Doctor Who (2005) 13-01: Flux - Chapter One: The Halloween Apocalypse

Episode:

863

|

Writer:

Chris Chibnall

|

Director:

Jamie Magnus Stone

|

Air Date:

31-Oct-2021

---

Hi, Sci-Fi Adventures should still be on a break, but I felt the urge to write something about Doctor Who... because Russell T Davies is coming back! Can't say I saw that coming. I'm not sure his next run is going to be the second coming of the Eccleston/Tennant era of the show, and I'm not sure I even want it to be, but I do feel cautiously optimistic about it. More optimistic than I am about Chris Chibnall's final series anyway.

Though with this series the Doctor Who revival does finally pulls ahead of Red Dwarf, which aired its Series XII in 2017 (even though it's really only had 11 seasons). Even more importantly, this is the first season since Doctor Who began where the Doctor's number is the same as the season number! (Neither of these two facts are important).

Series 13 is going to be massively cut down compared to a normal Doctor Who season, as COVID meant they were only able to produce six episodes, but for the first time since Trial of a Time Lord in 1986 we're getting one story playing out over an entire series! This is also the first six-parter since the Fourth Doctor's The Armageddon Factor in 1979, though the episodes are double the length these days.

To be honest I was seriously considering skipping the rest of Chibnall's run and waiting for the RTD episodes, but when I learned how short it was going to be I figured I might as well stick with it. It's the best marketing they could've done! Though the Doctor Who team also tried a bunch of other clever tricks to get me to watch, like projecting a spaceship in the sky and deleting their social media accounts. Plus they've brought in a new companion from Liverpool! Tom Baker and Liz Sladen were both from Liverpool as well, so I'm considering this to be a good sign.

What am I expecting from series 13? Fewer people on screen, less location filming in South Africa, and a frustratingly reactive and ineffective Doctor. I'm not expecting a regeneration though as I know we've got three Jodie Whittaker specials to come after this. I'm not expecting to enjoy it much, but I wouldn't mind being surprised.

Okay I'll be screencapping the episode in its entirety and writing some commentary underneath so this review is going to be full of SPOILERS.

---

The episode begins in medias res with the Doctor and her one remaining companion Yaz hanging upside from a floating gravbar, chatting with a hologram of a guy called Karvanista. Turn out that the restraints around their feet will release and let them drop into a sea of deadly boiling acid in a few seconds, and if they somehow survive that his kill discs will blast them, and if they somehow survive them the whole planet will be destroyed in four minutes. As death traps go it's fairly elaborate. Oh plus he also mentions that these are the final hours of planet Earth, so they've got that to think about as well.

I have to give the episode points here, as it doesn't flash "3 hours earlier..." on screen and then jump back in time to show how they got into this predicament. I'm really sick of series doing that! Instead they just tell us during a bit of clichéd banter where the Doctor admits that she can't help feel like this is partially her fault.

It also plays fair without how they get out of it, even if it's a bit daft. They pull an implausible last-second synchronised flip to grab onto the bar, which the Doctor then hot-wires to get them flying away from the deadly drones. She also tries to get their handcuffs open, which should be simple as they came from her pocket and they're voice activated, but it's not recognising the command. She's fairly sure it's "release" but she's not sure what accent to use.

Turns out the release word was "relief", as I guess the handcuffs heard her wrong when she was setting them up. To be honest I've been struggling a bit to make out the dialogue myself; there's been lots of loud music and yelling. The 'relief' gag has been the funniest thing in the episode so far though, even if that is faint praise.

Right now though my mind's on that mysterious mattress on the console room floor that just happened to be there for them to land on when they dropped through the Tardis' doors. I get that Yaz is probably sleeping over these days, but don't they have bedrooms on this thing?

Oh by the way, just realised, this is the first time in Doctor Who history that we've had an all-female Tardis crew. For a limited time only.

Meanwhile in Liverpool, 1820, a wealthy businessman tries to assure his associate that there's a good reason he's hiring so many people to build a series of pointless tunnels that go nowhere. He can't actually tell him the reason though, as it would blow his mind. So there's a mystery for later.

This part of the episode's actually based on a true story. A tobacco merchant and landowner called Joseph Williamson carried out extensive excavations under Edge Hill, Liverpool and we're still not entirely sure why. Maybe he wanted to help the poor by giving them chance to earn some money and learn some skills while keeping their pride. Maybe he wanted to dig up a bunch of sandstone from secret unlicensed quarrying. Maybe he just wanted an underground lair.

The episode jumps forward 201 years to 2021, where this guy is acting as a tour guide in the Museum of Liverpool. It's clear he really loves this stuff, so it's a bit of a shame that he doesn't actually work here. His friend Diane, who does work here, has to come and throw him out because he keeps doing this! They're still on for Halloween drinks tonight though.

This is a really weird way to set up the new companion, Dan, though I suppose it'll be helpful to have someone who knows a bit of history on the crew. By the way, there's a poster on the back wall about the Williamson Tunnels, though the scene doesn't draw too much attention to it.

Meanwhile the Doctor and Yaz are trying to race back to Earth, when she's suddenly hijacked into a psychic vision.

This means that the episode cuts to a fourth set of characters, walking through a moody quarry in future armour. They're here to check on an incredibly dangerous prisoner that they call 'Swarm', who may have been locked up here since the dawn of the universe. Hang on, haven't we done this already in The Impossible Planet?

Swarm just lets himself out though and then kills them by evaporating them into a cloud of crystals with a thought. So he's not really the kind of villain you want to meet face to face.

Then he absorbs the crystals to regenerate a bit, or something. There's an actor credited for 'Old Swarm' so it seems like they may have done a switch here, not that you can tell with the heavy makeup he's got on. He's got a head like a skull with a bunch of crystals sticking out of it, that's all I know.

So I guess this is the guy who sent the Doctor this vision, because he just wanted her to know that he's escaped.

The Doctor snaps back to reality and Yaz draws her attention to something leaking from the creepy crystal fingers. The Doctor scans it and then reassures Yaz that absolutely nothing's wrong with her or the Tardis, in a completely unreassuring kind of way.

I don't know if they're heading to any place in particular on Earth but they've arrived on a particular day: October 31st 2021. Hey that's when the episode aired!

The episode catches up to Dan again to reveal that he works in a food bank, but he's too proud to take even a can of soup for himself. We also learn that he lives right next to Anfield football stadium. I had to go check Google Maps to see if this street really exists, and it does... but it doesn't look like this. It's really close, but my guess is that what we're looking at here is actually a road in Cardiff with some seamless CGI augmentation. Either that or Google Maps is lying to me.

Dan goes home, deals with a couple of trick or treaters (one of them being an adult without a costume, holding a pack of eggs), then opens his empty fridge and wishes aloud that he'd taken that can of soup. Always nice to see a director go to the extra trouble of setting up a 'camera looking out of the fridge/cupboard/etc.' shot.

Then an alien with a glowing axe smashes his way into the house, and Dan just assumes he's another trick or treater. This is actually Karvanista, Vanquisher of a Thousand Civilisations, the villain who nearly defeated the Doctor in the teaser.

Karvanista removes his helmet to reveal that he looks like a cute little giant Yorkshire Terrier, but Dan's still not convinced he's an alien. I mean anyone who's seen the classic Who episode Survival knows that you could make a costume just as good as this on a BBC budget in the 80s.

He tries to explain to Dan that touching his soft fur and cute doggy nose is defiling the sacred legacy of his forebears, but that just sets Dan up to make a joke about him looking nothing like four bears, so he loses patience and seals him up in a stun cube.

Alright that's all the Halloween references in the episode done with now I think.

The Doctor and Yaz arrive too late to catch Karvanista, but they do arrive in the right place somehow and they're able to use Dan's laptop to scan for alien ships (she waved the sonic at it, so it can do that now). It turns out that Karvanista's not far away. Also there's a massive alien fleet with seven billion ships up there!

Turns out it hasn't escaped their attention that the fancy laptop's a bit incongruous in this house, and they escape just in time before the booby trap inside shrinks the building down to a couple of inches high!

Fortunately it only shrinks this house and nothing else, so the neighbours are fine. Well, okay it takes a bit of a bathroom wall, but that's only a minor inconvenience to the person sitting on the toilet. Don't think too hard about the gas main.

So the laptop was actually planted there deliberately as a trap for the Doctor? That's such a Master thing to do. It wasn't him though, even though the shrinking tech is totally his gimmick.

Meanwhile, in the Arctic Circle, a fifth set of characters are introduced. Man, it's a good thing I'm literally making notes as I'm going to need them to keep track of all these characters that keep appearing.

We get a bit of kitchen sink normalcy as the guy asks where the chilies are and is told by the woman he put them in the fridge, then this weird drone drops by to warn them about... something. The gravest of emergencies I guess. She's not interested though and smashes it with a hammer so they can ignore it.

The scene reminds me of the Doctor's undercover life in Fugitive of the Judoon, but we don't get any hints of who these two actually are.

Alright, we're back with Dan and the dog. The scene reveals that Dan is in a tiny cage that gives him a shock if he touches the bar, but Karvanista needs him alive for some reason. He assures Dan that there's absolutely nothing special about him though; he's insignificant and irrelevant.

Back on Earth, the Doctor picks up Dan's tiny house, which is really considerate of her. I mean it might be possible to get it back to full size after they've dealt with Karvanista, so Dan can collect his stuff from it, or live in it, or whatever. Yaz questions why she's so keen to track Karvanista anyway, as it turns out she was trying to hunt him down even before he mentioned that the Earth was doomed and then kidnapped a wannabe tour guide.

Just then they're interrupted by a woman called Claire who knows who the Doctor is. She tells them that she's going to meet them in their future, her past, and she's going home the long way apparently. She wasn't even expecting to see them here.

Seems like there's a proper Doctor Who mystery here, especially as the 'long way' often means getting to a point in time by living through the years in between, but the Doctor's already in the middle of another story so she has to leave her and run into the Tardis to pursue Karvanista.

There she finds yet another mystery: the door's in the wrong place. In fact there are two sets of doors now, which has never happened before (to my knowledge). Still, they made it inside and that's the important thing. These possibly catastrophic malfunctions can wait.

The two of them pilot the Tardis as an actual team, with Yaz cross-referencing space-temporal locations like a pro. I like this upgraded version of Yaz, she gets to do stuff. Though she still can't get a straight answer out of the Doctor when it comes to what's up with Karvanista, the Tardis, or her mind. Which is really annoying actually and I don't like it.

Then the episode cuts back to Claire, who's finally made it to her house...

...only to find herself face to face with a Weeping Angel! Okay the Angel doesn't show its face when you're looking at it, but you know what I mean. We haven't seen one of these show up in Doctor Who for ages, which is good because their appearances were definitely giving diminishing returns.

Claire then goes and has a two minute adventure of her own, as she makes a valiant effort to get into her front door without blinking or looking away from the Angel. She fails, badly, and is sent back in time.

The thing is, she already knows what the Angels are and how to deal with them, so this is almost certainly the version of Claire we just met, not her past self from before she met the Doctor. Maybe this Claire's going to end up having an adventure with her younger self, taking on the Weeping Angels with the Doctor. That's why she was taking the long way home: she knew what was coming and wasn't eager to face it. Or maybe not.

Then the episode cuts to Observation Outpost Rose somewhere in deep space to give another new character two minutes of screen time. This is Observation Officer Vinder and he's currently recording his 21,754th status report. So if they're daily then that's 60 years of solitary confinement he's suffered so far. I'm surprised he still bothers to shave or sort out his hair.

Turns out that everything here remains the same as it was in his last 21,753 reports, but he wants to express his gratitude for being able to see such an amazing sight. Then he ends his report by telling his superiors to go to hell.

Babylon 5 1-01: Midnight on the Firing Line

This scene immediately reminded me of these guys in their observation outpost at the start of Babylon 5's first episode. Doctor Who has a bit of a bad reputation for wobbly sets and rubbish effects, but the production values we get these days are miles ahead of this. The hair looks better too.

Suddenly an alert goes off and Vinder gets something else to worry about other than crushing tedium.

There's a massive cloud of destruction out there annihilating entire planets in seconds! Gas giants are crumbling to dust out there, and it's a very pretty visual effect. I'm not surprised Vinder was thankful for such an impressive view; you almost never get to see three planets right next to each other like this.

While that's happening, Swarm decides to go visit that couple living up in the Arctic Circle. He instantly evaporates the guy who put his chilies in the fridge, so he's gone now. No explanation for who he was. He also evaporates the woman, or at least that's what it looks like at first.

Turns out he was transforming her back into his sister! He even transformed her clothes.

Seems like crystals sticking out of the head may not be a normal trait for his species. His sister's mostly just got lots of glitter makeup on her.

Alright, it's been five and a half minutes so the episode's finally ready to check on what The Doctor and Yaz are doing. They've located Karvanista's ship, somewhere in a very blue part of space, and materialised the Tardis on board. It took a bit of effort though due to the unusual temporal residue around it. I wonder if that's what transformed the hull into a Japanese roof.

The Doctor and Yaz sort out the security with "virus particles" (from Orphan 55?) and then split up... which is a totally sensible thing to do in this case because Yaz knows what she's doing and is perfectly capable of rescuing Dan on her own. Hopefully. Plus it means that the Doctor can confront Karvanista in private and reveal that she's hunting him down because she knows that he's part of the Division!

Wait, what's the Division? Are those the ones the Doctor used to work for, who wiped her memory afterwards?

Meanwhile Yaz meets Dan and realises that his ridiculous cage is ridiculously booby trapped. But she's got it covered and releases him without trouble. Competent Yaz really is the best Yaz.

You know now that I think about it, the interior of this place has a bit of a Japanese feel as well. Plus Karvanista's dressed like a samurai.

The Doctor fails to get any information about the Division, but that's partly because she's distracted by what's going on with the console. Karvanista reveals that that right now he's busy with a massive coordinated attempt to save the entire human race from being destroyed by the Flux, with Dan being his designated human. Each of his race, the Lupari, are paired with a single human and are honour-bound to save them in the event of the ultimate crisis. There are 250 births and 100 deaths every minute, so it couldn't have been easy for them to work this system out.

I'm not sure I like this twist to be honest. I mean the idea of a race of aliens who feel bonded to one particular species and will do anything to save them in their time of need is great, and I hope humanity returns the favour someday. It's just that it makes no sense on Doctor Who, where the Earth is threatened every other week. Where were they during the 800 other catastrophes?

We've seen the Doctor misinterpret someone's actions and assume that they're hostile in the past, Demons of the Punjab springs to mind, but it's not quite the same this time. For one thing Karvanista really is everything she thinks he is, it's just that he's been roped into this other job at the moment. He doesn't even want to save Dan, in fact he's a total dick to him, and the moment he gets his weapons back on line he starts shooting at the Doctor and Yaz with his laser axe.

So the Lupari fleet isn't a threat to Earth, but this cloud definitely is. It's apparently ripping through the structure of the universe, erasing the galaxy, a bit like that wave of entropy in Logopolis. Maybe the Doctor needs to go back to that radio telescope and send another signal to fix it... and hopefully not fall off and regenerate this time.

Meanwhile, Vinder's still abandoning Outpost Rose. That's basically all that happens here. There's some nice effects though, as we see the station crumple up behind him. Lots of CGI in this episode. Bit of an interesting name for a space station by the way, Rose. I wonder if that's just coincidence.

The Doctor, Yaz and Dan escape Karvanista's blaster fire and make it to the safety of the Tardis, though they find themselves entering through a new door in the floor. In fact there's a whole police box embedded in there, so the doors are the wrong way around with the blue side of the door facing into the console room. Also I don't remember the glowing pillars looking so worn and chipped. Seems like the Tardis isn't doing so well right now.

It just has to hang on another two years though and then we'll get the new redesign! Hopefully! I mean every time the modern series has changed showrunner we've gotten a new console room and I don't see any reason why that won't happen when RTD comes back.

I'm hoping for something that's a little bit like a cross between the 12th Doctor's Tardis and Ruth's Tardis. Except better somehow. Maybe they could throw in a bit of 8's steampunk console room as well, as long as they leave out the giant pillars that get in the way and block the view.

Anyway the new companion's finally on the Tardis and his first reaction is great. First he criticises the door, then he mentions that he had a mate who had one of these, only his was a bit bigger. So the Doctor gives him something else to react to: his tiny house.

Oh what now? The human brain can only hold so many pieces of information in short term memory at once!

Thirty trillion light years. How far is that away? I feel like I've asked this before.

Oh right, the prison that the Doctor was being held in last episode (Revolution of the Daleks) was 79 billion light years away, and I figured out in my review that it was twice as far as the most distant object in the known universe, galaxy GN-z11. So what we're looking at here is 938 times as far away as the most distant object we know about. It may be the most distant object in all of science fiction, ever. At least until I publish my first novel Thirty Trillion and One Light Years From Home.

Hey, the Sontarans are finally back, looking a bit more like their classic series design... or so I've been told. I can see a bit of a difference in the frown but I probably wouldn't have noticed anything if I hadn't read about it. They just look like Sontarans to me, which is good. They're one of the better magic tricks of makeup as the eyes and mouth are blended with the giant egg-shaped head so well that it just looks like they've got a giant egg-shaped head.

Anyway 90% of the scene is just about the guy on the right mocking his mate for looking old and ugly. Just really hammering it home, to the poor guy's obvious discomfort. But they eventually mention that there's a conflict going on that'll dwarf all that have come before, and that's very much aligned with their interests. By the way, I think the one on the left is played by Dan Starkey, who has been on Doctor Who before. In fact he was Eleven's friend Strax, in addition to a bunch of other Sontarans. In fact I suppose he must be the world's leading expert in portraying Sontarans right now, so that's some smart casting.

Meanwhile the Doctor's confused when the Tardis brings her to the edge of Earth's solar system.

Personally I'm confused about space being so colourful here. You only have to look up at night to see that this isn't quite right.

I always like a shot of the Tardis hanging in space with the door open though, and it's even better when the companions are properly awed by the view. Dan wonders how he can breathe and Yaz is the one who answers, telling him there's a protective air bubble.

And then the Cloister Bell rings to spoil the mood. Other things that happen to spoil the mood include: the Flux appearing, and the Doctor getting another psychic vision.

This time her vision is of the death of a civilisation being wiped out by the Flux. To say it's a horrific sight is an understatement: this is one of the worst looking shots in modern Doctor Who!

To be fair there's only so much money you can spend on six second scene and they did go to the trouble of hiring a bunch of actors and dressing them up in new costumes and makeup. Plus the destruction in the background is fairly good.

I guess what this is showing is that the Flux isn't just here in our solar system right now, it's covering a vast amount of space and destroying everything it comes close to. Either that or these guys lived on Pluto.

The Doctor gets yanked away again into another psychic vision, except this time she's able to have an actual conversation with the villain, who has changed into a uniform with a stripe down his trousers and one pointy shoulder. Maybe both shoulders are pointy, it's hard to tell.

Swarm reveals that he's actually a pre-Hartnell villain that the Doctor defeated during her time with the Division! Or maybe just pre-Pertwee if the Master was lying in The Timeless Children and her mind wipe actually happened after she was working for the Time Lords as Troughton. Either way he claims he's faced the Doctor many times and she's forgotten all the ways she beat him, so now he has the advantage. Or, looking at it another way, she's always won in the past, and she's had 2000 years worth of experience facing the most dangerous threats in the galaxy since then, so maybe she has the advantage.

She wakes up and realises that the Flux is coming straight for the Tardis! The ship isn't working quite right at the moment and they can't just vanish into yesterday, so she decides to head to Earth. Uh, that seems like the exact place they don't want to be.

The cloud evaporates Neptune, which is both good and bad. Bad, because Neptune never hurt anyone, but good because it means that there's going to be a reset button at some point in the story. Now we know that anything can just be undone by the end of the six parter and none of the consequences are necessarily going to stick!

With the Earth facing imminent annihilation, the episode decides to cut to Dan's friend Diane hanging out in front of a creepy mansion, waiting for him to show up for their Halloween drinks.

Seriously, this is what we're doing now? To call this episode unfocused would be an understatement.

A voice calls to her to go inside the house she's waiting next to. She doesn't really want to go inside, the bright light and smoke is kind of a red flag, but she can't stop herself from walking up the stairs and through the door. Inside she finds herself in a massive pitch black flooded room/quarry... along with Swarm's evil sister.

Up in space the Doctor sends Karvanista a formation for his ships to use that will allow them to form an impenetrable survival structure to protect the Earth, and he's in a helpful mood at the moment so he goes along with it.

Okay there are 7 billion ships moving in place to surround a planet with a surface area of 196.7 million square miles. So that's 35.6 ships per square mile right? Well less actually, seeing as they're miles above the ground. I feel like there's going to be holes.

The Doctor tries to move the Tardis inside the barrier, but it's being pulled into the Flux and can't break free. If the Lupari battalion can somehow withstand it there's a chance the Tardis can too, but all the doors swing open and they start getting dragged out. Which makes me wonder how three exits can open to the same entrance. As a last ditch effort to save the day, the Doctor gets her percussive maintenance hammer and smashes the console, releasing the time vortex energy directly into the cloud. This is the stuff that turned Rose into a god once, so it's pretty powerful.

It does nothing. Also I guess they're out of fuel now? I don't actually have a clue.

Then we get a brief reminder of all the different disconnected stories that have been interrupting this episode of Doctor Who. There's a shot of Vinder in his escape pod, we see Claire appearing in the past, Williamson looks grim in front of his tunnelling operation, Diane is scared in the dark, Karvanista looks loveable on his spaceship, the Weeping Angel is still hanging out by the house, the Sontarans are hyped up for war, and Swarm and his sister look sinister in their glittery makeup.

The episode comes back to the Doctor so she can tell us it's the end of the universe and then the episode's over. The situation can't be all that serious though, as it doesn't even end with the words "TO BE CONTINUED" flying past as shiny 3D text.


CONCLUSION

---

It seems like Chris Chibnall's three series run is following the modern Doctor Who formula of starting relatively restrained, introducing familiar elements over time, and then escalating to insanity at the end. I figured that I knew what I was going to get from a Chibnall episode by now, but this isn't exactly what I expected. The episode has problems for sure, but to his credit many of them are different problems to the ones the series was struggling with at the start of his run.

For me I think there are two reasons I wasn't enjoying it all that much:

First, I feel like I've just watched a season trailer extended to run for 50 minutes. I mean it's not unusual for an episode or movie to keep jumping between different characters doing their own thing, but the way this did it was bizarre. It was like the story kept being interrupted by cold opens from other episodes, as if there were six different Doctor Who stories playing out simultaneously, and it turns out that's kind of confusing. It made it very easy to forget half of it as well.

Second, the villain's scheme is apparently to destroy everything with an inexplicable cloud of destruction that can go anywhere and break all the laws of physics (plus it destroys Neptune and that's never going to stick). So there's a big feeling of 'this is all ridiculous, none of this really matters' hanging over it. It's a bit like one of those big daft fun comic book crossover events where something absurd is threatening the entire multiverse, except all the characters crossing over are new and nothing's really all that fun. If your overall story is nonsense it's even more important to make the moments entertaining on their own, but this was mostly just setting up mysteries. (Also it reminded me a little of the episode where the trees sprang up across the world overnight to protect the Earth from a solar flare, except in this case it was space dogs appearing overnight. Man I hated that episode.)

On plus side it's got no shortage of flashy visual effects. The production values are high on this one. It also moved like a rocket, never giving me a chance to lose interest... or the characters a chance to really discuss anything. People had been hoping that dropping the number of companions would give Yaz more screen time and stuff to do, and I feel like the answers are 'no' and 'yes' respectively. The Doctor and Yaz appear for just under half the episode, about 24 minutes, but Yaz has become an experienced and knowledgeable time traveller since the last series and she works a lot better as a character now. I'm glad that she's finally getting a chance to shine, but I'm also optimistic about new companion Dan joining the crew.

Dan comes off as a bit weird, as the three things we learn about him are that he's too broke to afford food, he's kind, and he keeps getting thrown out of a museum for impersonating a tour guide. That's kind of eccentric. I can see him being a companion to both Yaz and the Doctor, asking questions that Yaz is able to answer. Plus the actor seems pretty good, but then that's true of everyone here. The actor playing Karvanista did especially well getting any kind of performance through that giant adorable dog head, as did the Sontarans.

It's a shame I wasn't able to like the Doctor as much in this story. She spends the whole episode being secretive and evasive, refusing to tell Yaz what the leaking Tardis means, that she's having visions, or about the Division, and it got kind of old. I do like that the episode's getting back to the Timeless Child story though. Don't get me wrong, I still hate that The Timeless Children claimed that the Doctor had countless regenerations called the Doctor that all travelled around in a blue police box long before Hartnell, as the way his character grew from a grumpy old man to Earth-saving hero during his time with Ian and Barbara and other humans is great. Turning the First Doctor from an origin to a temporary reset is really frustrating. BUT, the Doctor's search for the Division to get some answers implies that there's more to the story than we've been told, and there's another shoe out there waiting to drop. As long as the plot keeps going there's still hope!

I've been seeing a lot of positive reviews for this episode online from people who've been down on the last couple of series, and it's great that people are still giving the show a chance and aren't just hate-watching it. Personally I wasn't as impressed, though I did try to come into it with an open mind! I wasn't bored though, and I think the series could really improve from here if the rest of the episodes focus on just one or two threads at a time instead of trying to carry them all forward simultaneously.

So yeah, not my favourite episode of Doctor Who, but I've seen a lot worse.

---

COMING SOON

Thanks for reading! I know it's been a while since I covered any Babylon 5, but you're going to have to wait a little longer I'm afraid as the next review... isn't that. It probably won't be Doctor Who either.

On the plus side, I wasn't even supposed to be publishing articles in November, so this is bonus content you're getting here. Mysterious bonus content.