When we last saw our heroes, Swarm was about to send the full force of time through the Doctor's friends. Here, we see the Doctor throw herself into one of the Mouri positions so that she takes the brunt of the time storm instead of Yaz, Dan, and Vinder (in a sequence where the timing doesn't really match what we saw at the end of last episode, but never mind), leading to her hiding them in their own timelines while she works out a plan. This essentially lets Chibnall do a flashback episode, filling in some backstory for each of the characters. It's a risky move, having us explore each of our main characters' timelines in such a disjointed way, and I'm not completely convinced they pull it off.
Perhaps the most engaging of these narrative threads is the one that actually involves a new character, a young woman named Bel who's been traveling the universe in the aftermath of the Flux, searching for someone. Bel maintains a sense of hope and optimism, even as we see that the Flux has devastated the universe, with a handful of races (including Daleks, Cybermen, and Sontarans) fighting over the wreckage. It gives us a real sense of the destruction left by the Flux event (which actually seems really extensive indeed -- the sort of thing you'd think the Doctor would have heard of, given it seems to have happened in 2021), with lots of shots of ruins and shattered planets. And because Bel is fun to travel with, with both the hope and sense that she can handle herself (witness how she takes out a squad of Cybermen invading her ship), it makes us a lot more invested in this storyline, while the final reveal that it's Vinder she's looking for, and that she's pregnant with their child, feels well-earned. (Although, hilariously, the camera pans down to Bel's stomach when this reveal occurs, in case we weren't sure where pregnancy happens.) Bel is awesome, and I look forward to seeing more from her in the future.
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| The Doctor talks with the Fugitive Doctor. ("Once, Upon Time") ©BBC |
There's also a moment where the Doctor gets pulled out of the time storm to be lectured by an older woman in a clear piece of foreshadowing. "This universe is over, Doctor," she tells her. "...Don't lecture me, Doctor. Not when you should look to yourself. The Flux wasn't an accident. It wasn't a naturally occurring event. It was made. It was placed. ... Because of you." That's also an engaging bit of plotting, even if we don't know what Awsok (as the credits name her) is getting at just yet. There is a bit of sense of Chibnall moving pieces to where he needs them to be, but this is one case where they get away with it, just, due to the nature of the episode -- after all, what's one more slightly disconnected scene in an episode full of them?
The other three storylines are perhaps less compelling. We get some sweet moments between Dan and Diane, where we learn a little bit more about Dan's past, but in some ways this storyline is there more to illustrate the fragmented nature of the time storm they're all caught in, with lots of (well-done) jump cuts and such (along with an encounter with Joseph Williamson, who's been enigmatically popping up in these episodes to remind you that plot thread remains unresolved). Vinder's story is more interesting just because we learn more about who he is, being a decorated soldier who was assigned to be a guard of a leader called the Grand Serpent (Craig Parkinson, clearly relishing the chance to be sinister and superior) and then got reassigned to the outpost we saw him in at the start of Flux because he tried to stand up and do the right thing. And it helps that Jacob Anderson is excellent as Vinder; his quiet "don't make me relive this bit", for instance, is really lovely. Finally, Yaz is having troubles with her own timeline, as she finds herself in situations she hasn't been a part of (such as playing video games with her sister, who asserts, bizarrely, that "nobody calls them video games" -- is this true in Britain? Because everyone here in the US calls them that), stalked by a Weeping Angel. This bit seems more about setting up the next episode than anything else, so we sadly don't learn much about Yaz the way we do the other characters: a bit of a missed opportunity for a character who still hasn't been fleshed out as much as I'd like.
So when viewed as full narratives, each person's storyline is reasonably interesting. The issue is that because they're all jumbled together (which, again, is likely a deliberate choice to illustrate the nature of the time storm), it can be difficult to properly follow what's happening, so we end up gravitating toward the ones that are more inherently interesting. I'm still not completely certain, for instance, that I really understand what's happening in Yaz's part, and if there's more to it than just the Weeping Angel I don't know what it is. They tried with this episode, and it's certainly more interesting than just a series of staid, self-contained flashbacks, but given the alienating nature of the approach, I'm not sure it really works. Flux is already pretty dense and confusing without adding that into the mix; by the end we're halfway through this story, and it's not clear we really understand what Flux is about or why we should care, other than a general sense of impending doom. Again, I don't want to fault them for taking a big swing here, but (to continue the baseball metaphor) "Once, Upon Time" is more an in-field single than the out-of-the-park home run they were presumably going for. One wishes they would have provided just a little more explanation by this point in the story.
Still, they have three episodes remaining to bring it all home, so they still have time to pull this off. And the next episode looks like it's full of Weeping Angels, so that should be fun. Good cliffhanger, too, with a Weeping Angel emerging from Yaz's phone and taking control of the TARDIS...