Doctor Who (2005) 11-05: The Tsuranga Conundrum (Quick Review)

Episode:

845

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Serial:

281

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Writer:

Chris Chibnall

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Air Date:

04-Nov-2018

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm talking about Doctor Who again! Why? Because I feel compelled to finish this season and I can't write about two shows a week anymore because I burned up all my enthusiasm and determination a couple of months ago when I wrote about the entire classic series.

Uh, I mean I'm writing about this episode because I have many opinions on it... probably! None of them are really leaping to the forefront of my brain but I'm sure there must be some in there somewhere and I'm dying to share them with people.

I've also got at least one fact for you, which is that the episode was written by showrunner Chris Chibnall. That might not come as a huge shock considering that his name's on the title card up there and he was credited for the four that came before it as well, but you may not know that this is going to be his last for a while. The next four episodes, basically the second half of the season, were all written by new writers. So any one of them could be the next Blink or Flatline... or the next Fear Her or Sleep No More. They'll be a change at least. Hopefully.

There will be SPOILERS after this point, for this episode and maybe earlier ones as well.

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The last episode, Arachnids in the UK, was about gigantic (but still kind of small) CGI spiders running amok, not due to any evil plan but because they were mutated by a toxic landfill and just wanted to continue their spider lifestyle. This episode, on the other hand, was about a small CGI creature running amok, not due to any evil plan but because it was hungry, and it presumably wasn't mutated by the piles of trash seen earlier in the story. So they're actually pretty different episodes.

The opening scene at the alien junkyard featured a fantastic camera move by the way and the whole location looked entirely realistic to me. I could really believe that Team Tardis had ended up on a miserable ugly junk planet looking for a part that had no relevance to the rest of the story whatsoever, aside from it getting them hospitalised. Next time the Doctor should just time travel up some money and then buy a new one from the time period it was manufactured in.

Speaking of things that happened in earlier stories, the characters were lucky they were picked up by a passing spaceship just before dying again. The Doctor keeps getting bailed out of the unintended consequences of her actions this season, though this time it was out of kindness rather than because their rescuers wanted some kind of bonus.

I did like the early scenes in the mysterious medical facility though, with the Doctor running around in pain, being hostile and selfish in her attempts to get back to her Tardis. The extremely kind and thoughtful Thirteenth Doctor regressed back to Hartnell for a while until she was calmed down, realised what she was doing, and became the Doctor of candy floss and hope again. I appreciated how it 'humanised' her a bit, as so far she's been a paragon whose only flaw is the way she perhaps lets her villains off too easily and that's made her a bit dull.

Plus I'm so used to there being something sinister about science fiction hospitals that I found the scenes of her trying to find the way out and being told they couldn't escape to be fairly tense. Why couldn't they leave? Were they going to have to sacrifice some limbs or internal organs to pay for the treatment? Had they been implanted with something? Did the Doctor have a serious condition that they couldn't treat?

Nah, it turns out that they were just on an ordinary regular space ambulance. Everyone there was friendly, nothing was wrong. There was no dark secret whatsoever. No real conundrum either, so that title was teasing more than the story had any interest in delivering. Also, I've heard some people call the episode fast paced, but for me it lost a lot of its urgency after the Doctor stopped frantically looking for a way out. It had me thinking it was going to be one of those stories that plays out in real time, and I was 100% up for that, but then it settled down into a regular base under siege story. Well, regular aside for the fact that everyone was on board with the Doctor's plans and no one was being an obstruction in the slightest.

There were quite a few characters in this story and they got a decent amount of screen time, at the expense of Ryan and Yaz who seemed to vanish from the episode for a while. Plus it's a surprise historical celebrity story, as one of them's a famous general from the 67th century! One of the few soldiers that the Doctor actually likes.

The episode gave a decent amount of time to the general and her brother, as he tried to find out about the medical condition she was concealing, but I had very little interest in either of them once I realised that they weren't the target of the creature that had gotten on board. Though I have to admit that their robot was far better than Kamelion from the classic series, even if they missed an opportunity to make it look like the ones from Robots of Death. It's a shame he's apparently going to be shut down now that the general's dead; that seemed like an unnecessarily cruel bit of throwaway dialogue.

There was also a lot of time given to the pregnant bloke who inevitably gave birth during the crisis, and I can't say I really cared much about his story either. When I first saw that the guy was pregnant I assumed he was an altered human and the episode was going to have something to say about... something. But no, he was just an alien doing what aliens naturally do, and his subplot was about the companions getting over being weirded out by it and Ryan getting a new perspective on his dad's choice to abandon him. On the plus side there was no goofy comedy at the expense of pregnant women, just at the expense of poor Graham.

I've noticed a few people on the internet taking issue with the pregnancy plot, some because they hated it showing a man being pregnant for reasons I'm sure make a lot of sense in their own head, and some because they thought Ryan talking an potentially unsuitable parent out of giving up their baby was a bad message. Personally I thought that the point of the subplot was to justify Ryan's father's choice to give him up to a certain degree, and it certainly doesn't have anything bad to say about him being raised by his nan. But mostly I was thinking that I was bored by it.

I did like the little gremlin though.

The CGI on the Pting was fairly amazing for TV, especially the animation as he jumped and twirled around the pipes (he's suspiciously agile and humanoid for a creature who apparently lives in the vacuum of space). I honestly can't tell if they composited him into a live action shot here or rendered the whole room, but the camera move and the way he breaks the pipe makes me think it was all digital. Either way it looks great.

I've sometimes wondered how the Doctor would cope against creatures like the xenomorph from Alien, and we actually got to see that play out here. Well, we got the cute version of a Nostromo scenario anyway, where the alien didn't want to hurt anyone and the people on the ship were all very nice to each other. The worst thing it did to any of them was accidentally flush someone into space in an inexplicably exploding lifeboat, though the Doctor did finally pay the price for pointing the sonic at everything in a dramatic pose when the creature decided to have it as a snack. Fortunately it only drained its the power and then spat it back out again, perhaps because it's made out of spoons, and the thing recharged on its own somehow.

The closest thing to a conundrum the Doctor faces on the Tsuranga in this episode is how to deal with a creature that eats energy while also resolving the threat of the bomb that's going to be emitting a lot of energy very soon. It wasn't a hugely taxing problem to solve, especially as she was able to use the same solution she used in The Woman Who Fell to Earth: put the bomb into the creature. Though Yaz almost solved the crisis early by wrapping the thing up in a blanket and giving it a kick, which is incidentally something you should never do to your pets, no matter how much fun she made it look. If there'd been an open airlock door for her to kick it into, that would've been the problem solved right there, scoring Yaz a ridiculous number of points. Assuming that it wouldn't have just flown back again.

By the way, a few familiar faces flashed up when the Doctor was looking up the Pting in the database:

I did a rush job of enhancing the image of Davros a little, as he'd already started fading out when the shot started. Seems like he's representing the Daleks in this image as they're noticeably absent.

There's aliens from all eras of Doctor Who here, as the Cybermen were introduced in the 60s, the bottom row were all from the 70s, the Raxacoricofallapatorians, Ood and Weeping Angels were from the Russell T Davies era, and the Silence were from the Steven Moffat era. Oh hang on, they've left out the 80s entirely! Where's the giant evil snake? The sinister cactus? The Kandyman?

It's nice to see that the original Silurians from the Pertwee era have apparently made it to the 67th century, despite the fact that in every episode they showed up they all died. Less nice to see an image of a Weeping Angel, as I remember The Time of Angels revealing that careless photography can lead to bad consequences.

Here's a shot of the ship's pretty anti-matter engine room as well, just because I thought it looks cool. I guess I have to find something to say about it now though. Uh... I've heard it's really tricky to make a clean white sci-fi room look good on TV and they did a good job of pulling it off here. The whole ship looks great in fact, with all of its curvy corridors and computer panels.

Though that isn't an anti-matter reactor like the USS Enterprise's warp core at the centre of the room, it's actually the anti-matter generator used to create the fuel. The Doctor's hyped by the ingenuity of it and decides to explain to Yaz (the audience) what it does and why, which is cool I think. I like her being enthusiastic, I like the show trying to teach people about real science and I like that the ship's not powered by space magic. Though she skips over the part that explains how creating the anti-matter isn't using up just as much energy as the reactor is releasing.

Anyway, they set off a bomb inside the Pting, making him a happy little gremlin, and then released him into space with all the energy he needed. Jim Holden and Michael Burnham would approve. Then the ship finally made it to space station Rhesus 1 and they presumably passed this information on to the authorities so that they could equip other ambulances with bomb launchers to lure Ptings away in future.

I'm glad we actually got to see the destination they were heading for at the end, even if it meant the poor effects people had to build a whole space station for a brief shot (and then cover it with lens flares). But I thought it was a bit of a narrative misstep ending the story here, because I didn't really care about them reaching the space hospital. The sick patient had died and the pregnant patient had given birth, so both medical emergencies had already been resolved, and the characters I cared about were on a mission to get back to the Tardis.

What I really wanted to see was Team Tardis getting back to the junk world to find that the Tardis hadn't been nicked. Then maybe they could've used a device to disable the sonic mines so they could grab their part and make the place safer for the next scavengers to come along. The episode may have gotten distracted and forgotten how it started, but my subconscious mind hadn't and it was waiting for some closure. Maybe the series will come back to what the medic found on the Doctor's scan and the part she was looking for later, perhaps in the same episode that we finally learn what happened to Tim Shaw and what the deal with the Timeless Child is. Or maybe I'm just hoping for more of a story than the series is interested in giving right now.

It seems like this is maybe the most divisive episode of the season so far, with some people really liking it and others saying it's the worst thing since Sleep No More, and that surprises me a little because to me it was just alright. It functioned well enough as a story, it didn't do anything excessively daft, and I was a little bored but I didn't catch myself scribbling pictures on my notepad to keep my brain from going into standby mode. It's a watchable episode with functional dialogue about likeable people dealing with a typical sci-fi scenario, which is more interested in scenes of its characters facing their family issues or exchanging exposition than it is in paying off the sense of dread and mystery from its early scenes.

But it is my least favourite episode of the season so far, which has been on a very gentle downwards slope for me since The Woman Who Fell to Earth. Maybe that's due to the novelty wearing off, maybe they moved their best scripts forward to give the season a strong start, or maybe watching 600 episodes in 6 months has made me a little jaded, I dunno. It's still a fair distance from rock bottom though and the next four stories are by new writers so I'm optimistic.

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COMING SOON

Doctor Who will return with Demons of the Punjab.

One thing I'll never get tired of is getting new comments, so keep them coming please.