Doctor Who: The Halloween Apocalypse Review - 7 Ups & 5 Downs
5. DOWN - Bloated Plot
So you know all those threads we mentioned? Did anyone else feel just a tad overwhelmed? And we haven’t even covered all the plotlines in this episode yet…
There is a downside to introducing so much plot in the space of a single episode, and that is that the plot has to move very, very fast. As much as we liked most of the elements from this episode, very few of them were given sufficient room to breathe, or slow down for a quiet moment. Chiefly, poor Dan felt very much sidelined in his own introductory episode once we reached the halfway point.
We reckon just a few of these plot points could have been saved for next week: the Victorian miners, the Sontarans, the Arctic plot, and maybe even Vinder could have been pushed back to episode two with some minor rewrites that wouldn’t have hurt the plot too much.
We don’t mind it too much if this is only a single episode problem, but if this amount of dizzying plotting continues through throughout Flux, then we might end up with a series plot so dense it would make even Steven Moffat blush…