LogFAQs > #964956807

13. Series 13 (The Doctor: Jodie Whittaker, Companion/s: Yasmin Khan & Dan Lewis)

*SPOILERS BELOW FOR SERIES THIRTEEN OF DOCTOR WHO*

Best Episode: War of the Sontarans (Eve of the Daleks, if I'm to count the 2022 specials as part of Series 13)
Worst Episode: The Vanquishers

Hot take, I know, but the Flux season is the first season of the reboot where I genuinely feel like the producers had no idea what made Doctor Who work in the first place. This season just did so many things unbearably wrong, so I feel like I need to go through the list, point-by-point.

First off, the decision to make a six-episode season is a rough one. I don't care if they made the episodes longer to compensate...when you're given a longer runtime and shorter season, you wind up with a mess. Hello there Game of Thrones seasons 7 and 8. But more than just the limited run (which feels like a disservice in general and a lack of care for the season as a whole), the showrunners decided to turn this six-episode run into a serialized story.

Doctor Who can do a season-long storyline...if it's subtle. The second you decide that EVERY episode needs to be interconnected as part of a larger narrative...that's when you run into problems. Suddenly, if your story isn't working out, you're stuck with it. You can't just have a fun little one-off episode, because it still needs to tie back into the overarching storyline. Don't get me wrong: Flux has a pair of good episodes, but they're hindered from being truly GREAT episodes by the fact that they need to keep tying back into the mess of the Flux plot.

When I say a mess, I'm not even exaggerating. The first episode of this season introduces half a dozen plot points or more, many of which get a brief scene and are then left unattended for several episodes, until they're finally brought back into focus. So you'd think that the first episode was just the set-up, and the rest of the season would be dealing with those plots. Nope. Every subsequent episode kept introducing more and more characters and more plotpoints (including the return of Kate Lethridge Stewart in episode 5 of 6), to the point where you come to the realization that there's no way to tie up all these loose ends in a satisfying manner.

They don't, by the way. The angels, who are set up in the first episode and come back in the fourth episode...are immediately discarded after the big twist at the end of episode four. They're defeated off-screen. The big bad disintegration aliens who are introduced in episode one, and serve as recurring antagonists throughout the season...are defeated easily by an omnipotent being that just turns them to dust. The Sontarans, who play a prominent role throughout the season...admittedly they're defeated in an acceptable manner, but the show also introduces the Cybermen and Daleks, just to have them get wiped out as well. And snake man, introduced as part of the storyline for Vinder, goes MIA for so long that I forgot he existed until randomly showing up to menace the returning Kate Stewart. And then he's shunted off to the middle of nowhere, a la Samuel L. Jackson in Jumper.

But the worst thing? The Flux is this massive destruction of all of space, and there's simultaneous a complete destruction of all of time. Time is fixed pretty easily, and then the Flux wipes out three major armadas, only to be stopped by a convenient shield of the Lupari race...and that's it. Nevermind that like, 90% of the universe has been eradicated. Nope, the Flux is stopped and Earth is safe...so that's all that matters, apparently. It's such a disappointment, becuase the show doesn't even give us a half-assed deus ex machina to reset everything to the way it was. All that matters is Earth.

Finally, the running theme throughout the season is about the Doctor's past, first introduced in series 12. She's constantly trying to find out who she was in a past life, and we learn that she was involved in some special ops bullshit, and it's just more nonsense added onto the pile of existing nonsense. The Doctor does not need to be the focal point of the entire universe. In fact, the stories are worse when the Doctor is treated in that fashion. The Flux season is just the culmination of EVERYTHING Chibnall gets wrong about how Doctor Who should be.