Notes on - Doctor Who: Flux, Chapter Three: Once, Upon Time

 

 

Flux: Once, Upon Time Notes

 

Bel’s Story.  Interesting, the Flux has already come and trashed the universe and gone.  I did not expect that pacing for the story.

Bel is in the Dalek sector, which keeps growing. 

Time is totally jacked and flips around

Swarm of blue glowing things that affect people just like the flux.  Wait, is that actually Swarm?

Bel is trying to get to someone she loves.

When we left our heroes, Yaz was about to have all time poured through her.  We pick right up at the same moment

It’s not very clear what the Doctor is accomplishing at first.  By design.

She put all four of them inside the time storm, because time is broken.  Is it like an eye of th ehurrican situation?

Everything is corrupted.  Yaz, Dan and Vinder got drawn back into ‘time’

And suddenly we’re all wrong footed by all four of them being together but in a totally different situation,

I appreciate how little concession they’re making to clarity at this point.

The Siege of Atropos

Mouri Skiens

She’s on a long ago mission to resuce hostages and restart time.

And Dan, Meanwhile, is meeting up with Di to bring her coffee in the morning.  They’re sweet together.  And clearly in the ‘friends that fancy each other. But haven’t acknowledged it yet.’ Stage

Di:  I fell asleep in front of him.

Dan:  I thought you were going for pizza?

Di:  I fell asleep in me pizza in front of him.  He was so boring.

Nice how it’s not immediately obvious that place and time keep shifting behind them

We’re getting Dan’s backstory.  He was engaged and she called it off at the last minute.

That does sound brutal.

**** That’s life, isn’t it.  Nobody gets by without some bruises.

Yes, Di was waiting and Dan didn’t come.  What happened to her?  Nice reminder from the show that that mystery is still out there.

The Doctor can project herself into these other timestreams to tell the others what is going on.  We don’t get any info yet beyond that she can do this.  Which counts as information I suppose.

And then the Doctor is chatting with Yaz in one of her memories, but here they’re just establishing that the people you’re seeing in these memories aren’t necessarily the people that were actually there at the time.

Plus, thery’re bringing the Angels into things.  But they’re only seen in the mirror this time which is interesting.

Yaz’ timestream  has something glitchy in it trying to keep the doctor out.  That builds nicely on the info we got when she popped into Dan’s timestream e.g. that they were in their own timelines and the doctor could pop in.

And then we get to Vinder, who we know the least about so will benefit most from this format.

We’ve been given enough clues to guess that this isn’t really Yaz in his memory, and Vinder confirms it in dialogue just as we’re figuring it out.

Vinder took all offers of counseling.  That’s refreshingly not the ‘macho bullshit’ characterization

The Grand Serpent.  He’s demanding.  This boss must know how shady the grand serpent really is.

It’s nice that they’ve established what the inside of this temple looks like before attacking it from the outside.

They really are making this a huge clusterfuck as far as how time is functioning.  They’re all in on the ‘time is broken’ idea.

Giant Mouri.  They just told us that we were in a different part of the Doctor’s life

So are the Mouri just extradimensional beings that can funnel time?  Ho wmany of them are there

It should be clear that this is whatever happened the first time Swarm and Azure attacked the temple, but it’s just not spelled out enough until we see Doctor Ruth in the reflection.

The Doctor really wants to know more about her past, it makes sense that she’d obsess about it here.

She threw them all into a time storm and it kicked them all into their memories

Dan is Karvanista, they’re slowly hinting at it.  I wonder who Yaz and Vinder are for real?

They’ve promised the Doctor that if she succeeds in this mission, she’ll be free from the Division

***What am I running from?

Williamson accuses Dan of turning his back on The Task

What IS Williamson’s deal?

Here’s the azure swarm again

They remove people and objects from the mortal plane

The Doctor is trying to hide Dan but he keeps fidgeting out of his timestream

Time is breaking and hunting down anomalies

The Doctor:  Not that I want to worry you.  Cause I don’t.  But I have.  So sorry.

Del’s sector coordinates.  They’re kind of meaningless with space this jacked up

The Lupari have vanished from their home galaxy.  That’s because they’re all protecting Earth, right?

The red planet with fields is pretty

And here’s the cyber sector.

We think she’s talking to one of those tamaguchi pets or whatever they were called.

So it’s a duality.  The flux is destroying space and the fall of Atropos is destroying time.

The Grand Serpant.  Not sure about his jacket.

Who is Yaz in this memory.

The Grand Serpent is a douche.  Vinder was just being agreeable

So Vinder used to be a soldier of some kind for these people and got assigned to be a personal guard to their king douche.

Yaz and I both aren’t good at gaming

I hate the way they’re re-inforcing the stereotype that girls can only possibly be into gaming to trick guys into liking them

And now, finally they spell it out concretely nearly half way in.  They’re hidden in memories, possibly past, possibly future.

The Doctor:  The best place to hide you all is in your own lives.

There’s something wrong with Yaz’ timestream, presumably because of Angels.  They can do that because we know Yaz’ timestream, so they can use the time for something else.

They have to keep showing the Doctor with the Giant Mouri.  The resolution of this episodes structure resides with them

Swarm is more monstery and much less charming in the far past

What is passenger

They’re barred from our dimension.  By the Time Lords, one assumes

SO they can store endless numbers of life forms in each, like a soul TARDIS?

What is the Divisions dirty secret.

Oh, the planet time itself. 

So this planet is what the Time Lords used to ebnd the dark times and impose order on linear time.

Swarm describes it as the battle between time and space.  He appears to be on the side of time.

So the timelords constructed this planet as a vehicle to imprison the force of time.  That makes sense.  Space can be chaotic, but time must be linear because the time lords imposed that.

Didn’t Einstein say that Space and time were the same thing from different angles?

Why do Swarm and Azure have hostages?  What do they want?  How did the timelords find and deal with the Mouri?

The Division used a passenger while being all high ground about them being forbidden for other people to use

Dan has Karvanista’s gun – big hint that it’s him

So The Doctor just needs to replace the 4 burnt out Mouri

I like Bel

Tigmi – that’s linked to her unborn child then?

Sontarans, Daleks and Cybermen each have a zone.  What, no Zygons?  No Autons?

The Cybermen have lost that super speed thing and are much less challengiung than last time

Time is the temporal center.  So the flux kind of took out both time and space

Cyberman:  We shall command.  We shall rule.

Bel:  Over what?

Bel’s mission is Love.

I like that the Cyberman was driven to document what Bel was going for

I like the Alforian’s costumes.

I have a lot of questions about this culture ruled by the Grand Serpent.  But I like that they aren’t really explaining it, just giving us the aesthetic.

The Grand Serpent leaves some dirty dealing including ordering execution of his enemies’ family members off the record.  And of course Vinder feels duty bound to report it, which is why he ends up punished out on that observation post.

The recording would document that he stopped the recording though, right?

Whistleblower protocols.  That don’t really protect anyone.

Vinder is the ‘do what’s right regardless of cost’ guy.

Vinder:  I took an oath.  I swore my loyalty to our constitution.  Not to any one person.  Something bigger.  More important.

Vinder begging not to have to relieve certain parts is heartbreaking

Cut to , Vinder sending his one chance at recording a message off to someone.  It’s obvious in hindsight, but I didn’t see it at the time.

 

*** I’m sorry.  I was doing the right thing.

Lovely transition to the eye of the Mouri

Confirmed that ‘Dan’ is Karvanista.

The 4 replacement Mouri are replaced but the Doctor is willing to risk her life for even one more scrap of her lost memories.  Understandable.

So we’re performatively not told how that part of the story ends.  I bet we learn more in part 5 or 6

Who is this woman with the hat on her back.  She noticed the Doctor navigating all  those time streams.  She’s fixing something and says the damage to time was intentional and done.  She released them on purpose

The Doctor:  I’m sorry, I’m normally very good at keeping up with things, but you lost me quite early on.

The flux was deliberately made and placed because of the Doctor and Swarm and Azure were released.  To destroy Space and Time, respectively

And with that, this week’s framing device is closed out

Apparently they knew all along what the Doctor would do, but the circle was broken long enough to totally jack time up, so no problem.

Love the way Swarm points and says ‘Dan Lewis!’

Ah, Di is in the Passenger.  Why did they think they’d need her?

Swarm wants to reign in Hell. 

So the Time Lords put a control on time to free Space, and now that’s getting flipped.

Love the dimensional twists when Vinder puts his head in the TARDIS

Wait, Vinder knows what a TARDIS is and thought they didn’t exist??

Priest Triangle:  Did you repair?  Can you repair?

The Doctor:  I really hope so.

Cut to Bel watching Vinder’s message.  It’s him she loves and is trying to get to.  Sweet.  And nicely structured.

The Doctor gave VInder a space pager with a direct line to her when he needs them.  Good, I like Vinder.  Glad we’ll get to see more of him.

Lovely split screen of Bel and Vinder vowing to find one another.

And back to the Angels fucking with Yaz

The Angel’s have taken control of the TARDIS