Doctor Who Flux - It makes no sense yet here we are...

Having negatively-at-worst-tepidly-at-best reviewed the first two series of Mr Chibnall’s Dr Who reign I feel that it is only fair that I now review his third and final series “Flux” thusly – What fun!  I must start by stating that I have absolutely no idea what is really going on … but it doesn’t seem to matter.  The frenetic pace of cutting between locations seems to have increased even further across this series than the last two and yet all seems to make more sense.  Perhaps because it doesn't...?

The villains in this series are stand-out.  Some of the best we’ve had in years.  The Ravagers - a triumph of make-up and costume design that deserve some kind of industry award.  The “Grand Serpant” – a villain so narcissistic that he berates his minions for agreeing with him.  And Tecteun – the Doctor’s evil stepmother who has all the authority of Peggy Ashcroft as Mrs Moore while exuding all the evil of Rosa Klebb.  

All the Timeless Child plot holes seem so long ago now that I’ve forgotten what all the fuss was about.  I’d wondered how Dr Who was going to survive with the Doctor now seemingly immortal but the issue of the Timeless Child actually brings up a lot of interesting questions about the nature of identity.  While we don’t all have past lives that have been erased we all have memories that we bury, sides of ourselves that we do our best no to confront and family histories that we are curious about but do we want to know really…?  And our memories are often false anyway… The Doctor hiding the fob watch from herself inside the Tardis console seems an interesting comment on such themes.  I think I see now where they are trying to go with this…  Of course, there will be those who will question whether the Ruth Doctor is a ret-con too far but then again we can’t get William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton or Jon Pertwee to reprise their roles without prising their coffins open or using digital trickery, body doubles and archive footage and they’ve done almost all of that before during the Matt Smith era so inventing past Doctors that we know nothing about is perhaps the only way to go here.  We could bring back Tom Baker but he is an octogenarian and they’ve already done that too so … 

The supporting cast got a lot more to do this time around too with Yaz no longer a stick-in-the-mud, Dan/John Bishop getting to wave a wok around and the companions sent off on their own adventure in the way that used to happen in this old episodes where William Hartnell had to have a holiday scheduled in…  Jerico looking suitably scientific … And I liked Vinder.  And bringing in Mary Secole as the historical cameo was inspired… Whittaker herself also gets more substantial dialogue and triple dilemmas…  There’s a lot of things I still don’t understand – what was the Traveller?  But the preposterousness of the over-arching Flux storyline is in many ways the genius of the piece producing fantastic lines of dialogue like:

“There is no planet called Time?”

“Yet here we are, Doctor.”