Doctor Who series 13, part 6: The Vanquishers

Well, thank heaven that’s over. Aware that I’d left it much too long since I watched the penultimate episode of Flux — at least three months — I was determined to give the finale a good go. So as a refresher, I read the Wikipedia article about the previous episode, and I paid careful attention to the sequence of sub-second jump-cuts that constituted the recap at the start of this final episode. I still struggled to understand what was happening. Let’s take a moment first to think about the things that worked well: The make-up job on the two main bad guys (above) was excellent: very alien and exotic, but at the same time, leaving the actors free to communicate through facial expression as well as by speech. Which they did well. The brief quiet scene, or at least quietish, when the Doctor was locked in the Sontaran jail with Karvanista (the dog one), really worked. Just for a moment, I felt like I was in the presence of two actual characters. I’m pretty sure there must have been…