Holistic Review: Like the season opener, Survivors of the Flux tells several stories in parallel, but this time the disparate plot threads are woven together more successfully and with a greater sense of purpose; and one storyline, in particular, had me glued to my screen.

On several occasions while watching Survivors of the Flux, the thought that went through my head was, "I'm gonna have to eat my words now." So, here is me, admitting that I was wrong: rather than hurtling madly through a string of unconnected episodes toward a hasty and unsatisfying episode-six conclusion, the latter half of Flux does, in fact, seem to be gaining positive momentum and tying its disparate threads together in a satisfying way. I also certainly backhanded Chris Chibnall last week with my comment about how other writers' episodes tended to be better than his; I was, of course, forgetting about my own glowing response to The Timeless Children, and this episode proves me wrong twice over.

Had we gone five episodes without getting some answers, I'd have been really concerned, but Survivors of the Flux finally begins parcelling out explanations at a steady (not rushed) pace, for some of the story's biggest dangling questions. Which means, thankfully, there's no longer as much pressure on the final episode to wrap everything up. This week's episode addresses (wholly or partially) 12 out of my 29 questions:

• Question 1 is half-resolved, along with question 2: What project is Williamson working on, and for whom? and Why are the allegedly-pointless tunnels so important? We now understand that Williamson's tunnel system has, by design, connected to a series of doorways that each lead to a different point in space and time. (Another echo of Nightmare Café for any of my fellow fans out there!) The 'for whom' question is still unresolved, though the implication is that Williamson didn't build these tunnels for anyone but himself; the strong hint of madness about his portrayal may be designed to imply that he, like Claire, is a percipient who foresaw the coming battle and that these tunnels and doorways could save the planet. (It's pretty likely that this theory also answers question 23, "What kind of task does he think he's meant to obey?") Of course, we have yet to learn exactly how the tunnels will become Earth's saving grace — at the moment, they've done nothing but enable the Sontarans to invade more quickly! — but it's pretty clear now that they will indeed play a major part in unfolding events.
• Question 3 is much clearer now: in the immediate term, Swarm and Azure want revenge on Division for their aeons of imprisonment. One assumes that they have other goals as well — ie, what were they up to the first time, before the Division halted their reign of terror? — but this is a satisfying answer for their actions thus far. However, there are a couple of points that still need some clarification:
  1. I'm not entirely clear yet how the Temple of Atropos fits into their scheme, but maybe Swarm and Azure were somehow responsible for diverting Yaz and Vinder to the temple, explicitly so that they could be plugged into the corrupted Mouri slots, knowing that the Doctor would fling herself into the timestorm to save them, and suspecting that she would then encounter part of her long-hidden timestream, which would send her after Division, creating a path that they could follow. Except that convoluted explanation doesn't really pass muster; the Doctor's been trying to track down Division all along, and the only reason she found them this time is because they suddenly pinged her location and abducted her.
  2. Did Swarm know that Tecteun would eventually bring the Doctor to Division? Their plan does, after all, seem to hinge on being able to piggyback onto the Doctor's trail in order to reach the Division's inter-universe space station slash seed bank, which seems more reliant on chance than certainty.
• The answer to question 4 — "How does Swarm's containment chamber malfunction? Had he recruited an ally to help him escape, or did he somehow manage to disable it himself?" — is heavily implied, when Swarm says to Tecteun, "You released me." (Bet she's regretting that decision now. The expression 'fighting fire with fire' became a cliché for a reason!)
• Question 9 is resolved. The answer to "Where is the Flux from?" is: it was deliberately unleashed by Division, from outside our universe. We also now understand, more or less, what the Flux does: it's a compression field, indeed shaped — just as the crossfade effects shot of the Doctor's iris, in The Halloween Apocalypse, implied — like a ring or a sphere, collapsing inward toward the Earth at its center. The Doctor believes it can be reversed, thus de-compressing the entire Universe and, presumably, restoring it to its former glory. (It seems likely that the Universe will, at the very least, be badly damaged — you probably can't just zip up a star that's been ripped in half and expect it to be hunky-dory thereafter — but as inevitable reset buttons go, I guess this is no worse than any other.) The other piece of the puzzle that episode 5 solves is the question "Why?", which we didn't know to ask back in episode 1, when the Flux still seemed like a natural-ish occurrence or a revenge weapon unleashed by Swarm. As it turns out, the Division engineered the Flux in order to, basically, cover their tracks while they moved to a new universe to restart their experiment of playing God. It's beyond ghastly, and very much reminiscent of Light in Ghost Light, who wanted to destroy the whole planet just because evolution didn't play by his rules. I can't imagine why Division would want to go to all the trouble of obliterating the entire universe that they'd spent millennia influencing! But I suspect this lends further support to the theory that they have something to hide.
• We're all but guaranteed an answer next week to question 14, "What's the significance of the Doctor's vision about the old floating patchwork house?"
• I am delighted to report that I also have to eat my words with regard to question 16, "How are the Sontarans tied into the overarching Flux narrative? (Or are they?)" I am absolutely delighted to learn that the Sontarans will, indeed, have a role to play in the season finale, which seems to be motivated by their desire for revenge after the events of War of the Sontarans. So while that episode may not have been directly tied into the arc plot, its ramifications will be, and I'm perfectly happy with that. What a relief!
• Question 20 is now obvious. "Speaking of Williamson, what happens to him after he leaves Yaz?" We know now that he disappeared back into one of his tunnel doorways, which perhaps only he can see. He, at least, appears to have arrived on Atropos completely by accident, though it seems likely that his doorways are being drawn toward spacetime locations which have a higher number of quantum connections to the Flux.
• Question 24 — "Why does Swarm use the Passengers to take hostages?" — is resolved around the episode's midpoint: the purpose of Passenger, as I suspected, isn't just to keep the Doctor at bay by threatening the lives of innocents. Swarm and Azure are converting many of those hostages into a power source (though it's not clear whether the power is being absorbed by the Ravagers themselves, or some technological contraption) to grow the time-force, until they've harvested enough energy to punch a psychotemporal bridge through the boundary of the universe, enabling them to follow the Doctor's trail straight to Division HQ.
• Question 25 — "Who is this mysterious woman named Awsok?" — is definitively answered, and can I just pat myself on the back for a moment for correctly suspecting that Awsok was actually Tecteun, and that the golden thing on her back was a hat very much like Romana's in City of Death? Thank you, thank you. Please, no cries of "but those were the obvious answers", let me bask in my own percipient glory.
• Finally, question 27 — "why are the Division so determined to track down the Doctor?" — is addressed, though — as with question 13 — I'm not sure I find the answer completely satisfactory. Tecteun's motivations in bringing the Doctor to Division seem to be two-fold. First: though her original intention was to kill off Universe 1 with the Doctor still in it, the Doctor mucked up her plans by disrupting the Flux and making progress toward salvaging the universe. So, as a backup plan, she extracted the Doctor from Universe 1 so that the Flux could proceed to collapse it uninhibited. Second: once the Doctor is on Division, Tecteun considers an alternative. The Doctor clearly wants nothing more than her memories restored, so Tecteun offers her a deal that could benefit them both (while corrupting the Doctor's soul): rejoin the Division, and assist with essentially terraforming Universe 2 as a redo of their attempts to shape Universe 1, and regain her stolen memories; or, return to the inevitably-dying Universe 1 and try futilely to save it, but forego the opportunity to access her forgotten memories forever. It's a fantastically dramatic choice for the Doctor to be offered, and shrewd of Tecteun to leverage exactly what the Doctor wants most. There are, however, some staggeringly large blind spots in her logic. First, you can't have both "the Doctor will imperil my plan if I leave her in Universe 1" and "I'm willing to put you back in Universe 1 where you will surely die". Sure, the Doctor has disrupted the first Flux wave, but what makes Tecteun think that the Doctor would've had any chance of surviving the second Flux wave, especially if separated from her TARDIS? An equally head-scratching question is, why does Tecteun think that partnering up with the Doctor to reform Universe 2 would ever work, when the Doctor is the one who royally screwed up Universe 1 in the first place (from her perspective)? And especially why does she think this would work after a troublemaker like the Doctor remembers in vivid detail how horribly Division abused her, and why exactly she escaped them in the first place? The Doctor is hardly inclined to work with her now, even without being able to remember every single way Tecteun exploited her. There's zero chance that regaining her memories is going to make her more compliant.

I mean, y'all, we have now checked off a lot of questions. And that's not including 13 (arguably), 17, and most of 21, which were answered earlier. That brings the overall total, as of episode 5, to 15 questions addressed (52%), and that includes most of the really important ones. For those keeping count, the questions that remain to be answered are numbers 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 15, 18, 19, 22, 26, 28, and 29. Honestly, at this point, enough has been explained that the arc makes sense, so even if part six doesn't answer anything more, I'm feeling relatively content.

This week, we only tack on a handful of new questions:

30. How does the Grand Serpent know about Yaz, Dan, and Jericho's attempts to pin down the end-date of the world? This is very likely related to question #31...
31. How is the Grand Serpent travelling in time? Is he himself from a time-sensitive race, or has he acquired a time machine?
32. How did the closure of UNIT in 2017 enable the Grand Serpent to get access to the UK's missiles by 2021?
33. What is the Grand Serpent getting out of his alliance with the Sontarans? (Or, to put it another way, why is he bothering to infiltrate UNIT in the first place?)
34. How do the Ravagers manage to follow the Doctor's trail? (Their victims aren't connected to the Doctor in any way, so while converting them into fuel might give them the power that they need to punch through the universe, we haven't been told how exactly they were able to track the Doctor's location.)
35. Will Claire be rescued from 1967? (I was hoping we'd see her again this week!)

Like The Halloween Apocalypse, Survivors of the Flux spans a multitude of simultaneous plot threads unfolding across space and time, and sets its sights squarely on furthering the arc story. This time, however, now that the pieces of the puzzle are already in place and we understand some of the stakes, it's far more successful, because rather than a sense that Chibnall is throwing two handfuls of balls up in the air and just hoping he can juggle them all, Survivors of the Flux shows, if not all of the balls, certainly most of them in motion, forming a coherent and compelling story that's plainly moving in organized fashion toward an endgame. This gives me a lot more hope than I had last week that the season finale is going to be engrossing rather than befuddling.

Broadly speaking, Survivors of the Flux follows four primary plot threads.

Thread 1: 1904

Since becoming stranded in 1901, Yaz and Dan — together with fellow time-orphan Professor Jericho — have spent the last three years devoting their time to carrying out a mission from the Doctor: investigate prophecies, now retroactively influenced by the Flux, about a date when the Earth will potentially face an apocalypse. Under most circumstances, I would be shocked that Yaz and company were apparently able to narrow down a single date from the no-doubt-numerous apocalyptic prophecies found in various cultures around the world. (And cults, for that matter, though I feel relatively confident in assuming that, say, QAnon would not fall under the Doctor's description of "some smart people".) However, that's the beauty of the Flux as a plot catalyst: not only does it enable a degree of historical imprecision for dramatic license, it also seems to be bending causality in its direction. In our timeline, there might have been dozens to hundreds of distinct apocalypses predicted, but with the Flux affecting (and massively overwriting) spacetime, all predictions are now going to be pointing toward it.

So, this quest leads our intrepid heroes on an Edwardian worldwide tour through Mexico, Turkey, Nepal, China, and England. (How they pay for all this steamship travel, plus food and clothes and abseiling supplies and paint, etc, etc, we are never informed. Perhaps Dan has learned to play banjo, and busks on the city streets.)

They're also fretting, constantly, about how to find their way back home, since time-travel options in 1904 are even slimmer than they are in 2021. Impressively, rather than wallowing in misery about this dilemma, the three of them simply soldier on, doggedly following leads in the faith that, eventually, their mission will guide them to a way back home.

Yaz comes out of this episode looking even more competent, in some ways, than the Doctor. She glides gracefully down into the tomb, quickly identifies and retrieves the pot, springs into action and covers up the dynamite (well, partially) with rugs (thus saving several lives), she's immediately on high alert with their waiter, and to top it all off, she bests an assassin of the Grand Serpent in hand-to-hand combat, a moment that really had me cheering. I really hope Ryan and Graham get to meet this new evolved Yaz, to see just how breathtakingly knowledgeable and capable she's become.

Yaz: "Roll him under the bed for now. [...] Then come nightfall, when it's quiet, shove his body overboard."
They gawp at her.
Yaz: (sharpish) "What?"
Jericho: "You seem remarkably proficient at this, Miss Khan."
Yaz: "There's no use being squeamish. We've got the future to save."

The Yaz/Doctor relationship even gets some significant development via the Doctor's holographic message. (In fact, I'd argue it's the best they've had in ages, and they're not even really in the same room or having a proper conversation! That's partially a backhanded compliment about their typical lack of heart-to-heart scenes, but mostly a very genuine compliment about the difficulty of scripting a monologue like this as effectively as Chibnall has done.) It's pretty momentous that the Doctor has entrusted the future safety of the Earth to Yaz, and the strength of their friendship shines through the Doctor's words and the longing expressions on both of their faces. It's clearly not the first time Yaz has watched this message, and she's pining for the Doctor's company. I hope this separation, and reaffirmation of how much they mean to one another, prompts a really honest conversation between Yaz and the Doctor once they're reunited. Turning for a moment to fashion, I love that Yaz is getting a lot more mileage out of her early-1900s jackets these days. (It's kind of a shame she doesn't ring up ol' Nikola to say hi, while she's in the temporal area!)

This week, it becomes clear why Dan is on team TARDIS: as a born-and-bred Liverpudlian with an abiding interest in his city's history, he's the only person who recognizes the name and significance of Joseph Williamson, which enables our adventurers to find their way to his tunnels and locate the time-spanning doorways that could take them home. Dan also gets a nice moment helping Yaz pin down their attacker, though otherwise he's coming off as a bit of a klutz, in contrast to Yaz' cool-under-pressure capability. (So now, rather than Jamie and Zoe, Yaz and Dan are starting to remind me of Steven and Dodo!)

Dan: "Aaaaaah!"
He thuds into the temple floor.
Yaz: (unbothered, without looking) "Hiya."

Like Dodo, his ebullient good humor is proving to be a defining character trait: I loved that, even in the heat of battle against a murderous waiter, Dan threatens him with, "Answer the question, or I'll bite your toes!" (I can literally hear Jackie Lane delivering that line.) The dawning look of recognition on Bishop's face, as Dan hears Williamson's name, is very well-played. (And a shout-out for the fetching blue jacket he wears in Liverpool.)

Again, though, I wish Dan and Yaz would get some time to bond onscreen. They have a fun playful teasing relationship, and I love the look of understanding they share when they both immediately twig the 'dog' reference, but that's all superficial. Even after having spent three years together, I still don't necessarily get the sense that they care about one another, much less why. Dan does, at least, seem to think that Yaz considers him a reliable listening ear, judging from the look he gives Jericho when they find Yaz moping in their room, but there's no evidence that this is actually true. In the following exchange, Dan gives Yaz an opening to talk about how much she misses the Doctor, how much TARDIS travel means to her, etc, and she just deflects. Even when Dan tries to reassure her, all she gives him is a reluctant hint of a smile; she doesn't open up at all. Maybe that's because she feels like her friends' problems are just as bad or worse than her own, but I'm starting to feel like the guarded thirteenth Doctor and Yaz were made for one another:

Dan: "You okay?"
Yaz: (bottling up) "Mhm."

Jericho (Kevin McNally) doesn't get much development this week — his character comes across as "stereotypical English academic" despite the attention that was lavished on him last week — but I'm delighted that he's still palling around with Yaz and Dan. But he does get some nice character moments, as when he shrewdly notices that he needs to extricate himself from the room so that Dan and Yaz can chat.

I only really have four complaints about this plot thread. One: What do they actually accomplish, really? This is a lot of work to pinpoint a date that — judging by the Sontaran attack on the Lupari fleet — is probably going to become pretty self-evident before long. I'll eat my words here too, if it turns out that Yaz and Dan were able to warn the Lupari well in advance, and they've got some impressive Sontaran-repelling strategies up their sleeves, but at the moment it seems like a fairly chintzy goal to hang an entire storyline on.

Two: Following their visit to Nepal, their storyline temporarily veers into what seems to be a dead end. Karvanista gets their message, sure, but there's literally nothing he can do to help, and if by some miracle he gets time-travel technology next week (from the Sontarans maybe?), Dan is no longer at the Great Wall and is likely to no longer be in 1904. So I'm not sure what all this "get your dog" business was about.

Three, which is really a corollary to Two: the whole Great Wall of China scene is the only part of the episode that I wish we could excise. Even aside from point two above, it sticks out from the rest of the episode like a sore thumb, by virtue of being pointless (thus far), illogical, and groan-inducing. How did they carry that much paint? (Obviously they couldn't have! Was this a multi-day project?) And why does the message have to be so cheesy? The rest of the episode feels polished and professional; this scene feels like it's been tacked on from a sophomoric comedy series. (Part of me instead wants to say "...from a Moffat-era episode" which I guess accurately reflects my harshest critiques of his tenure.)

Four: I confess that I'm seriously beginning to tire of Williamson, whose zany antics put me right in the same headspace as being the only sober person trying to converse with a group of drunk friends, ie, I find him almost intolerably annoying. The moment he over-dramatically sneered "A ship? A ship at sea?", I was over it, and then he assaulted Dan — "Was that ghostly, sir? Did ya feel it?" — at which point I was about ready to smack him myself. Oh my goodness, he's so loathsome for a good guy! Was the real Joseph Williamson this unpleasant? If so, do I praise Steve Oram for doing a really good job of making a philanthropic ally unlikeable, or can I wish that he had played the part with a bit more subtlety and approachability? Still, on the upside, I love how much tourism this storyline is gonna drive to Liverpool to see the Williamson Tunnels. (I know I'll be one of them eventually!)

Nepalese seer and hermit Kumar (Kammy Darweish) is, without competition, the funniest character in the episode. You can tell that Darweish is having a whale of a time, and his line deliveries are killer: take, for example, his deadpan "That's your problem, I don't know." along with many others I'll be quoting at length below. He cycles through so many different emotions, with dramatic peaks and valleys (compare "Telephone?" to "I'll take anything!"), that I feel like this scene is destined to find a well-deserved place on Darweish's showreel.

Among the smaller parts in this thread, Guy List has two lines as the waiter who's secretly an assassin working for the Grand Serpent. He delivers his first line with casual nonchalance, belying the character's murderous intentions, but I'm a bit less fond of "You can't fight the future!" (which is, admittedly, a pretty clichéd line which is a lot harder to deliver naturalistically). Still, the fight scene is great! George Caple has a single scene as Alfie, a friendly young lad whom the TARDIS crew befriend in their search for Williamson's tunnels. His endearing-yet-misogynistic protectiveness of Yaz gives his character a bit of personality, even though it is a fairly typical trait for the time period... and unfortunately still far too typical today.

Thread 2: UNIT

Excuse me for a moment while I finish patting myself on the back again for correctly predicting the Grand Serpent's return. I've now learned that this role was written specifically for Craig Parkinson, and I fully understand why Chibnall was so eager to get him on board. It's an absolute joy to see Parkinson again.

This week, the Grand Serpent reveals a hitherto-unexpected lifelong ambition: to be in charge of UNIT. (?!?) I mean, it strikes me as the sort of goal that's awfully unlikely and small-potatoes for an alien warlord, especially one of his stature, unless the Grand Serpent has designs on Earth and feels like UNIT is standing in his way? Which, in this new post-Flux universe, is certainly a legitimate possibility, given that everyone and their aunt wants to occupy the Earth these days.

Gratifyingly, we learn that the Grand Serpent's title isn't just for show; he actually does have the very icky power to kill people by manifesting an alien snake in their esophagus. (For some reason, this process causes the victim's face to bulge most unnaturally; perhaps the snake is corporealized using the victim's own flesh and bones? Though this seems unlikely, given that each snake gets (re-?)absorbed into the Grand Serpent's body.) I absolutely love the snake-monster he creates; it looks like a spiny cross between a sidewinder and a Demogorgon from Stranger Things.

Paired with Parkinson for the majority of the Great Serpent's plot thread is the equally superb Robert Bathurst as UNIT founder General Farquhar. Here I must separate the actor from the character, because while I'm in love with Bathurst's performance, I'm wary about Farquhar himself. I've always been under the impression, mainly from The Invasion, that it was Lethbridge-Stewart who advocated for — indeed, insisted upon — the founding of UNIT, following the "London event", as The Web of Fear is referred to in the series of (mostly excellent) Lethbridge-Stewart novels. Sure enough, the TARDIS wiki confirms my recollection, along with my subsequent impression that this plot thread — in which Farquhar begins assembling UNIT on behalf of the United Nations as early as 1958 — is a direct contradiction of established canon (or at least fanon) as we knew it. So I might have to chew on this gristle for a while before I get to liking it. But hey, it wouldn't be the first time UNIT got mired in a dating controversy. It's not even the only time this episode! (cf. its definitive pinpointing of The Web of Fear to just after 1967.) Alternatively: it's entirely possible that this is another example of the Flux distorting history.

At any rate, Bathurst is just superb in the role. His Farquhar is deeply knowledgeable but doesn't take life too seriously. His perpetual smile and light-hearted demeanor seems like a rather enjoyably peculiar fit for UNIT, though it certainly explains his entertaining description of Lethbridge-Stewart:

Farquhar: "That's our new corporal. Brought him in after we missed the whole thing at the Post Office Tower. He's a shouter, but he's very good. Keeps everyone on their toes."

(Two thumbs up for that reference, by the way, officially linking The War Machines into UNIT history!) Bathurst perfectly captures the feel of that early-60s cultured posh dialogue on lines like "So, er, what's your field of expertise, Prentis? Can you say, entre nous?", and "Yes, I, I must admit I'm a little at sea. It's not my area of expertise. I'm a military man, this is beyond our normal ken. I mean, where does one start?" So many of his line readings are just delightful, but I'll also single out his gentle laugh and calm affability on "Nonsense! The boffins have been working on this for ages."

Exciting new dating controversies aside, it's a thrill not only to see UNIT back, but to witness more of its history. As a bonus, we finally get an explanation for why UNIT was suddenly decommissioned several years ago. It seemed abrupt and inexplicable at the time, but I never expected it to become part of a longer storytelling arc. Do you think Chibnall was planning this revelation the whole time??? If so, that really is some pretty impressive long-form storytelling.

Better yet, another familiar face is returning after 6 years: Kate Stewart (Jemma Redgrave), who we last saw back in 2015's The Zygon Inversion. And she gives a shout-out to Osgood! I love this season! Like Yaz, Kate is cool as a cucumber, and completely unintimidated by the Grand Serpent when she stands up to him (at which, unlike everyone else before her, she actually succeeds). It helps, of course, that she's done her homework. Not only has she managed to deduce how the Great Serpent murders his enemies, and taken steps to protect herself, she's also dug into all of the coverups in the UNIT files designed to conceal the Grand Serpent's presence: "It all suggested to me a non-terrestrial lifeform with hostile intent, possibly one with the ability to move in time." Her very thorough investigation and preparation really demonstrates just how shrewd Kate is.

In his pair of scenes as Millington, Nicholas Blane is excellent as exactly the sort of "good old boy" that the third Doctor would have lunched with at the club, enjoying their fine steaks with wine, affably bossing the waitstaff around, and having a generally pompous sense of self. In fact, I'm willing to be that, a decade or so earlier, the two of them did exactly that.

At the episode's end, we learn that the Grand Serpent is secretly allied with Sontaran Commander Stenck (Jonathan Watson), for reasons yet to be determined. The scene of a phalanx of Sontarans bursting into the tunnels made me realize that one of my big objections to episode 2 is about to be resolved: Yaz will get to fight the Sontarans after all! Hooray!

The date of the unspecified tragedy that Yaz and friends are chasing down sets up our finale episode, which as we now know will involve (at least in part) the Sontarans mounting another invasion of the Earth. The Doctor makes a very good point — and, indeed, a pretty obvious one — that if the Earth is one of the few planets to survive the Flux, it'll become a target for displaced aliens, both those peacefully looking for a new home, and those who want to take it by force. The Sontarans, it seems, have just beaten everyone else to the punch, thanks to their "man on the inside". One wonders if they'll be joined by any other opportunists, not limited to Daleks and Cybermen? (I would really like some Wirrn, please.)

Thread 3: Bel and Vinder

Poor Bel (Thaddea Graham) and Vinder (Jacob Anderson) came so close to reuniting this week! Alas, it was not meant to be: no doubt we must save such heartstring-tugging scenes for our dramatic season finale. But it's going to be a lot of fun to finally see these two skilled actors playing off one another. Loved Anderson's delivery of "No, I was pretty sure you could.", and his reaction when he meets Diane.

Speaking of Di (Nadia Albina), it's wonderful to see her properly back in the storyline again! Her response to Vinder's appearance — "Finally, someone with a gun!" — suggests not only that she's a spitfire, but also that she's coping with her imprisonment a lot better than others probably are (and, I admit, a lot better than I thought she would be!).

A fun and unexpected twist comes toward the episode's end, as Karvanista (Craige Els) forcibly recalls Bel's "borrowed" Lupari ship, and just as the two of them confront one another, armed and angry... their ship is suddenly boarded by Sontarans, forcing them into an awkward alliance. I sense I'll enjoy Karvanista more when he's bouncing off Bel, who's no shrinking violet and will give just as good as she gets, than when he's insulting his favorite punching-bag Dan.

Thread 4: the Doctor and the Division

It's this thread that really had me gripped throughout the episode. So much over the last two years has really built to this moment, when the Doctor finally confronts the Division that robbed her of her memories, and — even more poignantly — the adopted mother who rescued/kidnapped her, experimented on her, and then gave her up... and that's just what we knew about. Turns out there's a lot more to that picture, and we've still only just scratched the surface.

As for the Division itself, we get explicit confirmation that it was originally a Gallifreyan organization, but it expanded throughout the universe to keep pace with Time Lord influence. Tecteun also confirms that the Division guides and shapes events on other planets, which makes them sound exactly like the Celestial Intervention Agency first mentioned in The Deadly Assassin. (And the Doctor knew about the CIA, so I wonder why she's so astonished to hear about the Division, and how the two organizations differ? Though presumably the CIA is, or was, a purely internal organization made up of only Time Lords, so the Division seems to be much broader in scope, at least in terms of recruitment.) I'm curious to know what sorts of changes the Division has made throughout the universe; Tecteun is very evasive on that point, speaking mainly in generalities.

Parallel universes have always been canon in Doctor Who, at least since 1970's Inferno, but I love that this episode makes them more integral to the series. I mean, we're not quite at Sliders level yet, but it seems like parallel-universe excursions might become a bit more common from this point onward. What's especially exciting is that Tecteun reveals that she knows the endpoint of the wormhole where she found the Doctor: it leads into some part of what I guess we'll call Universe 2, the universe (or one of the universes) immediately adjacent to ours. This is heady stuff, just enough information to whet our appetites without revealing anything too major.

The Division, however, is not very happy with the Doctor going off like a loose cannon and daring to meddle with their perfectly-ordered universe. Tecteun claims that they're trying to better the societies that need to be helped by an outside influence, but naturally we suspect that the Division is getting up to a little bit more than that. If for no other reason, Tecteun describes the Division's control of the universe as an "experiment", which suggests that they're probably worsening some societies, just to see what happens. And the Division is certainly a capricious god: when it looks like the Doctor might be on their trail again, even though she's not making any progress in tracking them down, the Division decides to play it safe, just in case, and relocate to a new universe. But of course they can't leave their old experiment unattended — for one thing, the Doctor might be able to piece together clues about the Division from what they've left behind — so instead, they wreck it, unleashing the Flux to compress the matter of their old universe as they flee to a new one, prepared to start all over again. (Talk about flouncing.)

The de facto leader of the Division these days is none other than Tecteun, now regenerated into the form of Barbara Flynn. The very fact that Tecteun is in charge of this sprawling organization, which has so abused the Doctor and is now plotting the destruction of the universe, is cause enough for concern. But then the Doctor learns that it truly is personal: Tecteun not only gave her over to the Division in the first place, but monitored her performance there too, and it was Tecteun herself who ordered that the Doctor's memories be wiped.

One thing I've learned about myself, after years of watching TV and films, is that I absolutely hate it when things of sentimental importance are taken away irrevocably. For example, the Doctor's memories, which we now discover have been stored in a Time Lord chameleon arch. (In hindsight, I'm kicking myself, but in the moment, I didn't pick up at all on the significance of the whispering that only the Doctor could hear. When the fob watch appeared onscreen, I gasped quite loudly.) I love the idea that her memories have been removed from her temporarily, leaving open the possibility that she may eventually recover them, at least a bit at a time, parcelled out like treasures which she has to hunt down. I do not like the idea that the only copy of them — as opposed to, say, the watch being the most convenient device for recovering all of her memories at once, but not her sole option — now exists in this chameleon arch, which I suspect is about to get destroyed next week. On one hand, that's good, because it means the Doctor won't be regaining her memories right away, but I don't want it to eliminate the possibility of her ever getting them back. That outcome would certainly open up more dramatic potential, assuming the series were willing to explore the impact of that loss on the Doctor, but that storyline has been done before, both times that Gallifrey has been destroyed. Plus, the prospect of the Doctor losing her memories permanently, with no hope of recovery, isn't fun or tantalizing, it's just depressing.

Along similar lines, I am distraught that Tecteun gets killed off by Swarm, after only two or three episodes. I feel like she would've made one of the most fascinating recurring adversaries in the history of the series. Take the Master, who's most compelling when their sparring gets at the heart of their fractured friendship; similarly, the Doctor and Tecteun have soooooo much personal history and antagonism to plumb for rich character development, especially since the Doctor doesn't even remember most of what Tecteun did to her. Tecteun isn't some random new adversary, she's a woman who's known the Doctor for all their lives, monitoring the Doctor remotely even when they weren't together. Nobody has history with the Doctor like that, and nobody — not even the Master — knows her that intimately. ("I'm Tecteun," she reveals, dramatically: "the woman you used to call 'mother'.") They must have loved one another early on, which makes for a fantastically complicated relationship, but the moment Tecteun began to see the Doctor as a scientific mystery, or worse, as a resource, she became one of those unscrupulous scientists that the Doctor has been battling ever since.

Tecteun: "Morality was always your flaw."
Doctor: "Morality is a strength."

What's fantastic is that Tecteun's turn to the dark side doesn't come as a shocking out-of-the-blue surprise; no, The Timeless Children hinted pretty strongly that Tecteun was deliberately experimenting on her young charge, killing her over and over again to satisfy her scientific curiosity to study (and master) the regenerative process. That alone is mind-bogglingly sadistic and cruel, but we didn't even know the full extent of her depravity (and almost certainly still don't). It seems that Tecteun was in charge of everything that happened to the Doctor between the moment she was discovered and the moment she escaped (or was discharged) from Division, up to and including her memory wipe. And in the years since, Tecteun assumed the amnesiac Doctor would be brought to heel and easy to control; but their thirst for adventure and intolerance of injustice was too powerful a motivator, and now it seems the Doctor slipped Tecteun's clutches, too, when he fled from Gallifrey in an untraceable TARDIS. Since that time, Tecteun has come to see the Doctor as a virus, tampering with the universe in ways not sanctioned by the Division, and disrupting the carefully-controlled "experiment" that Tecteun thought she had made of it.

Turning the Doctor's adopted mother into a villain was a genius move, and I'm very sad her potential has been cut short. I can only hope that when everything is un-compressed next week, Swarm's victims will be restored too. So here's me, hoping for an even bigger reset button than I had initially resigned myself to getting! Pitiful, I tell you, absolutely pitiful. In the meantime, I shall console myself with Flynn's superb delivery of lines like "Well, it's complex, but I suppose yes, right now, leadership falls to me."

Swarm (Sam Spruell) and Azure (Rochenda Sandall) have a couple of fleeting appearances this week, first when they reveal the true purpose of their Passengers, and second when they ambush the Doctor and Tecteun aboard Division. One thing I'm finding very compelling about the two of them is that they're setting up Time and Space as diametrically opposing forces. I don't understand yet how they're opposed, or what they want, or what specific powers or abilities Time possesses compared to Space, but it's a mind-blowing concept. Ever since Susan first defined the TARDIS acronym way back in the series' very first episode, the assumption has been that the dimensions of Time and Space were complementary or cooperative, or at least coexisted neutrally, being nothing more than natural constants of the universe. Redefining them as two powerful forces that are actually locked in primal conflict has the potential to cast a foundational tenet of the entire series in a dramatic new light. Hopefully part 6 will go into more depth about just how Time operates, why it needs to be restrained, what damage it would do if set free, and how Space is instrumental in counterbalancing it.

It's so nice to see an Ood again, in more than just a cameo appearance! (The Ood are just so adorable when they blink, aren't they? I need more Ood blinks in my life.) Even though this poor Ood, apparently a slave of sorts to Tecteun who's been brainwashed into destroying its own universe, isn't even given the dignity of a name. Simon Carew imbues the Ood with some personality through his charming (if restrained) body language, particularly as the Ood considers the Doctor's request, while Silas Carson's vocal performance captures the script's humor perfectly, emphasizing the inadvertent humor of the Ood's failure to understand human cultural references, through its servile robotic speech patterns.

If there's one thing that the Chibnall era has accomplished with standout excellence, it's to center the Doctor in the narrative, not just by dint of her being the most intelligent person in the room (as per usual) but actually giving the character some of her deepest development in, well, ever. Before now, the best the Doctor ever got was a story about his tutor teaching him to properly admire a daisy on a mountain, or the dangling reveal of the Doctor's true name that never went anywhere. Rather, it's always been the case - cf the prohibition in the Virgin novels, which I think I'm remembering correctly, against scenes being written from the Doctor's POV, because we the readers should never be privy to the Doctor's thought processes - that the Doctor was so near-mythic and unknowably alien that the most a scriptwriter could hope for was to reveal some new personality facet of the latest incarnation. But this, this is foundation-shaking information, and what luck for Jodie Whittaker that she gets to be the incumbent when the role takes such a dramatic turn. (Of course, we're also the lucky ones to have her!)

Understandably, her reunion with Tecteun is, shall we say, fraught. On one hand, the Doctor is finally meeting her adopted mother, the woman who raised her on Gallifrey, who — for the last couple of years, in our time — has probably been the one person in the universe who the Doctor wanted to meet more than anyone. On the other hand, she feels immensely betrayed by the way Tecteun used her, then discarded her memories. You can tell in Whittaker's performance that as much as the Doctor longs to get to know Tecteun, she's disgusted and horrified by what Tecteun has become, and because Tecteun is unrepentant about her behaviour (then and now), the Doctor essentially has no choice but to set aside her deep desire to get to know this woman, in favor of challenging her dangerous mindset. Tecteun and the Doctor go at it like hammer and tongs, volleying cutting remarks back and forth as they size one another up. What's great about scenes like that is that they often provide opportunities to outline the Doctor's mission statement in soundbite form, and the Division scenes include two exquisite examples, each of which epitomizes the Doctor's character:

Tecteun: "You won't be told, will you?"
Doctor: "It's a defining trait."
Doctor: "How much power do you imagine I have?!"
Tecteun: "You inspire. Make people question, rise up. You give them hope. That can be problematic."

Tecteun even tries to play the old 'you're just like me' card, claiming that the Doctor uses and discards people in exactly the same way she did:

Tecteun: "You judge me for giving you the journey of your lifetime? What do you do, Doctor? Pick people up, take them with you? You adopt them, use them, for reassurance, for company? They're your experiments, just as you were mine."

She's not totally wrong, but she is certainly wrong to make it a direct comparison, mainly because in the Doctor's case, consent is always involved (except at the very beginning of her freedom, with Ian and Barbara, which just goes to show how much she's outgrown any similarity to Tecteun).

The Doctor's lost history continues to get ever-more interesting. Survivors of the Flux teases us with a super easy solution to the mystery of her life: if she's just willing to abandon our universe to its fate and rejoin Tecteun and the Division, she can regain her lost memories, travel together with her to Universe 2, and track down the other end of the wormhole to find out where she presumably originated. All very neat and tidy, and worryingly easy for a millennia-old mystery that we didn't even know existed until the last couple of years. So Chibnall throws in some twists, by pointing out the very obvious, and quite possibly erroneous, assumptions that we've been making:

Doctor: "You assumed I came through that wormhole, but 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?"

I hadn't considered any of these possibilities, so I'm thrilled that Chibnall is continuing to expand the mystery just as it looks like the Doctor might be able to get some answers. I hope that the answers to these questions will be left for future showrunners to explore at their leisure, and I hope that they will gradually delve into them.

The choice that the Doctor's given is framed as an impossible one. How can the Doctor give up what might be her only opportunity to get the answers she's so desperate to learn? But of course, that's what Tecteun expects, and that's our narcissistic human perspective; for the Doctor, given those options, the choice is nowhere near as difficult. Of course she's going to choose the universe over her own memories, because she'll always choose saving lives, no matter what the personal cost, which truly, deeply, reinforces what a selfless hero she is.

Naturally, such a meaty plotline gives the thirteenth Doctor, and Jodie Whittaker, lots of great material. I love that, within 15 seconds of finding out the full extent of Tecteun's plan, the Doctor has already formulated a plan for saving the entire universe (via reset button, as expected, but at least it feels somewhat earned rather than gratuitous). Dangling a solution this early makes me think that her plan is not going to run smoothly, but as always, time will tell. One thing that I absolutely adore about Whittaker's thirteenth Doctor, which hit me powerfully during the hologram scene, is that — except during those moments when she clams up — she wears her heart on her sleeve. Many other Doctors have a tendency to be reserved, to disguise their true feelings behind bluster or silence or understatement, but not this Doctor. She's enthusiastically open and honest with her emotions: whether she's feeling excited, or melancholy, or angry, boy howdy will you know it. It's part of what makes her so attuned to the feelings of others, I think, and I suspect it's a great role model both for mental health and interpersonal relationships. Loved Whittaker's delivery of "What is it then? A demonstration of strength?", "Tough crowd.", and "Mate, we have to stop this!" She's also fantastic as the menacing, whispering, sibilant Weeping Angel voice: "Your friends are marooned where we left them. They are lost!" And her confrontation with Tecteun gives her Doctor some of the strongest scenes she's had; her delivery of "You denied me my life!" and "Maybe. I'll never know." are powerful.

At this point, I'm gonna go so far as to say that the reveal of the Doctor's true origins is the most gripping storyline that the show has ever created, and I can't get enough of it. It's hands-down, flat-out, by far the best story arc this series has ever told, and it's making the Whittaker years into a true highlight of Doctor Who.

This week, Segun Akinola's score disappears into the background for me again. I can't even point out any moments when I noticed it. But maybe I'll dig it again next week!

As for the sets, I mean, it's hard to top that Division set, isn't it? It's such an appealing blend of organic and artificial. The control room is just gorgeous, with pink lighting that echoes what appears to be a massive cherry tree in bloom, growing up through the center of the machinery and along the upper ledges like a monstrous bonsai flourishing beneath the room's transparent dome. The softness of the pink is a fantastic contrast with the matte black metal of the control equipment, especially the illuminated cut-out symbols that resemble alien lettering. Cleverly, the cherry tree, draped with tubes and illuminated from below, is positioned within the central console just like the time column of a TARDIS, a similarity echoed by the four hexagonal mirrors surrounding the console, the placement of which imply that Tecteun's console, too, is six-sided, just like a TARDIS console. They're very subtle details, but the implication is there. And on the subject of details, this set is full of them, my other favorites being the glass panel with cascading water, the puffs of drifting purple smoke, and the curio cabinets made up of hexagonal cubicles. I also love the room where the Doctor comes to, with its bulbous wicker chandeliers. And on a side-note, I'm late to the party on this one, but I've also just now noticed the fang-like protrusions bordering the Lupari main control panel, which is a striking little canine-appropriate detail!

This week, the bulging-face effect that accompanies the Great Serpent's murders is more cheesy than convincing. But otherwise, the effects this week are solid. As usual, Doctor Who excels with space-based effects. The Division space station suspended between the boundaries of two universes is an effect that fires the imagination, the graphic of the shrunken universe being devoured by the Flux is beautifully rendered, and the Ravagers' monolith, shaped like a skeletal claw, is a super creepy design. Also love the old-fashioned progress-via-map effect as previously seen in Marco Polo, and the way the Angel's hand actually sounds like stone when the Doctor raps her knuckles against it.

I guess I'm not yet the biggest fan of Azhur Saleem's direction, which is totally fine but not super memorable, only because I seem to favor a slightly flashy director. I find myself again wishing that Saleem would include more continuity in his shots: for example, why do we cut from the Doctor petrifying into the position of a Weeping Angel to a shot of her just standing there, hands by her sides, as the Ood revives her with a device that emits quantum realignment pulses? We can extrapolate that she's been reverted from Weeping Angel form (and pose) in the interim, but I think it would've been much more effective if the shot had begun with the Doctor un-petrified but still frozen in position until the device brought her around. However, I did love the low-angle shot of Parkinson as he says "I prefer to be called Grand Serpent", followed by a clever cut from his line "Well don't just stand there, man, call a doctor!" to, sure enough, the Doctor watching the Ood at work. And hopefully next week I'll become a full convert to Saleem's brilliance!

Minor points:

• Despite my avoidance of even the 'next time' promos, people online do insist on describing what they contain! So I got spoiled on the return of Kate and the Grand Serpent, and — thanks to my phone, which has decided that because I like Show X, I will also like Article about Show X with Unavoidable Spoilery Headline, which pops up unbidden in my notifications — I was led to believe, mere seconds before I hit 'play', that the Master was returning too, and therefore spent a few seconds looking very suspiciously at the Grand Serpent until I decided that his method of killing people wasn't very Mastery. (Turns out, the tweet that made me throw my phone down in horror was just Sacha Dhawan thanking people for sending him lovely handwritten notes! Awww.)

• At the start of the episode, I initially wondered "what's the point of making the Doctor a Weeping Angel if she's just going to turn back right away?" Thankfully, the episode does sort of address this; she's able to temporarily shake it off, but the Angel-form is ostensibly required for transport between dimensions... or at least, it amuses the Weeping Angels to briefly turn her into stone for that purpose.

• So, let's talk about this prophecy-engraved pot. Point #1: I'm very grateful that this episode raises the issue that if the TARDIS crew takes it for keeps — as Jericho, a white man from the 1960s, seems to think is their right — that would be cultural theft. Yaz quite rightly points this out and insists on them returning it, which I hope they were / will be able to do:

  Yaz: "Er, I'm, I'm still not sure about taking it."
  Jericho: "It's a discovery! It's our discovery!"
  Yaz: "Strictly speaking, it's theft. If we take it, we have to bring it back once we have it decoded. And re-seal the ceiling."

• Pot Point #2: This tiny pot doesn't seem to have any language-y markings on it at all, just some lovely pictographs. What I can just about make out is a repeating pattern of yellow squiggles (like chalices or keys) around the center, framing round dark (gourd-like) circles in the negative space between them, with another repeating decorative border at the lip and base of white rectangle-ish shapes (which might be beasts of burden). Symbols, certainly, but simple repeating symbols are much more likely to be decoration than language.

• Pot Point #3: More importantly, if this is indeed a Mayan temple, the Mayans used a different calendar, so you'd have to pinpoint the Mayan year in question, before you could be certain what month and day you were looking at on the Gregorian calendar.

• Pot Point #4: Why would someone in Constantinople be most qualified to decipher indigenous Mexican glyphs?

• In Once, Upon Time, why did Tecteun tell the Doctor not to bother looking for this place (ie, Division) if she was trying to bring her here eventually anyway?

• Okay, now this sudden wholesale shift from "the Division" to just "Division" is really beginning to annoy me. I even internalized it, probably from my notes, when I wrote the first draft of this review. Do you know how many times I had to paste the 'the' back in??? I HAVE NEVER TYPED THE WORD 'THE' SO MANY TIMES IN MY LIFE. In the bullet just above, I've left the omission as is, just above to prove my point. Grrrrr.

• Judging by the timestorm and the hungry time particles, pink and purple seem to have become the color shorthand for Time in this arc, if not in the entire Chibnall era. Blue, in contrast, represents Space. That trend isn't entirely consistent — among the Ravagers, Swarm is pink and purple whereas Azure is blue, but both claim to be emissaries of Time, and their time-force conversion machines (or whatever they're called) glow blue, too. Still, I wonder if it's meaningful that the Division station has pink lighting and a pink flowering tree, with gusts of purple smoke?

• Let's explain things we already know!

  Yaz: "If she can decipher those markings, we should have a date when the world is gonna be in terrible danger."
  Jericho: "She's matching the symbols to the ancient panels. We should have a translation soon."
  Yaz: "Basically, this pot can decipher the exact date the world is gonna end."

• "We have a partial date," says Yaz, "December 5, but no year." HMMMMM I wonder what year that could turn out to be. *glances at next week's airdate* Chibnall's really done quite a fun job of matching up the scripts for these episodes to their actual airdates, which can't have been easy given the potential for unexpected COVID-related delays. I love it, and am very impressed!

• Poor beleaguered Dan!

  Dan: "Why do I have to be the stowaway? Can't we take turns?"

• Beautiful. Sheer poetry!

  Waiter: "One lump or two, sir?"
  Jericho: "One, please!"
  Waiter: (bashes him across the head, just once, with the teakettle)

• Poor beleaguered Dan #2!

  Dan: "Hang on, under the bed's where I sleep!"

• Despite my uncertainty about this newly-revised founding of UNIT, I'm delighted that they again make explicit that it was originally a United Nations taskforce, despite the real-life UN's desire in recent years to put some distance between themselves and the UK's most famous fictional extraterrestrial hunters.

• I was very worried, during their first scene together, that "Prentis" was about to turn around at any second and shoot Farquhar straight through the heart... but of course, he still needs the man alive at that point.

• Lovely character moment and delivery by Whittaker:

  Doctor: "I know you do. ...I hope you said 'I miss you too', else that bit's weird."

• Just to say that I absolutely love knowing now that "ablute" is also a verb! (I've only ever heard the noun form, as far as I can recall!)

• You tell 'er, Doctor! Nicely said. (Thankfully Tecteun responds rather better to this backtalk than my great-grandmother would have. The story my mother always told was that Grankie asked her to take some rolls of toilet paper upstairs, my mother replied that she didn't want to, and Grankie said "Don't sass me!" What I would've given to see Tecteun snap back with that. Then again, I feel relatively certain that Grankie never used the word 'reductive'.)

  Doctor: "Just tell me, where are we?"
  Tecteun: "You're being very reductive."
  Doctor: "And you're being evasive. A completely transparent power move, and not very effective."

• Another point firmly scored for the Doctor!

  Tecteun: "Of course you have a lot of questions. It must be hard to know where to start!"
  Doctor: "No, not hard at all. The hard bit is getting you to deign to answer."

• Oooohhhh slam dunk, Doctor.

  Doctor: "Are you in charge of it, or just behaving like you are?"

• So what I'm getting from this episode is that the Lupari originally built seven billion and one Flux-withstanding ships, but one and only one ship failed to show up for species recall, which was okay because they needed exactly seven billion ships to form the last-minute barrier around Earth, so it would've been surplus to requirements anyway. Very convenient, says me! (See also: the mysterious malfunction that causes one and only one ship to drift away, thus necessitating their present need for the one single backup replacement ship they built.)

• Is Vinder using something like a vortex manipulator to travel? Though I'm pretty sure his is purely spatial.

• Time to Eat My Words #3: maybe the Flux didn't become irrelevant after it hit the Earth. Maybe the Doctor's trick with the vortex energy actually worked! That would also explain why the Earth still has night and day periods, if the Flux never actually reached the sun.

  Tecteun: "Even then, you interfered! Disrupting the Flux just as it came into existence. Throwing yourself and a TARDIS in front of it!"

• OH MY GOODNESS I love the traditional giant not-at-all-top-secret UNIT sign posted right in front of their HQ!!!!! That really made my fan-heart swell with joy.

• On my first viewing, I didn't hear Nicholas Courtney's dialogue and, shockingly, didn't pick up on Farquhar's reference to him, either. I'd been wondering why Lethbridge-Stewart wasn't at least name-checked, until I stumbled upon a captioned screenshot of this scene on Twitter afterward, and ran back to the episode to check it out. (I absolutely adore that his offscreen line gets Courtney into the end credits again. Hooray!)

• I find it interesting that, in 1967, UNIT doesn't quite recognize the TARDIS yet!

• Well now I wanna know more about this unearthly "sample spoor" (or is it a "sample spore"?) that UNIT apparently has on hand to test its equipment on.

• Gosh, how likely is it that UNIT had such advanced handheld human-detecting technology in 1967?!

• What luck that (a) Vinder got absorbed into the same Passenger form that took Diane, and (b) she hadn't already been converted into fuel for Swarm and Azure!

• Time to Eat My Words #4: OH OKAY, I guess I have to take it all back, Vinder: you actually did a great job helping Dan to find Diane. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I should never have doubted you and been all snarky. (I mean, it still does kind of sound like he just stumbled upon Di accidentally while searching for Bel, but whatever. His line below is a pretty convincing save.)

  Vinder: "I'm looking for someone, myself, but I've got a plan to get you out of here."

• The scene with Kumar in Nepal is just so hilarious that I have to quote most of it here. The very moment that Jericho started declaiming his request in flowery language, I was keeping my fingers crossed that Kumar would turn out to be a more plain-spoken sort, and sure enough, Chibnall did not disappoint. Does that make it a predictable joke? Well, probably. But Darweish made me LOL repeatedly, especially in the last half of this exchange:

  Jericho: "Sir, my name is Eustacius Jericho. I am an expert in percipients and visionaries, and in my historic reading, I have read much about you and your abilities. We come to you in all humility, as we are in the midst of an extraordinary task, and seek guidance as to what the future holds."
  Kumar: "Took you long enough."
  Jericho: "I'm sorry?"
  Kumar: "To get up here! I've been watching you for days. You need to take more exercise. So! What's the gossip from down there? Who's kissed who?"
  Jericho: "Gossip?!"
  Kumar: "I don't get any up here! I'll take anything!"
  Jericho: "I mean, er... I think the telephone has been invented."
  Kumar: "Telephone?"
  Jericho: "Yes, you, you use it to talk to people, to communicate."
  Kumar: "I'm a hermit!"
  Jericho: "Ah."
  Yaz: "We would have brought a newspaper, if we'd've known."
  Kumar: "You mean you haven't?! What about some food? A rope? A pot? The latest Conan Doyle?"
  Dan: "Does seem rude, now you come to mention it."
  Kumar: "Ahhh I'm teasing you! I knew you wouldn't have anything, really."
  Jericho: "Do you have anything for us?"
  Kumar: "Ah, no."
  Yaz: "Really?!"
  Kumar: "Ahhhh I'm teasing you again!"
  Jericho: (rolls his eyes)
  Kumar: (sadly) "I don't get to tease people much."

• Oh, overly-literal Ood, you funny!

  Doctor: "It's never too late. I'm very good at pulling rabbits out of hats."
  Ood: "I have no rabbits."
  Doctor: (exasperated) "It's a metaphor."
  Ood: "Or hats."

• This representation of the Flux as a sphere constricting toward the Earth doesn't really square up with the fact that in The Halloween Apocalypse, the Flux was about to destroy Earth as just another casualty. But maybe after the Doctor disrupted that first wave, Tecteun decided to restructure the next wave of the Flux, and, in a warped form of vengeance, put the Earth at its center?

• Yaaaaaaassssss or should I say Yaaaaaaazzzzzz!!!

  Yaz: "This pretty girl can look after herself."

• Ahahahaha! Best moment of the episode for these two! (Shame it doesn't have more competition!)

  Dan: "I'll go over, one Scouser to another."
  Yaz: "Hey, Dan! Are you from Liverpool?! Why have you never mentioned it?"
  Dan: "All right, Sheffield, keep your cutlery on."

• For those who are curious: the Williamson Doors, ladies and gentlemen.
  1. "Viscous Transparent Mobbing Armies! DO NOT ENTER!" with a drawing of what appears to be a genie ("No Legs?") and, ahhh, not three Quarks but three Kasaavin, I think! (Could this be a very subtle clue that they'll be making an appearance next week too?)
  2. "Watery Ocean!!!" with a drawing that looks like a man wearing a top hat and the legend "RUN" or "REM"
  3. "Endless Cities of Steel Firebolts!" with a drawing of a ziggurat
  4. (aka the aforementioned Doorway 9) "Death! Rays of Death! NEVER OPEN!" and "Do Not Enter. Tunnel Cont(aminated?) Do not enter except in the gravest of peril!"

• I love McNally's response. Also: gee, I just wonder how they're going to defeat the Sontarans. Guaranteed this is a hexachromite situation ("Death, sir! Endless death, especially to potato-headed aliens!"), or I'll eat my hat that the Ood doesn't have.

  Williamson: "Do not touch doorway 9."
  Jericho: "Any particular reason?"
  Williamson: "Death, sir! Endless death!"
  Jericho: "Oh, that, that's persuasive."

• When the Grand Serpent orders the missile strike to be put on standby, he's sitting in front of a monitor bearing the UNIT logo. But UNIT should be long shut down; how is it still operating at all in 2021?

• Ahhhh, I'm so impressed. Appropriately, for the final cliffhanger, Chibnall gives us three for one:
  1. Bel and Karvanista are boarded by the Sontarans
  2. Armed Sontarans break into the tunnels, threatening Yaz, Dan, Jericho, and Williamson
  3. Swarm and Azure prepare to kill? the Doctor

• One possible resolution to cliffhanger 3 that occurred to me: assuming that Swarm actually is preparing to evaporate the Doctor — I'm not convinced; among other reasons, Azure does say they want to 'heal' the Doctor's pain, though maybe by 'heal' she means 'obliterate entirely' — how can he and Azure survive between universes without a conversion plate? Presumably they're as much creatures of Universe 1 as the Doctor is.

When an episode inspires me to write more than my usual word count, I know I've found it really engaging, one way or the other. Survivors of the Flux, thanks mainly to the momentous meeting between the Doctor and Tecteun, lands firmly on the "enthralling and exciting" side. I have some criticisms, mainly of the way the companions' plot thread plays out (though not of the thread itself, which keeps them all nicely engaged in the story), but this is more than balanced out by my excitement about the direction in which Flux is heading, and my optimism that signs are pointing to the story arc being able to stick its landing.

posted:

04 December 2021