![]() ![]() It seems likely that however Flux ultimately turns out, it is probably designed to be best enjoyed watched as a single cohesive entity. Watching The Halloween Apocalypse, it is clear that Chibnall is building this adventure for the binge or the boxset. The basic structure and premise of Flux assumes that the opposite is true: that modern Doctor Who is probably best designed with an eye to life after the initial broadcast. Flux demonstrates how times have changed. Those early adventures were discarded because Doctor Who was thought to have little value outside of its initial broadcast. It is unimaginable that any modern episodes would ever be lost like Marco Polo or The Macra Terror. While Doctor Who is a BBC production, it arguably no longer exists within the confines of its original broadcast. For all the panic and wand-wringing over the perceived decline in ratings, those figures ultimately suggest that audience viewing habits have changed. This is an episode of television in which the showrunner throws a host of balls into the air, making it very difficult to offer a convincing assessment of the effort until those balls have landed over the next five episodes. It’s a wonderful sleight of hand, in some ways the culmination of Chibnall’s efforts to transform Doctor Who into a facsimile of prestige television. There is simultaneously a lot to talk about in The Halloween Apocalypse and nothing at all. Why would Flux need heavy advertising, if the first episode was essentially a fifty-minute trailer? ![]() With that in mind, the marketting strategy makes a great deal more sense. Instead, they are simply spinning plates positioned for the rest of the six-episode arc. None of these elements get any pay-off, or even development. DOCTOR WHO FLUX CAST SERIESIt introduces a variety of disparate and disconnected elements that are presented as a series of mystery boxes, hoping that the audience will be enticed enough to keep watching – the Swarm and his history with the Doctor, the transformed Azure, the mysterious Vinder, Claire who appears to be from the Doctor’s past and/or future, the Sontaran invasion fleet, the mysterious excavations in 1820. The Halloween Apocalypse takes that idea to its logical extreme. Watching The Woman Who Fell to Earth, it seemed like Chibnall’s solution to this problem was to ensure that there was always something to cut away to – that he could get into and out of scenes quickly, to distract from the fact that his dialogue and characters felt rather generic. Davies and Steven Moffat, Chibnall was a writer who lacked his predecessors’ skill with character and dialogue. It is the ultimate acceleration and culmination of the style that he adopted in The Woman Who Fell to Earth. This is itself pure and unfiltered Chris Chibnall. However, that is just one thread of a story that cuts frantically from one thread to another, introducing a host of set-ups that promise the possibility and the potential of chaos. There is a relatively minor self-contained plot within the episode focusing on Karvanista and Dan, which is neatly wrapped up within the episode proper. The season premiere doesn’t really feel like an episode of television, at least not in the traditional sense. Then again, this makes a certain amount of sense watching The Halloween Apocalypse. For a sprawling six-part epic built around one of the BBC’s flagship properties, Flux seemed to fly in under the radar. The Chibnall era is very plot-focused, which means that it is paranoid of potential spoilers, and it is reasonable to wonder whether that paranoia makes it harder to sell the show to the general public. ![]() After all, Chibnall took great pride in seeding the phrase “the Timeless Child” in The Ghost Monument, only to eventually pay it off with twenty minutes of expository flashbacks in The Timeless Children. In some ways, this is typical of the larger Chibnall era. ![]()
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