Doctor Who: The Vanquishers Review - 4 Ups & 9 Downs
3. DOWN - A Waste Of Fluxing Time
Somewhere along the line, Chibnall seems to have forgotten that this series was titled Doctor Who: Flux, because this compelling narrative device has fallen completely to the wayside, playing second fiddle to pretty much every other plot. You might as well have called this series Doctor Who: The Division or Doctor Who And The Incredibly Long Expositionary Monologue.
After wiping out The Sontarans, Daleks and Cybermen, The Flux is dealt with by chucking Chekhov’s Passenger Form at it. The infinite matter within the passenger cancels out the antimatter of the Flux, and the universe is saved. Whose idea was this? Who gets the big hero moment of stopping the Flux once and for all? We can’t believe we’re actually saying this, but it’s Di. That’s right, Di from bloody Liverpool stopped the Flux. You have got to be kidding us. This should have been Yaz or Dan, maybe even Vinder or Bel. In fact, anyone but Di.
If all we needed to stop the Flux was infinite matter, then why didn’t the TARDIS, which is infinite in size, stop the Flux in episode one, instead of just teleporting the gang away?
But that’s not all. The Flux was never reversed, not that the plot seems to realise this. Intentionally or not, this series of Doctor Who resulted in 99% of the universe being destroyed, and trillions upon trillions of lives being lost. Most of the species and planets in the universe are gone. Considering this, everyone seems to be remarkably chill, chiefly The Doctor, who seems pretty happy-go-lucky in the scene where her and Yaz recruit Dan to the TARDIS team.