It’s been quite a while since I wrote my reviews of series 12 of Doctor Who; I saw series 13 with Lorelei Rivers only a few months after its initial broadcast, but I really wanted to see it again with Grace on DVD before reviewing it, and I only accomplished that a few weeks ago. Yes, I said “weeks”; I have rather been dreading tackling it, because it ain’t pretty. Series 13 consists of one six-part story entitled “Flux”, and given its low overall quality I think it best to handle it as I handled “The Trial of a Time Lord” or Torchwood‘s “Miracle Day“, in a single review covering all of its manifold problems.
I started all of my reviews of Series 12 in much the same way as I did every review of a 6th Doctor story: by saying something good about it, so as to force myself to be as objective as possible. And while I’ve already blown that in the previous paragraph, I think I can be forgiven considering what I had to work with here; still, it’s a practice that proved its worth when thinking about those other two collections of execrable rubbish, so I’m going to give it a go here. First, “Flux” isn’t unremittingly bad; two of the episodes (a third of the story) were quite watchable, and I’d go as far as to say chapter 2, “War of the Sontarans”, was actually good if one disregards the Flux-related crap, which isn’t difficult to do. The concept of the alternate history where Russia is inhabited by Sontarans is weird, but fun, and we’e seen similar historical screw-ups created by time-tampering before. Chapter 4, “Village of the Angels” had too many problems to be really good, but it was watchable and the flaws wouldn’t have been irremediable if worked over by a decent script editor; it also featured the only really interesting, engaging guest character of the whole 6-part story, the psychic researcher Professor Jericho, who would not have been out of place in a 3rd or 4th Doctor adventure. That’s certainly appropriate, given that the episode is set in 1967, but also surprising, given Chibnall’s apparent inability to dependably create interesting characters while also serving as showrunner.
The rest of the characters are, as is typical for Chibnall, more like descriptions than personalities. Many of the cast are probably very competent actors, but even the finest thespian can’t conjure Hamlet out of lackluster dialogue draped carelessly over a checklist. Dan isn’t a strong or interesting enough new companion to balance out the creepily-codependent Yaz; Vinder and Bel are just collections of lines rather than actual characters we might conceivably care about; the dog-faced boy oscillates between annoying and silly; and none of the villains go beyond “generic baddie in weird makeup” except for Snake Dude, who doesn’t seem to actually have a dramatic function except to complicate the already-convoluted plot even more unnecessarily (but maybe might have something to do with the Mara if Chibnall had the sense to actually connect his stories to the Whovian canon instead of merely sprinkling random references to past characters & events into his script while trying to invalidate the framework in which they were embedded). And though in the past Doctor Who was known for making even minor characters interesting, in here they might as well have script names like “Dan’s sweetheart”, “psychic woman”, “little girl”, and “old people” for all the development Chibnall gives them.
And then there’s the titular Apocalypse of the Week, the Flux, which manages to be dreadfully boring despite supposedly wiping out half of the universe. Part of the reason is that Doctor Who has steadily inflated its threats for 60 years, and we’ve already seen “malevolent Time Lord unleashes a chaos wave that destroys much of Creation” way back in 1981’s Logopolis. Another part is that it doesn’t actually make much sense; Chibnall seems unsure of exactly what it’s doing or how it’s doing it, which is why it can somehow be stopped by a wall of interlinked spaceships built by an advanced-but-not-remotely-godlike alien race we’ve never heard of before despite their supposedly being linked with humanity on some deep level. And why didn’t the Flux destroy the sun and other planets, when it sure looked like it was doing that in other parts of the universe back in Chapter One?
The real answer is, unfortunately, that the Flux is a naked metaphor, an in-universe representation of what Chibnall is trying to do with the Whoniverse: utterly destroy it in order to create his own, new Whoniverse without the slightest regard for anything that came before. Tecteun is thus revealed as a sort of self-insert character, a deranged control freak who, after failing to remake everything in her own image and likeness via more modestly-megalomaniacal means (Tecteun via her creepy spook “Division”, itself a blatant ripoff of the Time Lords’ Celestial Intervention Agency, and Chibnall via all his Hapless Child monkeyshines), decide to just destroy everything (including, in Chibnall’s case, Gallifrey itself) out of spite. “The Flux” is thus the culmination of a trend that started with mere spoiling, progressed to outright vandalism, and eventually arrived at wholesale arson of a venerable and beloved mythos. Was the extended metaphor intentional? I honestly don’t think Chibnall is that clever, but if it isn’t his subconscious was tattling on him. 
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Because I did want to write a much longer story than is typical for me, I’ve had to develop a new technique; typically, even my full-length short stories come into my head almost fully formed, and all I need to do is write them down and fill in a few details. But that won’t work for this one, which is currently over 7000 words and only in the vicinity of half-done (generally speaking, anything under 10,000 words is considered a short story; longer than that is in novelette territory). So what I’m doing is writing each episode of the tale as it comes into my head, then fitting the pieces into the larger whole and editing as necessary. The first scene I wrote was a pivotal one perhaps halfway through the narrative; I then wrote the first full scene, then the climax and denouement, and now I’m beginning to fill in. The characters are based upon Grace and myself, the setting is New Orleans in 1931, and the genre is adventure mixed with black comedy (which is why I recently re-watched The Avengers and watched The Thin Man series for the first time). I’m enjoying the process, and writing action and dialog for Grace’s character is almost like having her nearby, which is part of why I’m doing it. And I’m already thinking of other situations for the characters. So even though the word “therapeutic” is probably overused in this sort of context, it’s the right one. And I hope it will give my readers a little (fictionalized) taste of Grace’s personality, and the chemistry that made us such a great team.
