Doctor Who: Flux – Chapter Five: Survivors of the Flux

Doctor Who: Flux has reached its penultimate episode with “Survivors of the Flux.” It was an episode that answers some important questions and set up the conflict for the finale.

At the end of “Village of the Angels,” The Doctor has seemingly been turned into a Weeping Angel. She has really been teleported to a spacecraft run by Awosk (Barbara Flynn), the mysterious woman in “Once, Upon Time.” Awosk uses this as an opportunity to explain her plan. Yaz, Dan, and Jericho have been trapped in the early 20^th Century for over three years and they travel the globe to find out when the world will end. The episode also chronicles the rise of a mysterious man called Prentis (Craig Parkinson) and his role in UNIT.

Doctor Who: Flux has swung from telling sprawling stories from across the universe, to episodes that can work as self-contained stories, i.e. “War of the Sontarans” and “Village of the Angels.” “Survivors of the Flux” returns to being a big sprawling story that spans from Earth throughout the 20^th Century to the space between universes. It seemed like an episode that a lot was going on but not much happened.

The Doctor’s storyline was mostly talking and exposition as she speaks with Awosk. It was like the Doctor Who version of The Architect scene in The Matrix Reloaded. It was the scene where the main character learns the truth about their origins and their world. In The Doctor’s case, Awosk tells the Time Lord that she was a member of the Division who controlled the universe. They seem to have acted like TVA in Loki, an organisation that secretly controls and guides the multiverse. Because The Doctor kept interrupting The Division’s schemes Awosk takes the reasonable step to destroy the universe.

Awosk also offers The Doctor a deal that she can give the Time Lord her memories back. It was similar to Stryker making Wolverine an offer towards the end of X-Men 2. And like Wolverine, The Doctor rejected the offer. As The Doctor points out she would never make that deal. All versions of The Doctor would save lives above their own interests.

Whilst the storyline involving The Doctor and Awosk sounds interesting, it suffered from the same problem that blighted Chris Chibnall’s run of Doctor Who. Compared to The Matrix films there was action and a build-up to justify the exposition-heavy moments and scenes like Neo finding out about the truth in The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded were Earth-shattering to him.

The series was attempting to have a fun Indiana Jones tone with Yaz and Dan’s adventure. They were travelling the Earth looking for items and finding people to help decode them. They have to face assassins and it was fun to see Yaz take the lead because she’s the most experienced time traveller and a police officer by trade. They had the most to do because they were raiding temples, avoiding bombs, fighting assassins, and looking for ways to get back to the present day.

However, even Yaz and Dan’s storyline had issues. This was a storyline that was filled with cringy comedy. An example of this was when the trio went to a hermit living in the mountains of Nepal. The hermit kept making rubbish jokes and saying he was teasing them. The way the episode was edited the trio seemed to be able to travel across the globe just by boat. Their journey takes them from Mexico, to Constantinople, to Nepal, to the Great Wall of China, and backtrack to Liverpool.

Their actions end up seeming irrelevant. They go to the Great Wall of China to leave a message for Karvanista (Craige Els) so he could save them, but Karvanista ended up having his own issues. The trio ended up having a Deus ex Machina in the form of Joseph Williamson suddenly appearing and Dan figuring out they needed to go to the Williamson Tunnels in Liverpool. It was like bad fan fiction.

There have been articles claiming “Survivors of the Flux” was game-changing because it revealed the existence of the multiverse. However, the multiverse isn’t a new concept in Doctor Who. Series 2 had a two-part story where The Doctor, Rose, and Mickey were teleported into another universe and the Thirteenth Doctor did go into a parallel universe controlled by a space frog. Doctor Who was doing multiverse stories before they were cool.

Chris Chibnall has fallen back to his worst traits as a writer for this episode. He reverted to exposition instead of action or drama and made interesting ideas and situations dull. It’s far from being the worst episode of his run, but it was a let-down after the excellence of “Village of the Angels.”