Set up to be the big bad of the season, they’re relegated to second billing here, and we end the series still not sure who they actually are. And there’s an edge of original satire in the idea of the Sontarans taking advantage of a major disaster.īut, poor Swarm and Azure. The second half finally ramps stuff up, leading to a big space sequence with some impressive visual effects – as cinematic as Doctor Who’s ever looked. The chocolate-addicted Sontaran is a fun comedy scene (yes, it is, don’t pretend it isn’t to look grown-up). Let’s not be too grumpy, though – some of the Sontaran stuff has a lot going for it. (An easy solution could have been for episode 2’s Sontarans to be present in Liverpool and historical Crimea only, and for its mentioned-but-unseen global invasion to be held off until this finale.) It’s certainly true that this episode had a lot that it needed to do to provide a satisfying conclusion, and it’s also true that a lot of things happen in this episode, though they’re not necessarily the same things.Īfter all the build-up around new villains Swarm and Azure, and around the Doctor’s hidden past with the Division, Flux ultimately decides that it wants to spend most of its final hour being a Sontaran story – not only retreading invasion story tropes we’ve seen many times before, but retreading the Sontaran invasion we had four episodes ago.ĭespite all the added stuff about infiltrating UNIT and breaching the Lupari shield, it’s another case of the world being covered in Sontaran ships there’s an odd lack of escalation between the two invasions, as if Chris Chibnall forgot he’d done this bit already. We’ve been saying all along that our judgement on this six-part epic will rest on how well the many strands are wrapped up by the end, and now The Vanquishers has aired, well. Flux’s opening episode introduced around ten major plot threads in one go, and as the series has gone on, more and more characters and storylines have joined the fray.