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.

Are You Sure This Is What You Want?

Photo: Morgan Jeffery

13 thoughts about Series 12

1. The Lone Barrowman
2. Chaos Reigns
3. O No
4. Reasonable People
5. The Toymaker Would Approve
6. Wheeee
7. From The Top
8. The Bare Minimum
9. Epic Speech Moment
10. The Pointless Child
11. O Well
12. And The Particle Of Death
13. Doctor In Content

The Lone Barrowman

No, he’s not in the finale. No, the fact he’s teasing the finale doesn’t mean he’s involved in it. No, the narrative of the episode/season wouldn’t meaningfully change if he was removed…no, he doesn’t do anything especially distinctive other than kiss Graham (non-consensually, yeah?) and mistake him for the Doctor (like multiple other characters have).

Look, yes, it is a trailer. It is a trailer for a future episode, to air at some point. Could even be this year. It is a trailer for the presence of this character in a future episode.

Yes…yes…you can barely see him, because the room is so dark and everything is so blurry that he looks like an amorphous vision out of a waking nightmare. Nobody’s perfect. Do you realise how hard it is to get someone to look like they did ten years ago? His hair is white, for god’s sake.

People worked on this scene, you know. They probably had to rush it as well – get in and out very quickly, with very few personnel, so as to keep the whole thing as hush-hush as possible. The audience had to be surprised on seeing this trailer, this advertisement. Furthermore, integrating the scene into an actual narrative with tangible impact on other scenes would’ve risked a leak getting out. Hence all the teleporting characters back and forth. Would you really want to be spoiled on the fact Jack returned?

Jack returned, guys! Jack is back! Didn’t you miss him?

They cranked up the brightness just in case you were unsure.

Everything You Think You Know Is Lore (And Everything Will Change, Forever More (AGAIN))

Emergency post. [Originally uploaded February 29, 2020 – one day before the airing of Series 12’s finale]

The incumbent Doctor is reaching the climax of their second season in the role. Events set in motion by the Master have brought us to the cusp of discovering an enormous, world-shattering secret – one that promises not only to expose a shocking untold history capable of destroying the Time Lords themselves, but to retroactively recontextualise the entire journey of the show’s central character, answering the question of why this whole adventure truly started. Brand new information, divulged by the antagonist in the second half of a series-opening two-parter, has us asking fevered questions about a mysterious figure from the past and what their cryptic title could mean. A sudden return to Gallifrey at the end of the penultimate episode heralds a reveal that will surely rewrite the lore wholesale, and force us to forever view the Doctor and the Doctor Who apocrypha in a new light.