*Episode premise spoilers, with a nod to the ending of “War of the Sontarans.”*
A twisty, turny, trippy episode to take us to the middle of this painfully-shortened season. There’s a lot going on here, and I’m not convinced that all of it quite hangs together, but on the whole, I enjoyed myself and remain intrigued.
The Doctor and co. have been confronted by Swarm and Azure in a crumbling temple on a planet called Time, and in an effort to protect her friends, the Doctor leaps into the middle of a timestorm. This sends the Doctor, Yaz, Dan, and Vinder into corrupted versions of their own timestreams, jumbled at different points along their timelines where not everything fully adds up. The Doctor is anxious to resolve the situation in the present so she can pull the others back into restored time, but she grows increasingly interested in the events she’s reliving in her own timestream, secrets that may prove vital.
This is very much a “Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS”-type story, in which more time is spent on cool visuals, trippy storytelling, and character focus than on solid plot. I like those kinds of episodes if they’re done well, and for the most part, this one is. Getting thrown into four different timestreams, which are all disorienting but in a few different ways, makes you work to find your bearings, but it starts coming together little by little, and there are other plot elements at play here that resolve really nicely by the end of the episode.
As for the timestreams themselves, the Doctor and Vinder have it especially good here. The Doctor’s storyline ties past and present in important ways, giving us clues to the greater mystery while also having a lot of personal relevance for the Doctor. Meanwhile, Vinder’s storyline fills in his backstory really well, answering some of the questions that naturally came up when he was introduced in episode 1. However, if the Doctor and Vinder’s storylines are actual stories with added time-trippiness, Yaz and Dan’s are mostly just trippy, with a few nuts-and-bolts plot bits thrown in to move us forward through the season. The things we see in Yaz and Dan’s timestreams don’t really reveal anything new about either of them, which is disappointing. Vinder’s a great character, and I’m plenty invested in him, but I’d have liked to see more balance for all four characters here.
This is also the second episode in a row that largely separates the Doctor from her companions. If Dan is only going to be Thirteen’s companion for six (or potentially nine) episodes, we ought to be seeing more of him actually with her, and after Yaz spent two seasons sharing the TARDIS with two other companions, we’re still not getting a whole lot of Yaz meaningfully interacting with the Doctor. I hope the rest of the season keeps the group together more.
The episode also introduces a new character, Bel, as someone to follow in a “post-Flux” universe. While team TARDIS is getting pitched around through time itself, Bel is trying to navigate space through the wreckage left in the Flux’s wake. She’s immediately a character to root for, brave and resourceful but also vulnerable, lonely but hopeful, determined in the face of seemingly-insurmountable odds. I’m not familiar with Thaddea Graham, who plays her, but she does a wonderful job of pulling me in.
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