Pete Messum Reviews...

One notable criticism levied at Doctor Who: Flux so far has that it's been too complex, and may well have alienated the show's more casual viewers. This is a bit of a double-edged sword. If Doctor Who plays it too safe, audiences will lose interest. If the show aims for something more complex, far out and cerebral, people turn it off because they can't understand it. Personally, I think that the show can strike a firm balance between the two, and Flux just hasn't quite managed this.  For one thing, a large part of the story revolves around the Timeless Child revelations from the end of Series 12...which aired in March 2020. There's no recap in the "previously" segments, and expecting everyone to remember those revelations after a year and a half of...well, you know what seems a bit ridiculous. Also, The Timeless Children is only vaguely comprehensible if you've seen The Deadly Assassin - a four-part Tom Baker story from 1976. Chris Chibnall may h

If you're looking for nightmare-inducing, race-behind-the-sofa Doctor Who , Village of the Angels is certain to become a stone-cold (aha) classic. I'd been hoping that Flux : Chapter Four would be a horror piece, given that its the only instalment of this series to be co-written by Maxine Alderton - who wrote the the excellent The Haunting of Villa Diodati last year, an episode that's only grown on me with time. It'd be easy to say that Alderton was responsible for the best aspects of the episode, but I think that's a disservice to Chris Chibnall , who has given us two great episodes this season and one watchable bit of set-up. Which writer made it work? Perhaps it was the combination of the two. During Steven Moffat 's era I really started to feel as though the Weeping Angels were being overused. Their return in The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone was welcome, bar the moment when the lonely assassins moved on screen (for the first and only time). The Angel

I've been eagerly awaiting a proper tippy, mind-bending, timey-wimey episode of Doctor Who for a while now. Oftentimes such ideas are relegated to sequences, with a fear of (presumably) not being "mainstream" enough. We received hints of this in Series 12's Can You Hear Me? , but Once, Upon Time is almost entirely dedicated to this concept. Firstly, the big one: we finally get to see more of "The Division days", and it's simultaneously incredibly exciting and a tiny bit underwhelming. Jo Martin returns as the Fugitive Doctor! Although she clearly wasn't present during the initial shoot and has been added in pick-ups, resulting in a "glitch" effect switching between her and Jodie Whittaker . It's a good compromise, as though the production team couldn't make the schedules work, and so did what they could, but I'd have much rather seen at least one full scene with Martin in the role again. Perhaps she shot her snippets alongsid

Prior to watching War of the Sontarans on Sunday, I revisited the first chapter of Doctor Who: Flux , and I have to say that I enjoyed it a lot more. Was it the weight of expectations? The overwhelming number of disparate plot threads? Well, I still find the episode to be a little muddled, but it's a fun adventure, and if nothing else the dangling plot threads are all quite interesting. How would that cliffhanger be resolved?! Off-screen, it turns out... The best summary I have for War of the Sontarans is FUN . It's great to see the Sontarans back again, and I'm glad that writer Chris Chibnall dedicated 2/3 of the episode to them. J onathan Watson is great as his two Sontaran commanders, while Dan Starkey 's supporting role is a nice bit of continuity from previous Sontar tales. Having seen a number of set photos last year, I had expected the Crimean War storyline and modern day invasion to take place over two instalments of a two-parter; alas, it turns out that it