Doctor Who Series 13: Doctor In Flux

The story so far: after a shaky first season, Jodie Whittaker’s tenure as the Thirteenth Doctor has had an utterly disastrous second season, with Chris Chibnall’s judgement, taste, ability to promote the show, production knowhow, and writing approach all disintegrating. At this point, COVID struck. Rumour has it that there was about an hour or so during the pandemic when Doctor Who was cancelled or on hiatus, but Chibnall persuaded his superiors that it would be viable to do a six-episode mini-season for 2021 under COVID-safe production conditions.

There are many ironies arising from a teenage Chibnall’s appearance on a 1986 episode of feedback show Open Air, but perhaps the ultimate one is that after making a memorable television debut running down The Trial of a Time Lord, he ended up producing his own riff on the same basic concept – a season of Doctor Who with a truncated number of episodes compared to a full-size episode of the period, with one big story spanning the season divided into a series of smaller tales. The overarching tale is Flux, but I am going to treat each episode as an individual story because, as in The Trial of a Time Lord, mashing them all together risks letting unusually bad sub-stories off the hook and selling unusually good sub-stories short.

Our first episode is The Halloween Apocalypse. We open with a light, quip-heavy action sequence in which it turns out the Doctor and Yaz have annoyed a fairly generic space villain called Karvanista (Craig Els), who’s left them in a deathtrap whilst he heads to Earth to destroy it. They escape in a big, cartoonish way, and then use the TARDIS to pursue Karvanista. Meanwhile, Scouse pest Dan (John Bishop) is making a nuisance of himself at the Museum of Liverpool by pretending to be a tour guide, the mysterious entity known as Swarm (Sam Spruell) escapes from its aeons-long confinement and transmits to the Doctor a telepathic vision of its liberation, and the TARDIS has sprung a nasty leak. When Karvanista commences his invasion of Earth by busting into Dan’s house, Karvanista is perturbed when Dan seems immune to his mental powers. Can the Doctor and Yaz save Dan, stop Karvanista, figure out what the deal with Swarm is, and fix that leak?

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So, on the plus side, Karvanista is a DOGGY MAN! Even cuter and wufflier than the one from Terminus! The costume allows for somewhat more animated facial expressions, but it is still barely a step above Survival. At least this is played for laughs somewhat, although the truth of what Karvanista is is pretty absurd. See, it turns out that the Lupari, Karvanista’s people, are pair-bonded to humans – each human being has a space doggy equivalent among the Lupari, vowed to come rescue us in moments of ultimate danger.

I guess the idea here is to get across the idea that the Flux is the biggest most ultimate danger the Earth has ever faced, but frankly it just seems like the Lupari have been massively fucking negligent over the entire span of the series. It also makes no fucking sense given Karvanista’s actions over the course of the episode, which commences with him putting Yaz in mortal peril. Shouldn’t Yaz’s doggy guardian have something to say to him about that? Or are they only meant to intervene in Flux-scale crises and ignore anything lesser? If so their protection doesn’t seem to really count for much, given how many humans would likely live entire lifetimes without anything Flux-scale happening but still run into situations where they are in desperate need of help. In addition, Karvanista shows up in the very next episode to save Dan when he’s a life-or-death situation, establishing that the Lupari are in fact meant to intervene in situations at least as minor as “death by Sontaran firing squad”… so why didn’t the Lupari intervene in previous Sontaran-related crises?

The Lupari mostly seem to be here to provide a big planetary shield which can keep Earth safe whilst the Flux does its thing in the wider universe. (They don’t protect the Sun, though, so I guess total human extinction is on the cards anyway. Good job, Lupari.) Ah yes, the titular Flux itself – we get sight of that this episode and it’s essentially a big CGI phenomenon that deletes bits of the universe as it propagates. It’s rather pretty CGI, but pretty CGI by itself doesn’t count for much these days; it’s understandable that scenes which can largely be realised on a computer workstation are a significant feature given the COVID restrictions, mind, but blowing up a load of planets we’ve never seen before and won’t see again doesn’t exactly carry much narrative or emotional impact.

The main work the episode has to do is to reveal what the deal with the Lupari is, show us the Flux, and have the Lupari shield Earth from the Flux to set up the idea that we are on the verge of disaster, as covered above, but it’s also tossing out plot strands here and there to set up the action of the subsequent episodes. A Weeping Angel shows up in this kind of out of the blue, I suppose because they’re iconic monsters and Chibnall is playing the old Remember This Thing You Like? card as a desperation move. It doesn’t do much beyond show up and touch someone to set up a future episode. The Sontarans also show up and seem intent on exploiting the chaos caused by the Flux.

In terms of novel features, there’s Swarm, who looks intriguingly bizarre. Those keeping Swarm confined seem to have a shit setup. Only two people checking in at a time, with no backup on call in the event of a problem? Come off it. And shouldn’t they be maintaining a blockade around the prison site to prevent people inadvertently freeing Swarm? Then there’s the mystery couple on Earth, where Swarm shows up and disintegrates one of them and the other one transforms into Azure (Rochenda Sandall) gothy version of the same general type creature that Swarm is, and who prior to that seem to have had some knowledge of alien stuff. Everything here is signalling that we should treat this Swarm stuff as a very big deal, not least because Swarm is a former foe of the Doctor from her pre-Hartnell days in the Division. The Doctor’s telepathic visions of the Flux destroying things and Swarm being a bastard seem half intended as an Obi-Wan imitating “I felt a great disturbance in the Force” moment, half as a means of motivating the Doctor through abrupt ass-pulls.

The episode at least feels full of stuff, but the characterisation of the Doctor remains an issue. The banter between the Doctor and Yaz is particularly grating; when Yaz expresses concerns about the Doctor hiding stuff, the Doctor deflects and then starts berating Yaz like she’s making out that Yaz is an ungrateful swine for wanting to be kept informed. I guess if we’re doing a Sixth Doctor job on Thirteen we may as well throw in emotional abuse signifiers as part of the bargain, right? It’s also apparent that the Doctor is after Karvanista because she thinks he knows about the Division, and isn’t explaining that to Yaz, but… why? What’s the motivation for keeping the Division stuff secret? The Doctor kept the Time War stuff quiet in past because he was ashamed of his role in it – but where’s the shame and guilt here, when the Division victimised the Doctor to the extent they clearly did?

Yaz is being positioned here as the main companion (by virtue of being the only one from prior seasons to stick around), but we’ll have to see whether she actually gets treated as one in the long term; here, the Doctor’s dragging her around on risky missions but essentially treating it like none of her business what the point of the missions are, even when they come with danger of death. This is perhaps the worst basis for a Doctor-companion relationship we’ve seen since the Sixth Doctor and Peri.

Things become somewhat more focused with War of the Sontarans. After a run-in with the Flux, the TARDIS has crashed in the midst of the Crimean War – but rather than fighting the Russians, the British here are fighting the Sontarans, who seem to have ended up imposing themselves on Earth history, to the point where people seem to believe they have always been here. As the Doctor works with Mary Seacole (Sara Powell) to find out what’s going on, Dan and Yaz end up teleported away by powers unknown – Dan returning to the present, where the shape of history is more familiar but for the arrival of the Sontarans two days ago, and Yaz being sent to the Temple of Atropos on the Planet of Time, where a bizarre entity demands she conducts repairs lest Time itself run rogue.

War of the Sontarans must be the most generic possible Sontaran story title possible – it’s like Cybernetics of the Cybermen or The Time Travel of the Doctor or Frustrated Yelling of the Daleks. Nonetheless, there’s some bits to like here. Seeing a Sontaran on horseback is grand in the same way seeing apes on horseback in Planet of the Apes is cool, and the idea of the Sontarans establishing a beachhead in the 21st Century to jump back and rewrite the 19th is a fun concept.

Oi, Sontaran on horseback, helmet on! The pandemic’s still going!

In principle, dividing the Doctor and her companions up is a good way to give everyone some spotlight time. Some benefit from this more than others. The Doctor’s interactions with Mary Seacole get the most oxygen, and one suspects that the idea of a story where the gang encounter Seacole had been on the cards prior to being repurposed for Flux. It offers a nice compromise between the lighter “historical figure co-opted into a space adventure” angle from Spyfall and the more serious “let’s profile a real person” stories like Rosa, but inevitably ends up slipping more into the former mode. “I’m Mary Seacole’s assistant” is a lovely bit of dialogue from the Doctor to answer Seacole’s question about who she is, because it gets across the idea of how much she respects Seacole. At the same time, the Doctor effectively recruits Seacole to conduct espionage, monitoring the Sontaran encampment, and I feel like it’s mildly disrespecting Seacole’s work by having her co-opted like that.

The Doctor’s entire plot to beat them is also based on an absurdity – the idea that the Sontaran feeding and rest cycle requires each and every Sontaran to go back into their ships and replenish themselves via their probic vents, leaving the Doctor and her chums free to sabotage everything. This is ridiculous. Has Chibnall not heard of the idea of shifts? Surely Sontarans would be assigned to staggered feeding schedules, so as to avoid exactly this ridiculous vulnerability? The end, where the British general blows up the Sontaran ships as they retreat, feels like a somewhat clumsy rehash of the end of The Christmas Invasion without a cool “Don’t you think she looks tired?” moment.

The Crimean War section also borrows a bit from the Virgin New Adventures novel Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible where the Doctor is trying to get into the TARDIS but the doors have disappeared, which is rather fun and is a reminder that on some level Chibnall really is a Doctor Who fan with the sort of investment in the series to do that sort of callback, even if only a tiny fraction of the audience would pick up on it. Which in some respects makes the failure of his era all the more sad; it would be one thing if he blatantly didn’t care about the show and was half-assing it, but evidently this era really does represent the best he could do.

Dan’s section sees him infiltrating the Sontaran base on Liverpool docks, which in principle is fine, but feels like an incongruous thing for him to do this early on in his stint as a companion. He only just got onboard the TARDIS, and whilst it makes a lot of sense for Yaz to resort to “What Would The Doctor Do?” as a guiding principle (as she is shown doing), it feels like Dan’s actions here would make more sense of a Dan who’s been on a few adventures already and is placed to do a bit more solo adventuring. It also sees Karvanista saying that the Lupari really should have intervened to stop the Sontaran invasion, causing further problems with the concept. (Where they snoozing on the job every single time the Daleks have shown up?) By this point, we’re getting a handle on Dan as as a character; he seems to be basically a riff on Graham – he’s the down-to-Earth middle-aged dude who gets lots of comic relief lines.

As for Yaz’s section, this seems much more connected to the overarching season plot, with Swarm and Azure showing up and much waffle about the Mouri – clearly based on the Greek Moirai, the legendary Three Fates of Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos – and “Time” as a personification or force which can be unleashed and must be kept controlled, which is a very Sapphire and Steel concept. It’s otherwise very, very thinly developed – there’s enough time spent on it to leave the end of the other two strands feeling a tad rushed, but at the same time it’s kind of underbaked and feels like it offers little of substance, in part because of Chibnall’s tendency towards storytelling secrecy making him reluctant to present anything which might let you guess what direction things are going in.

Then again, the whole episode seems underbaked – it feels like three partial episodes which individually are not that good, brought together into a single episode which at least feels like it’s got a lot of stuff going on, even if a lot of that stuff is underdeveloped. It feels notably better than anything we’ve seen since, say, Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror, but that’s a low bar to clear.

The next episode is Once, Upon Time. Swarm and Azure have put Yaz and stranded space watchtower attendant Vinder (Jacob Anderson) at risk by plugging them in to the Temple’s systems in place of the destroyed Mouri. To prevent Yaz being utterly overloaded by the temporal forces involved, the Doctor intervenes, with Dan tagging along, dragging everyone involved into a time storm. Like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five, the Doctor, Yaz, Dan, and Vinder have ended up unstuck in time, floating in and out of moments in their personal history, occasionally communing with the Mouri, and in some cases seeing individuals in the incidents they visit as some of their fellow time pilgrims. (For instance, the Doctor experiences the Division’s original siege of the Temple of Atropos during which the Fugitive Doctor, prior to going Fugitive, originally captured Swarm, she sees the rest of the squad as Yaz, Vinder, and Dan.)

This is Chibnall’s big bid to show he can do a Steve Moffat story – a bizarre timey-wimey story which offers the sort of clever, thought-provoking, challenging, original material which the First Chibnall was asking for when he appeared on that feedback show to needle Pip and Jane Baker and John Nathan-Turner. Needless to say, it doesn’t quite play out that way.

For one thing, doing a “the characters all get shunted off in different plot strands” episode after going for the same gambit in the previous episode. Last time I wondered whether this was necessitated by the COVID restrictions – after all, one main character per plot thread allows for more supporting characters to participate in the same scene whilst sticking to limits on the number of people onset at any particular time. However, with the way the regulars appear in each others’ visions means that benefit is surely sabotaged.

Not all the time streams are created equal. The Doctor’s is perhaps the most significant, since it’s got Division lore in it and has some backstory to Swarm’s nonsense. Dan’s is trying to fill us in a bit more on his backstory and his emotional world, and there isn’t much of either so he doesn’t get much of a look in save as a guest in other people’s visions. Vinder is witnessing some political shenanigans, the import of which we have little basis for assessing, and which seems to largely be here to fill in his backstory, whilst Yaz is getting some Weeping Angel foreshadowing.

Interspersed with all this are vignettes where the mysterious Bel (Thaddea Graham) and her Tamagotchi are having very generic shooty space adventures in a cramped, collapsing post-Flux universe where various iconic Doctor Who monster species – Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans, all the classics – are squabbling over the remaining territory. Bel is the sort of character who says “Love is the only mission, idiot” before shooting a wounded Cyberman dead and then playing with her Tamagotchi a bit. She feels like a refugee from a Star Wars spinoff.

For an episode which is trying to do something timey-wimey and clever and artsy, this isn’t actually any of those things. The time streams don’t really interact with each other, and are fairly easy to unravel, and the episode largely serves to provide lots of fairly clumsy background dumps Chibnall had no more elegant way to deploy and do bits of foreshadowing. Towards the end the Doctor encounters Awksok (Barbara Flynn), who later turns out to be Tecteun, the Gallifreyan who discovered the Timeless Child, who drops some dialogue about how what’s going on in the Temple of Atropos is meant to disintegrate the flow of time just as the Flux consumes space itself because it’s been decided that this universe is due to be demolished. I certainly hope there’s a good, compelling reason for that?

In some respects, Once, Upon Time is the perfect microcosm of the Chibnall era, not because it’s necessarily bad (but feels like a step back from War of the Sontarans on that front) but because it’s trying to imitate the sort of thing a more capable showrunner would do, but fails at it. Even more Moffat mimicry is promised in the next episode, because it’s time for the Weeping Angels-focused bit of the storyline – Village of the Angels. This is also the only bit where Chibnall has a co-writer – Maxine Alderton, who wrote The Haunting of Villa Diodati last season.

We pick up from the cliffhanger last time, in which a Weeping Angel spontaneously appeared in the TARDIS and started messing with the controls. The Doctor keeps warning Yaz and Dan that they need to keep watching the Angel, because if they blink it might attack them, except if they are watching it continuously enough to stop it attacking them it shouldn’t be able to operate the controls – but hey, Moffat himself turned the Statue of Liberty into a Weeping Angel in The Angels Take Manhattan and had it moving about despite the Statue clearly being watched by someone at some point all day every day, so I suppose Moffat already set the precedent of eroding the rules.

The titular village is a rural place in 1960s Britain, where Weeping Angels are haunting the local churchyard, and parapsychologist Professor Jericho (Kevin McNally) is studying Claire (Annabel Scholey), a clairvoyant who was zapped back in time from 2021 back in The Halloween Apocalypse and has been trying to keep her origins in the future quiet as she attempts to make a life in the past, even though she has a newspaper printout from the future in her pocket which reveals that all the inhabitants of the village are due to disappear tonight. That’s far from Claire’s only problem, mind… for she seems to be turning into an Angel.

“What on earth is this on my TV screen, Doctor?” “The worst thing you can imagine, Professor Jericho: a Chibnall episode!”

This is rather fun! There’s some interesting twists on the Angel concept, there’s a fun moment where the edge of the village turns out to be a yawning gulf into space, and a nice confrontation between the Doctor and the Angel inside Claire’s mind which reveals some manner of infighting among the Angels themselves. It is, mind you, strikingly obvious that it’s almost wholly disconnected from the rest of the Flux plot – a side-story pasted in for the sake of filling out the episode numbers. Token connections are worked in – more Bel scenes, largely, plus the idea that the Angels that are trying to hunt down the Angel inside Claire’s head are acting on behalf of the Division.

Indeed, the story’s at its weakest the more it’s addressing Flux and Division stuff and the less it’s focusing on the village’s immediate situation, which sets this up for a fairly deflating ending when the situation in the village isn’t really resolved so much as the Doctor gets to the end of the breadcrumb trail of clues and gets transformed into Angel form for being shipped back to the Division – an ultimate outcome which not only could have been arrived at in the immediate wake of Once, Upon Time in all manner of other ways, but also robs us of a story about the Doctor saving a village which is about to be destroyed by Angels, which it feels like this story would have been had it not been tied into all this Flux stuff.

The next episode is Survivors of the Flux, where the Doctor ends up duly delivered to the Division to get a plot dump from Tecteun whilst Yaz, Dan, and Jericho do comic relief Indiana Jones adventures in 1904 and we get flashes of a backstory where the entity known as Grand Serpent (Craig Parkinson) was involved in setting up UNIT so he could pull the plug on it to pave the way for the Division’s shutdown of the universe and there’s more stuff with Bel and Vinder to keep us appraised of what Swarm and Azure are doing. It’s lots of little bits which are in principle connected but don’t really cohere.

There’s flashes of a good idea around the Division – an organisation so called because it places itself in the interstices between universes, and as a result of its advantaged position considers individual universes to be disposable. Chibnall, however, does not seem to have much confidence in Tecteun as a big bad – or perhaps wanted to get rid of her to remove people with inconvenient levels of knowledge about the Doctor’s past. (The Doctor decides not to get her memories of her pre-Hartnell incarnations back at the end of the season, and that decision is somewhat easier to justify if there aren’t people knocking around who knows that stuff and could use it as leverage.)

She’s deleted by Swarm and Azure, who turn out to be agents of a former cosmic order from before the Time Lords, via the Division, took control of time. (The Sapphire and Steel dimension to things may have given rise to Azure’s name, come to think of it.) The Flux was something that Tecteun unleashed to delete the universe, because she got tired of the Doctor being a disrupting force (what was she doing for the last 13 regenerations), Swarm and Azure are happy to keep it going so as to destroy everything the Division built, it’s all very goofy.

By the final episode, The Vanquishers, things have descended into near-total incoherence. Again, it’s a divided-into-three episode; in this case, the Doctor’s presence on the reality-defying Division station has caused her to trilocate – a fraction of her is still on the platform, a fraction is with Karvanista dealing with Grand Serpent (who turns out to be another secondary villain doing his own thing), and fraction is with Yaz and Dan and Jericho in 1904 interacting with Joseph Williamson, creator of the famed Williamson Tunnels and Kate Stewart of UNIT as they try to rally resistance to Sontaran domination of Earth.

In the hands of a cleverer writer, this could be City of Death in reverse – a story about the divided Doctor solving a problem in collaboration with herself. As it stands, even more than any other “trifurcated plotline” episodes of Flux, this gives the impression of Chibnall cramming in half-baked ideas for three different Doctor Who stories – one about the Grand Serpent manipulating UNIT, one about Swarm and Azure, and one about Joseph Williamson’s tunnels extending into otherdimensional spaces – and trying to smash them together into one story.

A good chunk of the plot ends up being about Sontarans outwitting Daleks and Cybermen, which feels like watching the three most pathetic people you know having a slapfight. The Sontaran plan depends on the Daleks and Cybermen acting like utter fools, and works to the extent that it does only because the Daleks and Cybermen somehow manage to be even bigger dullards than the Sontarans themselves. Then the Doctor hoovers up the Flux by putting it all in a Passenger, which is a sort of humanoid trap-universe. The entire thing ends with the Doctor not bothering to find out about her past, which in effect amounts to Chibnall simply refusing to resolve the situation he’d set up with the Timeless Child and leave it for subsequent showrunners to figure out how the living fuck you are meant to build on it.

The whole empty spectacle lurches and shudders to a halt. By the end, the Doctor vaguely discloses a partial explanation of what the whole thing was about to Yaz, leaving out almost all the important details, because apparently we’re still out to make the Thirteenth Doctor seem pathetic and maladjusted. In the final pass, it’s perhaps appropriate that Karvanista, implied to be a former companion of the Fugitive Doctor now synapse-locked so he can never speak of that time without dying, was such a constant presence in Flux… because the whole thing was just one long shaggy dog story.

Best Story: Village of the Angels, which like Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror is not a good story so much as it’s a vague approximation of the shape a good story might take, had someone else been executing it. In this case, decoupling it from the rest of the structure of Flux might have led to something appreciably better, particularly with the idea of the entire village being time-zapped in one night – leading to the prospect of a 1901 version of the village wholly inhabited by people from 1967, who commence living out their lives knowing that in 66 years it’s all going to happen again, so every time the village faces its Angel apocalypse there’s an older generation who know it’s about to end in tears, some of whose existence may involve grandfather paradoxes…

Yes, that’s why you pick this one as best story: because it’s the one where you can imagine better. For the rest, it’s hard to imagine what you do with what they bring to the table other than Flux, and hard to avoid the conclusion from The Vanquishers that Flux faintly wasn’t worth doing, since the only thing it accomplishes is ruling out the possibility that the Timeless Child stuff will ever be adequately explored under Chibnall.

Worst Story: Probably Survivors of the Flux, because it’s the moment you get that awful realisation that the show is 100% not going to stick the landing.

Most Important Story: The Vanquishers, because it does a scorched Earth on most of the Doctor’s opportunities to meaningfully learn more about her pre-Hartnell life.

Least Important Story: Village of the Angels, because you could edit it out of the season arc just fine and it’d still work.

Showrunner Ratio: This is where I offer the proportion of the season written or co-written by the current showrunner, calculated both in terms of stories and in terms of episodes. Here’s the proportion in terms of stories:

1. 2008-2010 Specials/Series 13 (100%).
2. Series 12 (66.6%).
3. Series 11 (63.6%).
4. Series 1 (60%)/Series 9 (60%).
5. Series 8 (58.3%).
6. Series 10 (46.2%).
7. Series 2/Series 4/Series 5 (45.5%).
8. Series 7 (43.8%).
9. Series 6 (41.6%).
10. Series 3 (40%).

And here’s the proportion in terms of episodes:

1. 2008-2010 Specials/Series 13 (100%).
2. Series 12 (72.7%).
3. Series 11 (63.6%).
4. Series 1/Series 8 (61.5%).
5. Series 9 (53.8%).
6. Series 5/Series 10 (50%).
7. Series 7 (43.8%).
8. Series 2/Series 3/Series 4/Series 6 (42.9%).

The problem here is self-evident. Although this season is not as consistently terrible as Series 12, the fact that Chibnall is such a dominant presence more or less guarantees it won’t be able to actually scramble its way towards actually being good.

Chibnall Quotient: This is the special Chibnall era-only category where I keep track of which stories involve “running about in corridors” or “silly monsters” or stories you could regard as being “unchallenging” or clichéd in a Doctor Who context. A story which avoids all these pitfalls might, possibly, meet the exacting standards of the First Chibnall, who showed up on Open Air back in 1986.

• Running Up and Down Corridors featured in War of the Sontarans, Once, Upon Time, Village of the Angels, and The Vanquishers.
• Silly Monsters featured in The Halloween Apocalypse, War of the Sontarans, Once, Upon Time, Survivors of the Flux, and The Vanquishers.
• Unchallenging Stories featured in The Halloween Apocalypse, War of the Sontarans, and Once, Upon Time, Village of the Angels, Survivors of the Flux, and The Vanquishers.

The First Chibnall would not have enjoyed Flux.

Season Ranking: So, how big of an improvement is this?

1. Season 26 (10/10).
2. Season 13 (10/10).
3. Season 14 (10/10).
4. Season 25 (10/10).
5. Season 18 (9/10).
6. Series 10 (9/10).
7. Season 12 (9/10).
8. Season 7 (9/10).
9. Series 9 (9/10).
10. Season 17 (9/10).
11. Season 6 (8/10).
12. Season 24 (8/10).
13. Season 4 (8/10).
14. Season 8 (8/10).
15. Season 9 (8/10).
16. Season 15 (8/10).
17. Season 5 (8/10).
18. Series 4 (8/10).
19. Season 2 (8/10).
20. Series 2 (7/10).
21. Season 20 (7/10).
22. Season 16 (7/10).
23. Season 1 (7/10).
24. Series 3 (7/10).
25. Season 10 (7/10).
26. Season 3 (7/10).
27. Series 8 (6/10).
28. Series 1 (6/10).
29. 2008-2010 Specials (6/10).
30. Series 6 (6/10).
31. Season 19 (6/10).
32. Series 5 (5/10).
33. The TV movie (5/10).
34. Series 7 (5/10).
35. Season 21 (5/10).
36. Series 11 (4/10).
37. Season 11 (4/10).
38. Season 23 (3/10).
39. Series 13 (2/10).
40. Season 22 (2/10).
41. Series 12 (1/10).

Not enough of one. There are glimmerings of good ideas and better stories here, and it’s shorter than Series 12; these are its main advantages over its immediate predecessor. Otherwise, we’re in the realm of statistical noise. It’s kind of appropriate that this has ended up landing square between Season 22 and Season 23; like the former, it has a dynamic of the Doctor being in an emotionally abusive relationship with their companion, and like the latter it’s got a season-long story which descends into total incoherence at the end.

The main difference between this and The Trial of a Time Lord is that Robert Holmes died before writing the ending of that one, but Chibnall survived Flux. Which meant he’d live to squeeze three more stories out of his dried-up creative well before finally abdicating the showrunner position and Fluxing off.