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We started watching the thirteenth series - which has the title ‘Flux’ on the box - towards the end of February. There are only six episodes, but I was away for three weeks and we had only seen five of them. We watched the last episode (and the extras on the third DVD) last night.
What an epic series it has been! Unusually for Doctor Who, the episodes are not complete in themselves, or even two-parters. They are essentially a six-part series, each episode ending with a dramatic cliff-hanger as the story continues. The overall theme is that a huge hurricane of anti-matter, known as The Flux, is sweeping across the entire universe causing devastation and wholesale destruction everywhere it goes.
Inevitably this eventually gets stopped in the final episode; that’s really no surprise. But there are many different subplots all blending together involving almost every enemy race that I could recall from the Doctor Who series. The daleks, the cybermen, the sontarans, the creepy weeping angels… all have their place in what feels like a very confusing but well-made series.
My favourite parts of Doctor Who are the human interactions that take place, and the more emotional stories. The start of the first episode drew me right in: a young man called Dan (John Bishop) acts as an unofficial guide to parts of Liverpool. He’s clearly a generous person but also in financial straits. Strange things start happening to him and then he’s kidnapped by an alien spaceship…
Inevitably Dan is rescued and it becomes clear that he’s going to travel with the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) for a while, along with Yas (Mandip Gill). He’s a good addition to the team, quick to grasp what is needed, and full of courage as well as having a sense of humour.
Another thread I liked involved two new characters: Vinder (Jacob Anderson) who is in a spacecraft travelling the galaxy alone and making reports, and Bel (Thaddea Graham) who is a talented warrier and navigator. The two are romantically involved but have somehow lost each other, and are both on a quest to reunite.
There are also quite complex time-travel threads with a woman called Clare (Annabel Scholey) who reappears in different eras, and a professor (Kevin McNally) who finds everything delightfully interesting despite increasing danger. And there’s an interesting connection with real-life history, with Joseph Williamson (Steve Oram) who built tunnels under Liverpool in the nineteenth century.
Another foray into real history happens in the second episode of the series, and involves Mary Seacole and the Crimean War… except that it’s a war against an entirely different race from that which we have learned about. Sara Powell is wonderful and entirely believable as the courageous Seacole who was a pioneer in medicine around the same time as Florence Nightingale.
Meanwhile the Doctor has lost some of her memories, and is fighting against not just the familiar enemies but the chilling ‘Ravagers’ who seek to destroy everything. There’s a lot of backstory about the Doctor in this series, and in the earlier ones too, which hasn’t happened so much with earlier incarnations of the Doctor.
It’s a magnificent series, shorter than planned, apparently, as it was filmed during the pandemic. My husband didn’t seem to have any problem understanding what was going on, but I find fast action and loud noises confusing, and had to read summaries of the episodes after watching to figure out what I had missed. I’m still not sure I grasped more than the overview but with all the human interest stories, I looked forward to watching it each week, and am very glad I did.
We have the subsequent ‘special’ episode to watch over the next few weeks, and in the autumn plan to start over with Series One of the ‘new’ seasons, involving the Ninth Doctor, and re-watch everything again to see if it gradually becomes clearer.
Definitely recommended if you like Doctor Who.
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