Potato warriors in Crimean cosplay. Yes, it’s as weird as it sounds.
Short Synopsis
The Flux has scrambled history, the Sontarans invade 19th-century Crimea, and the Doctor must sort out time while Dan Lewis fights aliens in his mum’s house with a wok.
Extended Storyline
We pick up right after The Halloween Apocalypse, with the Doctor, Yaz, and Dan yanked apart by the Flux’s narrative chaos. Yaz vanishes into a mysterious “temple of timey-wimey nonsense,” Dan gets unceremoniously dumped back in Liverpool, and the Doctor crash-lands in the Crimean War. Except there’s a problem: instead of fighting the Russians, the British army is at war with… Sontarans.
Yes, the Sontarans, who apparently looked at the Flux ripping reality apart and thought, “Excellent opportunity for colonialism.” They’ve rewritten Earth’s history so that they, not the Russians, are battling Florence Nightingale’s troops. (Poor Florence doesn’t actually appear, but we get Mary Seacole instead, who proceeds to be the MVP of the episode.)
The Doctor does her best “I’m pretending to be in control” routine, striding into camp and confusing generals with babble about fixed points in time. Mary Seacole, however, is the one actually keeping wounded soldiers alive while also sketching Sontarans like she’s auditioning for a sci-fi National Geographic. The Doctor bonds with her immediately, and frankly, the two should have gotten their own spin-off.
Meanwhile, Dan returns to Liverpool only to find that his city has been turned into a Sontaran supply base. He sneaks through docks full of alien ships, armed with nothing but Scouse sarcasm and, later, his dad’s wok. His parents immediately prove themselves the kind of no-nonsense Northerners who would absolutely fend off an alien invasion while still making time for tea.
The Sontarans, of course, are loving this. They’ve got war, glory, and the chance to wear silly Crimean hats. Commander Skaak is particularly smug, growling about honor while the Doctor pokes holes in his logic. As usual, the Sontarans are equal parts hilarious and terrifying: they’re too stupid to win long-term, but too deadly to underestimate.
Yaz, in the meantime, gets pulled into a surreal, ominous subplot inside the Temple of Atropos. Here she meets Vinder, also dragged in by the Flux, and the two try to decode the creepy “Mouri” — mysterious statues that apparently keep time flowing in the universe. Enter Swarm and Azure, who waltz in looking fabulous and immediately start turning people into glitter-dust. Yaz gets mind-zapped into spouting lines like “I am your servant,” which is never a good sign.
Back in Crimea, the Doctor comes up with a plan: let the Sontarans wipe themselves out. She tricks them into retreating for “reinforcements,” but thanks to some fiddling with their ships, they instead trigger a mass “temporal withdrawal,” essentially auto-deleting themselves from that point in history. The British general tries to claim victory, but the Doctor rages at him for ordering a massacre of retreating troops. For all her sarcasm, Thirteen still has a moral line: you don’t slaughter your enemies when they’re running away. Even if they are evil spuds.
The episode ends with the Doctor sensing that whatever’s happening in Crimea and Liverpool is just a small part of the bigger puzzle. The Flux isn’t just rewriting history randomly — it’s being manipulated. Yaz is stuck with Swarm and Azure, Dan’s accidentally a folk hero, and the Doctor’s getting more frantic by the minute.