Once, Upon Time is such an exciting and intricate third chapter of Flux, which really begins to dig into the main plot of this arc. It’s one you do have to concentrate on, but I think that really pays off, Chibnall makes a ton of great choices here. There is one major scene omission that I think would have really tied the whole thing together, but I’ll get to that in a sec.

The Doctor has only an instant to react before Swarm snaps, unleashing the full force of all Time through Yaz and Vinder’s bodies; Swarm and Azure have left four slots for missing Moori, so The Doctor hurls herself and Dan into the other slots and drops everyone into Time together, believing she can use her force of will to shield them from its worst effects. She hides them each in surreal versions of their past, which is a good idea specifically for giving us some Vinder backstory about working for The Grand Serpent that we need, and for providing a way for The Doctor to get around the Division mindwipe and access memories of Swarm and Azure’s previous defeat, which gives her a plan to replicate in the present, and reveals that Karvanista was one of her close, trusted team members. Her other two team members, their names and faces still missing from The Doctor’s memories, are represented by Yaz and Vinder but we do not learn their identities. The Doctor is hijacked on her return to the present by a mysterious older lady who seems to know exactly what’s going on, but dismisses The Doctor before providing any answers. Swarm and Azure have been defeated again by replacement Moori hidden within their Passenger form, only this time they didn’t really seek to win, only to break Time’s moorings for long enough to soak up energy for the next phase of their plan, they depart after making clear they have Dan’s love interest Diane hostage.

Back on the very sick and ever more disjointed TARDIS, a Weeping Angel that had been trapped in the raw Time stream had made itself known to Yaz through a video game screen and her rearview mirror, now it is able to pop out from her phone screen and assume control of the TARDIS, steering it somewhere specific. And around all of this we meet Bel, a feisty and capable young lady making her way across the universe in the aftermath of the Flux, providing us with info on how the three unkillable big bads, Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans, have sought to turn the Flux to their advantage, becoming masters of whatever universe is left. She is also pregnant, and the love she’s looking for is Vinder.

I did a full plot summary because this is a tricky one to track on first viewing! But it is absolutely all there, it all ties up and clicks together. The one scene which is missing but needs to be there to avoid some confusion is a scene of the current day Passenger having its Moori released and them taking the place of our four protagonists, shoving them out of the way and pulling them out of their Time streams, we need a visual representation of that repeated plan working, and we need to depict Yaz, Dan, and Vinder being pulled back from where they were to the temple, not just to be told that this happened and that it did work, after the fact. They do this because they really want to keep us in The Doctor’s perspective that whole time, they want to sit with how her desperation to know her entire past almost causes her death and ruins the plan, which is all good, and I love love love how grumpy and taciturn she becomes at the end of this, she is not just the rainbows and sunshine Doctor, she can get plenty snappy! But not depicting the actual victory in the present sort of makes us in the audience uncertain if we missed something or not.

But I kind of love this episode to pieces, it’s a very interesting, imaginative, and engrossing one, and the mirror scenes and doubled scenes with 13/Fugitive are really excellent (and I lovethe dark coat for 13, ahh what a look). Swarm and Azure remain two of the most threatening and also appealing villains of this era, Swarm in particular is played with a kind of sensuality to his evil that is just the right dash of camp (plus he’s wearing a spangly suit that would make Marc Bolan ask where he got it from). Setting up the Grand Serpent is good, I really like Bel, love the glimpse of those shiny copper Daleks. The Angel moments are correctly terrifying, teeing up a fantastic next episode with a third in a row killer cliffhanger. You guys, Flux rocks, this is so much fun a second time.

I asked my girlfriend after this ended “graded on a Doctor Who curve, what would you give this out of 5?” And with absolutely zero hesitation she said “4.5,” and I basically agree, I’m just gonna adjust it to 4.25/5 because it’s missing that little bit of connective tissue at the end but I sort of love everything else. This is great Doctor Who!

Once Upon Time

So much stuff happens in Flux. I don't think I can even describe what happened in this part. Fugitive makes another appearance as the characters get separated in time yet again, there seems to be a theme in these episodes. I'm going to assume the separation is due to real events in 2020.

The group experience past and future events with people being replaced by the other characters.

There's also a cyberman story happening during all this, a woman named Bel is recounting her experience in the aftermath of Flux, stealing a Lupari ship and landing on a planet full of cybermen, she escapes killing the cyber warriors who invade her ship.Vinder also leaves the trio, staying on his home planet to find Bel

The group keep seeing Weeping Angels through their adventure. This results in one entering the TARDIS from Yaz's phone, it has control of TARDIS.

It was by this point in Flux that I began to get worried that the story was biting off more than it could chew. Due to its short length and the large number of moving parts, it was inevitable that some parts were going to end up feeling a little bit cluttered. This episode ended up feeling more like a fever dream.

There are some individually interesting elements, like the Doctor's flashbacks to a siege of Atropos that she cannot remember. I was hopeful at this point that we would get a full accounting of who Jo Martin's Doctor really was and her place in the timeline, something which was never fully borne out, but at the very least this episode did not disappoint me. Getting flashbacks for characters where the incidental characters are replaced by visions of their friends acting not quite themselves was an interesting choice which I did enjoy. As a final happy note, I did think Bel and Vinder's pining was cute, even if the dialog was a bit off, and Dan and Diane's scenes were too.

Aside from those aspects, I didn't enjoy this one very much. It's a story where, paradoxically, so much goes on, but it doesn't feel like much happened. It develops the mystery hooks of the season without seeming to have anything particularly new or unique to say for its own sake. Spinning its wheels and waiting for Village of the Angels to come along.

All in all, a bit of a mess, which was enjoyable on broadcast but with the benefit of hindsight now just seems kind of pointless.

Plot wise I actually enjoyed this pretty well but I'm the kind of person that gets bored if a story isn't complicated enough, so maybe it is convoluted by a normal person's standards like the other reviews say. The dialogue is, like a lot of Chibnall era, very stylistically MCU-esque in a way that frequently breaks my focus and tempers my enjoyment of it somewhat. I don't know how else to describe it. Visuals were quite impressive while the soundtrack was a little over the top at times. Not bad.

very stylish and cool with a few great individual scenes but so hard to follow. SO much new information is introduced here. please. my brain is only so big.