Circuit Breaker (August 2026)

Chapter the 350th, the difficult middle part of a trilogy.

Plot:

[Spoiler alert: the Circuit Breaker epic is the nearest fans will get to a new season of Doctor Who in 2026; so, if you're planning to experience any part of it, best to do so before you read this.] The quest to return time-displaced objects from UNIT's Black Archive - and thereby save the world - continues. The Fugitive Doctor returns a Time Ring to the ancient past of the planet Skaro. She finds a group of Kaleds hiding out from the Daleks, living in a vast bunker with artificial sunlight and hothouse crops. The Daleks breach the defences and attack. The Doctor helps a few Kaleds get to the safety of another bunker that's not nearly so habitable. They won't let her take them to safety, wanting to stay on their planet. The Doctor returns to the present day, sad at these events and wanting to collaborate better with UNIT. She allows Osgood and Turner to join her on the next mission, returning a Sontaran helmet to the Shadow Proclamation. The Doctor has to avoid Judoon guards and attacking Sontarans. Although it appears the Sontarans have been defeated, they leave in a jubilant mood saying to themselves that everything is going as per the Conductor's plan. Back at UNIT HQ, Osgood finds evidence of sabotage. Martha Jones arrives to help advise UNIT about another time-displaced object, the Carrionite crystal orb. In the Black Archive, a captive Weeping Angel is released by someone. The Doctor, Martha and Osgood then hear Turner entering and go to help him. Just as the Angel is about to strike him, the Doctor holds up the orb and the Angel is trapped by its own reflection. Somehow the interaction between Angel and orb causes the Doctor to be trapped inside the dimension within the orb. Martha Jones follows her in using the Project Indigo transporter device. Together they confront the Carrionites and escape, but not before the space witches have taken a lock of hair, a sample of the Doctor's DNA for their co-conspirator, the Conductor. The Black Archive's memory dampers overload and our heroes are briefly unaware who they are or what they're doing. But they get better.

To be concluded...

Context:

I have decided to experience each and every part of the extended universe epic that is Circuit Breaker. This second of three blog posts covering the epic focusses on the five parts that became available in August 2026. A Titan Comics one-shot Dawn of the Daleks came out on the 4th. Next was an in-game story within the mobile app Doctor Who Lost in Time called Castling, which was available for a few days starting from the 6th. A short story on the official UNIT website called Don't Blink followed on the 17th. Three days later, Penguin's Doctor Who Children's Books imprint published another short story The Doctor and the Three Witches. This was a new story added to the paperback version of a book that had been out in hardback for almost a decade, Time Lord Fairy Tales. It was pre-ordered and arrived on publication day, the 20th. A week later on the 27th, the second of the Doctor Who Lost in Time in-game stories Memento Mori started. Early in September, I reread the comic and the two short stories in order. It doesn't seem possible (or at least I haven't found a way) to replay the cut scenes from Lost In Time, but an online fan wiki has been updated with detailed synopses for both Castling and Memento Mori, so I read those in the correct places to plug the gaps. As before, I also read the supplementary material provided on the UNIT website; these are epistolary pieces (faux emails and mission briefings and the like) that summarise and react to the ongoing action. They were uploaded around the dates that the main parts of the epic were released.

First Time Round:

As mentioned in the last blog post, I was slow in getting to grips with Circuit Breaker, and had to scramble to collect the first four parts released in June and July 2026 after things had got underway. I managed to experience them all before the next ones started coming out in August, so I was ready to obtain then watch and/or read each of the next five parts in order as they came out. Early in August, I read Titan Comics' second publication of the epic, Dawn of the Daleks (story by Dan Watters and Dulce Montoya, art by Sami Kivelä). Then, a few days later I played for the first time ever the Doctor Who mobile game Lost in Time, gradually getting to see in cut scenes the story Castling (by Mario Mentasti). I read the short story Don't Blink (by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson) on the UNIT website the day it was published there. A few days later the next part (written by Janelle McCurdy) arrived by post. I didn't get to read it straight away as the following day, the Better Half and I with the rest of the family (boys of 20 and 17, girl of 14) went on holiday to Corfu. The Time Lord Fairy Tales book containing this story was, for I think the first time ever since the blog began, a new Doctor Who product not purchased by me. My birthday fell within the week we were away and the BH desperately needed an idea for something light she could pack that I could open on the big day. I suggested the book, hence her ordering it rather than me. Happily, this meant that I took away on vacation a story that I would later cover for the blog, something I've done as an annual tradition every year since accidentally going on holiday to a Doctor Who filming location early on in the blog's life. We were still in Corfu on the 27th, when the second of the Doctor Who Lost in Time in-game stories Memento Mori (again by Mario Mentasti) started, so that was a holiday watch too.

Reaction:

To continue my musings from last time, I found the first batch of these stories not unappetising, but each was a relatively small and simple dish. If those were the starters, I was thinking that the main course would be on its way next. The five parts released in August, though, were all still relatively petite amuse bouches: a comic book, two short stories and two comic strips (I'll get into a bit more detail about the Lost In Time stories below, but they are definitely of the order of comic strip rather than comic book). Let's then just consider the stories of Circuit Breaker from June all the way through to the end of August as a lunch of tapas or dim sum, lots of different flavours but nothing too substantial on its own. September's releases, which I'll cover in the next blog post, comprise a full-length novel and two Big Finish audios - that will be the three course evening meal. We'll see if all of these added up equals a feast. Having made myself feel a bit peckish with all this food talk, I will abandon the metaphor now. There is still lots to enjoy in these shorter pieces. The key things are the development of both the overarching plot, and the emotional through-line. The significant development related to the former is Don't Blink's first hints that there's a saboteur in UNIT assisting the mysterious antagonists. Osgood suspects Andrew Turner briefly, but dismisses the thought after talking to him. It seems likely that it will turn out to be him, though, as he's the only new regular character that's been introduced for the epic (I haven't got to the finale of the epic at time of writing, so forgive me if this turns out to be clownishly wrong). On the 'feels' side, the Fugitive Doctor is gradually acclimatising to being the hero, and realising that she might need, or even want, to have companions alongside her.

Dawn of the Daleks has great artwork (lots of lovely pictures of Dalek attacks), but its depiction of Kaleds doesn't match with anything in the history of the show, which a long-term fan may find disconcerting. The surprise in the first few pages, that the idyllic world these people are living in is actually an underground bunker, is interesting but somewhat implausible given how the rest of Skaro is depicted. The bunker in which the last survivors later find refuge is so basic by comparison that one wonders why they would want to stay there rather than accept the Doctor's offer to leave the planet (what do they hope to achieve?). Additionally, the object being returned is so specific that I think it breaks the established logic of the epic. Isn't the point that each has to be returned to exactly from when and whence it was taken, to protect the timeline? If so, the Time Ring would need to be returned to some point during Genesis of the Daleks. Instead, it is left on Skaro many years after that (it's supposed to return to the Time Lords on Gallifrey, as seen at the start of Revenge of the Cybermen). The artwork for the Lost in Time game, though stylised and cartoon-like, is rather lovely too. It's an engaging game: one collects cards for Doctor Who characters and locations enough to power them up to different levels, which then generates in-app currency to allow one to do it some more. It's a Pokemon game, in other words, but one where one gets little segments of a Doctor Who story as rewards upon reaching in-game milestones.

The Lost in Time stories are basic (there's no character movement or lip sync, just speech bubbles and the odd onoematopoeic legend such as BOOM! or FA-FOOM! or VWORP VWORP). Not the most efficient story-delivery mechanism  (getting to the story quicker tends to involve watching lots of ads), but if you're a Doctor Who fan and you like mobile game apps, you may as well play one that's going to give you brand new Doctor Who stories, however simple. Having sampled a few other stories in the game for research purposes around the time of the two Circuit Breaker events, their strength lies in putting different characters together in interesting permutations, some that wouldn't be possible elsewhere because of budget or mortality (the Doctor and Donna defeating the Anthony Ainley Master on the planet of the Ood as an example). The two Circuit Breaker stories are more focussed than that, as they must fit into the overall epic. So, we just get the Doctor, some Sontarans and some companions, and a lot of action happening off screen. The second story Memento Mori is more successful by concentrating not on the quest but the characters. An error in the Black Archive's amnesia inducing tech means the Doctor, Martha, Osgood and Turner's memory is wiped, and they have to rediscover and come to terms with who they are. This story, like each of the final three in this batch features Martha Jones as companion; it's a great idea to pair up the first ever black female Doctor with the first ever black female companion, and the two characters work well together.

It was a shame for me when Memento Mori ended with Martha deciding not to travel with the Doctor anymore, and them saying goodbye to each other. However, the cover of the Kaleidoscope novel that is the next part of the epic shows Martha, and pre-publicity confirmed that she is a major part of the narrative. A set of stories put together like this will inevitably be at risk of such overarching editing problems. Another is that Don't Blink is written as if Osgood and Turner didn't accompany her on the Castling adventure, which they did. Aside from that minor continuity error, the website short story is a breathless, exciting sequence ending on a nice cliffhanger with the Doctor trapped. The Doctor and the Three Witches is designed to emulate a fairy tale and consequently is bigger on atmosphere than incident. There's quite a few similarities to a story in the last batch, The Deadliest Weapon, with the Doctor trapped in a dream dimension being tortured by her memories, with help coming from a companion breaking into that dimension from without. Again, we can chalk that up to the difficulties of editing across the many parts of the epic. The story in of itself meets the fairy tale brief admirably, and doesn't overstay its welcome. Not a huge amount happens, beyond some running about, but it builds up the mystery of the Conductor, who is in league with the three Carrionites, as the epic moves closer to its finale. Best of all, there's the introduction of the Fugitive's sonic screwdriver (a prototype gifted to her by UNIT that had been teased a couple of times earlier in the epic). A prop was even made IRL, which is wielded by the Doctor on the aforementioned cover of the Kaleidoscope novel. Anyway, that's enough of lunch - it's time to move on the final and biggest meal of the Circuit Breaker epic. Mmm - I'm feeling peckish again...

Connectivity:

Like in the first batch, this second set - parts five to nine of Circuit Breaker - features a short story on the UNIT website, a comic book adventure with the Daleks, and a skirmish with the Sontarans. Both also have parts where the Doctor is trapped in an alternate reality (a relived memory last time; this time, a fantasy dreamscape within a crystal ball).

Deeper Thoughts:

Back to the Wilderness - 2 of 3: Back Catalogue Blues. Fate and timing conspired to make my grumbling about Doctor Who's new wilderness years look a bit foolish. Five days after the last blog post was published, replete with such whinges, the BBC only went and put Doctor Who officially out to tender. There was a call for applications from Commissioning on the website, with a deliciously imminent deadline of the 2nd October 2026 for submissions. Even better was the comment included in there that "The contract is for a multi-episodic series (including specials) for transmission in 2028/29, with an option to extend...". It's rare nowadays for a British series to run weekly but cross from one calendar year into another. Therefore, it's likely the plan is for a Christmas special at the end of 2028 and a full series in 2029. If the winner of the tender can keep to that schedule, it would mean new Doctor Who hitting screens only two years later than expected, after the previously announced Christmas Special for 2026 was canned. As mentioned last time, I could not fathom what anyone had hoped to achieve in announcing a Christmas special they seemingly didn't intend to make. Writing this down might have given a jolt to my cognition, perhaps, as I now find I have a realistic analysis. The spotlight on the tendering process in recent weeks has made everyone focus on the question of who will replace Bad Wolf Studios, and that's sidelined the question of who will replace Disney+. At the time when it became public that there would be no budget forthcoming from Disney as streaming distributor outside of the UK, Bad Wolf Studios were still engaged as the production company making Doctor Who for the BBC; Russell T Davies was still the showrunner. Bad Wolf still had what would end up being a hit show in The War Between the Land and the Sea, ready to go. There were also rumours that it might be possible for another streamer to take over.

In October 2025 when the BBC and Bad Wolf announced the stop-gap Christmas special for 2026, there was still presumably a chance that a backer could be found to match, or at least come close to matching, the expired Disney+ investment. To keep that chance alive, and to keep Bad Wolf in the frame as current producers of the show, the announcement was made - Doctor Who was officially continuing. That also explains some of the touchiness that was seen from the Bad Wolf execs whenever it was suggested in that period that Doctor Who was dead (Jane Tranter reacting to some off-hand comments from Rob Shearman - as discussed in the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post - is one example of this). If a deal was in the offing, though, it didn't come to fruition. I'm sure that someone will be found as a non-UK distribution partner for new episodes in future, but they doubtless won't be stumping up the kind of cash that came from the House of Mouse; and, without that sort of money, it wasn't economical for Bad Wolf Studios to make the sort of Doctor Who they were set up to make. Hence, the BBC put the show out for tender and Davies announced he was moving on (again). This might be a complete misreading, I'm aware, but it seems like the only plausible flow of events to me. We might never know for sure, but at least soon we shall have the announcement of the winner of the tender. If I'm right in one point, and there seem to be some indications that I am, that company will likely have the challenge of making Doctor Who on a more restrictive budget than from 2023 to 2025 (which might not be that bad a thing). In the meantime, though, will that reduced budget have any impact beyond any new series?

Rob Shearman's comment, as noted at the time, only referred to the scope for continuing the story of Doctor Who in other media during any hiatus. He felt the end of The Reality War was a cul-de-sac, and there couldn't be an ongoing narrative about the Doctor's adventures in the same way as the Virgin New Adventures novels carried on from Survival, or the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures novels carried on after the TV Movie. Circuit Breaker has shown that there are limited ways to progress things. UNIT Tower and all its characters (including Osgood, and even Andrew Turner if he survives the epic and doesn't turn out to be a traitor) are ripe for continuing adventures. A big UNIT spectacular was, after all, the last thing shown on TV. Kate Lethbridge-Stewart's violent litter patrol is the 21st century equivalent of Ace and the Doctor, or the Eighth Doctor, walking off into their respective metaphorical sunsets. Still, though, it does feel that it's mostly into the back catalogue that content creators will be a-dippin'. Doctor Who Magazine's long-running comic strip, usually a good bellwether, has already said goodbye to Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor. Their first post-Fifteenth strip was - rather cleverly - set between episodes during the early period of The Daleks' Master Plan, tying in to the recent recovery of a couple of its previously lost episodes. The next and latest strip at the time of writing features the popular combo of the Tenth Doctor and Rose. Circuit Breaker also has done its fair share of pilfering from the archives. As well as featuring returning foes in all of its parts, there was also an additional release in August 2026 as part of the epic that I didn't mention above. This was The Black Archive Files Blu-Ray that came out on the final day of the month.

The set comprised a selection of Doctor Who stories from across the show's history that provided background information related to the stories forming Circuit Breaker. It included Fugitive of the Judoon (the story that introduced the Fugitive Doctor) and many stories featuring those different alien foes encountered during the epic. I didn't buy the box set as I own each of these stories already; I'd love to say that I diligently watched each of them from the iplayer in order to get the full Circuit Breaker experience, but life's too short to let one's completionism extend that far. What's most striking about the box set is that it's the only new Doctor Who home video release in four months, and looks to be the only one released during the second half of 2026. The lack of a Collection box set release is rumoured to be related to an online backlash against the impact of using AI tools in picture restoration; if the rumour is true, the next planned season set has been postponed until early 2027 while the team involved reworks things without the use of such tools. The Collection box sets are relatively low budget, though, utilising small expert teams and not requiring too much funding to produce the high standard of value added material that comes with them. The lack of any announcement about animations of missing stories (the last one released was The Savages in March 2025) might be more worrying. Though I don't believe that any Disney+ money ever went into budgets for those animations, their funding has always been a bit more precarious. It could be that if the BBC has less Who budget, it might concentrate on the main show rather than the side projects. This is important as one of the key things that sustained fans through the first wilderness years was getting regular releases of lots of archive stories on VHS. Can we make it through another wilderness period (even if it only lasts two more years) without animations, and with a reduced number box sets? Well, yes, obviously - it's not the end of the world. It would be nicer if we didn't have to, though.

In Summary:

Circuit running...

The Time of the Doctor

Chapter the 274th, where the Doctor makes a house call and stays for simply ages (it tends to happen as one gets older).

Plot:
A coded message is being signalled out from a planet, and this attracts spaceships from every alien species (you know, like in the Pandorica one). The Doctor investigates, but Clara distracts him for a bit getting him to pose as her boyfriend making an appearance at Christmas dinner on contemporary Earth (where Clara's relatives see him naked - don't ask). Soon, Clara is helping him uncover the mystery of the message. It turns out to be from the Time Lords, and the planet turns out to be Trenzalore, the place where the Doctor is destined to die. Tasha Lem, a great friend of the Doctor that he's never mentioned before and never will again, is leader of a religious order based on one of the ships in orbit. She helps to get the Doctor and Clara down to the planet; they land in the town of Christmas, where no one can lie. In a tower in the town, the Doctor discovers the crack in space and time that he first saw in Amy Pond's bedroom. Through it, the Time Lords are broadcasting the signal from another universe in which they are hiding; once decoded it is heard to be the question "Doctor Who?" If the Doctor answers with his name, they will know it is him because of the truth field they are also creating, and will know it's safe to come through. This, though, will start the Time War again. All those in the ships surrounding the planet will attack to prevent the Doctor answering the question (in other words, to ensure 'silence will fall').

The Doctor tricks Clara into travelling home in the TARDIS, and stays to defend the town and the planet. Lots of different aliens attack, but he sees them off. Clara, annoyed at being sent home, comes back with the TARDIS. By the time she gets to Trenzalore, the Doctor has been there many years, and is looking much older. The Doctor persuades her to travel home in the TARDIS again, and stays to defend the town some more. Lots of different aliens attack, but he sees them off. Clara, still not happy at being sent home, is picked up by Tasha Lem in the TARDIS, and comes back. By the time she gets to Trenzalore, the Doctor's been there many more years, and is looking very old. The Daleks come in for a final big attack. The Doctor knows he's going to die, as he has no regenerations left, and has seen the future of his tomb on the empty battlefields of Trenzalore. Clara doesn't want to accept this, though, and persuades the Time Lords, talking through the crack to them, to grant the Doctor more regenerations. He uses this gifted regeneration energy to zap the Dalek ships, then goes back to the TARDIS, sees a vision of Amy Pond, and changes into Peter Capaldi. He then talks about his kidneys for a bit.

Context:

It's been a while since the randomiser has chosen an unseasonable festive special to watch in the middle of Summer. As if to compensate for this, the UK weather at the start of August 2023 when we watched this turned chillier and wetter. At least it didn't snow. I watched this on a Sunday afternoon with all three children (boys of 17 and 13, girl of 11) from the disc in the 50th Anniversary Collector's edition Blu-ray box set, which brought together the specials shown in 2013. All the children did me proud one way or the other. The eldest, when watching the (first) scene where the Doctor fools Clara into leaving in the TARDIS because the situation is too dangerous, said "Isn't this just a rip-off of The Parting of the Ways?" He's so right. After the story had finished, the middle child went into a very Doctor Who fan rant about how the Timeless Child arc from Jodie Whittaker's time had retrospectively ruined the drama of The Time of the Doctor. He's a chip off the old block. The youngest really enjoyed all the jokes about the Doctor and Clara being naked. (You hear that Moffat? The humour is at just the right level for 11-year olds!) She was also excited to see Amy again at the end, though she'd forgotten all about the significance of fish fingers and custard.

First Time Round:

Christmas day 2013. After the in-laws had gone home in the early evening and the kids were abed, the Better Half and I would have had a friendly and harmonious discussion about which we would watch first that evening, the Doctor Who or the Downton Abbey special episode. My memory is that Julian Fellowes's posho potboiler was on an hour later than Who, around the time we were both finally alone, so we could watch it as it went out live. So, we did. When Downton finished it was 10.30pm; after a long day of eating and drinking and being merry, I feel sure that the BH went to bed at that point, leaving me alone to watch the recording of The Time of the Doctor. She then caught up when I watched it again the following day. Some of the later Capaldi festive ones I left until I was a little fresher on Boxing Day, but at this point it was still important to me to watch the special on the big day. Reminiscing years later, when I wrote the blog post for the The Doctor, The Widow, His Wife and Her Lover or whatever it's called, I satirised the tired, tipsy conversations the BH and I would exchange when trying to work out the continuity of the show that was the other person's favourite, thus: "Why is he in old guy make-up now?" "Why is the crack in the wall back?" "Have we ever met this footman before?" "What relation is the American guy from Sideways to the Granthams again?". I feel, though,  that this is probably verbatim what was said on December 25th and 26th 2013 chez Perry.

Reaction:

Responding to change can be better than following a plan. There's so much evidence that Steven Moffat, writer of this story and showrunner since Matt Smith took over as the Doctor, had planned for this finale throughout his time in charge; so many detailed set-ups are paid off here. I wonder, though, whether he anticipated that he would have to set the story that represented the culmination of all that work at Christmas, and almost immediately after a big, showy anniversary episode, and whether he had sufficient time to respond to that. I think not, as the narrative structure of The Time of the Doctor is all over the place. It's particularly striking just how wrong the structure is, because this is an area where Moffat is usually very strong. Three years worth of plot comes to an end in this story: where Gallifrey has disappeared off to, what was the final significance of the crack in space/time that appeared in Amy's bedroom wall, what the true meaning was of the oldest question, hidden in plain sight, why silence had to fall, what was destined to happen on Trenzalore, who exactly were the Silence that the Doctor encountered in 1969 and why they wanted to kill him, what the Doctor's greatest fear was that he saw in The God Complex. All these are explained in a coherent sweep: it's all about stopping the time war from starting up again (and so links ever further back to the very earliest episode of the relaunched series, Rose). I don't know how much Moffat worked out opportunistically as he was going along, but a lot of past material must have been produced knowing exactly where things would end. But, in The Time of the Doctor, all that explanation is done in the first 20 minutes out of 60; there's still two thirds of the running time to go.

Why in the name of all that's sacred did Moffat blow all that story material so early on? It's even worse than it seems, as that first 20 minutes is also shared with some misfiring comedy about nudity, domestic scenes of Clara's Christmas (the scantest lip service being paid to the festive season), and lots of set piece sequences with Doctor Who monsters like the Daleks, Cybermen and Weeping Angels. The culmination of the plotting of three years of episodes is spaffed away in something like 10 minutes. This would be okay if there was a lot of incident left to happen in the remaining running time, but there's barely anything. A clear indication that something's gone wrong is that, in the last two-thirds of The Time of the Doctor, Clara is tricked by our favourite Time Lord into getting in the TARDIS, is sent back home to safety, refuses to accept that and returns to find the Doctor has aged in the meantime... TWICE. The same damn story beats - too similar, as my son pointed out (see above), to what happens to Rose in another regeneration story - play out again in the same way. It's first draft stuff; any cursory review of a screenplay would clearly show this, and the two sets of repetitive beats would have to be combined to form one stronger sequence. For a start, the first time round, the TARDIS stays with Clara, which is a terrible mistake that the second time round rectifies. It can't be a heroic sacrifice by the Doctor to defend Trenzalore if he's trapped there anyway and has no choice. Was this a first draft? Did Moffat put all his energy into preceding 50th anniversary story The Day of the Doctor and have no time to do any rewrites on the subsequent script?

Aside from Clara yo-yoing back and forth between contemporary Earth and Trenzalore, all that's left is a Western-style stand off, with the Doctor as the Sheriff protecting the small town from bandits, or rather another succession of set piece sequences with Doctor Who monsters (Sontarans and Silence included as well this time). It's not that there aren't nice moments (Dan Starkey being funny as identical Sontarans, a wooden cyberman being outwitted, the Silence fighting alongside the Doctor) but each lasts for a few seconds at a time. The rest of the final two-thirds of the story is just a lot of droning on about mortality (to get my own back, I am going to drone on a bit in the Deeper Thoughts section below about my own mortality - you can judge how entertaining or not it is). Even if a viewer has been living under a rock and missed that Peter Capaldi is taking over (and that was showcased in its own live broadcast entertainment extravaganza), they still know the Doctor's not going to die, so the ageing of the Doctor and the long, drawn out sequences dwelling on it seem dull at best, over-sentimental and manipulative at worst. To make it in any way work, Smith has to persuade us that at least the Doctor really thinks he's going to die, but he struggles to do that from deep within a mound of latex. There is no make-up job that can convince that the youngest ever Doctor is an old man. Maybe he could do this with his performance, and Moffat was quoted as saying that he thinks that it's Smith's best performance in the role, but I don't agree. His best performance was when he was the Doctor, young and early on. This is tacitly confirmed by returning him to look like that before the regeneration happens properly.

The significant character of Tasha Lem is so similar to River Song that it makes one wonder whether Alex Kingston just wasn't available and it was a hasty recasting. Tasha Lem doesn't age (presumably to avoid a guest artist having to also endure a restrictive make-up job), but that doesn't make sense (it's covered by a quippy line of dialogue). Two fine actors - Rob Jarvis and Tessa-Peake-Jones - are wasted in tiny cameos as passers-by in the town of Christmas; this isn't the first time such a thing would happen in the Moffat era, but it's a problem here as it would be good to have more feeling for the people whom the Doctor is protecting. The scene in the TARDIS for the regeneration with the appearance from Karen Gillan as Amy is fine, but Capaldi's first line being about his kidneys doesn't really work, and displays a desperation towards wackiness. Less is more. Here's how I think it should have played: first, lose the nudity gags. Expand out the investigation and solving the mystery to 35 to 40 minutes; there is definitely enough there to keep things pacy at that duration. At that point, send Clara home (just the once) and return the TARDIS immediately to Trenzalore, so the Doctor is choosing to stay. If you can't get Alex Kingston to play a Library hologram version of River (who wouldn't age), then have a succession of different cameo appearances as different leaders of the religious order over the years or write out the role altogether, and instead build up the roles of one or two people who are with the Doctor on Trenzalore. At around the 50-minute mark, get Clara back to find out the Doctor's aged (but maybe just have Smith play him older rather than overdo the latex), Clara then works out how to save him, and there's Daleks and energy bolts just as it plays now. When Smith turns into Capaldi have the Doctor and Clara look at each other for a moment or two, then he says "Just one question: do you happen to know how to fly this thing?!". Crash to credits, and we're out.

Connectivity:

The Time of the Doctor and The Ambassadors of Death both feature a grey-haired Doctor stuck on a planet helping the locals against alien invasion. Both stories see the Doctor go into battle on the same side as some scary-seeming but ultimately nice aliens (space-suited ambassadors in the Pertwee story, the Silence in Matt Smith's swansong).

Deeper Thoughts:

What do you want to be when you grow up? It's a question, even after half a century of ageing, that I keep asking myself. I'm not looking yet as old as Matt Smith in either stage of his old man make-up from The Time of the Doctor (but then, I doubt anyone has ever looked like that, it's well over the top!). Recent readers of the blog (Hi Mum!) will know that I have found a box of old diaries when cleaning out the garage. Reading these and getting a glimpse of the old me at different and more youthful stages of my life, I do find myself dwelling upon my mortality and my place in the world, very much in the manner of the Doctor in a Steven Moffat screenplay that was maybe written in a hurry. If you'll indulge me, I'd like to share a section of a diary entry from 1995 here, as I think it's illuminating, and I think that the 22-year old me who wrote it pretty much nails it. Is there ever anyone who dwells upon their own mortality more than a 22-year old bloke does? Except maybe characters in a Steven Moffat screenplay that was maybe written in a hurry, perhaps? Anyway, to set the scene, it is early 1995; I had finished at university the year before, and hadn't shined academically; without a clue what to do next, I had come back to my home town of Worthing, and started working in a temp job to pay off my student overdraft, while I waited for inspiration to hit me. At university (in St. Aidan's College, Durham) I'd vaguely known a chap that was a student union rep, and wrote for the university magazine, Palatinate. On February 21st of 1995, with a long wait for a bus to take me home after work, I popped into the W.H. Smiths near the bus stop and flicked through the latest Doctor Who Magazine (issue 223, out since the 16th February, fact fans!). With surprise, I found that that chap I vaguely know from university, Gary Gillatt - for it was he - has become the editor of said magazine.

 

This immediately made me, a wannabe writer who received the same class of degree as Gary after three years, incredibly uninspired, and very envious. The following day, I explode the following screed upon the pages of my journal: "First off, you're young and the world of the telly and the world of you and your mates are entirely separate. It stays that way (unless you're at stage school, or happened to be young like I was when that 10-year old from Musical bloody Youth was always on the TV) for many years. Then, at about sixteen or seventeen years of age, you realise that the teenage daughter in the sitcom is the same age as you, and you fancy her and she's probably doing coke at Stringfellows every night. Then, you get a little older (and maybe wiser) and you're still on the same course or the same pay. You're flicking through the Mirror lifestyle pages when you find out that Andi Peters / Dani Behr / some page 3 model are one year, two years, three years younger than you. Then, the first of your baby sister's friends has an abortion. A year later, you're maybe hanging around the student union, when someone tells you that the woman you were sure was looking at you in the bar used to have a promising career in modelling. A friend gets engaged. Someone from another class at middle school dies on the flyover. Then, you get to the present, and you're flicking through Doctor Who Magazine when you realise that it's being edited by someone you knew vaguely at university. The world of the media and the world of you and your mates are almost overlapping. The next stage will be for someone that you're good friends with to become famous. And it better be me!"

I never did become famous. Nor did any of my friends. I know a couple of radio presenters, and some people who have written Doctor Who extended universe media, or other books or films. That's about it. I only ever wanted to write, and I suppose I am doing that. In fact, I'm doing it right now. Piecing things together, I look at the dates of all the diaries collected in that box from the garage. In fits and starts, I keep a journal from youth in the mid-1980s through to starting university. Then, in all my time studying for a degree, I don't keep a diary. I'm instead writing lots and lots of poems (which occasionally are taken seriously by other parties and get performed and shared in a small way). As soon as I've finished studying, I start a diary again, and again in fits and starts keep that going through the rest of the 1990s.  From 2000, I give up writing poems and work seriously on screenplays for about a decade. During this time, I never keep a journal, though I do have a blog. When I stop screenwriting, I start a diary again. I give that up, and within a few months I start this Doctor Who blog, with enough material to keep me going for a decade. Writing is less a vocation and more an affliction; one can't stop doing it, it'll escape out, one way or the other. This makes me feel better - if I had become famous or not, it would have been the same, I'd have still been writing. An author too can be any age when first successful, so I can always live in hope. It makes me more disposed to be nicer to Steven Moffat, a habitual writer if ever there was one, for his sometimes less than perfect efforts. I can also take some small comfort - now that I can look such things up easily on the web - in my being slightly younger than both Andi Peters and Dani Behr.

In Summary:

Some good stuff is buried in there, but the screenplay desperately needed another rewrite.

The Angels Take Manhattan

Chapter The 228th, where you can tell it in his accent when he talks, he's a Gallifreyan in New York.

Plot:

The Doctor, Amy and Rory are enjoying a trip to present day Manhattan, when Rory disappears. Strangely, the events of his disappearance seem to follow the text of a book the Doctor is reading, which turned up from nowhere, a hard-boiled detective story featuring a character called Melody Malone (the character is a proxy for, and the novel has been written by, River Song). A weeping angel has zapped Rory back to 1938 where he meets with River. She has been able to travel there with her vortex manipulator, but the TARDIS won't easily be able to land because of time distortion. River and Rory are held up by gunmen, who put them in a limo and drive them to the house of a rich mobster, Grayle. He's a collector who has a captive weeping angel, and he wants information about it from River. His goons throw Rory into a dark basement which contains cherubic baby angels. The Doctor, with Amy who's trying not to fix events by reading too far ahead in the book, arranges some convoluted gubbins to allow the TARDIS to land, knocks out Grayle and rescues River. They find that the baby angels have zapped Rory in space, not in time, and follow him to a place called Winter Quay, an apartment block near Battery Park.

The building is being used as a temporal energy farm by the many angels living in New York; they tempt people to the location, then zap them back decades to live the whole of their lives trapped in an apartment room. The others catch up with Rory as he sees his older self in a bed in such a room: an angel therefore will get him imminently. Refusing to accept this fate, Rory goes to the roof of the building with Amy, intending to jump off and kill himself, preventing that future; Amy is going to jump with him. This will create a paradox, and hopefully they will come back to life. The angels close in on them, including a moving Statue of Liberty, which turns out to be a giant angel. They jump, and time is erased. Along with the Doctor and River, they find themselves in a graveyard near the TARDIS in present day New York. The TARDIS can now definitely not ever go back to the 1938 time zone as it is too screwy. Rory spots a gravestone with his name on it, and a lone angel behind him zaps him back to 1938. Amy chooses to let the angel get her too, and they live their lives together back in that time, her name appearing alongside his on the gravestone. River leaves the Doctor saying that she'll write up the book and give it to Amy in the past to get published, but will also ask Amy to write an afterword. Alone, the Doctor reads this; Amy tells him to go back and tell the waiting Amelia on the first night they met of all the adventures that she will have in the future. He does this.

Context:

Watched on my own one evening, late, from the disc in the series 7 Blu-ray box set; even though the story is presumably available on the BBC iplayer, my first instinct wasn't to go there, but was instead to go to the bother of reaching up to a high self, fetching down a reasonably well-designed box, extracting - fiddly, this - a disc, and putting this disc into the Blu-ray player. I'm old school, I suppose (more on that in the next section below). If I put on a Doctor Who story earlier in the day and invite the children to watch, they tend not to be interested; this time, when they should have been sleeping, it attracted them like moths. Both the youngest (girl of 9) and the eldest (boy of 15) snuck in and watched for a bit, before I insisted they get back to bed.

First Time Round:

It know it does very much sound like I'm talking about dusty, dated concepts such as corsets and penny-farthings, but my chief memory of seeing this story first time round in 2012 is that - for whatever reason - the recording of the BBC1 broadcast onto my PVR didn't work, and I had to wait for the traditionally scheduled BBC3 repeat of the story that week, to add it to my hard drive. I was miffed about this, as in those days BBC3 in my area wasn't available in HD on Freeview, so the picture quality was inferior to the rest of the episodes of this half-season that I'd digitally recorded the previous weeks. It was a bit fuzzy, and it had an intrusive station ident (or DOG, or Digitally Originated Graphic) spoiling one corner of the picture. Ugh. BBC iplayer was a thing even in those days, but maybe I could only watch that on my computer rather than the TV. Or maybe I was just set in my ways. I finally saw the story in HD when the aforementioned Complete Seventh Series Blu-ray box set came out in autumn 2013. I still record every Doctor Who story on first broadcast, then delete them once they've come out on Blu-ray and I've purchased them. Currently, my hard drive just contains the most recent Eve of the Daleks and Legend of the Sea Devils, even though I don't really need to keep them as they are constantly available to stream. I'm keeping alive the tradition of watching and recording Doctor Who onto video tape from the earlier days of my fandom in the 1980s.

A couple of weeks after the broadcast of the story, a web 'minisode' that provided a coda to Amy and Rory's story aired called P.S. I raved about this 5-minute long storyboard and narration creation way back in an early blog post published in August 2015. It was written by the current showrunner Chris Chibnall, and his writing for the Ponds there, as well as that in the two episodes he wrote for the first half of series 7, and other online minisodes, was great - the best I think that they'd been depicted in the show up to that point. There's definitely been as good character work in the stories of his own era, but perhaps not quite as consistently done as in 2012.

Reaction:

I was reminded while watching The Angels Take Manhattan of an interview that 1960s companion actor Frazer Hines (who played Jamie) once gave. I can't remember exactly when and how I experienced it, but I think I can recall enough to reflect the spirit. He was talking of his disappointment at the long-running role he played in the soap Emmerdale Farm, Joe Sugden, being killed off, and said that he'd have always been prepared to come back and make cameo appearances when there were family weddings and such, which he thought important to keep up the verisimilitude of such a fictional landscape. I agree with him that that's important, and I believe he would have been good to his word (he returned to his role on Doctor Who a couple of times many years after originally appearing, for example). There isn't much plot in this Angels story. Bags of atmosphere, some clever ideas, some nice-one liners and moments of emotion, all are present; but, what actually happens? Rory gets zapped back into the past and Amy choses to follow him, and they live happily ever after. That's it. Everything else surrounding that is a complicated construction built specifically to avoid having the risk that Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill (as Amy and Rory) might not want to come back in future for the Doctor Who equivalent of a wedding episode. A ridiculous amount of heavy-lifting in the script arranges things so that they are stranded in a time zone that the Doctor can't again visit. The lifting is so heavy, in fact, that you can see the writer straining at various points. Was it worth all the effort?

To be fair, it's not something of which just this story is guilty, it's endemic from 2005 onwards; the final stories of companions tend to have to be final with a capital F, allowing for no chance of return; they also, though, don't include anyone being killed off completely. (Yes, writer Steven Moffat did kill a few people off during his tenure, but only for them to be brought back to life, sometimes multiple times, so that doesn't count; The Angels Take Manhattan even makes a joke about the many previous times Rory's been resurrected.) I'm guessing it's a search for drama and novelty that produced this trend, rather than narrative plausibility - it's not like Doctor Who is set in a farming village, the whole of time and space is big enough that you might not run into the same people often. It gets progressively harder to achieve the operatic level of finality that is felt to be required, though, and the amount of screen time devoted to that rather than any actual story is quite marked with respect to this story particularly. It also seems unnecessary, as a lot of the previous few stories (the first half of series 7) had been building up to the Ponds choosing to leave anyway. Time travelling is increasingly impacting their day-to-day lives, and they're getting older (though the scene where the Doctor and Rory diplomatically avoid the subject of Amy's wrinkles doesn't work because she has no bloody wrinkles, she's a twenty-bloody-five year old actress and former model ferchrissakes). It wouldn't have been beyond writer Steven Moffat to make an exciting and moving departure without forcing a wedge of time-distorted decades between the members of his first TARDIS team, but he obviously felt it was necessary.

It's mostly just window dressing without much story, then; but, it's pretty superior window dressing for all that. Creating a detective story in the Raymond Chandler style is in itself a first for the show, and a good fit for the River Song character; Alex Kingston is giving her usual 5-star performance, having fun playing the detective and the femme fatale rolled into one. Moffat's integration of this heightened narrative, by making it a story within a story, is very clever. There's lots of energy in the sequence of intercut scenes with events playing out in the 1930s time zone, and other characters reading of the events in the book in the 2010s; Moffat then takes it an extra step by making this a timey-wimey conceit: it the characters read too far ahead they'll be powerless to change things. Sequences with weeping angels stalking people as those people blink were probably already overused even in 2012, but Moffat still innovates by adding the baby angel cherubs. There's the wonderful moment where one blows out the match that Rory is using to keep it observed in the dark cellar; this and almost every scary scene is expertly shot by director Nick Hurran and crew. The one big thing that doesn't work in the script, and no amount of direction can make work, and which I suspect was one of those things that occasionally come up where the author's enthusiasm just runs away and they can't resist, is the angel Statue of Liberty. The concept of the angels is that they can only move when not being observed. How is it even remotely possible that something as large as the statue of liberty could be unobserved long enough to travel an inch, let alone get from Liberty Island to Battery Park and back without masses of people noticing? It's very silly.

A couple of other points bothered me on this watch that I didn't notice on previous watches. The Doctor hints that New York is a great place for the angels as it's "the city that never sleeps", but that's the exact opposite of an environment they could flourish in. They'd surely be better off in some sleepy village where they can creep around undetected (ooh, now there's an idea!). The concept of the battery farm in Battery park (silly, but Moffat presumably couldn't resist again) took me a while to get my head round. When the angels zap people back in time it releases a burst of temporal energy that it's been established they feed on, but presumably they'd be able to absorb more if they kept in close proximity to their victim over a longer period? So, they zap people only in a limited area they can control - and presumably only back within a limited sweep of years -  and then keep their victim in one place, so any angels in the vicinity can get the benefit. I think that's what's being suggested. What a palaver! May as well just say they stay in the area because they're fans of Broadway shows, and ignore all of that nonsense. The other head-scratcher for me is what exactly happens at the end: in Amy / Amelia's original timeline did the future Doctor come back to her on the first night and tell her all about her adventures to come (and she's forgotten about this, or assumed it was a dream), or does he by going back there at the end of the Angels in Manhattan story change her past? Either way, it undermines some of the drama of their very first story The Eleventh Hour for me, without adding much in the way of emotion. The emotion had peaked anyway at the wonderful "Together or not at all" moment where Amy and Rory take a leap into the unknown. The rest - the excellent and the silly - doesn't matter much compared to that.

Connectivity: 

Both The Angels Take Manhattan and Legend of the Sea Devils see the Doctor accompanied by two companions, one male one female; in both stories, the adventure takes place outside the British Isles, with trips to the same places in two different time periods.

Deeper Thoughts:

Nobody Knows Anything. My day job for pretty much my entire working life to date has seen me in various roles on various teams, all of whose aim was to deliver something digital, a web application or phone app, that users might like, or at the very least might use. My favourite quote about the complexities of that day job, though, links to another career I had for a few years, as a screenwriter. It is William Goldman's "Nobody Knows Anything" first put out into the world in his 1983 book Adventures in the Screen Trade. He follows up the initial three word soundbite with a short explanation: "Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess—and, if you're lucky, an educated one". Without this additional explanation, people can misunderstand it as something anti-intellectual or even anarchic. But Goldman was a Hollywood man, though he might not have liked that description particularly, and he respected the craft of all the cast and crew of Tinseltown. Even with all that knowledge and graft, he thought that you could get no better than an educated guess of the reaction when you present something to an audience. I think his words can be applied to any complex endeavour, and not just films. You can do all the market research you can afford, and arguably you should, but nothing beats putting something out there and seeing what people think of it. In my day job, of course, you can still change it once people start using it, and you've seen how they're using it, and what aspects of it they think are useful or not. Unless you're someone who tinkers like George Lucas with his various versions of the Star Wars films over the years, you can't do this for a movie or a TV show.

It's an exposing business to be in; the figures will tell you if something's a hit or a miss, but by then there's not much more you can do about it. Based on ratings, the most recent Doctor Who story Legend of the Sea Devils has been a miss, not a hit. It has achieved the lowest overnight (2.2 million) and consolidated weekly (3.4 million) viewers since the series returned in 2005. Fans and commentators have had their say about why this might be. Not enough marketing, wrong time of year, inferior scripting, being up against a live ITV show (Britain's Got Talent), not enough special elements to draw in a crowd. People have also said that these figures don't have any meaning in the modern context of streaming and constant availability, though some others have said that those making Doctor Who should be aiming for a large audience that want to watch it live (though that could be because, like me and my unnecessary recordings as described in the First Time Round section above, they are living in the past). Many people have speculated on what the incoming showrunner (Russell T Davies, returning to the role) might do to make things better. Of course, according to Goldman, none of these people really know what to change to make the next story a hit, because nobody knows anything. Me neither, but I have something of a theory; to illustrate this theory, I need to bring in something I have learnt about over the years as part of the day job, but which also has some relevance to films and TV: the Cynefin framework. Cynefin (named after the Welsh word for habitat) was invented in 1999 by the very clever Dave Snowden, and is a model to help understand problems and their possible solutions.

Snowden - who is as much a tinkerer as George Lucas, and has continued to enhance and amend Cynefin over the years - would no doubt hate me over-simplifying it thus, but at heart it comprises four main domains (there is a fifth, but I won't go into it here) in which any situation might fall: Clear, Complicated, Complex and Chaotic. In clear situations, the course of action to take is obvious to any reasonable person, with little room for different approaches. In complicated situations, you need specialist knowledge or up-front analysis to a lesser or greater degree; with that, you should be able to get the same basic result each time you apply the approach that is indicated. Complex situations are different to complicated ones, because no matter how expert you are, or how much advance work you put in, you might not get the same result between one try and another; cause and effect appear to be more loosely coupled because there are so many variables at play. Finally, chaotic situations are where cause and effect seem completely uncoupled, and the course of action to take is going to have to involve more gamble and risk. To help grasp this, consider different ways of making a film or video recording. Making a short home movie using a smartphone is in the Clear domain; any reasonable person can point and click and create something watchable. This has not always been the case; making a home movie 40 years ago was most definitely a complicated affair, involving equipment not everyone could afford, and relying on a company to print the film from the captured negative. It required practice and expertise and planning; the refinement of technology platforms over the years has helped move the basic act from complicated to clear. Seeing movement between the domains is one interesting aspect of using this model.

An example of a similar situation in the Complicated domain is one that is familiar to Doctor Who fans, the making of a multi-camera video in a studio. This was how the show's early episodes were made. Expertise was definitely required, and much forward planning by the director creating the camera script, so the cameramen on the floor knew where to go to get their next shot, and the vision mixers in the studio gallery would know when to switch between cameras, and so on. It was a craft that could be taught, though; generally, if a director had done his or her preparation, any piece could be created consistently, reflecting the writer's screenplay, as many had before. In the height of the popularity of this method of making television, every day in multiple studios of BBC's television centre, multiple programmes were being made this way. The programmes were recorded before broadcast, but the approach grew out of live performances captured in the same way in previous decades; it being live meant a few more variables, but still we're in the Complicated domain unless there's a radical change in one of those variables. A good example of such a shoot falling into the Chaotic domain is the infamous story of Underground, a 1958 TV play going out live on ITV in the UK, where one of the actors died (off camera) midway through the performance. In the sprit of "the show must go on", the cast ad-libbed around the lack of an important character, the director tore up his camera script and shot the remainder of the play "like a football match", following the action, and frantically, rewrote lines on the fly supplying them to the cast when they were off screen. They got through it, by roughly following Snowden's recommended approach in that domain: act to stabilise the situation as much as you can, sense what is happening, and respond to what you sense.

So, in the world of making films and TV, what's an example of something from the Complex domain? That would be creating the screenplay in the first place. Putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, to create something that one hopes will engage an audience. Remember, that in the Complex domain, putting in the same basic efforts does not necessarily mean the same result, and for a show like Doctor Who it needs to be done over and over again, week on week; the writers have to come up with interesting and new scenarios each time, and no guarantee that any of them won't bomb. So, what advice does the Cynefin framework give for a problem in the Complex domain? In a word, experimentation. Ideally, you try lots of different approaches (Snowden refers to them as probes, and would suggest you do them concurrently), see what works and what doesn't, amplify the former, dampen the latter. A writer can do this within the process of creating the text, trying things out and reworking them, but as per Goldman's guidance, you can't truly know until something is made and broadcast. Interestingly, Doctor Who has more scope to do this than a lot of other shows - it can sample different settings and genres every story. So, for those that didn't like recent Chris Chibnall episodes of Doctor Who, I say: one answer might have been to have more of them. Because of Covid, and because a handover is required to a new team taking over making the show, 2021 and 2022 will only see nine episodes of Doctor Who broadcast. The scope for trying different things has been restricted. Whether - had it been possible - the creation of a wider range of stories in that time might have meant more audience engagement and enjoyment, we can never know for sure (because - all together now - nobody knows anything), but it couldn't have hurt. Here's to more episodes per year in future!

In Summary:

Window dressing, but for a superior window, like one on 5th Avenue or somewhere like that.

Flux

Chapter The 216th, is the biggest chapter to date.

Plot:

[These are the most recent episodes of Doctor Who at the time of writing, so be wary of spoilers from this point on if you haven't seen the shows; there's also a lot of plot to recount.]

Many years ago, some Time Lords including Tecteun - the Doctor's adopted mother who took the Doctor when she was the seemingly abandoned Timeless child - formed the Division. This was a group that slowly came to recruit operatives from all races including Weeping Angels and Ood, who interfered in events in a way that the official Time Lords swear never to do. Early on, they created the Temple of Atropos on the Planet Time to imprison the chaotic and destructive time force that existed back then. Two Ravagers, brother and sister Swarm and Azure, powerful creatures who revere this time force as an anthropomorphised entity, later take over the temple and there is a siege. The pre-William Hartnell regeneration of the Doctor, who later was a fugitive on Earth in Gloucester, led a Division team that broke the siege, and captured Swarm and Azure. Both were imprisoned - Swarm fully conscious in a remote prison somewhere in space, and Azure on Earth in human form, unaware of her real identity. Tecteun, now in charge of Division, notices the current Doctor's investigations into the forgotten lives she had before she was an old man with long white hair. Wary that the Doctor will find out too much about the Division, Tectuen decides on a quite extreme way to stop the Doctor - destroying the universe. Tecteun is based on a vehicle outside our universe, poised to navigate to a new one. She releases the Flux, an energy wave that destroys matter. Just in case that's not enough, she also frees Swarm who then finds and frees his sister; they will want revenge on the Doctor, and will ensure complete destruction by mucking about with time too.

In 1820, Joseph Williamson is building his tunnels under Liverpool, and finds that some of them lead to other times and places (through rips in the fabric of time and space). From what he witnesses, he pieces together the danger that the Flux will mean in the future, and develops the tunnels to become a survival chamber for humans. On an unnamed planet, Bel and Vinder are life partners, and recent graduates of space pilot academy. They only have one night together before they are given separate postings. Vinder is given special duty as the personal guard of their ruler, the Grand Serpent. The Grand Serpent is corrupt, though, and abuses his position to threaten his political enemies. Vinder tries to blow the whistle, and finds himself sent to do a punishment duty in a deep space observation station, Outpost Rose. As he was sent there directly, he does not know that Bel is pregnant with his child. Vinder spots the Flux coming, and it destroys planets around him and finally Outpost Rose. It also unbeknown to him lays waste to his home planet. Vinder is transported to Atropos by the Ravagers as part of their plan to humiliate the Doctor. Bel travels off world to find Vinder.

The Doctor, helped by Yaz, has found an ex-member of the Division, Karvanista, a dog-like alien from a race called the Lupari. He won't tell her anything of her history, tries to kill both her and Yaz, and makes off for Earth. It looks as if he and the massive Lupari fleet are out to invade, but they are really trying to save the human race. Each Lupar is pair-bonded with a specific human. As he's ahead of his fleet, Karvanista is the first to pick up his human, arriving on the evening of October 31st 2021 and caging the human within his Flux-proof craft. This is Dan Lewis from Liverpool, who's very surprised to be on a dog's spaceship, and is even more surprised to then be rescued by the Doctor and Yaz. Eventually working out that Karvanista isn't exactly against her, the Doctor gives the Lupari a new plan, to configure the fleet into a Flux barrier encircling the Earth. The Earth is safe, but the Sontarans, exploiting possibilities offered by the Flux, sneak in before the barrier goes up. In the TARDIS, the Doctor, Yaz and Dan just avoid being destroyed by the Flux in space, and materialise in the Crimean War. The Sontarans have changed history and taken the place of the Russians in this conflict.

The Doctor is left alone when her two companions are transported elsewhere by the time disturbance. Yaz goes to Atropos and meets Vinder. Dan appears back in Liverpool 2021, meeting his Mum and Dad who explain that in the two days since he's been gone, the Sontarans have taken over the Liverpool docks. Helped by Mary Seacole, the Doctor defeats the Sontarans in the Crimea. Dan sneaks aboard one of their ships and communicates across time to the Doctor. The Potato-Heads' misadventures in the Crimean War are just a pilot scheme, and they plan to continue temporal warfare throughout Earth history. With Karvanista's help, still protecting his human, Dan destroys the Sontaran ships on Earth, and the time explosion reverts things to normal as if they'd never been there. Leaving Karvanista and the other Lupari in their ships still protecting Earth, the Doctor and Dan go in the TARDIS to find Yaz on Atropos.

Since the siege, the temple has been enhanced by incorporating time-sensitive lifeforms called Mouri that have the time vortex flowing through them as part of the temple circuit. Several of the Mouri have now been destroyed by Azure and Swarm sabotaging the system. The Ravagers wire in Vinder and Yaz to take their place, and are just about to switch on, which will kill both. To save them, the Doctor pulls herself, them and Dan into the unstable time vortex, hiding everyone in moments from their own timelines while she pieces together some of the backstory of what's happening, and persuades more Mouri to complete the temple circuit again. Once this is done, the Ravagers don't seem too bothered - they were just taunting the Doctor. They reveal that their attendants are Passenger forms, bigger on the inside prisons shaped like lumbering blokes in masks. Inside one is Diane, the person that Dan was set to meet for a date on Halloween night, who they've kidnapped. Again, they tell Dan this just for shits and giggles then they nick off. The Doctor drops Vinder off to search for Bel; Bel has by this time commandeered an abandoned Lupari ship and is searching the remaining areas of the Flux-impacted universe for Vinder. The TARDIS team are in the control room when a Weeping Angel, which Yaz had seen visions of in the time vortex, appears and takes control of the time ship.

Claire Brown lives in Liverpool in the present day and has psychic ability. She sees visions of the TARDIS, the Doctor and a Weeping Angel. On Halloween night 2021, she briefly met the Doctor and Yaz, and then got attacked by an angel, and zapped back to 1965. By 1967, she is in the village home of Professor Jericho who's investigating her abilities. The Weeping Angel brings the TARDIS to that village, and the Doctor finds Jericho and Claire. Meanwhile, Yaz and Dan are zapped back to 1901 by another angel. The angels attack Jericho's home. These angels are an extraction squad working for Division and want the angel from the TARDIS, who is now hiding in Claire's head, because it also previously worked for Division and has vital knowledge including information about the Doctor. The angels break in to the house. The Doctor, Claire, and Jericho attempt to escape but Jericho is zapped back to 1901 where he meets Dan and Yaz. The Doctor and Claire escape to find a stone vehicle that the angels used to get to Earth. The extraction squad angels are no longer interested in the rogue angel, they have a bigger prize now: the Doctor. Yaz, Dan and Jericho watch through a portal linking the time zones to see the Doctor turned into an angel and taken off.

Bel goes to the planet Puzano, one of the last remaining wrecks of planets surviving after the Flux, and where she and Vinder were planning to honeymoon. She finds that Azure is tricking refugees arriving there, promising to take them to safety but instead locking them up in a Passenger form. Vinder arrives on Puzano too, but after Bel's left, just missing her. Bel and Vinder both trace the source of the Passenger form signals, but Bel's Lupari spacecraft is called away to join the rest of the fleet round Earth before Vinder can catch up with her. He is captured by the Ravagers, who are exploding all the people they have abducted to generate power. They put Vinder in a Passenger form where he meets with Diane. Yaz, Dan and Jericho spend a few years of the early 20th century trying to work out when the final date for Flux destruction will occur, based on a recorded mission set for them by the Doctor. They don't get very far, but finally bump into Joseph Willamson, who shows them the portals within his tunnels. Meanwhile, still protected by the Lupari shields, with the Flux still active elsewhere in the cosmos, Earth becomes a target. The displaced Grand Serpent makes his way there, and infiltrates UNIT at its formation, then hopping through its formative years using time travel. In the present, Kate Stewart uncovers this, and gives him a warning; he blows up her house, so she goes underground. Karvanista boards the Lupari craft to wrest control of it back from Bel, just as the fleet is attacked by Sontarans. The Grand Serpent has done a deal with them, and has used his UNIT influence to weaken Earth's defences.

The Doctor is taken to Tecteun's base outside the universe and returned to her normal form. She has a converter attached so she can exist outside the universe. Tecteun and an Ood are controlling the Flux from here. Tecteun reveals that she has all the Doctor's lost memories in a fob watch, but neither the offer of this, nor an offer to spare the Earth from the Flux, persuade the Doctor not to interfere. With their needed power built up, Swarm and Azure are able to cross into Tecteun's domain, and kill her. They tease the Doctor with the memories from the fob watch, threatening to erase them, then roll back time, and erase them over and over again. The Doctor persuades the Ood to come to her aid, and rips off her converter device to return to the universe. Because of the time disruption, this instead splits her into three identical copies of the Doctor phasing in and out: one with Swarm and Azure, one with Karvanista and Bel, one with Yaz, Dan and Jericho. Between them, the three Doctors and her various helpers work to defeat the Sontarans. The Sontaran plan is to lure the Daleks and Cybermen to the area of space where the final Flux activity will happen, with a promise to use the Lupari shield to protect them; they'll then let both races be destroyed with the hope that all that matter being consumed will exhaust the Flux's anti-matter energy, leaving the Sontarans to rule over the remaining universe.

Kate Stewart arrives in the Williamson tunnels with the TARDIS (that UNIT retrieved from the abandoned 1967 village attacked by angels) and shares a plan that she's been developing to infiltrate the Sontarans. They are using humans with psychic ability to forecast where the final Flux activity will take place. The Doctor picks up Claire from the 1960s, and Claire and Jericho infiltrate a Sontaran psychic team, and come up with the desired coordinates. Diane and Vinder work out a way to signal to the Doctor, and she rescues them. The Sontaran fleet is destroyed alongside the Daleks and Cybermen, but not before they kill all the other Lupari except Karvanista. Claire manages to transmat away from a Sontaran ship before the Flux hits, but Jericho is not so lucky and dies. It's still not enough matter to halt the Flux though, but Diane has had the idea to use the Passenger form to suck up the remaining Flux energy, which works. Swarm and Azure summon their "Saviour" Time and offer up the Doctor. As the Flux has not destroyed Atropos, Time is still not free, so it destroys the Ravagers in punishment. It does not kill the Doctor, though, instead dropping a hint that her time is ending soon. The three parts to the Doctor come together as one and stabilise. The Grand Serpent is banished to an exile on a barren rock in space. Bel and Vinder are reunited, and go off with Karvanista. Everyone else is returned to their proper time and place. Diane is no longer interested in going for a date with Dan. The Doctor invites him instead to join the TARDIS team. The Doctor still has the fob watch, but decides not to open it for now, and hides it deep within the TARDIS.

Context:

I brought this on my self. About this time three years ago, in a blog post for the 12 x 25 minute episode story The Daleks' Master Plan, I made the following comment: "Unless Chris Chibnall were to take things in a very unexpected direction in 2020, Master Plan is going to be the longest story with which I will ever wrestle". Well, it took him until 2021, but he did indeed take things in a new direction, and created a story longer than that William Hartnell behemoth that took up three months of Saturday afternoons in the 1960s. Flux is composed of varying length episodes, three of 50 minutes and three of around an hour, so is the equivalent of at least 13 episodes of classic Who, making it the second longest Doctor Who story ever, measured in minutes. The winner, 14-episode The Trial of a Time Lord, doesn't really count to my mind, as it is composed of four discrete segments under an umbrella title. Each story is as separable as those that make up the Doctor's quest for the Key to Time, say, or various parts of more involved series arcs in 21st century Who like the Silence episodes in 2011. Not Flux though. If you cut out all the running subplots, you could make a standalone adventure out of Chapter 2 (War of the Sontarans) or Chapter 4 (Village of the Angels) at a push, but everything else is interweaved too tightly with the overall narrative.

There was nothing for it but to cover the story as one long piece. It troubled me a tiny bit to burn through so much of Jodie Whittaker's limited and precious stock of remaining stories, so I've decided I won't post about any of her three 2022 specials until they come up randomly, the better to make her era last throughout the remaining lifetime of the blog. Perhaps perversely, I also decided if I was going to use up six episodes in one go, I would use them up in one go. I would binge the lot in one five and a half hour marathon, with only the odd bathroom break on pause. I previously managed this for the relatively svelte 10-parter The War Games, but this would be even more of a challenge. I very nearly made it, but during Christmas holidays in a busy family house it wasn't possible to not have one meal break of half an hour. It at least took place between chapters four and five, so not interrupting an episode and following a cracking cliffhanger. I was accompanied throughout both shifts by the youngest (girl of 9) who was keen to watch it all again, and felt happier that some outstanding questions in her mind were answered by this re-watch. We viewed the story from my PVR recordings of the episodes rather than on the BBC iplayer, so we could get the surrounding idents, continuity and trails as part of the experience.

First Time Round:

I have often bemoaned my meagre remembrances of recent stories when covering them only a few years later here on the blog; many times I've suggested the keeping of a viewing diary, so as an experiment I tried it for Flux:

• 31st October. Chapter 1: The Halloween Apocalypse. Giving out sweets from about 5.30pm while the kids are out trick or treating. All sweets gone in half an hour, but that's not stopping people ringing the doorbell. Put up polite notice - 5 minutes to go before the broadcast, but kids not back yet. Start to watch live at 6.25pm, but feel guilty that I'm not waiting and give up at "Liverpool 1820" just after the beginning credits. When they get back, kids need to warm up with some soup. End up watching [from the start] with the two youngest (boy of 12, girl of 9) time-shifted using the PVR about 40 minutes later than live.
• 8th November. Chapter 2: War of the Sontarans. Missed the live broadcast as I was at the BFI for the Galaxy 4 animation screening, then with friends in London afterwards. Kids waited so they could watch with me. Put on the PVR recording the following evening after dinner with two youngest [they will be my only viewing partners throughout Flux]. Lots of chants of "Sontar-ha!" from both before they settled down to bed afterwards.
• 14th November. Chapter 3: Once, Upon Time. First episode we watched live as it went out on BBC1. Caught the obligatory last few minutes of Countryfile, waiting in anticipation. Youngest showed me that she was keeping her eyes wide open whenever the Weeping Angels were on screen.
• 21st November. Chapter 4: Village of the Angels. Slightly time-shifted (about 10 minutes or so) as we couldn't wolf down our supper fast enough. Youngest needed to play a game on my phone to distract herself towards the end as it was getting too scary, but didn't want to leave the room and kept occasionally glancing at what was on screen.
• 28th November. Chapter 5: Survivors of the Flux. Watched live including the last few minutes of Countryfile again. Youngest is feeling a bit poorly but didn't want to miss it. [This will turn out to be Covid and everyone in the family will get it before too long.]
• 5th December. Chapter 6: The Vanquishers. Tested positive the day before on a Lateral Flow Test, so could not be at the BFI again for City of Death as planned. Consolation is that we can watch the finale live. All three of us enjoy it.

Reaction:

Chris Chibnall famously appeared as a young Doctor Who Appreciation Society member on BBC public feedback show Open Air to express his lack of appreciation of the most recently broadcast series of Doctor Who. It being 1986, that was The Trial of a Time Lord. It is amusing therefore that all these years later, Chibnall has used the key idea from that 80s epic (an entire season of Doctor Who as one long serial) and for the exact same reason (to make a benefit of a reduced episode count thrust upon the production team by factors outside of their control; Covid this time, rather than Michael Grade). To be fair to Chibnall, the structure of the series was never what he had a problem with, and he certainly wasn't the only one then or since to find the writing of Colin Baker's final year as the Doctor a little lacklustre. People now and in the future may well say the same about Flux. I always thought people were generally a little hard on Trial - it has some great moments, and hangs together reasonably well. I would think anyone being so sniffy about Flux was being massively unfair though. It's a magnificent achievement. Watching the whole thing in one go makes it clear that everything in the narrative is clearly explained and paid off. It's only confusing when you're meant to be confused, and is paced well overall across the six chapters - frenetic opening of multiple narrative strands, action story with a little bit of resolution, pause for the revelation of some backstory, chamber horror piece that ends of a big cliffhanger, confrontation and more explanations, big explosive finale.

Like many of the longer stories of 1960s Doctor Who, including the other major antecedent for Flux, The Daleks' Master Plan, the narrative keeps things interesting over its running time by hopping between many different locales. Every single one of these is beautifully realised. What is on screen is breathtaking in its scope (many CGI-rendered spacecraft whizzing through amazing starscapes), beautiful in its detail (the Samurai styling of Karvanista's Lupari technology, as just one example) and perfect in its design (the make-up and costume for Swarm and Azure is outstanding). These episodes were made during a pandemic, when the crew were working out as they went along how to operate within restrictions that kept changing. I can't think of any moment that lets the side down. There was some carping online that the Passenger masks were commercially available ones that hadn't been adapted, but this misses the point to my mind, and the point is: the Passenger forms looked really cool. Why mess with that? Just like Trial of a Timelord back in the day, the epic starts with a sequence that pushes the boundaries of effects technology (the Doctor and Yaz zooming around above a lake of acid), but this is then sustained. There's at least one amazing set piece in every episode, like the massed ranks of Sontarans versus British soldiers in the Crimea, or many of the moments involving Weeping Angels from the fourth episode including perhaps the most memorable image of the Doctor turned into an angel. This is the one episode that I think will come in for the most praise, but it was mostly quite derivative. Nonetheless, it was enjoyable and scary. It seems that no matter how many times you have statues advancing on people trying not to blink, it never gets old. In that story, the 1960s are expertly recreated, as elsewhere is the Crimean War, and various places in 1904, and the many 20th century moments in the formation of UNIT that the Grand Serpent gatecrashes.

More than times and places, though, the many people of Flux help propel it along, and keep the audience engaged. Chibnall clearly understands this, as he ends the first episode with an exciting montage of each featured character at the start of their journey. The cast is Flux's biggest asset and every performance is a good one, some great. Karvanista is the first of the recurring guest cast to be introduced, and he's an instantly complete and engaging creation: gruff, blunt, and very Northern, at times almost antagonistic, but always coming back however unwillingly to his basic moral code. He also looks like a very cute dog, which is a genius choice as it informs his character - it could've been rubbish and just seemed like a mask (though the handiwork is exceptional) but it's great because looking cute clearly annoys the character so much. The concept allows for some wit in the dialogue too; "I still have a human in this fight". He's also now stitched into the programme's lore as an old companion of the Doctor, and I'd love to see Craige Els return to portray him again. Vinder and Bel, as more straightforward action / romantic heroes, are not quite so interesting, but nonetheless are engagingly performed (by Jacob Anderson and Thaddea Graham respectively), and both have some good moments. Vinder's backstory as a punished whistle-blower in a corrupt regime is something a bit different, and it's great to see them reunited near the end after a series of near misses. Annabel Scholey as Claire Brown doesn't get much to do that doesn't involve reacting to moving statues, but makes the most of it; the scene where she looks in the mirror to see her reflection has stone angel wings (achieved in camera with physical effects work) is another standout moment.

Other guest actors shine in less extensively featured roles: Nadia Albina as the resourceful Diane, Jemma Redgrave returning as Kate Stewart, Sarah Powell perfect as Mary Seacole, the historical celebrity around which a lot of the second episode revolves. On first watch, Blake Harrison seemed a little wasted in the role of Namaca, but this time round I got that he's there to represent all of the refugees displaced by the Flux, who otherwise wouldn't have a voice in the narrative. Best of all the guest characters, even though he doesn't turn up until halfway through, is Professor Eustacius Jericho, haunted but indomitable, serious but with a twinkle. It was a treat when he continued to work with Yaz and Dan in episode five, as he looked set to be a one-off character specific to the Angels plotline. It's also nice that Kevin McNally gets to do another good performance in Doctor Who, but this time as part of a story that's not The Twin Dilemma. Also returning to Doctor Who after a reasonable time away is Dan Starkey, who along with Johnathan Watson plays the different Sontarans featured. They are both so good, and the slightly tweaked masks similarly good, that you almost forget that there are actors in there. This is perhaps the best Sontaran story ever - showing them actually getting to participate in a war, having one ride a horse, and putting them on a level with the Daleks and Cybermen as top-tier adversaries. Main villains Swarm and Azure are gleefully but also glamorously sadistic, and actors Sam Spruell and Rochenda Sandall are having enormous fun playing them. Best of all the baddies, and also well dressed, is Craig Parkinson as the Grand Serpent. Yes, he's playing an extra-terrestrial twist on a somewhat similar role he famously played in another series (I'm trying not to spoiler here, if you know, you know) but he's doing it so well. He's also still alive at the end, so potentially could return to face the Doctor again.

There's still room left for the regulars to shine. John Bishop arrives fully formed as Dan, and slots instantly into the team, bringing a down-to-Earth warmth and humour to a long-running team, but also a greater sense of wonder than the existing regulars who maybe take the adventuring a bit for granted now. A new companion, and long periods where the Doctor is separated from the others, allows Mandip Gill to shine as the experienced old hand, and even act as the Doctor surrogate at times: her having WWTDD (What would the Doctor do?) written on her hand is a lovely character touch. There's some great interplay between the two companions too; I particularly liked the following naturally funny exchange: "Dan, are you from Liverpool? Why have you never mentioned it?" "Alright Sheffield, keep your cutlery on!". Jodie Whittaker has never been less than excellent in any of her previous stories, no matter the quality of the material. Here, with a rollicking good set of scripts, she somehow steps it up a gear and is sensational. Too many memorable scenes to list them all, but some stand-outs include flirting with her self when split into multiple Doctors, many scenes with the Ravagers playing vulnerable as her secret past is teased but not revealed, and turning the tables on the Grand Serpent in the finale. Best of all are the sequences with Barbara Flynn as Tecteun, the Doctor confronting the mother she never knew she had, who has robbed her twice, once by changing the course of her life by taking her as a foundling (an assumption that the Doctor points out was not necessarily a sound one), and secondly by removing her memories. These are great scenes in a story stuffed full of them, and crackling with some great jokes and snappy dialogue.

The nature of such a long story with many facets is going to attract a particular criticism. When I reviewed similarly epic The War Games I described it as the Doctor Who equivalent of The Beatles' White Album. Could Flux then be the long medley from Abbey Road? In other words, it's lots of bits and bobs put together with only a semblance of coherence. I'd take exception to such a reading, as the whole is well integrated and more than the sum of its parts (actually, you could say that about side 2 of Abbey Road too, I suppose). Sure, any one of the story threads could be unpicked and lumped together to create more modular individual episodes, but the whole would suffer. You could, for example, take all of Steve Oram's moments as Liverpool tunneler Joseph Williamson out of chapters one to five and just have him in the finale, but him popping up and meeting characters at unexpected moments, being weird and portentous, is much more fun. Any other flaws I've seen levelled are minor ones, or ones I can't accept as flaws at all. Yaz, Dan and Jericho spend a globe-trotting episode achieving naff all, but it's so much fun to be in those characters' company. The Sontarans vulnerability at the end because they have become addicted to chocolate is no bum note, it's a sort of crazy genius. The universe is so changed by the end that the show might have to reset, but that's true towards the end of any showrunner or Doctor's era. The next episode on the 1st January features Daleks who were seemingly all eaten up by the Flux, so they're already ignoring it anyway. The story might not be very deep; unlike previous Jodie Whittaker seasons there are no political or ecological themes, just an exploration of lore. Some people might think this is a good thing, of course.

Connectivity: 

Both Flux and A Christmas Carol feature a Doctor paired with two companions, one male one female, and both see them assisted by a wider group of people, some of whom travel in the TARDIS. Both stories feature scenes set around a notable day of the religious calendar (All Hallow's Eve and Christmas). Both see the Doctor flying through the air in a somewhat unconventional manner. Flux contains lots and lots of elements from Doctor Who's history, but it couldn't find room to include any flying sharks, alas.

Deeper Thoughts:

Everything's in flux. The 2021 story / season was an enjoyable event as it went out weekly, and stands up well when watched as one very long - Peter-Jackson movie length - special. I think it's fair to say that nobody on December 31st 2020 could have predicted that Chibnall would provide us with the 21st Century's version of The Daleks' Master Plan or Trial of a Timelord in the following year. So, it's probably a pointless exercise to look ahead to next year and speculate; but, I like pointless exercises, so here we go. Whatever else we guess about what 2022 has to offer, we know it will have one of the most exciting moments for a Doctor Who fan - the final story for a Doctor. Jodie Whittaker has three more stories left for 2022: a festive special on January 1st, and then two more specials in Spring and Autumn. In the final one, no doubt some of the questions about the Doctor's past left unanswered by Flux will have been answered, but the smart money would be on it not being all of them. Some mystery is likely to remain. I'd also bet that Sacha Dhawan will return as the Master and Jo Martin as the Division Doctor, but it's not certain. The only thing we can be 100% sure of is that the lead actor will bow out (Jodie's finished all her filming) and the character will regenerate. Beyond that, anything could happen. It's not completely unprecedented for the regeneration to end on a cliffhanger without revealing a new Doctor and actor, but it's not been done for a long time and only happened once (Jon Pertwee did not appear in Patrick Troughton's finale). Large sections of the audience would be very miffed to not have resolution and confirmation of the new Doctor, but that doesn't mean returning showrunner Russell T Davies won't do it.

I think it's more likely that someone will be cast as the Doctor next year and announced before the final special airs. It would be lovely for it to be a complete surprise and revealed only at the end of that story, but I don't think it's realistic. Any actor and their agent is going to want to keep the casting secret for only so long; professionally, it would need to be known that the person has the kudos of one of biggest roles in television (as well as clarifying that they won't be able to take on any other work for a bit). When the 2023 episodes start filming, it would be very likely to leak anyway. It's exciting, though; it means that sometime in the first three quarters of 2022, we should find out. According to a recent interview, Davies and team have not cast anyone yet (but he has been known to lie in interviews to ensure surprises). He also confirms that he has already written more than one episode, and the first one will be broadcast in November 2023 around the 60th anniversary of the show. This means that there will definitely not be a festive special on January 1st 2023, so 2022 could see the end of that tradition (or the schedulers and Davies could move the special back to the 25th December and there'd be one before the year is out). It's always nice for the profile of the show that Doctor Who is on over the Christmas period, but maybe all the possible stories set sometime between the 24th December and the 1st January have been told now, so I wouldn't be that sad about it ending.

Aside from the new, there's also the new old. One animation of a 1960s missing story has been confirmed for 2022; this will be 1967's The Abominable Snowmen. There's no date confirmed yet, but it's likely to be in the first half of the year if it's already being talked up. There are now two teams regularly tackling the creation of pictures to accompany stories where only the audio survives intact. So, providing the budget's still there to commission both, the other team should be working on something (it certainly seemed that way when they appeared at the BFI showing their last project The Evil of the Daleks). My guess, which will undoubtedly be wrong, is that they'll do The Wheel in Space next and it will be released late in the year. This will complete season five (Patrick Troughton's second year) on shiny disc, and will make it feasible to release that season as a Blu-ray box set sometime in the future. With regard to the Blu-ray sets, they returned to their pre-Covid release frequency in 2021, with three limited edition box sets (as well as some re-releases of older box sets in standard packaging). From social media mentions from some of the people that work on them, more are definitely in the works, and I'd expect another three in 2022. I'll speculate again, and no doubt be wrong again, and guess that the releases will be season 13 (Tom Baker's second year, a fan favourite, and there seems to be a one Tom set per year rule), season 22 (Colin Baker's first full year), and season 2 (William Hartnell's second year, which would be the first black and white season set, and would likely have photo reconstructions of the only two missing episodes in the season).

The previously mentioned RTD interview tied in with the Guardian's annual countdown of the 50 best TV shows of the year. I looked through the list and - as usual, and doubtless as intended - disagreed with a lot of it. Flux does not make the list, which maybe shows more about a long-running consistent programme such as Doctor Who being taken for granted rather than necessarily anything about the quality of the episodes themselves. Having paid for a month of Disney Plus to watch the Beatles documentary Get Back (number 27 in the Guardian's list), I was finally able to see WandaVision (the Guardian number 16), one of the fantasy shows to which Doctor Who has been compared unfavourably of late, and... it's only okay; wildly overrated, to my mind, and nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is. I am still to watch The Mandalorian or Loki; I'll report back if they rock my world. I much preferred the new seasons of a couple of US shows that I first watched during last year's lockdowns: Superstore and Ted Lasso. The latter made the Guardian list (at number 14) , the former didn't. As good as Lasso is, Superstore's emotional final season was slightly better for this viewer. Best of all for me was discovering the UK comedy series Ghosts (a US remake also premiered this year, but I haven't seen that yet). It only made number 34 in the Guardian list, but it was top ten for me. At some future date, when they finish telling the story of Button House, the entire Ghosts creative team would be a great pick to become showrunners of Doctor Who (though they might fall out between themselves as to which of them gets to play the Doctor). Of course, the next showrunner Russell T Davies happens to be the writer of the Guardian's number 1 show of the year, It's a Sin. It was shown early in the year, but it was such an intense, upsetting, invigorating and unforgettable drama that nothing shown since could top it. A worthy winner. It's very exciting to see what the writer of It's a Sin (who's maybe a slightly different man to the writer The Second Coming all those years ago) will make of Doctor Who next. But that's 2023, and we have 2022 to enjoy first. Any minute now...

In Summary:

It's fluxing great. Happy New Year!