I want to know more about how far his power extends and what others in Vinder’s position have been asked to ignore. At the same time, this certainly isn’t the first time the Grand Serpent has outsourced a mass murder or been otherwise corrupt.
Vinder reports what he’s witnessed, knowing full well that he will be retaliated against, but he accepts the Observation Outpost Rose posting with a clean conscience. (Though, to sneak a complaint into this section, I wish Chris Chibnall would reserve some of that darkness to give his heroes even the occasional whisper of moral ambiguity.) And we love some political intrigue in our Doctor Who. The actions of the highly respected and feared Grand Serpent are rather thrillingly dark. We learn when we first meet Vinder that he’s been given a grunt assignment as some form of punishment, and in this third episode, we learn what he’s been punished for. In fact, every choice made in this episode falls so squarely into a like/do-not-like dichotomy that that’s how I’ll be organizing this recap. While last week’s episode gave us a fully contained story in which most things were in some sense what they seemed, “Once, Upon Time” swan dives back into incoherence and a form of storytelling that I find unnecessarily aggravating.
We are now officially halfway through the last season of Doctor Who we’re going to get until at least 2023, and I still wish that I could tell you with any confidence what it’s about.