Doctor Who “Flux Chapter Three: Once, Upon Time”

Well, I am at the halfway point.  Do I have any idea what’s going on?  Not really.  I’ll chalk that up to fast-talking and the accents of the actors.  Oh, and since this is a Chris Chibnall story, that means there needs to be even more characters.

Now, to be clear, I am not completely lost over what’s happening.  There’s just a lot I just plain don’t understand.  The Doctor appears to be as confused as I am about all that.  But, to protect Yaz from whatever Swarm is doing in the Temple of Atropos, she quickly shoves Dan onto another platform, leaps to a third herself, and uses the sonic screwdriver to zap the three (plus Vinder) into a timestorm until she can figure something out.

From there, she figures the way to protect them is to send them into their own pasts.

And, for some reason, there’s a Weeping Angel in the timestorm.  It follows Yaz into her past.

Now, the Doctor goes into her own past, a past she eventually figures out was as the Fugitive Doctor in that woman’s time as a member of the Division in a team that, sure, looks like Yaz, Dan, and Vinder, but actually isn’t because the members of the TARDIS crew, plus Vinder, keep seeing the others in their own pasts, with the Doctor able to break through from time to time with short messages.

Basically, the Doctor and the others, which included Karvanista the dog-man, had managed to capture Swarm and Azure on the planet Time, setting the Priests of Atropos up to protect the place.  Eventually, the remaining priests take control again and send the four back out because even the Doctor can’t survive forever in a time storm, and it turns out Swarm had planned that all along and he got exactly what he wanted.

So, Swarm basically knows stuff, right?  He knew what Yaz had written on her hand, and he knew to capture Dan’s romantic interest for…something.  Remember, I don’t really know what’s going on.  Vinder’s subplot was nice, I will say.  He was on that outpost alone because he exposed corruption from a high ranking official and the whistleblower protection wasn’t really a thing.  Yaz keeps seeing that Weeping Angel in her past, and the Doctor can only tell her not to blink even as the thing comes through a video game into Yaz’s living room.

So, what about new characters?  Well, there’s Bel.  She’s a survivor of the Flux which seems weird since the Flux doesn’t seem to leave enough of anything around after it passes through.  She’s running around dodging the surviving threats that aren’t swarms of things that tend to leave nothing left when they hit something.  What’s she dodging?  Daleks.  Cybermen.  Probably the Sontatans.  She’s also Vinder’s sweetheart and carrying his child.  She’s badass enough to take down a whole Cyberman patrol by herself, so I won’t get too upset if she comes back.

But then there’s Awsok, some old woman who seems to be one of those mysterious entities that sometimes cause trouble.  She appears to the Doctor, tells her there’s nothing she can do to stop the Flux, it’s an artificial thing, and it’s possibly somehow the Doctor’s fault.

Yeah, that doesn’t help, like, at all.

Anyway, the Doctor does get everyone back to the TARDIS, but after dropping Vinder off on his devastated homeworld, that Weeping Angel comes out of Yaz’s phone to fiddle with the TARDIS’s controls.

Hold on?  Weeping Angels can do that?

You know what?  It’s probably better not to think too hard about any of this.