Show Pieces

Nothing will come of nothing; speak again.

— King Lear, demanding empty words for their own sake. It doesn’t end well for him.

What’s the Flux?

The name suggests continual change, warping into the unexpected and unpredictable. In practice, we see that what it actually does (most of the time) is reduce stuff to particles. People, spaceships, buildings, planets, all kinds of large and complex structures broken down into the smallest possible units – homogenous motes of dust. It’s a blob subsuming everything else into its indistinct mass.

Refusing to be outdone, the Flux even manages to atomise itself; the after-effects we see it leave in episodes 3 and 4 – barren, post-collapse wastelands – don’t seem consistent with its planet-dissolving behaviour in The Halloween Apocalypse. Disconnected ideas of its role float around, as dots, rather than forming part of a larger whole. It’s in this manner that the Flux achieves its greatest conquest: disintegrating the show it’s a part of. We can view this as a model for the entirety of Flux as a season.

Everywhere, there are fragments. There’s Tecteun’s fragment – in episode 5 of 6 she portentously announces herself as the woman the Doctor used to call mother, suggesting a degree of dramatic significance, then she’s dusted by Swarm and in episode 6 she isn’t even mentioned. Episode 3 is heavily concerned with the Mouri, who are trying to guard a malevolent “time force” and ultimately fail to prevent “tiny fragments of temporal destruction” from leaking out in fuzzy blue clouds – these and the Mouri neither appear nor get brought up in episodes 4 through 6. Episode 5 spends ages documenting a scheme by the Grand Serpent, travelling along Earth’s timeline, to infiltrate and sabotage UNIT from its very inception so that the planet will be defenceless when the Sontarans begin their assault – which is in actuality the second Sontaran invasion of Earth in about a month, explicitly described as “revenge” for the Doctor/Karvanista’s defeat of the first in episode 2. Yaz and Dan get their own fragment in episode 5, wandering around in the 1900s and enacting at length a plan to message Karvanista in the future by writing gigantic letters on the ground; this instantly proves pointless, and they are instead saved by Joseph Williamson inadvertently stumbling onto their boat via his randomised time tunnels. The cosmic romance subplot of Vinder and Bel begins with them looking for each other, and culminates not with deliberate actions on either of their parts, but by a series of hapless coincidences that happen to eventually land them both in the TARDIS – happy end. And so on.

The fragments do run into and out of each other in a (mostly) logical way, like one very long sentence. But in spite of the marketing’s insistence on serialisation, there does not appear to be any actual arc to this arc. No underlying larger structure. The season is outrageously uninvested in its own countless constituent parts, unwilling to let them matter. As the Doctor confronts Tecteun, and has the fob watch containing her dark past dangled in front of her, Flux risks arriving at a dramatic destination…and then it simply decides not to. The finale, The Vanquishers, spools itself out in yet more fragments until there’s no more tape left. Even the Doctor herself is fragmented, trifurcated into three identical Doctors so the episode can channel-hop between three equally inert storylines, and ultimately have them talk to each other – sameness upon thudding sameness – as they clear up what remains of the spilled plot. In the final minutes we meet the personification of Time itself, the big bad that all this was done in the name of, but all they do is take the form of yet another Jodie Whittaker and tease that the Master is coming back for the regeneration episode.
It feels as though we’ve skipped over the true climax of the series, any point at which it might have reached a peak of emotion or intensity, revealed a purpose to the whole exercise. Instead we just have exercise, exercise, exercise.

By the end, the Flux seems to have mostly done its work, with no effort made to address its earlier obliteration of the universe beyond Earth. In episode 5 the Doctor implies that its ‘compression’ effect could potentially be reversed, but by episode 6 this is another forgotten fragment. Nobody remaining in the script even so much as acknowledges the damage or its incomprehensible scale; business appears to resume as usual. As the storyteller forgets it, the immediate past becomes meaningless, leaving the present to become yet another disembodied particle.

Why’s the Flux?

The mythological conflict apparently motivating Swarm and Azure – the battle of Space vs. Time – might be more accurately phrased as “meaning vs. entropy”. The Ravagers’ desire is for everything to be dust-ified, dissolve into a homogenous mass with no structure. Why? Who knows.

AZURE: You want to keep things alive. You want creatures to breathe and live. You want species and races to build. I look into your mind and your hearts, and I don’t know why you want it so much. And I don’t know why you’re so afraid of the opposite. Do you?
DOCTOR: Life must win.
AZURE: But why? Why is it better? Why is what you fight for better than what we will bring?
DOCTOR: Because otherwise… why are we here?
AZURE: You shouldn’t be. That’s why we exist, to correct the error.
DOCTOR: There’s a balance to the universe. It exists that way for a reason.
AZURE: That is your faith. Ours is different. Ours is true.

Yet when it comes time for the Doctor to stand up for Team Spatial Objects…she has nothing to say in their defence. Nothing beyond “it is this way for a reason”. What reason? Who knows. It’s just an appeal to an undefined higher authority, or to tradition maybe – no core values. Nothing rooted in a genuine philosophical preference for life, for meaning or structure, no suggestion that those things might have defensible qualities, not even so much as a Five-esque worship of well-prepared meals. The Doctor honestly seems to have less of a case than Azure here; by her own logic the Ravagers’ existence is justified, and since no other rationale for their existence or skillset is forthcoming, that would suggest spatial objects really are a heresy that ought to be obliterated.

And that might just provide us an answer – not for why the Ravagers worship Time, or why Tecteun invited the Doctor to Universe 2 despite having destroyed Universe 1 in an attempt to get rid of her, but for why Chibnall wrote this. Why spend so many hours on a story to make it one in which nothing really means anything? Why content oneself, as a writer, with throwing in so many elements – particles – with no intention of valuing them?
The classical “epic” mode of storytelling, seen in the epic poems of old and adapted by Brecht for his “epic theatre”, eschews overall arcs; instead, each individual scene in the life of its protagonist tells its own tale, making its own point that holds up independently, while forming a larger nuanced picture in juxtaposition with the others. Flux is not that. Flux can barely muster five minutes of internal coherence.

Take Karvanista, for example. His entire people, the Lupari, are casually revealed during The Vanquishers to have been slaughtered off-screen (not a great start, given that they’ve been off-screen this entire time). At one point while he despairs about this in a prison cell, Dan ambles into the room, teasing him, making dog puns, blithering on about the Nepal fragment from last week; one jump-cut later in the TARDIS, Dan is suddenly dead somber – “Sontarans killed all of his people” – then we’re straight back to the Doctor whizzing around the console spouting exposition. The key interaction that’s implied here, between Dan and Karvanista, is completely missing. Dan presumably realised it was horrible of him to shit-talk Karvanista in this situation, and gained a new level of sympathy for his anthropomorphic protector – this would be the dramatic relationship between the units of screentime, the story! – but this is lost. The result is tonally disjointed and accidentally hilarious.
Not long after, the Doctor casually sacrifices all of the Sontarans to the Flux, despite having raged at General Logan four episodes ago for blowing a load of them up with some dynamite. Little of this is new, or COVID-contingent, for Chibnall. The centreless, fragmentary approach to writing can be traced back to Series 11 (recall that Ranskoor Av Kolos was obsessed with how killing T’zim-Sha would make Graham “the same as him”, yet had no qualms about locking him in one of his own living-death pods for all eternity). But it’s in overdrive here, almost relentless, for five and a half hours.

Even the two much-vaunted Flux episodes which contain glimmers of hypothetical standalone stories – War of the Sontarans and Village of the Angels – are both essentially made of disembodied bits and pieces.
Sontarans kicks off, before anything else can happen, with Yaz and Dan abruptly being teleported away by the magic winds of Fluxiness to separate plot-related locations. The Doctor entrusts Dan, a bloke she’s just met, with taking down a Sontaran army in her absence; he succeeds by wandering into an apparently unlocked ship and being rescued by his guardian furry who also crashes the ship – erasing the whole fleet from time, just ’cause. Where’s the drama? What do we take from it? Do any of the characters’ decisions matter? Do they grow, change, or even feel particularly strong emotions from encountering such arbitrarily solved problems?
The main plot of Angels is the Doctor being besieged inside a house, escaping the house through a tunnel, then walking into a trap at the exit of said tunnel. Meanwhile, large amounts of screentime are allotted to Yaz and Dan, who are zapped by an Angel into 1901 and meet a creepy little girl. They wander around, wondering why the village is now deserted, until they stumble across some sort of time window into 1967 that the Angels have erected for…shits ‘n’ giggles? The child sees her older self through the window, and gets a “I’m you from your future, sorry but you’re stuck in the past!” moment – because that’s just a thing that happens in timeslip stories, not because she’s actually an emotional key to the story of the episode or anything – then becomes utterly irrelevant along with everything else about the village, because something about Weeping Angel Division Squad Quantum Extraction is going on. Yaz and Dan’s thread goes nowhere so they can stay stuck in 1901 for episode 5, when their equally irrelevant fragment (as discussed above) will occur and conclude in a manner bereft of even cause-and-effect, let alone drama. And Dr. Jericho comes along so he can randomly get Earthshocked in the finale.

In both of the above cases, these hollow, slapdash quasi-episodes are able to coast along on a wave atop the sea of particles – feigning narrative momentum by tacking on bits of the endlessly self-teasing season storyline. The storyline which, again, ultimately proves an enormous waste of time. There’s so much suggestion of exciting, dramatic things happening later, and they never arrive. Almost every element seems purely obligatory. Why create a season of television so empty? Why bother?

Who’s the Flux?

Perhaps the answer is that Chibnall has no answer. A recent video, in which he and Whittaker spend an astonishing fifteen minutes just summarising the painfully shallow arc plot of Flux (with no reference to Yaz or Dan, of course – a separate fragment), sees him suggest that the Doctor’s emotional arc was the point:

It’s really important, I think in any era of Doctor Who, for the Doctor to have an emotional journey, to have an arc and to start one place and go on a voyage of discovery through their time on the show. And I always knew this was going to be the arc for Jodie’s Doctor and that the third series would be about exploring the fallout from the information she got at the end of ‘The Timeless Children’. […] I think you can put your own interpretations on why the Doctor decides not to fully open the fob watch and to access all her memories, all her past lives, all that information at the end of episode six. […] the story is all about her identity, really, and there are issues around adoption and issues around personal identity and issues around how one views oneself and really I think for me, the reason she doesn’t open it is because she understands that she has an identity already and that she isn’t necessarily defined by a past that she hasn’t known about and actually for this Doctor, it’s as much about what you do today and tomorrow as it is about who you were a very long time ago.

So she’s chasing knowledge about her Division past, and when she gains access to that knowledge (or rather, it falls into her lap through circumstances largely outside her control…) she decides not to look at it. For now. Maybe.

But what in the story motivated that? Was it a moment of personal growth – namely, a repeat of the same realisation she already had with Ruth’s help in 2020’s The Timeless Children, that who she is right now is more important than a wiped memory? Was it borne of regret for how she treated Yaz in pursuit of the information, considering she apologises for that just beforehand? Was it perhaps from cowardice; fear of more unpleasant revelations such as her brutal abandonment of ex-companion Karvanista? Well, even Chibnall suggests it’s up to the viewer. Your guess is as good as mine. Either way, it just happens. We did not spend six episodes organically charting a character journey to this point. It’s another particle. Another thing that seems more like the fulfilment of an abstract obligation (“it’s really important for the Doctor to have an emotional journey”) than a genuine effort at weaving a story.

Nowhere among any of this does a story emerge. There’s certainly plot; there are events aplenty. But the way in which the events not only fail to reflect one another, but also to provide any insight even by themselves (so busy are they with hyping up later events, or barfing up lazy cliché), indicates that so many of these scenes – these characters, these plot devices, these entire episodes – are merely words for their own sake. Not stories in service of a perspective, an emotion, or any kind of narrative catharsis. Just epic-sounding Doctor Who-like things, produced so that there will be epic-sounding Doctor Who-like things on screen, because the franchise demands it.

Faced with a notoriously difficult job, one that requires the writer bring their own sense of meaning, Chibnall is of the same creed as his Doctor: content to obey the way of things, uninterested in identifying a point to any of it at all. Doing stuff simply because it’s the stuff that’s done. Incapable of challenging meaninglessness.  Resigned to entropy and seas of dust.

And with no point, there can be no structure, no arc, no development of ideas in any particular direction. No climax. No conclusion. Neither past nor present. Nothing can come of nothing. With no underlying reason to tell this specific story, no underlying point of view on life, all the subplots and callbacks and Sontarans in the universe can’t save this mere plot from being an ocean of nothingness; the vastest and most deeply pathetic one in televised Doctor Who’s long history. Flux is the embodiment of the shapeless blob from which it derives its title.

When we submit to rote obligation for its own sake – actions alienated from meaning, labour alienated from its value, coerced reproduction – we snuff out the essence of conscious life. We reduce life to a conveyor belt of flesh. The content and quality of our lives become subordinate to the empty process of continuing the status quo, life as a chore. We create a soulless vacuum, in which growth and genuine joy are all but impossible. All that can be found there are brief, superficial distractions from the void…and the demons bred of despair, who crave the end of everything.

You owe yourself more than this.

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