Doctor Who: Once, Upon Time Review - 5 Ups & 6 Downs

In his first episode, we saw Dan abducted from his beloved home city of Liverpool. Last week, we watched on as he valiantly took the fight to the Sontarans following their invasion of… Liverpool. We simply can’t wait to see where his third journey in a literal time and space machine takes him! Where will he end up? Yup, he’s in Liverpool…again. Great. Is anyone else starting to think that John Bishop can only sustain his mortal form so long as he stays within Merseyside?

Dan’s story is fairly inoffensive this episode - there’s nothing terribly bad about it, but there’s not much good either. Sure, we get a nice bit of backstory about his ex, and his chemistry with Diane is passable, but other than that this story meanders for much of the runtime, culminating in the reveal that Diane’s consciousness has been stored inside The Passenger, as many of us already suspected. We still aren’t quite sure why Azure chose to capture Diane, given that Dan had zero connection to The Doctor at the time, but we digress.

We also saw the third appearance of Joseph Williamson, who made just as much sense and impact as he did the last two times as he runs from some terribly CGI’d blue fireflies. We’re going to need an explanation for this guy real soon, because his presence is becoming annoying.

Dan hasn’t really had his moment to shine yet, and his main contribution to Flux has been the ‘Evil Dan’ memes, but we live in hope.