] not maker of meaning’[47]. The Angels’ causal loop bootstrap-trap comprises all the events of this episode, which itself has been extracted, narratively and creatively, from the story of Flux as a whole.

This brings us to the end of the story, and here we get the episode’s defining image.

Set in Stone: The Agents of Division, the Division of Agency

It’s important to note, now, that despite this Lovecraftian view of the Angels as eldritch and ancient and fundamentally conceptual, the first time that their rule is explained, back in Blink, we’re told that it ‘evolved’. They’re as old as the universe ‘or very nearly’ but somehow still born out of a kind of natural selection.

TV, as a medium, is inherently and especially memetic, a field of thought which co-opts Darwinian principles of biological evolution to describe the way ideas change and spread, ‘leaping from brain to brain’[48]. In a TV series airing week-by-week, each episode is an iteration, like offspring, of different qualities and aspects of some prior, parent version of the show. Each generation, traditionally a year after the one before (although delivery times may vary), experiments with and adapts to the failures and successes of the previous cohort[49].

Doctor Who in particular, as an unusual hybrid of serial storytelling and anthology structure, has a particularly high conceptual variance between sibling stories you could call hetero-memeity, from the genetic terminology. For example: the original success of the Weeping Angels in Blink is in part a result of that story’s deviation from the norm – it wouldn’t have existed at all if the ‘double banking’ production strategy hadn’t demanded an entirely standalone episode with a unique cast and story[50]. And then Blink conferred attributes to following Weeping Angel stories, culminating in ‘Village of the Angels’, as well as pollinating future stories in other ways[51].

Doctor Who is also in the rarer category of media that undergo not just series-to-series variations, but era-to-era, and even show-to-show; the so-called ‘revival’ version of Doctor Who is itself a revisitation of the full TV show that came before it. And as Alasdair Stuart and the other contributors across this book have described, Flux is once again a loud iteration on the form of the show, born out of unique circumstance.

So, if television is an environment hosting a kind of evolution of ideas, the survival conditions which lead to reproduction and proliferation are observational. Watching. In this way, the Angels were almost the inevitable result of the starting conditions of Doctor Who, as seen on that 60s TV set, because they are the definitive televisual monster. And this iteration of the show, called Flux, with its infinitely high stakes and its everything-at-once energy, is adapted, exactly the same as the Angels, to keep eyes on it. And one of the defining features of Doctor Who as a TV show, which climaxes in the unique shape of Flux, is its own ‘perfect defence mechanism’ of the cliffhanger.

Cliffhangers are the weaponisation of not-watching. The colonisation of those 167 hours between episodes by the anxiety of not-knowing. The liminality of that space is the ultimate unknowable; the time travel of suspending that climactic instant and making audiences wait a week that feels like a lifetime to discover what happens in the very next second of the story. The thing is observed, even in looking away[52].

Because, of course, looking away from a Weeping Angel is a microcosmic cliffhanger in and of itself – a moment of not-watching where, in a cruel catch-22 that is the most perfectly evolved trap imaginable, the monster exerts even more memetic power over observers in the moment they stop observing. Creed describes horror so abject ‘that the spectator cannot bear to look at all,’ and inversely, the cliffhanger forces the spectator’s ‘abjection from the narrative’[53].

And this brings us to our cliffhanger image, perhaps the single most powerful image of the 13th Doctor’s time:

This trap closes in around the Doctor and she is ‘recalled to Division’, turned to stone, hands forced over her eyes, and transformed into a Weeping Angel.

If we accept that the Angels are the natural climax of the idea of a Doctor Who monster, and that Flux, in its stakes too high to resolve and its lore too deep to be spelunked, is the natural climax of the Doctor Who series, then it must follow that this exact cliffhanger is the inevitable, pre-determined conceptual climax of this iteration of the show.

Just as the silent credits of Earthshock (1982) defined the darkest day of the 20th century series, ‘Village of the Angels’ echoes this deepest night with an end credits arrangement transformed into something cold and uncanny, in line with the Angels’ time-manipulated ‘siren sound’, which is itself so reminiscent of the sound effects of the 60s era this story situates us in[54].

The baseline is taken out, the literal 4-thump heartbeat so representative of the Doctor’s identity. As Alasdair Stuart’s introductory essay explored, the Doctor themself is an idea, but here that ‘pillar of hope’ at the centre of the show is entirely absent from the story[55]. The Doctor’s lost identity is explored in more depth elsewhere in this book, but it comes to a head in this moment. The Doctor is dragged back into the past she doesn’t remember specifically by being ‘recalled’, time again inverted, the past recalling the now. The question of the Doctor’s lost history is one of agency, framed throughout in terms of self-determination, but also of an agency; an organisation so singularly vast that it keeps eldritch monsters on its payroll, that it sits outside the universe, that the show can’t seem to decide if a definite article applies[56].

The reveal that the Weeping Angels work for Division (this era’s version of Robert Holmes’ ‘Celestial Intervention Agency’[57]) echoes the real-life utilisation of the Angels’ systems by the real-life CIA in the reported ‘Weeping Angel’ smart TV hack that would put screens into a ‘fake off’ mode while the microphone remained active[58]. Division’s trap, this adventure in Medderton that seemed episodic and disconnected from the rest of Flux, operates on the same logic again; the thing is most dangerous when it is not observed.

During most of Blink, the Doctor appears only as his image on a screen, as a knot of the causal loop. By knowing events, reading from a script, he becomes a non-character; his breach of the fourth wall breaches, too, his personhood. To exactly the same effect, the bootstrap loop of the trap that is ‘Village of the Angels’ as a story, is used to deliver the ultimate blow to the Doctor; that of a loss of agency, compounded by the fact that the story itself is so entirely predetermined. The closed causal loop, which we assumed had been the story of Medderton, turns out in fact to encompass everything.

According to Peggy, the Stone Age burial site where the episode climaxes appeared ‘overnight’, which, combined with the cave-paintings in the lovers’ tunnel, suggests a constructed ancient history in Medderton thousands of years old, magnitudes further back than the generational cycles of decades which define the limits of our agency[59]. The success of the trap was so deterministically assured that it was laid even before the Anthropocene era had begun, with the bootstrapping logic of the rest of the story, but simultaneously appeared from nowhere, in a blink. In looking into the Angels, away from Flux and Division, gaze snatched by the cliffhanger to ‘Once, Upon Time’, they caught the Doctor and cast her out of the narrative entirely, back in time to her forgotten origins. The physical ‘Village of the Angels’, and the episode ‘Village of the Angels’, are the representations of a standalone narrative that here gives way to the inevitable gravity of the serial.

And then these appropriately atmospheric closing credits glitch out and the episodic format collapses entirely.

Bel’s Theorem: Extraction and Entanglement

While the techno-farce of media-glitches is a recurrent trope of the Angels, in this episode spanning polygraphs and idiot’s lanterns, this glitch is digital in a way that is immediately interruptive of the Gothic tone, especially when the credits are already running silently. The content of the cutaway is disruptive too, in that it acts to resolve the episode’s distant C plot, which has been so separated from the main drama that it’s just not come up so far.

Periodically, throughout the episode, ‘Bel’s Story’, as it was introduced in ‘Once, Upon Time’, has interrupted this more standalone episode and returned us to the entirely separate present-day of the ongoing Flux story. As James Cooray Smith explores regarding ‘The Halloween Apocalypse,’ this dislocation of events is recurring in Flux, and in the era generally. While there are parallels with the use of feminine faith symbols to trap and reduce people to sub-agent plot pieces – not to mention the biblical link of angels and false prophets at the time of Armageddon – these cutaways feel so abrupt because they are so entirely causally separated, by ‘quantum extraction’ and by the pure gulf of immeasurable literal and narrative distance.

But by the nature of cutting between them, these two non-local stories are entangled with one another in their meaning, the vast span of time and space that is the division across storylines becomes another lens between the haunting of Medderton and the hauntological Halloween adventure of the rest of Flux, in some metaphysical iteration of what Einstein jokingly called ‘spooky action at a distance’[60]; the interaction and connection between things that cannot be physically associated, but which are somehow intertwined in the nature of our observation of them. The principle of locality we discussed before was refuted by Bell’s theorem, metaphysical findings in the 1960s that proved the interconnectedness of distant variables, counter to our understanding of the physical world[61].

This final scene depicts Jacob Anderson’s Vinder meeting Blake Harrison’s Namaca, who Bel earlier saved from the deceptive trap of the Ravagers. This sub-narrative, then, as a lens on the rest of the episode, forms a kind of psychic bridge between the Angels and the series’ central interpersonal drama between the Doctor and Yaz that, at the tail end of the previous episode, spun into the starting conditions of this one. When Yaz and Dan are cast so far back in time as to be removed from the story entirely, it follows as an inevitable and foreseeable outcome of the Doctor’s typical ‘don’t wander off,’ which itself dispossesses them of a say in the story, and which echoes through the central pair’s relationship all the way to the Doctor sending Yaz home before she is ready[62].

The visual image of the transformation in the above cliffhanger could only work with this Doctor – the long coat, like a dress, the bob hair, feminine features – but thematically and emotionally, too, no previous Doctor has been as challenged by questions of autonomy. The threat of the Division conspiracy she is dragged back into is exactly this; not just a violation of agency, but the retroactive erasure of the base-level self-determination of one’s own image. The bait in the episode’s trap is the purely metaphysical, entirely amaterial question of the Doctor’s identity, a new origin factually and functionally discretely disconnected from her present and so abstract and obscured that it might well both be true and untrue at once until fully observed.

As we meander towards our own cliffhanger ending, let’s not leave the gendered dimension to the characters’ narrative control in subtext, because the threat of the loss of agency against Jodie Whittaker’s first female Doctor is conspicuous. And simultaneously, while she asks Claire’s permission before entering her mind in this episode, the Doctor’s authoritative disregard for consent with Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan, or her stubborn refusal just to talk with Yaz, are a premonition of what the following episode will characterise as cycles of robbed agency, like another causal loop[63]. The elimination of the agency of women by setting a particular version of history in stone, as Emma Reed highlights regarding ‘War of the Sontarans,’ is made literal by the Angels trapping all but one female character in this episode in their own past, out of reach of the series main story of unfolding events at the end of the universe.

It’s only in the final glitching mid-credits sequence that this comes into focus, and Bel’s hologram tells her love that she ‘had to go and help some people,’ as an abdication of her own desires and agency, in assent to the principles of basic decency. The representational logics of narrative media, Mulvey rounds out, ‘portray a hermetically sealed world […] indifferent to the presence of the audience,’ like a locked-off, long-passed historical event, set in stone, but this is ultimately just an ‘illusion of voyeuristic separation’[64]. There is no such thing as just watching, when we know that the act of observation itself changes that being observed, and the recognition of the agency of those who have been made objects ‘endangers the unity of the diegesis’ which here ‘bursts’ open in this end-credits interruption[65].

Matt Hill writes more about the agency politics of the media glitch later, but here the glitching apart of the title sequence, is the killing blow to the episodic and the rupturing invasion of serialisation. By some margin the most stand-alone episode covered in this book is at last fully overwhelmed, and in no small way undercut by the narrative of Flux. Even the term ‘mid-credits scene’ is itself a formal colonisation by the cultural behemoth of I.P. serial sci-fantasy streaming that Doctor Who creatives have been trying to ‘keep up with’[66]. Shortly after the end of the Chibnall run it was announced that one of them (Disney+) would be distributing the show directly in future[67].

This is the interruption of a whole new digital logic of television that sees the separate become entirely entangled in the transmedia web, temporally and physically distant events become simultaneous, the episodic become indistinct, and the boundary of the screen becomes transgressed entirely. See where we started, with the ever-expanding media of spinoffs and tie-ins which centre the Angels so often. And as we’ve described, every aspect of this inevitably rolled out from those initial conditions of Doctor Who, and the institutionalised logic of television as a visual medium more broadly.

And so, one final image, in exactly the same place, at just a slightly different time, almost a year after ‘Village of the Angels’:

A celebration of the BBC Centenary, 100 years of British television, on 23 October 2022; a Weeping Angel takes to the Strictly Come Dancing ballroom, climbed from one TV show to another, and from drama out into reality, across the fourth wall.

[1] The Weeping Angels would have played a significant role in Class (2016) had a second series been commissioned, hence the surprise cameo at the end of the final episode, The Lost. Fullerton, Huw, ‘Class Writers Tease Scrapped Weeping Angels Storylines for Cancelled Doctor Who Spin-off.’

[2] The God Complex, for example, animates the image of an Angel as a real-life ‘bad dream’ in a story all about belief in harmful images.

[3] Blink (2007).

[4] Not even merchandise made by the creatives, but independently generated reproductions; there are dozens of variations of the shirt on RedBubble alone.

[5] Moffat, Steven, and Murray Gold, Blink, DVD audio commentary.

[6] Moffat, Steven, interviewed by Crystel Dee, ‘Steven Moffat On Writing, Weeping Angels, and More’.

[7] Exceptions include female members of the Slitheen family, and the Ice Warrior Iraxxa (Empress of Mars (2017)).

[8] Elias, Danny Marie, ‘Creature Features’, p49.

[9] Creed, Barbara, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, p154.

[10] Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual Pleasures of Narrative Cinema’, Screen #16.3, p17.

[11] The Haunting of Villa Diodati and The Power of the Doctor, .

[12] Lovecraft, HP ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, The Recluse, p23-60.

[13] Kaiser, Zoe, ‘Doctor Who’s Weeping Angels are Perfect Horror Monsters but are they Returning Villains?’

[14] Weston, Evan, ‘We Have No Need of Comfy Chairs’, The Doctor Who Ratings Guide, 22 Apr 2017.

[15] Dracula: The Dark Compass (2020).

[16] ‘Speaking of people who know the Doctor, but they don’t know them, there’s Claire (Annabel Scholey), who met the Doctor and Yaz in a past that has yet to unfold for us or our heroes,’ Whitbrook, James, ‘Doctor Who's Big New Experiment Is Off to a Very Messy Start’.

[17] Blink.

[18] Pixley, Andrew, ‘Episode 10: Blink’, DWM Special Edition #17, p96.

[19] ‘Locality,’ Encyclopaedia of Quantum Physics and Philosophy of Science.

[20] This might, too, offer an explanation for an aspect of this time-travel rule introduced in this episode that being touched twice petrifies and disintegrates Gerald and Jean; being doubly displaced breaches the metaphor, makes the two into literal objects, and then destroys them altogether.

[21] Barnes, Alan, ‘Village of the Angels’, DWM: The 2022 Yearbook, p50.

[22] Bardsley, CW, A Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames: With Special American Instances, p368.

[23] Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, p32.

[24] Fukurai, Tomokichi, Clairvoyance and Thoughtography.

[25] Collins, James, The Thomistic Philosophy of the Angels: A Dissertation.

[26] Aquinas was called ‘the Angelic Doctor’ in his time, which feels like an important bit of foreshadowing for our purposes.

[27] Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologiae, Ia 51.2.

[28] ‘And they like to leave a few rare witnesses. To tell the story,’ explains Mrs Hayward. Also note that in the moment that the image of an Angel proves so strong as to reconstitute a torn-up drawing, the VFX is one of reversing footage, backwards in time.

[29] Singler, Beth, ‘Roko’s Basilisk or Pascal’s? Thinking of Singularity Thought Experiments as Implicit Religion’, Implicit Religion #20.3, pp279-97.

[30] Hanton, Alex, ‘Reminder: Angels in the Bible Were Mind-Melting Horror Beasts’.

[31] Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, p156.

[32] Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasures’, p11.

[33] Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologiae, Ia 51.2.

[34] Sandifer, Elizabeth, ‘The Image of an Angel (Blink)’.

[35] Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, p154.

[36] The Lonely Assassins, Maze Theory, 2021.

[37] Jeanson, Liam, ‘Doctor Who: Blink 1960s Edition – Part I: Don’t Turn Your Back’.

[38] On ‘manifestations’ of fascism, see Stanley, Jason, How Fascism Works.

[39] Most famously, Umberto Eco’s 1995 ‘Ur-Fascism’ describes the ephemeral recurrence of one image across time and space: ‘the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change’.

[40] Moffat, Steven, Joking Apart (1993-95), series 1 episode 5, DVD audio commentary.

[41] Sandifer, Elizabeth, ‘The Image of an Angel’.

[42] ‘Representative’ here referring to the retelling of a past (if fictional) event, as opposed to ‘presenting’ something as if currently happening (Goffman, Erving, Frame Analysis, p125).

[43] Eisenstein, Sergei, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, p75.

[44] Chibnall, Chris, and Maxine Alderton, ‘Village of the Angels’, p65.

[45] Goffman, Frame Analysis, p125.

[46] ‘It’s happening again,’ as Hayward says on the moment of her own disappearance, is the same phrase used in Turn Left (2008) to describe the societal cycle into fascism, which recurs later in the story.

[47] Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasures’, p7.

[48] Dawkins, Richard, The Selfish Gene, p192.

[49] Richard Dawkins, who coined the term, has disavowed the independent life that ‘memetic’ thought has taken on, which is apposite (Solon, Olivia, ‘Richard Dawkins on the Internet’s Hijacking of the Word Meme’).

[50] Pixley, Andrew, ‘Episode 10: Blink’, p96.

[51] For example, every monster whose rules are written in reference to Blink: the ‘Don’t think!’ Teller from Time Heist (2014), Snowmen from The Snowmen (2013), Dream Crabs from Last Christmas (2014); the ‘Don’t breathe!’ clockwork droids in Deep Breath; or the ‘Don’t don’t smile’ Emojibots in Smile (2017).

[52] This fear from not-knowing is the endnote of Blink: the Angels aren’t every statue, they could be any statue – a Moffat motif.

[53] Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, p154.

[54] Akinola, Segun, ‘Sounds of the Universe’, DWM: The 2021 Yearbook, p56.

[55] A ‘pillar of hope’ was the phrase used by both Chris Chibnall and Jodie Whittaker to introduce the role of the Doctor ahead of their first series, at San Diego Comic Con, 2018.

[56] It changes from ‘The Division’ in S12 to just ‘Division’ throughout Flux, though ‘Village of the Angels’ uses both syntaxes.

[57] First mentioned in The Deadly Assassin (1976).

[58] MacAskill, Ewen, ‘Did Doctor Who Really Inspire a CIA Surveillance Codename?’

[59] The reveal of monsters as the bedrock of life on Earth is now a standard Doctor Who twist; ‘City of Death’ (1979), ‘The Runaway Bride’ (2006), ‘Day of the Moon’ (2011).

[60] ‘Spukhafte Fernwirkungen’ in the original German. (Einstein, Albert, The Born-Einstein letters: correspondence between Albert Einstein and Max and Hedwig Born from 1916–1955, with commentaries by Max Born, p158).

[61] Myrvold, Wayne, Marco Genovese, and Abner Shimony, ‘Bell’s Theorem’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[62] The Power of the Doctor.

[63] See, for example, how Yaz’s seemingly independent adventuring in the next chapter is revealed to actually be under the instruction of a glitching hologram Doctor, hidden on Yaz’s person at some point in the opening of ‘Village of the Angels’; that unobserved intrusion of agency is born out of clairvoyance and direct authorial intervention.

[64] Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasures’, p8.

[65] Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasures’, p18.

[66] Chibnall, Chris, ‘Production Notes’, DWM #568.

[67] Moss, Molly, ‘Doctor Who to Stream on Disney Plus Outside of the UK’.

SURVIVORS OF THE FLUX

OVERVIEW

Writer: Chris Chibnall

Director: Azhur Saleem

Original UK Transmission Date: 28 November 2021

Running Time: 50m 34s

UK Viewing Figures: 4.87 million

Regular Cast: Jodie Whittaker (the Doctor), Mandip Gill (Yasmin Khan), John Bishop (Dan Lewis)

Recurring Cast: Jemma Redgrave (Kate Stewart), Nicholas Courtney (Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart)[1]

Guest Cast: Kevin McNally (Professor Jericho), Barbara Flynn (Tecteun), Craig Parkinson (Prentis / Grand Serpent), Robert Bathhurst (Farquhar), Craige Els (Karvanista), Thaddea Graham (Bel), Jacob Anderson (Vinder), Sam Spruell (Swarm), Rochenda Sandall (Azure), Nadia Albina (Diane), Nicholas Blane (Millington), Steve Oram (Joseph Williamson), Jonathan Watson (Sontaran Commander Stenck), Barbara Fadden, Isla Moody, Lowrie Brown (Weeping Angels), Simon Carew (Ood), Silas Carson (voice of the Ood), Guy List (Waiter), Jonny Mathers (Passenger), Kammy Darweish (Kumar), George Caple (Alfie)

Antagonists: Tecteun, the Grand Serpent, Swarm, Azure

Responses:

‘[T]he penultimate episode of Flux delivered mesmerising plot twists, epic revelations and a brilliant cliffhanger […] everything’s in place for the final showdown and I, for one, can’t wait.’

[Robert Fairclough, We Are Cult]

‘Much of the episode is taken up by barely-relevant subplots, while the rest is devoted [to] exposition from a generic villain who gets killed off unceremoniously by even more generic villains in the form of the Ravagers. “Survivors of the Flux” at least provides some long-overdue answers to the season’s mysteries but said answers aren’t all that satisfying.’

[Barrett Edwards Smith, Game Rant]

SYNOPSIS

The Angel transformation was a temporary measure to enable the Doctor to pass through the Flux-ravaged universe. Back in her natural form, she is woken up by an Ood on the space station she had briefly visited in the Time Storm. His boss, Awsok, welcomes the Doctor to Division. Later the Doctor questions Awsok, who reveals her true identity as Tecteun, the Doctor’s adoptive mother. She explains they are currently in the void between universes. Tecteun created the Flux to destroy the Doctor’s universe because she believes it has been irreparably damaged by all the Doctor’s meddling. Taking genetic codes from it, she plans to start her experiments again in a new universe.

Since being sent back to 1901 by the Weeping Angels, Yaz, Dan and Jericho have been stranded for three years. They have been following up on a holographic message the Doctor left with Yaz should they get separated, asking them to find out the date of the end of the world. One lead has taken them to an ancient temple in Mexico, where the date is inscribed on a pot. They take the pot to a market trader in Constantinople who partially deciphers the date as 5 December, but someone tries to blow them up. Back on their boat, they are attacked again, but overcome their assailant, a waiter with a snake tattoo. To avoid being questioned, he poisons himself.

In 1958 the Grand Serpent, adopting the name Prentis, infiltrates UNIT at its very inception, by befriending its founder, General Farquhar. 10 years later, the General shows off an alien detector. It identifies Prentis, who protects his cover by killing Farquhar.

Bel has tracked Azure and the Puzona refugees to a monolith in deep space. Meanwhile, Karvanista is still part of the Lupari fleet protecting Earth in 2021. When one of the ships breaks formation, compromising the shield, he takes control of the one Bel has stolen. As her ship warps away, Vinder arrives. He watches as Swarm and Azure disintegrate the refugees, harvesting their life forces.

Yaz, Dan and Jericho travel to Nepal to meet Kumar, a seer who they hope will give them the year of the Earth’s destruction. Instead he tells them to ‘fetch your dog’. Dan and Yaz realise this means Karvanista and they spend months creating a message at the Great Wall of China, telling him to come and get Dan. Karvanista sees the message but is unable to time travel. On their ship, Yaz and Dan are surprised to see Williamson wandering around lost again. He disappears, but Dan remembers the Liverpool caves and suggest they continue their investigations there. Williamson takes them to a central chamber in the cave network, where he has been labelling various doorways as leading to different times and places.

The Grand Serpent continues his rise to ultimate control of UNIT, and in 2017 he begins to wind down the organisation, forcing Kate Stewart, who has already discovered him, to go underground. Four years later his mission is completed when he orders UNIT to lower the Earth’s defences, leaving a path open for a Sontaran invasion. The Sontarans infiltrate both Williamson’s caves and the Lupari ships, including Bel’s, with Karvanista now on board.

The Doctor recruits the Ood to help her, by pointing out that Tecteun will destroy his people too, but her plans are interrupted when she is distracted by a fob watch which contains her lost memories. Swarm and Azure teleport to Division using the power harnessed from the refugees. They kill Tecteun and tell the Doctor she is next.

DOCTOR WHO’S MOTHER

James Mortimer

Stood still on a highway,

I saw a woman,

By the side of the road,

With a face that I knew like my own […]

She said ‘Son, what are you doing here?

My fear for you has turned me in my grave.

[Chris Rea, ‘The Road to Hell (Part I)’]

When The Timeless Children aired on 1 March 2020, the reaction was divided.

Which isn’t unusual. Reactions are divided about all creative media, and this was an episode that partially gives the Doctor an ‘origin story’, providing the show with a ‘narrative opportunity […] to be able to go to places that were shut off before now’. Chris Chibnall stated that the Timeless Child arc was intended ‘from the start’ of his time as Executive Producer, designed in order to ‘open […] up the mythology to more stories’[2].

This mythology is built on throughout Flux, and comes to a head in its fifth instalment, which allows the Doctor to finally come face to face with Tecteun, ‘the woman [she] used to call mother’[3].

Ultimately, however, the divisive reaction is not where the focus should be. There is more to be gleaned about the show and the rationale behind this era by tracing what may have created this specific origin story, and why this will be important for the show as a whole, outside of any polarised reactions.

Lore of the Time Lords

There are several themes throughout this era of the show that are developed in ‘Survivors of the Flux’, and the first of these to note is that of colonialism[4].

In The Timeless Children, the Master narrates the Doctor’s previously unknown backstory. Tecteun, a member of Gallifrey’s ‘indigenous race’ the Shobogans, and the first to achieve space travel, leaves her ‘little regarded’ home planet to explore. Beneath a ‘boundary’ into an ‘unknown dimension’, she finds an ‘abandoned’ child, and chooses to ‘adopt […] the refugee as her own’. Tecteun then genetically profiles the child, learning nothing, until an ‘accident’ causes the child to regenerate. Tecteun’s adopted child becomes a ‘new landscape to explore […] obsess[ing]’ over her study, until she eventually makes her discovery.

With the power of regeneration now within her, Tecteun supports Gallifrey’s growth, turning Shobogans who live in the newly-constructed citadel into a ‘self-appointed ruling elite’. She would ‘gene-splice the ability to regenerate into future generations of citadel dwellers’, giving them a ‘genetic inheritance’, and separating themselves from those who lived outside the citadel. The Master comments that the civilisation ‘renamed themselves, with characteristic pomposity, Time Lords.’

The first thing to note is how seamlessly this fits in with previously established lore. The majority of what the audience has been told about the Time Lords before – including the name of their planet[5], their ability to regenerate 12 times, and the existence of a group of time-interferers called the Celestial Intervention Agency – was created by Robert Holmes[6]. Although we see the Time Lords first in The War Games (1969), and later again in Jon Pertwee’s era, the first story based around Gallifrey is Holmes’s The Deadly Assassin. The dialogue of The Timeless Children explicitly mentions the regeneration limit established during this story[7].

Holmes’s vision of the Doctor’s people and (as then) home planet has informed a vast amount of the established lore, and the history of Gallifrey told by Chris Chibnall largely fits in with this, giving context to what we already know. The lore around regeneration is expanded, and a similar group of time-interferers is created in Division. However, the context it provides also repositions the history of Gallifrey as one of colonialisation.

When telling this story, the Master characterises the history he and the Doctor had been told as a ‘noble creation myth’[8]. Tecteun has suppressed the information that their race and history are built entirely on the experiments performed on a refugee. This child was taken and abused by Tecteun, whose obsession took ‘several of the child’s regenerations.’ The way this is framed in the episode, where the child’s different incarnations are shown in Tecteun’s lab, strongly suggests that these regenerations were caused by the experiments. The Child grows older in each incarnation we are shown – but remains a child.

Gallifrey itself, spearheaded it seems by Tecteun as well as previously-established leaders Rassilon and Omega, chooses only to give the regenerative ability to those who are born in the citadel. They rename themselves, presumably, to distance themselves from those who live outside of it – despite the fact Tecteun, and presumably all first-generation Citadel-dwellers, were originally Shobogans too. The Time Lords become the privileged, the ‘elite’, the comfortable. Those outside the citadel are deliberately excluded from the same rights and luxuries, despite the ability of those in the citadel to share it with them. The comparisons to the way class and race work within our own society are deliberate and unavoidable.

Although the episode doesn’t refer to Gallifrey as an ‘empire’, the comparisons between Tecteun’s so-called explorations and the British Empire’s colonial expansions are clear. The Timeless Children was broadcast in early 2020, meaning that the script would have been written shortly after the Windrush scandal emerged in 2017. Further to this, Chris Chibnall had planned the Timeless Child arc since the beginning of his time on the show, referencing it in The Ghost Monument, and planning to run the story ‘in the second year’[9]. This means that when Windrush was in the news, Chibnall was developing his ideas for the show and writing his first series.

The scandal itself uncovered that those who had legally settled in the UK but had never been provided with any documentation, had been subject to ‘injustice and hardship’ as a result of ‘tightening immigration control.’ The report into the scandal stated that ‘those in power forgot’ about this generation and created a ‘hostile environment’ for those who had immigrated[10].

Elsewhere in 2017, 170 academics signed a letter condemning the Oxford University-backed ‘Ethics and Empire’ scheme, where ‘a series of workshops’ were designed to ‘measure apologias and critiques of empire against historical data’[11]. The letter objected to the ‘crude cost/benefit analysis’ which ‘obscure[d] the complexities which scholars of empire have carefully unpicked.’[12]

Discussions of colonialism, and the need to educate about the Empire, have only increased since the broadcast of The Timeless Children. The Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd in May 2020, and the subsequent movement to take down statues of historically racist figures in the UK, was a milestone on these issues. In March 2021, the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities dismissed the tearing down of statues, and claimed that calls to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ were ‘negative’[13], instead recommending that the Department for Education should ‘produce high-quality teaching resources to tell the multiple, nuanced stories of the contributions made by different groups that have made this country the one it is today.’[14]

More recently, there has been talk that the British education system ought to teach ‘all aspects of empire’[15] – the positives as well as the negatives – but the criticism levelled at this argument is that the negatives are usually ignored. There is often ‘little mention of famines […] massacres […] or the use of torture or castration on […] rebels that occurred under British imperial rule,’[16] two scholars argued in 2017. Indeed, a 2019 YouGov survey reported that 33% of Britons believed that ‘former colonies are better off’[17] for having been a part of an Empire, and 27% believed Britain should still have one. If ‘discussions of the empire itself remain largely absent’[18], and yet within public consciousness and culture there is still discussion and sometimes celebration of the empire’s achievements, it’s no surprise that drama will choose the empire and colonialism as potent ground to explore through its narratives. Especially, narratives written around the time of these reports.

The narrative of Gallifrey has been rewritten to echo the colonialist nature of the British Empire; plundering resources from occupied countries, with the Timeless Child a metaphor for these. The Child is representative of the mistreatment often experienced by refugees, and as clearly documented in the Windrush report.

The colonialist narrative is evidenced one more time in The Timeless Children. The script specifies that when the Child regenerates, she changes into a ‘young brown girl’[19]. To explicitly make the decision that this narrative is about a then-white woman experimenting on a person of colour should leave us in no doubt of what the intention of this narrative is.

But these themes are building onto what has already been established. Holmes observed that The Deadly Assassin ‘aroused a lot of anger amongst the traditionalists, but that’s alright’[20]. The similarities between Britain and Gallifrey were present in 1976, and ‘the 1,000-year English legal system’[21] is ‘much the same’ as Gallifrey’s in that episode. ‘[T]he majority of […] organisations,’ both in Britain and Gallifrey, are ‘entirely populated by (elder) white men’[22]. This episode is the modern era’s The Deadly Assassin.

Colony in Kasterborous

‘Survivors of the Flux’ further reinforces the ideas introduced in the Master’s narrative. Tecteun – then referred to as ‘Awsok’ by the script – tells the Doctor that Division, the CIA-style interference group that the Doctor was involved with in her Fugitive incarnation, is ‘a group to ensure the safety of [Gallifrey’s] galaxy’. She is told they ‘guided and shaped events’.

These two statements are worth considering separately. The first implies Division was initially created to protect the interests of Gallifrey. What would the citadel-dwellers want to protect? The statement sounds like it could be altruistic, if the intention was to protect the galaxy Gallifrey was situated in, and therefore its neighbouring planets as well as itself. But read through the lens of a coloniser, it’s logical to assume that the Gallifreyans would want to protect the position they had put themselves in. They would want to stop their power being taken or used, the way Tecteun used the unique powers of the Child. This is reinforced by the idea that Gallifrey’s Division ‘guided and shaped’ events. They decided that other peoples and planets needed to be ‘civilised’ in a way that they found suitable. ‘Not every civilisation works or is enlightened. Some require help. Some need to be told.’

In this example, Tecteun again delivers an initial statement that could appear altruistic, that other civilisations need ‘help’, and then makes a subsequent statement that is colonialist, through the use of the word ‘enlightened’. This inevitably brings to mind the Age of Enlightenment (late 1600s-1804) which saw the development of science, art and philosophy in countries that still took part in the slave trade. Other cultures were not deemed appropriate to be enlightened, but subjugated. They were not allowed to develop in a way that the coloniser deemed appropriate, and even if Division bestowed technology to help the advancement of these planets, the clear comparisons to the British Empire tell us that this would not be without damaging consequences for their growth and independence.

The Doctor’s reaction to Tecteun’s statement about Division is interesting. She is quick to cut through her adoptive mother’s ‘guided and shaped’ euphemism for interference. However, she then claims this is ‘in contravention of all Time Lord directives’. Is there a difference, then, between the colonialist history of the Time Lords, and the colonialist behaviour of Division?

The Doctor has mentioned Time Lord rules before. In The Timeless Children she says there should be ‘no humans on Gallifrey’[23]. Indeed, despite the Time Lords becoming ‘evil’[24] in the last days of the Time War, the Doctor still chooses to remember them wistfully and nostalgically. Perhaps the Doctor’s memory of Gallifrey isn’t too dissimilar to the way the British Empire is sometimes viewed by Britons?

In this conversation, the Doctor is clearly associating the acts of interference with Division, and specifically with Tecteun, its current leader. Although we have no way of knowing whether Tecteun set up Division, they have clearly always been involved with it, sitting proudly alongside the Child when the latter is first recruited.

But the Doctor has worked for Division too. Does this make her complicit in the organisation’s colonial methods? We know from the Fugitive Doctor’s appearances that she desperately wanted to leave. We also know that Division have sometimes appeared to act in a seemingly positive manner: freeing hostages from Swarm and Azure in ‘Once, Upon Time’. However, in that instance, Division is still interfering. Their intention is to control the force of Time, channelling it through one planet in order to create, essentially, a timeline for history, as opposed to the chaos of the Dark Times. The Fugitive Doctor, at least, appears to believe this is the right thing to do[25]. Swarm and Azure are antagonists, and the audience is encouraged to agree they are in the wrong. In this instance, are we to take Division’s interference as a positive?

Even if this mission was beneficent, there were clearly missions designed to interfere, and therefore perhaps the Doctor did take part in missions which helped to ‘guide and shape.’ Perhaps they were complicit in colonialist endeavours. Indeed, Tecteun accuses the Doctor of being like her, calling her friends her ‘experiments’, and claiming that they are not so different.

There is undeniably a colonialist element to some of the Doctor’s behaviour. The 10th Doctor tells Martha, a person of colour, to ‘walk about like you own the place’ when she is worried about being ‘carted off as a slave’[26]. In an earlier episode he claims there is no higher authority than him on New Earth when he speaks on behalf of humanity – ‘it stops with me’[27]. The Doctor is also a Lord.

The 13th Doctor learns that some historical injustices aren’t possible to fix in the way that previous incarnations may have tried. She has to be complicit during Rosa Parks’ decision to sit in Rosa. She has to step away and let Prem be killed as part of the opposition to Partition in Demons of the Punjab (2018). The rules put in place to protect people aren’t always the correct rules to uphold, and that’s something this Doctor is aware of, despite her insistence on upholding Time Lord rules.

The Doctor does try to fight for those who are underprivileged and oppressed, or against those who are oppressing them. This is evident most significantly in The Witchfinders (2018) and Can You Hear Me? in this era, and has been established throughout the history of the show, notably in The Daleks, The Sun Makers (1977), The Happiness Patrol (1988), and many others. So perhaps it can be concluded that the Doctor has taken part in colonial actions and been complicit in these actions when delivered by the people she works for, as well as fighting actively against these attitudes[28].

We should also consider the history of the Child. It is Tecteun who sits beside them as they are signed up to Division, and it is Tecteun who decides that the universe is untenable because the Doctor is a ‘virus’. She gives people ‘inspiration, hope, protest’ and this is deemed ‘problematic’. Maybe the Doctor’s involvement in Division is just another extension of the abuse that the Child suffered: a way of keeping them under control, because Tecteun is too scared of what will happen without that.

Therefore, although both Gallifrey and Division take part in undoubtedly colonialist actions, it could be suggested that this stems from Tecteun, even if, of course, she has worked with other people who have upheld and built upon her (and their own) colonialist intentions. She experimented on the Child, she helped to make Gallifrey the way it is, and with Division under her control, she is destroying the universe. To be more specific, she is taking elements of the universe she deems worth keeping in her ‘seed vault’ to the next one, where she will control and influence again.

But to lay the blame at the door of one person seems counterproductive. Racism and colonialism are a result of systems created by more than one person and sustained by many others. Tecteun may be the visual representation of a lot of these themes the episode deals with, and may be at the root of many of them, but she is far from being the sole perpetrator.

When the Doctor confronts Tecteun, it is as a refugee challenging the person who appeared to be saving her, but was instead subjecting her to abuse. This is an incredibly powerful decision for the Doctor’s backstory, and it does exactly what Chris Chibnall set out to do in opening up the storytelling to future opportunities. It deconstructs the image of the Doctor as all-powerful. She is a victim of terrible circumstances and terrible people, even if she cannot be completely absolved from blame.

The Doctor may be at the source of the Time Lords’ biology and longevity, but this wasn’t a choice she made. It doesn’t make her a ‘chosen one’, and it doesn’t make her god-like. Nor does it solely leave her as a victim. She is powerful in spite of these things. She is forced to reconsider everything she knows about herself, but is powerful enough to do so. Her past influences who she is, but does not define her, nor does it not hold her back. And these are issues that have been prevalent throughout Chris Chibnall’s era of the show, beginning in the very first. ‘We are all capable of the most incredible change. We can evolve while still staying true to who we are. We can honour who we’ve been and choose who we want to be next’[29].

The Doctor’s Choice

Themes of parenthood, and specifically parental absence, identity and family have been crucial throughout this era. From The Woman Who Fell to Earth, Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor refers to her newfound group of friends as her ‘fam’. She stays behind for Grace’s funeral, and when Ryan’s dad lets him down, she immediately calls him out on this when they meet.

These themes gather and culminate in ‘Survivors of the Flux’, but we can trace the journey to get there. In The Tsuranga Conundrum (2018), when Yoss is considering giving up his baby for adoption because he’s worried about what he’ll be like as a parent, Ryan assures him that ‘you don’t have to be perfect, you just have to be there’. The Doctor’s conversation with King James in The Witchfinders questions why he didn’t visit his mother as she was dying, to which he responds ‘she left me when I was not even one year old. What kind of mother does that?’ The Doctor tells him he can’t ‘go hurting people because you’re scared to face up to the darkness inside you.’

In It Takes You Away, the fam find an abandoned daughter at the threshold to another dimension, directly foreshadowing what was to come. Both the father in It Takes You Away, and Ryan’s dad in Resolution (2019), are seemingly redeemed by their actions, and the same happens with Kane and Bella in Orphan 55 (2020). The parents choose to be there, to make things better, just like Ryan advised Yoss.

Tecteun never makes the choice to be present for the Doctor[30], and any opportunities for redemption are cut short when Swarm and Azure arrive at Division. In fact, the episode as filmed has no final look of regret between Tecteun and the Doctor, but the directions in the script contain slightly more information.

‘She looks to the Doctor – and says what she would never say – never admit – until a final moment like this […] What is that in her eyes, regret? Apology? Sadness? Whatever it is, she doesn’t get to speak it. The Doctor’s adopted mother disintegrates before her eyes.’[31]

It’s interesting that it seems the intention was to suggest that Tecteun could at least show regret about her actions towards the Doctor, but perhaps this manifests itself in the finished episode in other ways.

This Doctor’s identity becomes increasingly caught up in the discrepancy between the ideas she has of herself, and the reality she is faced with. The Fugitive Doctor has reassured her that she’s never ‘been limited’[32] by who she was before, but even after this reassurance, the Doctor has claimed that she ‘wasn’t sure’[33] what being her meant. The narrative of Flux is initially driven by the Doctor seeking answers about Division.

This is another theme that has been prevalent throughout the run of episodes. In Demons of the Punjab, Yaz has to reconcile ideas of who she thought her grandmother was, with who she actually is. The Master’s identity in Series 12 is built around his ideas of his own past, much as the Doctor’s is. The Fugitive Doctor insists she knows her own life, again much like the 13th Doctor does, but when encountering both the Master and the Fugitive, it is the Doctor’s memories which are shown to be wrong.

There’s a great deal of thematic cohesion between these episodes. Crucially, although the Doctor doubts who she is, this Doctor is rarely uncertain about what she must do. She warns King James that he mustn’t turn to the darkness when he can’t understand his own past, and this Doctor isn’t tempted by Tecteun’s offer to discover more about herself, or build the next universe alongside her.

This could be interpreted as Tecteun’s attempt at redemption. In order to make amends for the past, she is offering the Doctor a place alongside her, to shape the next universe. But the Doctor doesn’t want this. Her focus is on saving the Earth, and saving her friends.

However, the uncertainty about her past does manifest in this Doctor in other ways. She is incredibly secretive, refusing to tell Yaz what she needs to know until ‘The Vanquishers’, and being evasive throughout most of Series 12 and Flux. She is protective of information about her own life, sharing her adventures with her friends but never wanting to give details about what she’s going through. When she finally realises she needs to do this, the narrative about her and Yaz’s feelings for each other finally begins to emerge. Until she is honest about herself, the Doctor cannot hope to be honest about her feelings for Yaz. It’s telling that in Legend of the Sea Devils, it is the Doctor who leads the conversation about a possible relationship. She is able to be more open, and she is able to listen to Dan’s advice, when prior to this she relies almost exclusively on her own counsel. Her character has grown and changed as a result of going through the events of Flux.

It’s possible that the death of Tecteun provides some kind of catharsis for this. The Doctor is unable to find closure from her mother, so all that remains is the fob watch containing her lost memories. She chooses, in ‘The Vanquishers’, not to open the watch, and it is the ability to choose that re-establishes some of her confidence in who she is. Because, so often, this incarnation of the Doctor has had that freedom to choose taken away from her. She has no say in learning about her history – it is the Master who brings up the subject, and then explains what happened to her. When she learns the truth in The Timeless Children, it is as his prisoner. She only breaks out when she is reminded of the strength of her own identity.

If Tecteun had remained alive, then anything the Doctor learnt about her past would have been on Tecteun’s terms. Swarm kills Tecteun by saying ‘Now I release you’. Ironically, perhaps it is the Doctor who ends up being free.

However, this cannot negate the trauma of losing the person that could have held so many answers for her. The Doctor has been separated from blood relatives for such a long time, and her found family is what sustains her, particularly in this incarnation. If Tecteun had remained alive, the Doctor could have unearthed some of the links to family, and her own past, that she is craving. In fact, Tecteun is ‘hurt’[34] when the Doctor insists that they are not the same as each other. Would there have been some hope for reconciliation? The script suggests that Tecteun wanted this. Or maybe it’s more likely that the Doctor would have had to step away from Tecteun by choice, without learning everything she needed to know, because of Tecteun’s intentions for the universe.

The difference here would have been that the Doctor would have chosen to do that. Despite being ‘released’ by Swarm’s actions, the Doctor still has no autonomy in this decision. The choices about her own life are being made for her – and this is why reclaiming the watch, and choosing to hide it away, are so important. This is why it matters that she can only choose to be honest with Yaz when she is once again in control of herself.

And perhaps this is why the Doctor is so insistent about the rules of Gallifrey. These structures informed her life, and her upbringing. They are instrumental to who she is and her worldview – just as anyone’s upbringing can’t help but inform how they see and move about in the world. Without this certainty about her past life, she is clinging onto the structures that she knows. Her history is now so much more than these, and yet she has no control over what her history has become. As a result of this, she falls back on the things she considers to be certain.

This is why, in the conversation between Tecteun and the Doctor, her focus is in a very specific place.

DOCTOR

You took something that didn’t belong to you.

TECTEUN

I rescued you. Would you have preferred to have been left?

DOCTOR

You assumed I came through that wormhole. You don’t know. What if I was waiting there to be collected? What if I was supposed to be taken through it? What if whoever left me there was taken by that wormhole?

From the very beginning, this Doctor has been about asking the right questions. Here, she is asking them about her very existence, and challenges Tecteun because she doesn’t ‘know’. It is the lack of certainty that shakes the Doctor’s belief in who she is, and she is uncertain even about what her life could’ve been:

DOCTOR

You denied me my life!

TECTEUN

I gave you your life. Everything you are, is because of me.

Tecteun isn’t technically wrong here, but the Doctor’s fixation on who she could have been is fascinating. It fits in perfectly with Yaz’s experiences with her grandmother (Demons of the Punjab) and with Ruth’s doubts about her own identity (Fugitive of the Doctor). It is the possibility of another life – perhaps even the life she was meant to live – that interests the Doctor the most. She feels a sense of loss that she will never know who she would have become.

Everything she thought she was doesn’t come from her, but someone else. It comes from a place she has no information about. The Master attacks Gallifrey for very similar reasons. He doesn’t like where he came from, he doesn’t like that the Doctor is a part of who he is, and why he is. The Doctor has the same feelings. What she thought she knew is wrong, therefore perhaps the reasons why she is as she is are wrong. The difference, though, is that the Master gives into the darkness that this causes. The Doctor follows her own advice, and doesn’t.

There is a moment in the script where the Doctor is described as ‘a vulnerable child’. She makes ‘the most terrible, deep, personal admission’ that she ‘could have been someone else.’ She is ‘so quiet’ before admitting that she’ll ‘never know’ if this was the case[35]. She has lost that part of herself, a part of herself she never knew, and that feels so profound.

It could be argued, then, that this is at the heart of Chris Chibnall’s era of the show, and view of the Doctor. She does wonderful things, but there’s a sadness to her. A sadness in losing her sense of identity, a sense of home that she is yearning for. It’s the same longing that the Doctor shows in Gridlock (2007), that Susan shows in ‘A Desperate Venture’ (The Sensorites episode 6, 1964), and that the Master shows in The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (2007)[36].

The Doctor’s Mother

Throughout Flux, the Doctor has not been searching for her adoptive mother. She believes it’s Division that will hold the answers about her forgotten past. Finding Tecteun at the head of this organisation would have been completely unexpected. Did the Doctor consider that Tecteun might be dead? The Time Lords have been destroyed twice, and the Doctor has long assumed their family to be dead, even if they didn’t know about all of them. In Whittaker’s very first story, she says she ‘lost them a long time ago’[37].

The only time that the Doctor may have seen a mother-figure in more recent years is when the 10th Doctor was on the verge of regenerating in the Naismith mansion[38].

The Woman was created for the 10th Doctor’s final adventure, The End of Time, in order to give the story ‘scale […] in personal terms’. Russell T Davies created the character partially to give the Doctor ‘a Gallifreyan on [his] side’ [39], and commented in The Writer’s Tale that ‘it could only be his mother, really’[40]. He was also reminded of the ‘incredible, terrifying opening verse’ of the Chris Rea song The Road to Hell (1989): ‘It came out in the writing, all on its own’.

The ‘subconscious’ link to this song is particularly interesting, because it ties in with Davies’s own lore about the Time War. He believed that ‘everyone was brought back to life’[41] during the war, something which was later built on by Steven Moffat in the 50th anniversary mini-episode ‘The Last Day’ (2013). The concept that something so horrendous is happening in the universe, that the dead come back, and the Doctor’s mother is the only one who can provide him solace and direction, is a remarkably emotional idea.

Davies is keen to leave this ambiguous in the episode itself, allowing people to interpret it as ‘whatever you want,’ but he explains his motivation for the character thus: ‘If I can’t imagine a world in which our mothers are there, at the end of our lives, in our time of need, to help us, then what’s the point? It’ll never really happen, so I want to imagine it.’[42]

The appearance of the Doctor’s mother in this story does not only provide the Doctor with emotional support in his final moments. The character is the one who drives the narrative, suggesting Wilf brings the gun that the Doctor will use to destroy the link to Gallifrey. She is also ‘telling him what to do’ in the mansion, flicking her eyes to one side to indicate to the Doctor what he should shoot.

The decision she encourages is one that destroys Gallifrey and stops its salvation. She is firmly on the side of the Doctor, of humanity, and is notably described in the script as ‘wise, kind’[43]. Both for narrative and emotional reasons, this Woman is obviously not Tecteun, but there is an interesting comparison to be made here.

When Chris Chibnall accepted the job as showrunner, he looked ‘at the documents that were drawn up in 1963 in order to understand ‘its inherent DNA’. He realised that questions about the Doctor’s identity were ‘built in’ to those original plans, and with ‘so many incredible gaps’. He asked himself, ‘Where’s the mother? Where’s the father?’[44]

If these documents helped to inspire Chris Chibnall’s decisions, then perhaps he had also been inspired by a viewing of The End of Time. In the podcast commentary for the episode, Russell T Davies explains:

‘We played this episode to Chris Chibnall […] and we quizzed him. “Who do you think [the Woman] is?” […] He loved it. […] I remember the opening scene, we played him the opening of this episode with Gallifrey, and he just sighed. He just went “40 years…” That’s how long he’d been waiting to see Gallifrey like that!’[45]

Did seeing the Woman plant the idea for Tecteun? Did the appeal of discovering Gallifreyan lore come from a realisation of how the planet could now be shown on TV?

Chris Chibnall’s intentions were also to ‘dispel […] this sense that there was a locked-in, fixed myth, and that the only stuff that counts is what’s been seen on screen so far’[46]. He approached the series with the intention of not only challenging a central character, whose identity has been an (ironically) fixed part of the show since 1963, but also opening up and broadening Doctor Who’s narrative possibilities.

The Power of the Doctor

So what are the effects of this, and how have Chris Chibnall’s ideas surrounding the lore enhanced what has come before?

We’ve seen that the innovations put in place during Whittaker’s era of the show have not only built upon existing ideas, but also crucially reflected the current affairs of the time. It’s faced historical issues head on, in episodes like Rosa and Demons of the Punjab, creating a Doctor who is limited by the same structures in society that limit us, and by the choices that other characters make, whilst being no less powerful or inspirational to those around her. This Doctor can disapprove of other’s choices – for example, Graham’s insistence he will kill Tzim-Sha in The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos (2018) – but she can only advise. She won’t control his decision, and he has to make it himself.

But sometimes decisions are made for this Doctor in her life, and she is sometimes controlled by those around her. She is able to regain her power when she reclaims control and choice; something which she advocates for in others. She ‘travel[s] hopefully’[47]. She cannot change or fix everything, but she can try. She can hope, and spread hope. In a world where we are more aware of the size of the problems we face, and of deconstructing issues that are systematic and deep-rooted, things cannot always be fixed in 50 minutes of screen time.

Of course, the next era of the show could be completely different. This philosophy is one that has been brought to it by Chris Chibnall, and is inhabited well by a Doctor who is often uncertain, and made to be uncertain, of herself. She reflects our own uncertainties and insecurities. She is a person: contradictory, awkward, inspiring. She doesn’t always know what to say and sometimes her words are not enough. She changes and grows through the stories, becoming someone who can confide in the friends she values, whilst also being at times incredibly secretive towards them.

This is a different take on a character whose confidence is often unrivalled, and whose certainty in themself is rarely challenged. Although other Doctors have had introspective moments and questioned themselves throughout series arcs (for example, the 12th Doctor’s arc in Series 8), the 13th Doctor’s self-doubts are never fully resolved[48]. She isn’t sure how to respond to Graham’s anxieties in Can You Hear Me? and, as already discussed, the mysteries surrounding her past make her unsure about who she is in the present.

This is an era of the show that values coming together, and understands that the power of the individual comes from community. The Doctor is not powerful enough to do everything on her own; she relies on her ‘fam’, and those she quickly aligns herself with, who she regularly refers to as her ‘extended fam’[49]. There is a significant amount of value placed on inclusivity and acceptance – and this is clearer than ever in the decision to introduce the Timeless Child arc.

The storytelling has been reverted to ‘that original idea’ of ‘Doctor Who?’, and Chris Chibnall is clear that ‘I’m not egotistical enough to think it could never be contradicted or erased.’ This is the nature of any long-running show, and creative decisions and visions are subjective. Even with regards to the mythology, ‘one person’s experience is very different to another’s.’[50] And despite how well the new ideas fit into what has already been established, this doesn’t really matter.

Because, ultimately, what the arc is about is inclusivity. What matters is what the stories mean now, and what they might mean in the future. What they mean to an audience growing up with this show, and an audience who are yet to discover it. Here, we have the story of a refugee, a person of colour, subjected to the power of those who have chosen to oppress them. We have a story of coming to terms with and understanding that, and how difficult it can be to find answers. We have a story that allows its central character to be conflicted and confused – yet never sway from what they know must be done.

And, in the Timeless Child, we have a crucial introduction to the lore. The Doctor can be anyone. For anyone who loves this show, any child who loves this show, from any background, that is the most inspiring message of all. Every Doctor is real. Every Doctor is valid. Anyone can be the Doctor. Including you.

[1] Credited, but appearing in archive audio only.

[2] Fullerton, Huw, ‘Doctor Who Boss Says he Planned Jodie Whittaker’s Timeless Child Twists “From the Start” When Taking Over the Show’.

[3] ‘Survivors of the Flux’.

[4] I will be focussing mainly on why these comparisons could be made, why the decision to introduce these themes was taken, and how this ties into the show’s existing lore surrounding Gallifrey. For a more detailed discussion of colonialism and the British Empire, and its impact and influence on Doctor Who, see Nicol, Danny, A British Alien.

[5] Although, either ignoring or more likely unaware of this, the 1975 TV Comic story ‘Return of the Daleks’ posits that the name of the Doctor’s home planet is ‘Jewel’.

[6] For the use of ‘Celestial’ here, see Orton, Andrew, The Black Archive #45: The Deadly Assassin.

[7] The script for The Timeless Children also mentions ‘Rassilon and Omega’, the latter of whom first appeared in The Three Doctors (1972). The Shobogans are first referenced by name in The Invasion of Time (1978), the second of the Gallifrey-based stories, and another that references the aesthetics and lore created by Holmes.

[8] The Timeless Children.

[9] Fullerton, ‘Doctor Who Boss Says he Planned Jodie Whittaker’s Timeless Child Twists “From the Start”’

[10] Windrush Report, p7.

[11] ‘Ethics and Empire’, McDonald Centre.

[12] Wilson, John, ‘A Collective Statement on Ethics and Empire’.

[13] ‘Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities: The Report’, p8.

[14] ‘Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities’, p24.

[15] Smyth, Chris, ’Teach pupils the benefits of the British Empire, says Nadhim Zahawi’.

[16] Koram, Kojo, and Kerem Nisancioglu, ‘Britain: The Empire that Never Was’.

[17] Smith, Matthew, ‘How Unique are British Attitudes to Empire?’

[18] Koram and Nisanciolgu, ‘Britain: The Empire that Never Was’

[19] Chibnall, ‘The Timeless Children’, p24.

[20] Russell, Gary, ‘Robert Holmes’, DWM #100.

[21] Orton, The Deadly Assassin, p71.

[22] Orton, The Deadly Assassin, p72.

[23] A callback to the closing moments of The Hand of Fear as Sarah Jane Smith is forced to depart before the Doctor’s return to Gallifrey in The Deadly Assassin.

[24] Davies, Russell T, The End of Time, episode commentary.

[25] An inference based on the 13th Doctor not questioning this as she plays out the role of the Fugitive Doctor in these scenes.

[26] The Shakespeare Code (2007).

[27] New Earth (2006).

[28] Perhaps, within the lore, there could be an argument for her involvement in Division being the foundation of why she fights against such oppression.

[29] The Woman Who Fell to Earth.

[30] Although Tecteun brings the Doctor to her on two separate occasions during Flux, both times are in order to remove the Doctor and, ironically, stop her interfering. They can’t be considered the expression of a mother who wants to be present for her child.

[31] Chibnall, Chris, ‘Survivors of the Flux’, p68.

[32] The Timeless Children.

[33] Revolution of the Daleks.

[34] Chibnall, ‘Survivors of the Flux’, p38.

[35] Chibnall, ‘Survivors of the Flux’, p37.

[36] There is further discussion of the Master’s longing for home in Mortimer, James, The Black Archive #38: The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords.

[37] The Woman Who Fell to Earth.

[38] A similar character, also named ‘The Woman’, appears when the Doctor visits Gallifrey in Hell Bent (2015). Writer Steven Moffat states that ‘we’ve no idea who she is, nor should we’, but that it is ‘unlikely’ this character is intended to be the Doctor’s mother (Moffat, Steven, ‘Ask Steven Moffat’, DWM #496, p4). However, if this is the same barn that the Doctor hid in during Listen (2014), then it’s logical to assume that this woman may have been a mother-figure for the character, offering him similar emotional support to the Woman in The End of Time.

[39] Davies, Russell T, The Writer’s Tale, p623.

[40] Davies, The Writer’s Tale, p622.

[41] Davies, The Writer’s Tale, p626.

[42] Davies, The Writer’s Tale, p622.

[43] Davies, The Writer’s Tale, p547.

[44] Hearn and Cook, ‘Setting the Story Straight’, p14.

[45] Davies, The End of Time, commentary.

[46] Hearn and Cook, ‘Setting the Story Straight’, p15.

[47] The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos.

[48] See ‘Her Fugitive Reflection’ section in Phillip Purser-Hallard’s essay above.

[49] Including in Resolution and The Power of the Doctor.

[50] Hearn, Marcus, and Emily Cook, ‘Volume III: Flux and the 2022 Specials’, DWM #577, p25.

THE VANQUISHERS

OVERVIEW

Writer: Chris Chibnall

Director: Azhur Saleem

Original UK Transmission Date: 5 December 2021

Running Time: 59m 16s

UK Viewing Figures: 4.68 million

Regular Cast: Jodie Whittaker (the Doctor)[1], Mandip Gill (Yasmin Khan), John Bishop (Dan Lewis)

Recurring Cast: Jemma Redgrave (Kate Stewart)

Guest Cast: Sam Spruell (Swarm), Rochenda Sandall (Azure), Steve Oram (Williamson), Kevin McNally (Professor Jericho), Craige Els (Karvanista), Thaddea Graham (Bel), Jonathan Watson (Sontaran Commander Stenck), Craig Parkinson (Grand Serpent), Dan Starkey (Senstarg/Shallo/Kragar), Annabel Scholey (Claire Brown), Jacob Anderson (Vinder), Nadia Albina (Diane), Simon Carew (Ood), Silas Carson (voice of the Ood), Jonny Mathers (Passenger), Sonny Walker (Stevie (Grand Serpent Victim), Nicholas Briggs (Voice of the Daleks/Cybermen)

Antagonists: Time, Swarm, Azure, the Grand Serpent, Sontarans

Responses:

‘As an episode in its own right, “The Vanquishers” brings Flux to a satisfactory close, full of action, thrills, laughs and emotion. And full of pace. Lots and lots of pace. Whether it will be as satisfying when rewatched as the sixth hour of a binge remains to be seen.’

[Peter Nolan, Blogtor Who]

‘Some of the very best stories in the programme’s history have struggled to stick the landing, and I’m afraid to say that Flux – which on the whole has been a joy – did not entirely escape this curse. Fundamentally, there’s just too much going on here.’

[Paul Kirkley, Doctor Who Magazine]

SYNOPSIS

The Doctor escapes the Ravagers, running away with the Ood. Swarm and Azure catch up with them and, holding up the fob watch, encourage the Doctor to stay and find out the truth about her past. She resists and with the Ood’s help is transported back to their universe. She arrives not in the TARDIS as planned, but on a Lupari ship with Bel and Karvanista and several dead Sontarans.

Meanwhile, the Sontarans in Williamson’s caves are killed when Yaz opens the entrance marked ‘death ray’. They find another doorway leading to 5 December 2021. Here, the caves form part of the Liverpool Museum. They are met by Kate Stewart, who is leading the human resistance against the Sontarans. She has had the TARDIS transported there and knows of the incident in Medderton. The Doctor arrives but is glitching, having been split into three.

The third version of the Doctor is still at Division. Azure teases her that she cannot keep away from the fob watch and the knowledge it contains. When Azure opens it, the Doctor has a vision of being outside the dilapidated house from her visions. If she enters, she will find the truth about her past. Swarm starts disintegrating it, causing the Doctor to suffer, but reverses the process to repeat the torture again and again.

With Earth the only part of the universe undamaged by the Flux, the Sontarans plan to not only invade, but also set themselves up as the lead partner in an alliance with Daleks and Cybermen. The first version of the Doctor takes drastic action and flies the Lupari ship straight into the Sontaran fleet, deliberately getting herself and Karvanista captured so that Bel can spy on the Sontarans. While there, the Doctor learns that Karvanista cannot reveal any information about Division because it would trigger an explosive implant in his head. She is interrogated by the Grand Serpent.

The second version of the Doctor hears Kate’s plan to infiltrate the Sontaran Psychic command centre. She instigates Operation Corner Shop, making a deal with a Sontaran to trade sweets for getting access to the centre. On Jericho’s advice, they bring Claire back to the present, so that she and Jericho can act as the plants. The Sontarans task them with finding out the location of the final Flux event. The Doctor has given them transmat rings to return them to the TARDIS when their mission is done, but Jericho drops his and is killed.

The first version of the Doctor is rescued by the second, who traps the Grand Serpent in his own interrogation ray. Meanwhile Dan frees Karvanista. The Sontarans plan to double-cross the Daleks and Cybermen, using their matter to counteract the anti-matter effects of the Flux, but to avenge his species, Karvanista ensures that the Sontaran fleet is also destroyed.

Vinder, in his hunt for Bel, enters a Passenger where he finds Diane and they escape together to be reunited with Bel and Dan, respectively. The Doctor uses the huge dimensionally transcendent mass of the Passenger to destroy the Flux.

Swarm and Azure have moved the Flux’s final point of destruction from Earth to the Temple of Atropos, in an effort to free their god, Time, but the reward for their failure is their death, which they welcome. The Doctor recovers the fob watch. Time, now taking the form of the Doctor, ominously warns her that her final end is coming, before bringing the three versions of the Doctor back together.

The Doctor deposits the closed fob watch in the heart of the TARDIS, ready to be recovered if she ever has cause to open it.

THE THREE DOCTORS… AND A SONTARAN STRATAGEM

Matt Hills

End of the Serial, Bottom of the Poll?

Serialisation represents business as usual for Doctor Who, given the series’ early reliance on multi-part stories replete with cliffhangers. But in its contemporary format, made up of occasional two-parters and with more implicit story arcs threaded across seasons, Doctor Who has become less about the pleasures of seriality. This surely made Flux feel like an event, even while series 13 returned to the programme’s longer heritage and to what Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text describes as ‘displacing endlessly the mystery of the Doctor’[2].

As the finale to Flux, however, ‘The Vanquishers’ might have been expected to offer a convincing resolution and even some reduction in the programme’s overall ‘television discourse’ of mystery[3], revealing more about the Doctor’s origins. But fandom on the whole seems to have been dismayed by Flux’s oddly consequence-free ending; if vast sections of the universe remained destroyed, no-one seemed too concerned (and Flux has, in effect, been mothballed by the three subsequent specials). Both the finale and penultimate episode languished at the bottom of DWM’s season survey, in eighth and ninth places respectively, below the seventh-placed Legend of the Sea Devils[4]. The Oxford Doctor Who Society fanzine Tides of Time placed ‘The Vanquishers’ at the bottom of its Flux survey, with only Legend of the Sea Devils below it[5], and unusually for Gallifrey Base’s episode ratings threads, the very lowest score (1 out of 10) has the highest percentage vote at 19.8% (334 votes) from a total of 1,690 votes[6].

For many, Chris Chibnall has form when it comes to relatively disappointing finales. In his Black Archive analysis of The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos, James F McGrath acknowledges its mixed reviews[7] and sets out to revalue series 11’s finale by suggesting that what it ‘lacks in thrills, high stakes, and gravitas, it makes up for in depth, attention to detail, and character development’[8]. By contrast, series 12’s closer certainly could not be accused of missing out on high stakes, returning to a more conventionally epic structure by focusing on a showdown between the Master, the Cybermen and the Doctor on Gallifrey. But even here, Chibnall’s emphasis on his ‘Timeless Child’ reveal – an exposition dump in which the Master, or the Lecturer as he seemingly becomes, essentially tutors the Doctor on her secret history – disappointed some as a result of its ‘oddly polite absolute recontextualisation of the entirety of established canon’[9]. The Timeless Children was about as far away from the scale of Ranskoor as could be imagined, an antithesis to its thesis, but still a source of dismay.

In the first part of this discussion of ‘The Vanquishers’, I want to consider how expectations of narrative resolution remain constantly in tension with Chibnall’s emphasis on surprise, as he arguably seeks to second-guess likely fan speculation surrounding both Flux’s ending and the Timeless Child story arc. In particular, I’ll focus on the role of the ‘multiverse’ in this process, and what this can suggest about the episode’s take on multiversal Doctor Who in a franchise era dominated by superhero multiverses.

Next, I’ll turn to a partial defence of ‘The Vanquishers’, looking specifically at the Doctor’s unusual role in the story. It forms an unexpected tribute to the 1972 serial The Three Doctors (this is even named in the script available online at the BBC Writers’ Room[10]) and raises interesting issues about the Doctor’s amplified agency when she’s placed in a state of ‘flux’ herself, connecting universal and personal flux events. Building on the previous section, I will argue that ‘The Vanquishers’ shows its fan showrunner writer aiming not just for fan surprise but also incorporating a fan sensibility, elevating the (multiple) 13th Doctor’s narrative importance to superheroic levels.

‘The Vanquishers’ and its ‘Quantum Readers’: Fan Surprise Over and Above Fan Service

The episode title suggests a definitive, zero-sum ending in place of a state of flux; some forces will be defeated and others will be victorious. It promises a very traditional narrative shape, but within conventional parameters, the programme’s third showrunner-fan aims to invert fandom’s hierarchies. It would not be contentious to suggest that the pantheon of Doctor Who monsters has long been dominated by Daleks and Cybermen – these are surely the gold and silver medallists of Who monstrosity, with only the Weeping Angels threatening to disrupt their dominance over the fan imagination. Below the Dalek / Cyberman duality are a set of fondly recalled monsters constituting a pool of bronze medal-winners, the Sontarans among them. That Chibnall makes the Sontarans our titular ‘vanquishers’ is therefore an in-universe promotion for them, a piece of knowing, metafictional gameplaying with fans’ expectations which aims to unsettle and surprise. It’s almost as if the Lupari genocide and Karvanista’s traumatisation are this episode’s way of solidifying its Sontaran proof of threat.

I’ve argued elsewhere that the showrunner-fan is well placed to adopt a distinctive approach to contemporary Doctor Who[11]. Not only can they commission science-fictional scripts which introduce a ‘novum’, or a particular imaginative change in how the ‘realist’ world works, but they can draw on their expert fan knowledge to craft a fan novum, a ‘novelty defined in relation to fan-culturally acquired logics of continuity and characterisation rather than scientific/cognitive logic’[12]. The ‘Last of the Time Lords’ is a fan novum, drawing on fan knowledge to rework the show’s mythos; Clara entering the Doctor’s timeline and the appearance of the War Doctor are other prime examples. In this era, the Fugitive Doctor, Division and the ‘Timeless Child’ scenario provide the fan novum’s characteristic surprise and defamiliarisation (going forward, so too does the precise identity of the 14th Doctor). And the elevation of the Sontarans performs such a role here, as their scheming unexpectedly outmanoeuvres Dalek and Cyber forces.

The fan novum transformatively draws on established continuity and fans’ received wisdom in order to create a ‘shock of the new’ within fandom – a sense of creative disruption that can nevertheless be mapped back into canon and continuity. This isn’t fan service per se, yet it stems from the same principle: it recognises fans’ investment in learning about the world(s) of Doctor Who.

Fan service mirrors fans’ emotional engagement with the show back at them; it’s ‘more of what you love’. Bart Beaty has studied fan service in Hollywood superhero blockbusters, especially the Marvel Cinematic Universe, noting that the term ‘refers to the tendency of cultural creators to provide fans with story elements that they long to see – to cater unabashedly to an audience’s expressed desires’[13]. The inclusion of ‘Easter eggs’ targeting fans then leads to an ‘insider/outsider divide’ that activates ‘the imagination of the most dedicated readers […] to reward their brand loyalty and story knowledge’[14]. The issue with fan service is that just as it rewards fandom, it excludes other audiences who are less engaged, stratifying and reinforcing audience hierarchies.

By contrast, fan surprise recognises fan knowledge (and indeed shares it in order to create novel narrative effects), but does not so markedly create audience insiders and outsiders. Any new spin on canon might give fans a frisson – or alternatively, inspire agitation – but it is equally narratively legible to more casual audiences, being far less exclusionary than outright fan service. Fan surprise, one might suggest, is an inclusive narrative strategy better suited to public service TV blockbusters rather than the Hollywood superhero variety.

And ‘The Vanquishers’ is marked by many moments of fan surprise. Its shift from ‘Previously’ to ‘Now’ even begins with a major example – the disintegrative death of Tecteun. Like the powerful cliffhanger at the end of Flux’s fourth chapter ‘Village of the Angels’ (turning the Doctor into a Weeping Angel is the apotheosis of fan surprise crystallised into a single image), as a moment this is very rapidly moved on from and left behind. Chibnall’s approach to providing unexpected narrative images and developments seems to very often be excessively momentary – rather than integrating moments of shock into ongoing narrative, they are all too often engineered and surrendered almost immediately. Removing Tecteun from the finale, when fans tuned into the era’s neo-canon would likely have expected some further showdown and new revelations about the Doctor’s lives, seems to waste dramatic potential purely for the sake of an arresting twist and shocking special effect. Audiences alert to Tecteun’s importance as the Doctor’s adoptive mother, anticipating that she’d play a key role in the finale, are second-guessed and outwitted by Chibnall’s storylining at the end of episode 5. It could be argued that a key dimension of contemporary SF/fantasy franchises is that they must be ‘a perpetually incomplete project, a “never-ending story” […] of endlessly unfinished […] business’[15]. And as Gregory Erickson has noted, ‘Doctor Who, with its multiple actors, genres, styles, and time-bending storylines, is […] a good example of incompletion, even if it has shown us the end of the universe several times’[16]. Excising Tecteun almost as soon as she’s had a chance to begin confronting the Doctor fits into this sense of ‘incompletion’, but at the same time it steals away opportunities for emotional realism in this episode.

‘The Vanquishers’ is marked by repeated instances of momentary fan surprise, especially in relation to its fob watch story strand, one which again promises the Doctor (and the audience) new information about her Division selves. The script plays a continual game with fan and audience expectations: surely the Doctor won’t manage to get inside the domain of her lost selves? Surprise – she will, but then immediately gets stalled outside the ‘creepy house’[17] by Swarm and Azure. Surely the 13th Doctor won’t succeed in capturing the fob watch which contains her stolen memories, as this might do away with too much of the ‘Timeless Child’ mystery? Surprise – she does get hold of the watch. In which case, surely she won’t be able to resist opening it? Surprise – she decides to put it out of her reach, and away from temptation. All that struggle, simply to defer any greater self-knowledge. These accumulated moments of shock seeking to outmanoeuvre fan speculation result in a scenario that seems to lack emotional realism. As James Ashworth suggests in a review of the finale in The Tides of Time, ‘Emotions […] prove to be the episode’s undoing’ as ‘emotional literacy’ is sacrificed in favour of plotting[18].

By consistently seeking to evade fan speculation and narrative predictions, ‘The Vanquishers’ creates a sense of pace curiously combined with world-building stasis: the Doctor has met a very old companion but cannot learn more about their shared history; she’s secured the fob watch containing her stolen memories but decides not to let it (re)define her.

At the time of broadcast, it may have seemed that ‘The Vanquishers’ was a staging-post finale, deferring bigger narrative answers for the veritable ‘finale of finales’ at the end of the Chibnall era a few specials later. Yet in the wake of The Power of the Doctor, with none of these strands having been picked up on and the fob watch presumably remaining buried in the TARDIS, the ‘perpetually incomplete project’ of contemporary media franchising starts to seem like nothing more than fan/audience ‘aspirational labour’[19]. Brooke Erin Duffy originally coined this phrase to describe social media influencers working for promotion and publicity rather than pay, always hoping that they’d ‘make it’ eventually. Here, people ‘are constantly encouraged to think of the future and to carefully consider what opportunities may arise’[20]. Repurposing the term to think about ‘The Vanquishers’ narrative deferral suggests that in this case fans are encouraged to think about what narrative payoffs could be delivered in the future, perhaps via Big Finish audios starring Sacha Dhawan and Jo Martin, through other spin-off media, or via fanfiction. For audiences desiring traditional narrative resolution, the difficulty is that no finale can be particularly final; contemporary media franchising means never letting go of the hope of further narrative revelations to come. As Martin Belam suggested in his Guardian recap:

‘Whether this episode is a storytelling success depends on what comes next. If the following three specials pick up the loose threads as we head towards this Doctor’s regeneration, it may have worked as a springboard for those stories. If they don’t, and the end of the divisive Timeless Child arc is “The Doctor hides a fob watch inside the Tardis and we never mention it again,” that is rather more “OK, so what was the point of all that?”’[21]

However, an alternative reading can be offered up for ‘The Vanquishers’ stance on the Doctor’s ‘endlessly unfinished […] business’ of her Division past. By refusing to open the fob watch, the 13th Doctor remains in the moment rather than letting past traumas (re)define her, enabling a kind of existential security and free-floating self-creativity. Although its emotional realism may be questionable after the Doctor’s demanding quest, this implicit focus on heroic mindfulness does resonate coherently with the 13th Doctor’s characterisation elsewhere – for example, she confronts her regeneration peaceably and by remaining in the moment – and with the era’s focus on fan surprise, where to achieve this momentary impact requires tight control over publicity and spoilers. Chibnall’s recurrent emphasis on moments of shock from Spyfall onwards, especially prevalent in ‘The Vanquishers’, emphasises a version of deliberately ‘mindful’, or at the very least aesthetically immersive, Doctor Who. The programme’s audiences are imagined as being caught up in unanticipated and unspoiled moments of revelation, with narrative instants and images being designed to optimise this sense of ‘being in the moment’, akin to the 13th Doctor herself. Of course, for fans who want to know more in advance, or who want to bring greater programme mastery with them to the table, such a reading position might be far from ideal, or even a source of frustration.

‘The Vanquishers’, on the face of it, looks like a relatively straightforward pacey action-adventure. It lacks the ‘playfully reflexive approach that Doctor Who takes to its medium’ in 1980s stories such as Vengeance on Varos (1985)[22]. Neither does it seem to adopt the format-interrogating perspective of episodes like the 50th anniversary’s The Day of The Doctor, ‘a metafictional story about the most metafictional character in modern Western culture’[23]. Benedict Morrison argues that Doctor Who always retains an inherent reflexivity:

‘On television, figures, objects and events exist as both recorded reality and constructed television image, but this dual identity is typically effaced, with the latter element suppressed in order to allow investment in the pleasures of the former. Doctor Who, from its first episode, explicitly makes both elements visible, allowing them to complicate each other. The TARDIS is both a time machine and the set for a television drama, not-just reality and not-just illusion. Each of these significances is simple in itself; brought into view together they become complexly self-reflexive […] The programme articulate[s…] both a sincere commitment to its narrative universe and an awareness of that universe’s construction.’[24]

If this is so, how can ‘The Vanquishers’ be understood through a ‘both/and’ logic? The episode is tasked with resolving a narrative situation where the Doctor’s universe is under threat of termination by the Flux, whilst Division intends to seed a second universe and start over again without the Doctor’s interference. Division’s control centre exists outside both universes. All this suggests that towards the end of his time as showrunner, Chris Chibnall is incorporating connotations of rebooting into series 13. Division threatens to do in-universe what another showrunner might do in actuality, and erase this version of the Doctor. Indeed, Chibnall has indicated his awareness of this possibility in interview: ‘Russell […], or whoever comes after Russell, could wipe away what we’ve done with the Timeless Child in two sentences […] I’m not egotistical enough to think that it could never be […] erased’[25].

But ‘The Vanquishers’ doesn’t just double universes, it also engages with ideas of the ‘multiverse’ currently de rigueur in popular culture and superhero franchises. Not only are multiple universes part of the threat to the Doctor’s existence, but the branching of quantum pathways is also a crucial part of overcoming the Flux. In order to defeat the Daleks and Cybermen, the Sontarans need to know the coordinates of the final Flux event, and to that end they are using humans – including Professor Jericho and Claire Brown – linked into ‘quantum readers’ to psychically evaluate all possible worlds so as to find this universe’s Flux co-ordinates. If the Doctor can intercept this vital information then she can intervene to save the day, though Jericho’s tragic loss becomes the price to be paid for this.

Considered via a ‘both/and’ approach, the concept of ‘quantum readers’ seems more than a little fan-like. As Chibnall has acknowledged in the context of Flux’s making, ‘It’s quite a fan thing to wonder about what wasn’t made’ due to COVID disruption[26] and so to imagine different, multiversal versions of ‘shadow’ Doctor Who[27]. The multiverse concept has also been used in recent scholarship to address the multiplicity of franchises such as Star Wars[28] and the creation of fanwork that ‘overrides any limiting notion of […] who (or what) has authority to (re)create, record, expand or access’ a narrative world[29]. The proliferation of fan versions of Doctor Who may render the show vigorously multiversal, but Chibnall’s Timeless Child reworking of canon also opens up a vast array of unexplored (yet-to-be-explored?) possibilities for fan speculation, opposing the limits of prior canon. And at times, Flux seems almost designed to feed into new possibilities for future licence holders, whether by allowing potential space for the further adventures of Yaz, Dan and Jericho, or by sketching faint outlines for more Division backstories.

I would argue that ‘The Vanquishers’ notion of ‘quantum readers’ hovers between ‘narrative universe and an awareness of that universe’s construction’, hence ‘allowing them to complicate each other,’ in Benedict Morrison’s terms quoted earlier. Quantum readers of Doctor Who’s construction are members of multiversal fandom sifting through story versions and predictions, and they are showrunner-fans crafting a fan novum to open up the closed, branded world and transform canonical possibilities. Quantum readers aren’t only a gimmick used to set up Flux’s return to some semblance of eventual order in the narrative universe; in a metafictional, reflexive sense they are the conditions of possibility for contemporary Doctor Who, switching restlessly through what’s been done in six decades of the show to evaluate new, defamiliarising options. In this regard, the 13th Doctor regenerating into David Tennant in a variant of his iconic costume[30] is structurally of a piece with the ‘Timeless Child’ and its renovation of the series.

So far, I’ve explored issues of narrative shock in ‘The Vanquishers’, and how these can relate to an inclusive spirit of fan surprise rather than more exclusionary fan service. Although reviewers and fans were often disappointed by the episode, I’ve suggested that it reflexively conceptualises fans, again inclusively, as ‘quantum readers’ sifting Who multiversally for new story possibilities and predictions. Simultaneously, a focus on fan surprise seeks to make the programme both unguessable and unpredictable, as well as suggesting that audiences should adopt a position of being mindfully immersed in moments of viewing.

In the next section, I want to shift tack to focus on narrative agency, since the 13th Doctor’s apparent lack of agency has been a repeated criticism of Chris Chibnall’s tenure. How did ‘The Vanquishers’ utilise a set of three (13th) Doctors to tell a story marked by fan sensibility as well as fan surprise?

‘The Vanquishers’ and its Three Realities: Fan Sensibility Via the ‘Intimate Epic’ of Flux

Another fan novum, and another moment of shock which could never have been predicted on the basis of prior narrative information – in fact, perhaps the most striking one of the episode – is the splitting of the Doctor across three space-times, with the script distinguishing between the ‘DOCTOR’ and ‘TARDIS DOCTOR’ when two of them meet up to overcome the Grand Serpent[31]. Eddie Robson wryly observes the originality of this multiplication: ‘Considering Doctor Who is a time-travel show, this has happened surprisingly rarely… [usually] it’s all clones and holograms and spare Doctors grown from a severed hand’. And when exactly the same multiplication of the 13th Doctor happens in her regeneration story a few episodes later, it is precisely as an AI hologram constructed from data regarding the Doctor’s existence. But ‘The Vanquishers’ playfully cites the template of a multi-Doctor story by having the three versions of Whittaker’s Doctor link consciousness in exactly the same way as The Three Doctors, as well as following this adventure’s precedent by focusing on the possible ‘destruction of the universe’[32].

It could be argued that ‘contemporary multi-Doctor stories […] operate [by] incorporating knowledge of fan critique’[33]. For instance, The Day of the Doctor refrained from involving too many Doctors across its runtime (bringing in ‘all thirteen’ in brief valedictory sequences) in order to maintain a manageable and focused narrative structure. And The Power of the Doctor surely responded to fan criticisms of the fact that Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann had not been included in the 50th anniversary special. ‘The Vanquishers’ gives Whittaker a chance to showcase her acting chops ‘by […] literally having her bounce ideas off herself’[34], but its triplicate 13th Doctors also enable the finale to speak back to critiques of the character’s lack of agency. In an online article for The Escapist, Darren Mooney claims that

‘The 13th Doctor is a largely passive character, who seems unable or unwilling to effect any meaningful change to the worlds in which she finds herself. In both Arachnids in the UK [2018] and Revolution of the Daleks, industrialist Jack Robertson (Chris Noth) escapes scot-free despite being implicated in disasters that killed multiple people. At the end of Spyfall Part 2, after assisting an alien species in an attempted invasion, tech mogul Daniel Barton (Lenny Henry) just… walks away.

‘Critics like Kelly Connolly have praised the show for allowing the Doctor to embrace a radical form of “helplessness”, tapping into the sense of powerlessness that many people in both the United Kingdom and the United States felt when the show was airing. That said, it is perhaps unfortunate that Chibnall should choose this characterization for the first female incarnation.’[35]

The 13th Doctor’s inaction has also aggravated fan commentators due to episodes such as Kerblam! (2018), where she sees no reason to challenge or reform ‘a giant futuristic corporation transparently modelled on Amazon’[36]. And Sam Maleski has similarly linked the ‘muddled politics’ of Arachnids in the UK to a ‘blurry quality […] at the core of the character’[37].

But rather than viewing this Doctor as curiously muted, we might additionally consider how the Doctor has always, in effect, acted as a fictional ‘hero of the BBC’[38] required to emulate the ‘presentational mode of nearly all the BBC’s […] heroes of “factual” discourse’[39]. At previous moments of cultural history, this meant staging narrative debates between ‘left’ and ‘right’, with the Doctor critiquing extreme political positions on either side and so (re)producing a certain narrative and cultural-political ‘consensus’.[40] For the 13th Doctor to act as a ‘hero of the BBC’ akin to her predecessors could be taken to connect to the Chibnall era’s emphasis on diversity and inclusivity, as well as its sense of observing, and acting as witness to, historical wrongs without being directly interventionist. Like the contemporary BBC, this Doctor should seemingly remain above the fray as much as possible, acting when – and only when – cultural order itself is about to be undone, whilst otherwise affirming corporate and technological power. As Mooney puts it:

‘The 13th Doctor’s most frequently recurring threat seems to be the idea of chaos and the breakdown of the established order. In […] Flux, the title phenomenon is presented as the embodiment of chaos spreading through the cosmos’[41].

‘The Vanquishers’ three Doctors dramatise enhanced agency for the character, refuting fan criticisms, then, but still remaining safely within the imaginative consensus of a ‘BBC hero’ (battling pure disorder rather than right-wing corruption and incompetence, for instance). Here, the 13th Doctor can intervene in multiple story strands, rescue herself, and confront Swarm and Azure alongside combating the Sontarans, whose rapid ‘switcheroo’ into the season’s ‘main villains’ represents not only fan service[42] and surprise but also further evidence of the Whoniverse’s ‘natural order’ breaking down[43]. Ironically, the Doctor’s boosted agency reduces what could have been a genuinely ensemble-based finale to a sequence of different companion squads, each given its own mission. She co-ordinates Bel and Karvanista, directs Kate Stewart, Joseph Williamson, Jericho, Yaz and Dan, retrieves Claire from 1967, and then sets up new teams including Diane and Vinder. (It could be argued that The Power of the Doctor replays a very similar dynamic, albeit with AI/hologram Doctors directing their companions).

And the epic threat of Flux, the Flux event, is weirdly individualised – this universe has to be shut down by Tecteun in order to remove the Doctor from the next ‘universe 2.0’ update, in what feels like the ultimate filter bubble of personalisation (or the ultimate reset-as-paranoid-fantasy). Doctor Who’s post-2005 finales have often involved universe-level threats, whether a reality bomb or the breaking down of time. But here the show’s ‘intimate epic’, combining ‘a ‘close-up’ focus on emotion and characters’ private lives with large-scale, spectacular SF conceits such as alien invasions’[44], centres on the Doctor herself. Tecteun has resolved to use the Flux to wipe away the universe specifically to guarantee erasing the Doctor. Not simply a course-correction recognising fan-critical accusations of passivity, this is a vast inflation of the 13th Doctor’s agency on the part of her antagonist (and Flux’s showrunner-writer); ending the Doctor means nothing less than ending the universe, and no smaller scale will suffice. It really is ‘an awfully big adventure’. Swarm and Azure entrepreneurially generate their own scheme within this Doctor-targeted personalisation, but they are coded in satirically consumerist terms, wanting to replay the universe’s disintegration over and over again on a loop – the ultimate sovereign consumers enjoying on-demand devastation, followed by rewatch parties of doom.

The intimate epic of ‘The Vanquishers’ is therefore distinctively individualised; as well as splitting the Doctor into three, it equates her with the threatened universe, transforming her not just into a figure of exaggerated agency but into a strange kind of superhero, a universal self. As a result, the episode comes close to literalising the Byronic poetry at the end of The Haunting of Villa Diodati:

‘the “She” of the poem is Darkness itself, personified […] This is, to say the least, at odds with how the Doctor is normally understood, but it accurately reflects her actions in the story […H]owever, in transitioning visually from Byron’s poetry reading to the Doctor in the TARDIS, the episode suggests that the closing words may be divorced from their disconcerting context […] It allows the viewer to bypass the “darkness” part of the equation and infer that the Doctor herself embodies the Universe.[45]

‘She was the universe’. And Swarm repeats this equation when illustrating his cosmological plan by partially disintegrating the Doctor – ‘You are the universe, Doctor.’ Emotional, personal stakes and epic science-fictional scale completely collapse together here, fused into one. Strikingly, the Master’s scheme in The Power of the Doctor works in much the same way, fusing the Doctor’s individualised targeting and displacement with a byzantine epic of planet-shifting and time-zone-hopping. Neither plot probably makes much sense in traditional narrative terms, but thought of as the individual and the universal colliding, the intimate and the epic coinciding, they are both vast inflations of the Doctor’s importance. In short, they resemble the branded ‘Whoniverse’ converted into a narrative trope; the Doctor as the single most important identity within the storyworld universe.

In Benedict Morrison’s terms again, the Doctor treated as a universal self ‘articulate[s…] both a sincere commitment to […the] narrative […] and an awareness of that […] construction’.[46] This is not fan service as it’s generally understood; it’s not an Easter egg, nor a returning character; not an in-joke nor a blast of nostalgia. But it takes fannish attachment – a passionate fan’s sense of how much the Doctor matters – and pulls this sense of TV ‘construction’ through into ‘narrative’. Consequently, it’s more about fan sensibility than fan service, parlaying how fans are imagined to feel about the character into an in-universe account of the Doctor’s monumental significance (something displayed by the ‘last of the Time Lords’ scenario as much as by the ‘Timeless Child’ retcon).

Set against such inflationary pressures, Paul Kirkley’s DWM review conveyed understandable hesitation over the scale of ‘The Vanquishers’:

‘Maybe Doctor Who shouldn’t play like some grand, intergalactic opera […] Maybe there’s actually something uniquely, cherishably Doctor Who about a universal extinction event being foiled by three people in a corner shop bribing an alien with Mars bars – […] simultaneously the dumbest and most brilliant scene in the episode, possibly in Doctor Who history.’[47]

To be fair, ‘The Vanquishers’ undercuts its superheroic reversioning of the 13th Doctor through abrupt tonal shifts such as this, suggesting that long-running discourses of English eccentricity versus Hollywood/Disney-style spectacle may still circulate meaningfully around the show even in an era of globalised streaming. The fan sensibility bound up with the three (13th) Doctors’ inflation of agency, and the Doctor’s superhero-level importance, is also tempered by the Doctor’s glitching between realities when she splits in three. The script stresses this glitch[48], with the Doctor’s instability mirroring Flux’s award-winning marketing[49] (the programme’s social media accounts underwent visual/branding disruption and glitching as the season progressed):

KARVANISTA

What in the name of Rayfax are you doing here?!

THE DOCTOR

I really don’t know! Lupari ship, dead Sontarans – ow!!

She glitches in and out –

BEL

I dunno who you are, but you’re pretty unstable –

THE DOCTOR

Oi, I’m the most stable person I know –

In her study High-Tech Trash: Glitch, Noise, and Aesthetic Failure, Carolyn L Kane begins by citing Foucault: ‘“Life is what is capable of error,” Michel Foucault wrote […], and indeed, because we can err, it is also in our capacity to grow and change thereafter’.[50] In this argument, glitching isn’t just a technological failure or a digital disruption – the sense of existential flux that it avers is what makes personal development possible. And on this account, being resolutely stable might actually be counterproductive, since it can fix the self in place while denying growth, multiplicity and openness to the world. But as the three Doctors glitch from story strand to strand, the 13th Doctor’s agency is intensified through another both/and logic – it is both amplified (acknowledging fan critiques) and rendered haphazard (maintaining narrative pace and tension) at one and the same time. In-story, the strategy itself is a desperate piece of extemporisation, as the Doctor ponders what will happen to her if she’s not stabilised outside the universe in Division’s control centre. While it may give the 13th Doctor near-magical powers, it also testifies to her risk-taking and creative improvisation, making her an unusual kind of superhero – one whose powers are anomalous and peculiar rather than a matter of smooth mastery.

Jodie Whittaker doesn’t only play three versions of the Doctor in this episode; she also appears briefly near the end as the figure of ‘Time’, or ‘TIME SWARM’ recalibrated into ‘TIME DOCTOR’, as the script puts it[51]. This means that the 13th Doctor is aligned both with the universe and with darkness – the coolly sinister figure of ‘TIME DOCTOR’ sports her dark blue coat design, as previously worn by the ‘Division Doctor’ on Atropos in ‘Once, Upon Time’. This altered coat, ‘the reverse of her normal one’[52], cues us to recognise a darker version of the Doctor – after all, when we see her in Division she’s commanding a military operation. Piers Britton has observed of the programme’s production/costume design that ‘in such moments Doctor Who reflexively underscores its visual pleasures – and indeed underscores the designedness of these pleasures.’[53] The dark-coated Whittaker Doctor riffs on the design decisions made for her ‘normal’ costume[54], representing a kind of ‘design novum’ that meshes with the concept of the showrunner’s fan novum, this time using key design elements in a remixed manner[55]:

THE DOCTOR

Nice look. Quite fancy that coat.

(realising)

Oh I get how that ego appeal thing works now.

(grimmer)

My turn now, is it? My reckoning.[56]

Ending with a thinly-veiled tease for the BBC Centenary Special and the Master’s return, the three Doctors are then swiftly re-unified and the status quo seemingly restored. Having said that, precise details of the story edit rendered it rather unclear whether the universe had been restored alongside the 13th Doctor, or whether ‘The Vanquishers’ equation of the series’ multiversal scope and the Doctor’s personal dilemma had been disarticulated at the death. Given that universal levels of destruction have not subsequently been directly referred to, we might assume a reset, but unsatisfyingly this remains speculative. Although there are some references to Flux in Eve of the Daleks, implying that no reset has occurred, these remain somewhat sketchy and don’t definitively settle the matter. Doubts over these story details might well remain, but did Flux vanquish doubts surrounding Chris Chibnall’s track record with finales?

Surprise and Sensibility: Finding a Synthesis?

I’ve argued that series 13 concluded by displacing fan service and targeting fans and audiences more inclusively, through fan surprise as a type of gameplaying with expectations, as if Chibnall was worried that online fandom would guess Flux’s ending. Instead, the showrunner-fan seemed intent on outwitting the audience speculation typically inspired by seriality. This carried through into the fleeting but narratively significant idea of ‘quantum readers’ able to sift through all multiversal pathways, implying that the writer had similarly toyed with various story outcomes, and that he very much expected fans on social media to do the same. But this emphasis on fan surprise, especially in relation to the fob watch story strand, where events remained unpredictable and full of twists, reduced ‘The Vanquishers’’ emotional realism. All that fight, just to put transformative self-knowledge back in its box. Likewise, the splitting of the Doctor, playing with the form of the multi-Doctor story, came out of left field in terms of pure unpredictability whilst responding to criticisms of the 13th Doctor’s lack of agency. Another case of fan surprise, it introduced a fan novum into Flux by doing something basically unprecedented in the programme’s history.

Placing the Doctor in flux just as the universe was similarly under threat offered a degree of thematic coherence to ‘The Vanquishers’, but this equation of Doctor and universe, already set out by Tecteun’s plan, pushed at the modern show’s use of ‘intimate epic’ by collapsing together the personal and the multiversal. Though the Doctor might have been glitching erratically between storylines, her agency was not just amplified here – she took on a level of superheroic status, made to matter to the universe’s fate in an echo of how much she matters, as a character, to fandom.

This fan sensibility, inflating the Doctor’s importance, is integrated into the novum of fan surprise in The Timeless Children’s reworking of canon (the Doctor, innovatively, as the motor of all Time Lord genetics), and in The Power of the Doctor’s forced regeneration (the Master, innovatively, compelling the Doctor to regenerate into him). But here, the strategies feel somewhat in tension. It may be an unpredictable surprise for the Doctor to stash away the fob watch, but this results in a concluding implication of stasis. It may be an unguessable shock for three 13th Doctors to suddenly emerge, but the twist doesn’t feel narratively earned: it is created, in effect, by the Doctor taking off a badge (deus ex insigne, not deus ex machina). And it may be an unanticipated shift to establish the Sontarans as the finale’s central antagonists – contra long-held fan hierarchies of monsters – but the stratagem risks marginalising, if not displacing, Swarm and Azure as key characters. As a result, it sometimes feels in this episode as if seriality itself is choppily glitching rather than causally and convincingly flowing onward. ‘The Vanquishers’ is always playful and smart TV drama, but rather than synthesising tendencies in Chris Chibnall’s finale writing, it ultimately feels self-divided – like a thesis and antithesis struggling with one another, or like space somehow nonsensically battling time.

[1] Whittaker also plays Time, sharing the part with Matthew Needham (who played Old Swarm in ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ and ‘Once, Upon Time’, but is uncredited here).

[2] Tulloch, John, and Manuel Alvarado, Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text, p33.

[3] Tulloch and Alvarado, The Unfolding Text, p13.

[4] DWM #581, p60; the survey was conducted prior to transmission of The Power of the Doctor.

[5] Barker, Thomas, ‘Fluxury Goods?’, The Tides of Time #48, pp18-24.

[6] Although the same pattern is also true for the forum’s ratings of The Timeless Children.

[7] McGrath, James F, The Black Archive #52: The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos, p15.

[8] McGrath, The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos, p16.

[9] Stuart, Alasdair, The Black Archive #50: The Day of the Doctor, p127.

[10] When the 13th Doctors make telepathic contact with each other, the script notes ‘As first seen in The Three Doctors’ (Chibnall, Chris, ‘The Vanquishers’, p47).

[11] Hills, Matt, ‘The Expertise of Digital Fandom as a “Community of Practice”’, Convergence #21(3).

[12] Hills, Matt, ‘The Expertise of Digital Fandom…’, pp368-69. For the idea of the ‘novum’, see Suvin, Darko, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, p66.

[13] Beaty, Bart, ‘Superhero Fan Service: Audience Strategies in the Contemporary Interlinked Hollywood Blockbuster’, The Information Society #32(5), p324.

[14] Beaty, ‘Superhero Fan Service’, p322.

[15] Gelder, Ken, Adapting Bestsellers: Fantasy, Franchise and the Afterlife of Storyworlds, p4.

[16] Erickson, Gregory, Speculative Television and the Doing and Undoing of Religion, p235.

[17] Chibnall, ‘The Vanquishers’, p17.

[18] Ashworth, James, ‘The Vanquishers’, The Tides of Time #48, p14.

[19] Duffy, Brooke Erin, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love, p7.

[20] Johanseen, Jacob, and Steffen Krüger, Media and Psychoanalysis, p109.

[21] Belam, Martin, ‘Doctor Who Recap: Flux Chapter Six - The Vanquishers’.

[22] Leach, Jim, TV Milestones: Doctor Who, p64.

[23] Stuart, The Day of the Doctor, p16.

[24] Morrison, Benedict, ‘Queer Adventures in Time and Space: Complicating Simplicity in Doctor Who’, in Cardwell, Bignell, Donaldson, eds, Complexity/Simplicity: Moments in Television, p170.

[25] Hearn and Cook, ‘Volume III’, p25.

[26] Chibnall in Hearn and Cook, ‘Volume III’,, p25.

[27] On the term ‘shadow cinema’, meaning unproduced screenplays or unseen edits etc., see Fenwick, James, Kieran Foster and David Eldridge, eds, Shadow Cinema: The Historical and Production Contexts of Unmade Films. I’m borrowing the term ‘shadow Who’ for unproduced Doctor Who from them.

[28] See Esterrich, Carmelo, Star Wars Multiverse.

[29] Fazel, Valerie M, and Louise Geddes, The Shakespeare Multiverse: Fandom as Literary Praxis, p19.

[30] The Power of the Doctor.

[31] Chibnall, ‘The Vanquishers’, p41.

[32] Robson, Eddie, ‘The Vanquishers’, DWM: 2022 Yearbook, pp70-71.

[33] Hills, Matt, ‘When Doctor Who Enters Its Own Timeline: The Database Aesthetics and Hyperdiegesis of Multi-Doctor Stories’, Critical Studies in Television #9(1), p95.

[34] Kirkley, Paul, ‘Reviews: The Vanquishers’, DWM #573, p65.

[35] Mooney, Darren, ‘A Grand Unified Theory of Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who’.

[36] Mooney, ‘A Grand Unified Theory’. See also Jacobs, Naomi, and Thomas L Rodebaugh, The Black Archive #37: Kerblam!, p137.

[37] Maleski, Sam, The Black Archive #48: Arachnids in the UK, pp8, 100.

[38] Tulloch and Alvarado, The Unfolding Text, p54.

[39] Tulloch and Alvarado, The Unfolding Text, p52.

[40] Tulloch and Alvarado, The Unfolding Text, p51.

[41] Mooney, ‘A Grand Unified Theory’.

[42] By calling to mind the unexpected reveal of the Sontarans as the true villains of the piece (as opposed to the Vardans) in The Invasion of Time (1978).

[43] Kirkley, ‘Reviews: The Vanquishers’, p64.

[44] Hills, Matt, Triumph of a Time Lord, p111.

[45] Purser-Hallard, Philip, The Black Archive #56: The Haunting of Villa Diodati, pp83-84.

[46] Morrison, ‘Queer Adventures in Time and Space’, p170.

[47] Kirkley, ‘Reviews: The Vanquishers’, p65.

[48] Chibnall, ‘The Vanquishers’, p8.

[49] Ormesher, Ellen, ‘Why BBC’s Dr Who Killed its Social Media Channels for 24 Hours’.

[50] Kane, Carolyn L, High-Tech Trash, p2.

[51] Chibnall, ‘The Vanquishers’, p73.

[52] Chibnall, ‘Once, Upon Time’, p10.

[53] Britton, Piers D, Design for Doctor Who, p2.

[54] Britton, Design for Doctor Who, pp214-16.

[55] Britton, Design for Doctor Who , p141.

[56] Chibnall, ‘The Vanquishers’, p3.

CONCLUSION

Alasdair Stuart

‘You are the Universe, Doctor’

This line, and concept, haunts Flux like Banquo’s temporally displaced ghost. The season is at its best when it embraces the complexity elegantly explored here: the Doctor as the embodiment of everything that’s good, even in the face of unthinkable destruction. Looked at through that it’s easy to see why Flux is so frustrating in places. The show finishes in a universe of quantum uncertainty to match the quantum fans discussed earlier. Most of it is destroyed but life goes on within sight of normal. Everything is changed but nothing is changed quite enough. The Doctor picks herself up, dusts herself off and starts running towards trouble all over again.

But that uncertainty speaks directly to the period of time in which the show was created and it leads to some startling powerful moments. The sheer audacity of making two characters we’ve never met before, Bel and Vinder, so vital is matched only by just how well it works. Vinder’s ‘I am on my way,’ delivered to a hologram of Bel that cannot possibly hear him is intensely moving because he needs to say it and we need to hear it. The universe is ending, nothing matters, so everything matters, so everyone matters. That echoes down the season too. Dan, Karvanista, Jericho, Claire and the others are all vital to their own stories, which in turn matter to the universe. Each a miniature disaster or a minor catastrophe, each fragile and vital, making their way across a landscape only slightly more certain than the Doctor’s own cautious traversal of her shattered memories and history. There too, the season attacks the personal head-on and in widescreen. The Doctor’s past remains untidy and ambiguous as the season finishes, just as it’s always been. The difference is that now the Doctor has mapped at least some of the obfuscated country of her previous lives and feels empowered enough to choose not to visit it again until she has no choice.

In every case, from companions to Time Lords to villains, these stories play out across a universe that’s alien long before it’s shattered, and that uncertainty and trauma ties the season to every moment of adversity the show has faced up to now. Lockdown ended. The pandemic has not. No one’s hiding behind the sofa anymore and nowhere near enough people are shielding behind masks but, still, on we go. Danger becoming, if not routine then certainly familiar, and in doing so, drawing fiction and reality ever closer. Less quantum fans, more a quantum show.

Flux by name and nature then. A story that shifts gears and focus with a wild abandon drawn from circumstance, but drawn also from its own joyous past. Issues of faith, narrative determinism and the very nature of the show itself rub shoulder with a wildly different personification of both time and space. Both are couched in stories the show has told a dozen times before but rarely with such curious poignancy. The Dalek and Sontaran plans as presented here are less universe-shattering and more oddly pitiable. Two species unable to move past the one objective that matters to them even as everything else collapses.

On a more personal level, Dan’s growth as a companion counterpoints this. Dan growing into his new life and using it to make his old life better is one of the season’s sweetest moments. It’s coupled too with the move to Liverpool, which simultaneously builds on the Sheffield setting of the previous seasons, moves the show out of Cardiff and London and serves to focus the idea that everyone and everywhere matters. The tunnels beneath Liverpool are key to saving the day, regardless of what side of the Pennines they’re on.

Looked at this way, the Flux and what it brings is an active benefit; new takes on old stories, new approaches to the biggest elements of the show’s past and using them, as the show so often has, to build its future.

But at its core, this season is about one of the most fundamental concepts of the show: change. The acknowledgement of mortality that has always been baked into the very concept of regeneration. The show always survives. The Doctor always survives. We always survive. None of us are the same when we’re done

It’s here that the show pulls one last trick. The Doctor’s discovery that her time is running out is a moment every one of her predecessors has experienced. Here, though, it’s presented as a centring moment. The universe has been all but destroyed, and then saved but perhaps not reset. The Flux is dealt with. Everything is different aside from the constant of change. It’s no wonder this Doctor doesn’t rail against her misfortune or fight the process when it finally begins (The Power of the Doctor). She welcomes it, not as a release but as a moment of normality. Nothing is the same, aside from the process which will enable her to keep pace with the universe she worships and embodies. Living the values she transmitted across the fourth wall, especially in this, a familiar moment of certainty, ending a season of flux.

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Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Title Page

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

THE HALLOWEEN APOCALYPSE

WAR OF THE SONTARANS

ONCE, UPON TIME

VILLAGE OF THE ANGELS

SURVIVORS OF THE FLUX

THE VANQUISHERS

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY