Faithful readers will remember that I found Season 12 a step up from the deeply disappointing Season 11. Not great, but with some good parts. After that I am pretty sure (based on the Wikipedia synopsis seeming sort of familiar) that I watched Revolution of the Daleks, and I definitely made a start on Season 13 (Flux), watching two episodes before I drifted away.

After that, half a dozen specials were broadcast (I missed them all) and then The New Guy debuted. I was slightly excited about this, but having a completionist streak, I wouldn’t let myself watch Ncuti Gatwa’s episodes until I’d caught up with the end of Jodie Whittaker. And that is why, dear reader, I sat down this evening to have another stab at Flux, the six-episode story that encompasses all six episodes of Season 13. I know, I know.

Did I like it? Reader, I did not.

First, the opening. The Doctor and Yaz in an inescapable trap, about to be killed in three different ways for some reason. When the hazards are piled up like this (dropped into acid lava, shot by robot drones, the planet’s about to explode), it doesn’t make things more exciting — it just takes away any sense of credibility; and with it, any real sense of jeopardy. How can Chris Chibnall (for it is he) not understand this?

Anyway, with one bound, the Doctor and Yaz are free, and we’re free to get started on the actual episode (pausing only for the curiously bloodless current version of the once-iconic theme music). And that main story, when we get to it, is all about … well, I couldn’t tell you.

What I can tell you is the ingredients of the main story. In roughly the order they appear, they are:

• A dog-like alien called Carvinista
• Victorian industrialists supervising a mine that is digging for something we’re not told about
• John Bishop’s character and his not-girlfriend Di
• An imprisoned alien (who Wikipedia tells me is called Swarm) and his captors
• A couple living in an isolated house in the Arctic Circle
• A woman called Claire from the Doctor’s future
• New doors spontaneously appearing in the TARDIS
• A Weeping Angel for some reason
• Observation Post Rose and its inhabitant, whose name escapes me for the moment
• Something called The Division, which I still have no idea about
• The eponymous Flux, which Carvinista tells us about
• Sontarans for some reason
• The Doctor’s alleged history with the Big Bad, which she doesn’t remember
• The Big Bad’s sister who summons Di into a deserted house for some reason

I make that fourteen plot points and thirteen new characters (not counting the Sontarans), besides the Doctor and Yaz. That’s an awful lot to squeeze into one episode. To cover all that ground, and to hit each plot point and character with enough clarity to make us care about them, takes some great writing.

Chris Chibnall is not a great writer.

As a result, every single one of these elements falls flat — briefly examined, then dropped on the floor just as we start to think it might be interesting. At the end of the episode I was left with nothing more concrete that that the Flux is destroying the universe, and that the no-longer-imprisoned alien … exists. I guess they may be connected somehow. Then again maybe not. And what the Sontarans and Weeping Angels have to do with anything, I can’t begin to imagine. I just don’t care about any of this. There are no stakes. It’s only the end of the universe. Again. yawn.

Why does Doctor Who have to be like this? Are the people running it now really so unimaginative that they think all it takes to make an exciting story is the multiplication of entities with necessity? Where is the craftsmanship? One feels that if Chibnall had been directing Jaws, we would have found out part way through that the shark is a shape-shifting alien and that Roy Scheider had been tracking it through time and space, and Richard Dreyfuss was dyslexic but it had absolutely no effect on the story, and Robert Shaw had been a ghost all along.

I’ve been re-watching Lego Masters Australia, which can tell you is much more entertaining than The Halloween Apocalypse. Eight teams of two people compete to build the best Lego models, judged by Ryan “Brickman” McNaught. And one thing that Brickman tells the teams over and over is that he wants to see “one good idea, well executed”.

Can someone please tell Chris Chibnall that?

(Note added in proof. I see that this post contains the phrase “for some reason” in four different places. I think that fact tells its own story.)

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