![]() Looking at the first half of the season, it seems like Chibnall’s response to this constraint has been to simply compress the story that he wants to tell, rather than trying to realign the larger narrative. It cut down the number of episodes in the season. After all, the production team have been open about how the pandemic affected the planned production of Doctor Who: Flux. One of the more frustrating aspects of Once, Upon Time is that so much of the episode feels like window-dressing on a bullet-point list of tasks that Chibnall needs to accomplish. The audience were oriented coming into the episode, which made the chaos somewhat compelling. The Halloween Apocalypse worked because it started with a bang. It demonstrates that an episode like The Halloween Apocalypse – an episode with multiple seemingly disconnected threads constantly pushing the narrative forward – only really worked as a season premiere. Like The Timeless Children before it, Once, Upon Time is an episode that doesn’t necessarily work on its own terms. However, that’s a very qualified comparison. For Doctor Who to grow and evolve, it needs to be able to try new things. ![]() That is genuinely admirable, particularly given how traditionalist the rest of the era around it can feel. He is trying to do something new with a nearly sixty-year-old franchise. On some level, it recalls another of the bolder scripts of the Chibnall era, The Timeless Children, in that it really feels like Chris Chibnall is driving Doctor Who like he stole it. In contrast, Once, Upon Time is a radically different approach to Doctor Who on television, one that feels like an extension of the style of The Halloween Apocalypse.
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