Doctor Whew!
"The Halloween Apocalypse" gets Doctor Who's Series 13 off to a rollicking start.
Doctor Who: Flux
“Chapter One: The Halloween Apocalypse”
Series 13, Episode 1 (Season Premiere)
Written by Chris Chibnall
Directed by Jamie Magnus Stone
Starring Jodie Whittaker, Mandip Gill, and John Bishop
Guest Starring Craige Els, Rochenda Sandall, Sam Spruell, and Jacob Anderson
51 minutes
Original broadcast 31 October 2021
1. Goings & Comings
On Halloween Night 2021, Doctor Who (2005-Present) returned to television for its thirteenth series (in sixteen years), offering audiences a shortened season of six interconnected episodes that showrunner Chris Chibnall, star Jodie Whittaker, and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) promised would tell a single story. This shift in narrative format mimics Classic Doctor Who’s (1963-1989) serial structure while introducing, for the first time since New Who’s 2005 debut, an appropriately ambiguous season subtitle: Flux.
This premiere is no small matter, either, arriving after months of news stories about Doctor Who’s future gave fans much to consider, to embrace, and to regret. As late as the day before “The Halloween Apocalypse’s” 31 October 2021 broadcast, these developments threatened to overshadow Flux despite the BBC’s recent, intense promotional push (the network’s executives, it seems, belatedly realizing that Flux is their proper focus).
Given these news flashes’ fast-and-furious pace, divided attention was inevitable. To recap, first came 29 July 2021’s announcement that Series 13 would be Jodie Whittaker’s third and final season as keeper of the TARDIS keys.1 Whittaker here follows the now-expected pattern established by her three immediate predecessors in the role, with David Tennant (the Tenth Doctor), Matt Smith (the Eleventh Doctor), and Peter Capaldi (the Twelfth Doctor) all playing the program’s titular protagonist for three seasons (or series, as the Brits call them) before moving onto other roles and challenges, causing Doctor Who fans everywhere to lament the incumbent performer’s retirement before feverishly speculating about her (or his) successor.
Such has happened with Whittaker, who received the consequent outpouring of acclaim for her work on Doctor Who as graciously as she has handled everything else related to the part. Whittaker’s statement about leaving also provoked considerable off-track betting about her replacement, illustrating yet again that London’s bookies are never happier than when the roles of the Doctor and James Bond are coming empty (meaning that 2021 has been a banner year for them).
Whittaker fully deserves this praise, which has been too parsimonious during her tenure aboard the TARDIS. Considering how terrific she has been as the Thirteenth Doctor, some viewers may have forgotten that Whittaker took over from Capaldi while facing backlash from regressive Who fans for breaking ground as the first woman to play the role. She has been superb in every episode despite lingering (and wrongheaded) criticism about the supposedly poor writing that has dogged her installments. As readers of my Series 11 reviews know, I don’t share this opinion, leading me to report with equal regret that Chris Chibnall will depart alongside Whittaker.
Chibnall’s critics—some of whom fall into the category “toxic fandom” as if born to it—have crowed about the fact that he becomes the first of Who’s revival showrunners to captain only three seasons of the BBC’s flagship time-travel drama. Russell T. Davies, after all, oversaw four full series and the five later specials that concluded his era, while Steven Moffat managed six full seasons—including the fiftieth-anniversary year of 2013 and its Fiftieth Anniversary Special, “The Day of the Doctor”—to prove to Chibnall’s haters that he has been fired.
In this telling, Chibnall’s dodgy creative decisions, particularly Series 12’s controversial-but-fascinating “Timeless Child” storyline, produced declining ratings and fan recoil (this last being less pronounced than its most vociferous advocates claim, but real nonetheless) that required the BBC to say “Enough!”
I cannot speak to these behind-the-scenes machinations. Yes, the BBC may have become so unhappy with Chibnall’s choice to rewrite (seemingly) much of the Doctor’s and the franchise’s backstory that its executives pink-slipped him, making Chibnall’s official statement that he and Whittaker agreed to a “three-series-and-out” pact little more than professional face-saving.2
Even the BBC’s request that Chibnall and Whittaker extend their run with an additional, feature-length special—that will celebrate the network’s 2022 centenary and that will see Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor regenerate into her successor—is not evidence that Chibnall leaves in better odor than his detractors claim. No, friends, as predictable as the sun rising in the east tomorrow morning, these readers of the BBC’s corporate mind believe the network’s bosses only approved the Centenary Special to squelch Chibnall from publicly disclosing their high-handed treatment of him.
Who knows if such conjecture is true? Everyone at the BBC may in fact backbite everyone else all the time. Truth be told, I neither know nor care. Unlike his haters, I have found Chibnall’s era to be as enjoyable and edifying as Russell T. Davies’s and Steven Moffat’s (with Chibnall’s missteps being less objectionable than claimed, to wit: he thankfully avoided Moffat’s compulsion to turn companions—especially women—into characters whose lives revolve fully around the Doctor).
Then came Russell T. Davies’s 24 September 2021 announcement that he will return as Doctor Who’s showrunner for its sixtieth-anniversary year in 2023,3 a move that delights me (as an unabashed admirer of Davies’s writing for the franchise and for everything else) but that has provoked schizophrenia in members of the Chibnall-as-villain camp, many of whom publicly extol the Davies era as those halcyon days when Doctor Who was fit and fabulous, even if nostalgia makes memories hazy and gauzy and unreliable, and—if you look hard enough—you just might locate online comments by these same people about how rubbish Davies was during his first go-round with Doctor Who (especially, they said, his tendencies for too-convenient denouements and too-bombastic season finales).
Pay no attention to these contradictions, however, since we must remember that: 1) Whovians are a famously chatty and disputatious bunch whose incessant carping is a force unto itself, and 2) Noting such hypocrisy interferes with declaring Chris Chibnall the worst Doctor Who writer since Steven Moffatt, who, in his day, was the worst thing to happen to Doctor Who since Russell T. Davies, who was—well, you get the picture.
2. Comings & Goings
As such, the many press releases, hopes, and fears flying about cyberspace have threatened to swamp Doctor Who in a mire of rumor and innuendo, but now that Flux’s premiere episode (remember, the first of only six) has arrived, one hopes that we can return to enjoying the show itself (rather than shouting about its production whims and woes). Chibnall, always good with titles, serves up “The Halloween Apocalypse” as Flux’s inaugural entry to suggest that a fun and spooky adventure awaits. After all the bile, excitement, and hoopla the past few months have occasioned, what a relief it is to ask: How good is this newest outing?
“Good enough,” is my response, even if “The Halloween Apocalypse” is not quite as fine as it should be and not quite as sharp as Chibnall’s previous two season premieres (Series 11’s “The Woman Who Fell to Earth” and Series 12’s “Spyfall: Part One”). Yet “The Halloween Apocalypse” may be better than it has any right to be. Chibnall offers more exposition than seems wise even for an episode that introduces a complex, serialized plot that delves deeper into the already-complicated Timeless Child narrative he has created, a move bound to upset fans who disdain this development, which was suggested, after all, by only a single line of dialogue in Chibnall’s second Who installment, Series 11’s “The Ghost Monument” (first broadcast way back on 14 October 2018).
If you can parse even small passages of that last paragraph, you may well enjoy “The Halloween Apocalypse” for what it is: Chibnall’s grand place-setting episode, wherein he establishes the players, the locations, the themes, and the conflicts that Flux will dramatize. Chibnall prefers the furious pace that Doctor Who stories have always favored, with “The Halloween Apocalypse” being no exception. In simpler language, viewers must pay strict attention to every last detail or get left behind.
This outing does not tarry with recaps or reminders about where we last saw the Thirteenth Doctor (an effervescent Whittaker) and her longtime companion Yasmin “Yaz” Khan (the excellent Mandip Gill). Yaz and the Doctor, we learn, have been travelling together since their friends Ryan Sinclair (Tosin Cole) and Graham O’Brien (Bradley Walsh) exited the TARDIS for good at the conclusion of “Revolution of the Daleks,” 1 January 2021’s New Year’s Day Special.
Yes, friends, ten months have elapsed since Doctor Who last graced our screens, but, during this interregnum, Chibnall has not lost his taste for absurd spectacle. The opening shot of “The Halloween Apocalypse,” for instance, finds the Doctor and Yaz hanging upside down from a hovering metal bar that suspends them over an unnamed planet’s ocean of acid (yes, really!). A helmeted character named Karvanista (Craige Els) explains, in his acerbic dialogue, that he has wearied of the Doctor tracking him throughout space and time, so Karvanista decides to do what so many previous characters have failed to accomplish: end the Doctor’s travels once and for all.
“Bad move,” longtime viewers think, since the Doctor scrambles the hoverbar’s engines to rush herself and Yaz through the air, racing toward the TARDIS in a sequence whose visual effects mix impressive foreground renderings with dodgy background images. These shots may not quite mesh, but this first sequence’s tempo is so frenetic that these flaws—having characterized New Who since “Rose” launched the show in 2005—seem forgivable. Indeed, why complain when watching these events is so much fun? Once safely aboard the TARDIS, the Doctor refuses to stop chasing Karvanista, telling Yaz, “No one gets away with doing that to us.”
Jodie Whittaker again proves why her departure from Doctor Who will be a hammer blow. She pitches this dialogue perfectly, on the edge of anger that expresses more annoyance than rage, even if Whittaker makes it clear that Karvanista has made the worst mistake of his life by opposing the Doctor. Viewers, therefore, may be taken by surprise when Karvanista later removes his helmet to reveal the face of a large dog-man. Yes, dear reader, Karvanista is Lupari, a canine species that walks upright and that is “species-bonded” to humanity, a concept that will take on life-or-death significance later in “The Halloween Apocalypse.” He is also the last living member of Division, the temporal covert-ops agency that erased the Doctor’s memories of being the Timeless Child.
This development, however, comes only after the episode jumps frantically from location to location to introduce unrelated guest characters that, you guessed it, are linked by unexpected circumstances. Chibnall nicks this expository technique wholesale from every disaster movie ever filmed, having employed it in previous episodes, particularly 2019’s New Year’s Day Special “Resolution,” as well as Series 12’s first and sixth outings (“Spyfall: Part One” and “Praxeus,” respectively).
Viewers are flung from Liverpool, England in the year 1820, where a man named Joseph Williamson (Steve Oram) ominously presides over scores of bereft workers digging huge tunnels underneath the city, to the faraway space station Observation Outpost Rose, where Officer Inston-Vee Vinder (Jacob Anderson) makes his daily report (Number 21,754, to be precise): despite Vinder’s view of galactic space being unimaginably beautiful, nothing much has changed. We stop along the way at an Arctic research station whose two inhabitants, Jón (Gunnar Cauthery) and Anna (Rochenda Sandall), encounter a glowing device that floats above their garage floor, that both characters seem to recognize (if not fear), and that Anna quickly smashes with a shovel.
The Doctor, in the meantime, receives a vision (or psychic projection) from a creature known only as Swarm (Matthew Needham) as he breaks free from his millennia-long confinement in a cage located on the remnants of the Burnished Rage battleground (whatever that is). He does so by exploiting weaknesses in his containment capsule’s security fields, then slaughtering the two female Division agents sent to monitor his captivity before draining their life-forces.
Swarm then seems to regenerate, Time-Lord style, into a different incarnation of himself, this one also called Swarm (Sam Spruell), who bears a face that resembles a varnished human skull with rocky or metal spikes jutting from different areas. As this description implies, Swarm is a menacing creation who recalls Chibnall’s first Doctor Who antagonist—Series 11’s T’zim-Sha (Samuel Oatley)—and who similarly profits from the makeup team’s terrific prosthetics.
As busy as this installment already is, we have not yet finished touring its locales or dramatis personae. No, “The Halloween Apocalypse” keeps the surprises coming by including a single Weeping Angel, by next bringing back the Sontarans (that fierce-but-short warrior species whose members resemble dumplings in spacesuits), and, just to keep us on our toes, by then introducing a brand-new companion in the form of John Bishop’s instantly likable Dan Lewis. Whew! Blimey! Chibnall fills his narrative cup to the brim, requiring viewers to track these disparate elements not merely across the episode’s fictional universe but also across the first fifteen minutes of “The Halloween Apocalypse’s” 51-minute running time. Put another way (and perhaps more generously), Doctor Who, on a frame-by-frame basis, gives us more than our money’s worth in Flux’s inaugural entry.
3. Leavings & Weavings
“The Halloween Apocalypse” lives up to its name, particularly in its unabashed love of Doctor Who’s long lineage of monsters. The Weeping Angels, for instance, may be Steven Moffat’s greatest contribution to Doctor Who’s ever-expanding roster of extraterrestrials, but, in “The Halloween Apocalypse,” a single member of this silently dangerous species haunts a human woman named Claire (Annabel Scholey), who comes upon the Doctor and Yaz just as they arrive in Liverpool, England on 31 October 2021, having tracked Karvanista there.
Claire says that she has encountered the perplexed Doctor and Yaz before, but that this meeting occurs in the future, making their confusion understandable. This short interaction recalls Sally Sparrow’s (Carey Mulligan’s) meeting with the Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) and Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman) near the conclusion of Moffat’s “Blink,” the brilliant third-season installment that introduces the Weeping Angels for the first time.
Chibnall’s love of Who lore deepens to alarming proportions when Claire says that she is “taking the long way home.” This reference to Moffat’s “The Day of the Doctor,” the franchise’s fantastic Fiftieth Anniversary Special, evokes the Eleventh Doctor’s (Matt Smith’s) statement during that episode’s final moments that he will travel home, to his native planet Gallifrey, “the long way round,” a trip only completed by his successor, Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor, in Series 9’s penultimate episode, “Heaven Sent.”
Got that? Yes? No? Maybe?
Don’t worry, dear reader, Chibnall designs “The Halloween Apocalypse” to pay off plot lines, characters, and themes that stretch to New Who’s beginnings (and before), making his choice to drive this installment at a furious clip wiser than it initially appears, especially when its most significant details are laid out in so short a space.
Would it surprise you to know that I have forgotten a few, foremost among them the fact that Arctic researcher Anna (you know, the one who destroyed that floating thing-a-ma-jig with a shovel) is, in fact, Swarm’s sister, revealed in a scene midway through the episode as a creature who sports a jewel-encrusted blue skull and the name Azure? Get it?
Then there is the Flux, the subject of Series 13’s subtitle. What might that be? Oh, nothing less than a universe-destroying force (that resembles a murky shockwave rippling through deep space) that Officer Vinder witnesses vaporize three planets before he escapes Observation Outpost Rose in a small pod. How shocking would it be to learn that the Flux will eventually consume Earth? Not at all?
Chibnall here throws so many SF tropes into Doctor Who’s narrative blender that everything and nothing become predictable. Given this episode’s pell-mell rush, the fact that we can understand “The Halloween Apocalypse” at all qualifies as some type of victory. This outing’s expositional co-efficient is big enough to drag it down, but Chibnall handles everything deftly enough that we can follow along (if, that is, we pay close-enough attention).
And “The Halloween Apocalypse” is not yet done. It introduces a new companion to the Doctor and to Doctor Who, meaning that it qualifies as an important episode regardless of anything else. Although I had hoped that Series 13 would see Yaz travel alone with the Doctor, if we must meet a new companion, then Chibnall’s decision to cast comedian John Bishop as Dan Lewis pays off magnificently. Dan is a proud Liverpudlian, indeed so proud that he gives tours of the Museum of Liverpool despite not working there and, in a line enthusiastically uttered by Bishop, even refers to himself as “a Scouse!” Dan seems to work odd jobs (his occupation remains unclear), but, when we meet him, he volunteers time at Liverpool’s Jennings Street Food Bank, refuses to take home soup despite his fridge and cupboards being bare, and gives Halloween candy to visiting trick-or-treaters.
Dan, as such, joins New Who’s long line of compassionate everyday strivers. He’s a working-class bloke whose essential goodness makes him a prime candidate for travelling with the Doctor, even if doing so will forever change him. Bishop plays Dan as a sweet, happy-go-lucky fellow who doesn’t complain about his straitened circumstances, but simply gets on with life by enjoying what he can where he can. He is one of the best aspects of “The Halloween Apocalypse,” so seeing more of Dan as Flux unfolds is a welcome prospect. Bishop seems up to challenge of playing whatever Chibnall throws at him, so I look forward to watching this new addition to Who’s cast nearly as much as I anticipate enjoying the delightful tag-team rhythm that Yaz and the Doctor have developed during their solo travels.
Speaking of the Flux, its meaning stays in flux (get it?) until the final moments of “The Halloween Apocalypse,” where it presages—drumroll, please!—nothing less than the end of the universe itself. Doctor Who has been here many times before, so the question isn’t if the Doctor will save all of space and time from utter devastation, but rather how she will do so.
Chris Chibnall knows this as well as anyone, so he engineers a nice narrative reversal in “The Halloween Apocalypse’s” final act. When the Doctor realizes that the Flux has already begun annihilating other planets and will soon reach Earth, she and Yaz also recognize that Karvanista is not, as they presumed, the advance scout of a Lupari invasion fleet. Instead, the species-bond that the Lupari share with human beings compels the Lupari to send their seven-billion interstellar ships to Earth to save as many people as possible from the Flux’s destruction.
Karvanista is personally bonded to Dan, meaning that, despite not liking his personality, Karvanista attempts to save Dan throughout “The Halloween Apocalypse.” Craige Els is marvelous in the role, which cannot be easy given that Els must play Karvanista as a proud warrior while wearing a furry-dog head whose expressiveness marks another triumph by Doctor Who’s makeup team (even as it risks making Karvanista more cute and cuddly than intimidating). Els’s deep-baritone voice gives Karvanista a gravity and menace he might otherwise lack, while the plan that this dog warrior and the Doctor formulate to preserve Earth from the Flux’s onrushing shockwave is clever, even ingenious, in its simplicity.
So, friends, “The Halloween Apocalypse” is all-too-much in conception, but better-than-expected in execution. This judgment is a credit to the cast’s and crew’s talents, to say nothing of their commitment to bringing off a script packed to the gills with portent and incident. Chibnall sets a high bar for Flux’s remaining five episodes, so let us hope these future installments slow down enough to weave many—if not all—the threads begun here into an attractive tapestry. “The Halloween Apocalypse” achieves its chief aim (namely, keeping me coming back for more), so I shall credit Chibnall with a good-enough job here, yet await stronger dramatic tidings in the weeks ahead.
FILE
NOTES
See Clark Collis’s 29 July 2021 Entertainment Weekly article “Jodie Whittaker Is Leaving Doctor Who after 3 Seasons” (among many others) for information.
See Doctor Who TV’s 29 July 2021 article “Jodie Whittaker and Chris Chibnall to Leave Doctor Who in a Trio of Specials in 2022” (among many others) for Chinball’s “three-series-and-out” claim.
See Nick Romano’s 24 September 2021 Entertainment Weekly article “Doctor Who Vet Russell T. Davies Returns as Showrunner 12 Years after His Departure” and Alex Ritman’s 24 September 2021 Hollywood Reporter article “Russell T. Davies to Return as Doctor Who Showrunner 12 Years after Departure” (among many others) for information.