A temporal clip show that leaves a good few questions unanswered

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Quicker than your run-of-the-mill multicoloured crystalline space nemesis can snap his fingers, Doc has leapt into the fray and undone last week’s cliffhanger. Her plan of action: to drag her new fam into a time storm, whatever that is. Suddenly everything goes out the window. Temporal cohesion, recall reliability, the kind of narrative restrictions that certain lesser showrunners might benefit from in order to thrive. You name it! But in their stead comes the hope of Doc regaining her lost past.

As she gives it her all to reclaim her roots, she must also fight to keep hold of her companions (and Vinder) who have been scattered across each other’s timelines. And intercutting this week’s temporal mess is the story of Bel, or so we’re told, she’s barely in it, and who is Bel anyway, isn’t this meant to be her story? Point is across this fragmented clip show we also learn that the Daleks and Cybermen, like the Sontarans before them, are scavenging lives across a failing universe, so adventure must surely lie ahead.

Les Visiteurs meets The Boys in Brazil with Cybermen and archery

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We’re in South America in November 1988 and there are some nazis. That’s all we need to say about them, so let’s move on to Windsor in 1638. Lady Peinforte is having a whale of a time shooting some pigeons while she waits for a Mr Magoo-a-like to work out when some fancy shmancy comet is coming to Earth. This is no ordinary comet, of course, and time may well tell that it in fact contains some kind of living metal that someone, (cough) Doc, might have accidentally released from Gallifrey.

Bing-bong, fast-forward. Peinforte and her adjutant have now sipped a time potion and Les Visiteurs’ed to the 1980s to no one’s shock or surprise. And now all forces converge on Windsor: Les Visiteurs, the Boys from Brazil, the fam, the metal lady inexplicably enslaved inside the comet, and Wagnerian giants aka gosh-darned Cybermen. Not a single one among them stands flaccid in the presence of archery paraphernalia and stuff is about to get very real.

A pluri-temporal tater invasion splinters the fam across history while the baddies provide time stream tech support

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The TARDIS and its occupants are miraculously, some might say arbitrarily, thrown by the Flux into the midst of the Crimean War. You incorrigible cynic, obviously the Sontarans’ obsession with Japanese food caused some tempura residue to hurl Fam 2.0 to where the potatoes’ pilot scheme to invade all of Earth’s history was taking its first soft baby steps on the heaped bodies of the British Imperial Army.

However, said plot-enabling residue equally miraculously sends Dan hurtling straight back to 2021 Liverpool where he tries to wok things out with his parents, and it spirits Yaz straight to the Planet of Time itself, where the Mouri are at risk of being turned into mere mementoes by the oncoming Swarm. Vinder’s also there, so he can show off the Mouri’s fancy proximity activation. And Mary Seacole takes notes.

Margaret Thatcher’s husband runs away with the baker’s apprentice and the indigenous species receives zero reparations

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For reasons irrelevant to the story, the Seventh Doctor and Ace go to Terra Alpha, a human colony where the prevailing government decree is “don’t worry, be happy”, or else! The pink-wigged, laser-cannon-wielding ladies of the Happiness Patrol enforce this law, treating glum dissidents to either death by fondant drowning, or recruitment into their ranks, which usually involves death by laser.

Head pink wig, Helen A has her partner whipped, her pet dog trained to murder the rat people living in the sewers (oh, yeah, there are rat people), and a head executioner in the guise of Bertie goddamn Bassett in an act of bizarro satire gone astray. Doc and Ace must now team up with a random blues harmonica player to prevent this society from practising its presumably democratically chosen laws.

All in all, yeah, a pretty promising thrill-ride season opener

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Since we last saw the Fam finally sloughing off its redundant half, Doc and Yaz have been whirling around the universe taking in amazing places, circus workshops, and Meanwhile, in Liverpool in 1820 Joseph Williamson is compelling the multifarious unfortunates of the northwest to come on inside his tunnels to nowhere, because Meanwhile, nicest guy in Liverpool, Dan Lewis né Stevens, is giving free museum tours, handing out free food, and planning to give Di a—

Meanwhile, the TARDIS is on the fritz, requiring a series of escalating blunt force traumas to get it to Meanwhile a quartz-headed bad egg imprisoned since Big Bang One is coming out of his cage and doing just Meanwhile the Doc’s would-be murderer from the beginning turns out to be a laser-axe-wielding dog who kidnaps lovely Scouse Dan in his own electrified crate Meanwhile Arctic Circle Meanwhile Outpost Rose Meanwhile Sontarans, and did we mention the Flux?!

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This is the second time we've discussed The Halloween Apocalypse on Who Back When.
Have a listen to our first take here: B075 Doctor Who: Flux, Part 1 — Instant(ish)Reaction Review

Doc Fluxes Skaro in the final Dalek story of Classic Who

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Doc brings Ace back to 1960s London to see famous Whovian sights like Coal Hill School and Foreman’s yard, and to pick up the stellar manipulator he happened to have left lying around by mistake. He’s not the only one after it, though. Far from it! Two Dalek factions are at war and one of them has decided that having a stellar manipulator might just be a game changer.

Also on location is not-Bagels, leading a not-UNIT team cosplaying as Liz Shaw, Jo Grant and Mike Yates, and approximately 33% of whom are second-generation nazis. With the Seeeeeventh Doctor fully leaning into his eccentricities, however, and with Ace equipped with a suped-up baseball bat, our pre-fam Fam is on the case!

After Captain Jack breaks Doc out of not-Shada, they team up with the Scoobies for one last adventure as a fam

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After the events of Resolution (of the Dalek), as the Fam obliviously indulged in 007-themed shenanigans, the corrupt half of the two people working at GCHQ handed the remains of the Reconnaissance Dalek to Mr Big of Spiders in Sheffield fame. Similar to GCHQ, captain of industry Jack Robertson’s company also only employs two people, and the not-Mr-Big half of them sets about revolutionising the Dalek to form the basis of a new prototype security drone with a suspiciously Dalek-sized hole in the middle.

One year later, the aforementioned corrupt official is now somehow-still-not-the-worst Prime Minister and about to level up Britain’s security by unilaterally rolling out said security drones nationwide. Obviously the Dalek has gotten itself cloned in the meantime, though, and with Doc still stuck in a space prison there’s no one around to prevent the Earth from getting invaded from within. Nope, spoke too soon. Actual Captain Jack just broke her out of there with a breakout ball and a quick dart of Harkness, OK, tension resolved.

(Ok, there WAS a podium...)

What's that? We've discussed this episode once before? Yep, that's right. Heads-up, we were significantly more vitriolic in our instant-ish reaction review, available here: B070 Revolution of the Daleks (2021 New Year's Special)

The 3,000-year-old supervisor of a shopping mall uses a hypnosis doubloon to recruit henchmen in a serial that channels iconic moments from 80s cinema.

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Oh, you lucky, lucky people. You’re about to learn of the time when Doc and Mel bumped into Sabalom Glitz on a space trading colony. Well, it was more like a freezer warehouse with a cafe. The fact it has a cafe is strangely important because we bump into a waitress that thinks everything is totally Ace and brill, and who may or may not be hitching a ride at the end of this serial. Oh, and when I said freezer warehouse before, I of course meant a place where a Mr Freeze-wannabe is storing tens of soldiers that he’s bought, brainwashed, and turned into undead popsicles.

Sabalom Glitz has just sold his entire crew to Mr Freeze, in fact, and somehow in the process purloined a map to the treasure hidden deep beneath Ice World that, legend has it, is guarded by a dragon. Naturally, he was allowed to steal the map by this week’s baddie because old Freezy McFreezeface really wants said treasure, and somehow getting Glitz, unaccompanied by a crew, to battle a dragon for it is, I’m sure you’ll agree, the most straightforward way of getting one’s frozen paws on it. Doc, Mel and newcomer Ace join Glitz’s fellowship and thus adventure and hilarity ensue.

Doctor Who is Redacted and we're told Doc was The Chosen One all along

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Transported through the boundary gateway to a post-apocalyptic Gallifrey, The Master imprisons The Doctor inside the Matrix, where he sets about rewriting six decades of lore, carefully crafted by generations of BBC writers, by way of a retconning drinking game. Regeneration, we learn, was spliced into Gallifreyan genes from an immortal child hailing from goodness-knows-where, ostensibly making said child the unwitting creator-God of the Time Lords. And by a coincidence of Skywalkerian proportions said inadvertent deity grew up to become The Doctor.

Not to worry. There’s way too much other stuff going on here as well. In the real world, The Master has welcomed Ashad, his death particle, and his fleet of Cyber Warriors to Gallifrey, and the only peeps who can save the day are the extended fam. With Yaz and Graham ordering the remaining humans to scoop out Cybermen on one side, and Ryan, younger, better Ryan, and whatshisface Barristan Selmy from Game of Thrones running around the Community blanket fort on the other, the Cybes don’t stand a chance. Tecteun, Tecteun, Tecteun be praised.

A monarch fleeing genocide hides among alien tourists at a Welsh Butlin's where no one reacts to her green baby

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Landing on a super interesting space station, the Seventh Doctor and Mel B win a free trip to 1959’s Disneyland which elicits in said companion an inordinate level of exuberance. Thus, with a legitimate reason to adhere to budget cuts this week, off they plop to our part of the galaxy where they bump into a satellite and crash in Wales, thus avoiding the further cost of a trip across the pond. Also along for the ride is a white-clad, silver-egg-toting princess from a war torn world populated by green dudes battling bad guys dressed in black. Wonder if that’s going to factor in.

It will! Gavrok, leader of the bad guys, is after the princess for a reason we’re not privy to, and thanks to the interventions of a bounty hunter we won’t explore further, travels from his world that we learn nothing more about, to Wales, which is much cheaper. Now, with all protagonists, tourists, bad guys, a beekeeper and two American spies about whom we’ll learn nothing more, assembled at a Butlin’s, action, adventure and rock’n’roll are sure to ensue.