Конец года (и усиление фк-сезона) означает, что я ещё не написала про финал Флакса не только сюда, но и в канал, возмутительно.
Пока я пытаюсь привести мысли в порядок, вот
интересная теория от Джонатана Блама о том, как менялась структура сезона в процессе съёмок и откуда могли появиться некоторые бесмысленные сюжетные петли:
Way back when they wrote "The War Games" as a ten-parter, Terrance Dicks and Mac Hulke wrote the first five episodes, then jumped ahead to episode ten, because they needed parts of the grand finale ready for the first bits of filming. And then they went back and filled in episodes 6-9 -- stretching out the rather-less-than-four-episodes-worth of story they still had to build up to that pre-set ending, resulting in delights such as Arturo Villar the comedy Mexican bandito filling up chunks of time.
"Flux", I think, is what happens if you try to write a modern six-parter that way -- but in this case you jumped ahead to write episode *five*.
And you leave a big honking cliffhanger into your finale... and then realise that episode six is actually about an episode and a half's worth of stuff.
читать дальшеBecause judging by the clapperboard in the behind-the-scenes video, "Village of the Angels", which aired as ep 4, was intended to be ep 5. As previously mentioned, "Flux" was shot in two blocks -- Chibnall delivered eps 1, 2, and 5 (the intro and the two "standalone" stories), and then had maybe another four months to get the other three episodes worked out. Only to find out that ep 6 would be huge, and presumably ep 4 wasn't.
My guess is that the Angel seizing the TARDIS was originally meant to be a coda to ep 4. Instead it was pasted onto the end of ep 3, to lead straight into "Village", which became ep 4. Then the first chunk of the stuff meant for part 6 (fifteen or so minutes of the Doctor at Division), along with some of the stuff from the original part 4 (Vinder's search for Bel), got mashed together to create a new part 5, "Survivors of the Flux". But that wasn't enough... so all the other stuff that turned up in the final part 5 -- Yaz, Dan, and Jericho's globetrotting adventures, the entire Grand Serpent / UNIT subplot -- was pulled out of thin air to make up the length.
(Reasons I think that? Note that the globetrotting is almost entirely a Terrance Dicks - style plot loop; all they actually needed to do to get into position for the finale would be for Yaz and Dan to travel the few miles from the returned village to the Williamson tunnels in Liverpool, and they could have been clued in to that by Williamson at any time. Similarly, the Grand Serpent subplot has no effect on anything outside itself, and they never even bother to explain what he's doing in Earth history or why he's working with the Sontarans. The whole thing, including Kate's cameos, could just be snipped out -- leaving the Grand Serpent as I suspect he was originally intended, as just a bit of Vinder backstory in episode 3.)
And *then*, once that new plan was in place... I suspect part of the Bel / Vinder subplot overflowed and got spliced into "Village" as ep 4. (Note that without those scenes, "Village" is pretty much exactly a normal-length 50-minute episode.) Those scenes being moved at a late stage would explain why an episode titled "Survivors of the Flux" has almost no material involving the survivors of the Flux...
I figure the Sontaran plot in ep 6 may well have expanded too -- note that there's no actual requirement for there to be a second Sontaran invasion of Earth, they could have simply conquered the Lupari and seized their ships without landing, and their "research" to locate the origin of the second Flux event could just as easily take place on a spaceship in space as a spaceship in a matte shot of Chile.
The Grand Serpent may well have been in ep 3 as part of Vinder's backstory, and maybe even in the original episode 4 somewhere. But his scenes in the last two episodes? Those were the modern day Arturo Villar.