Doctor Who Flux: The Halloween Apocalypse Review - 6 Ups & 3 Downs

2. The Doctor's Secrecy Doesn't Feel Earned

Doctor Who The Halloween Apocalypse Thirteenth Doctor
BBC

We're going to hop over to Yaz's side for this one, because the way the Doctor treated her throughout this episode felt unnecessarily harsh.

For starters, there was that one moment where a concerned Yaz asked the Doctor why she didn't mention her mind glitch, only for the Doctor to coldly retort "you know what Yaz? I don't mention everything". But our bigger problem here is the Doctor's refusal to tell Yaz what's going on.

There are several points in The Halloween Apocalypse where Yaz asks the Doctor why they're hunting Karvanista, or what's going on inside her head. The Doctor, in response, goes on the defensive, inferring that Yaz should simply be grateful for all the amazing adventures they've been on, essentially telling her to shut up and mind her own business.

The Doctor comes off as super unlikeable in these moments, and they're particularly frustrating because there doesn't seem to be a good reason for her secrecy. When the Eleventh Doctor was hiding stuff from Amy and Rory in Series 6 (the pregnant/not pregnant weirdness, Amy's Flesh doppelganger) it was abundantly clear why he couldn't tell them. Here though? It isn't, and the tension between the Doctor and Yaz feels incredibly forced as a result.

Chibnall clearly wants to have a heartfelt reconciliation between the pair later in the series, but he could've come up with a better way to get us there.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!