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| The Doctor faces her hungriest foe! |
THE PLOT:
The Doctor's companions are enjoying the most glorious part of time travel: Poking around a planet-sized junkyard looking for spare parts. Graham is grumbling about hunting for needles in haystacks when he makes a find of the worst kind - a sonic mine, which detonates and knocks all four of them unconscious.
They wake on the Tsuranga, a rescue ship en route to a medical station. The ship's complement includes: two medics - veteran Astos (Brett Goldstein) and nervous rookie Mabli (Lois Chimimba); Yoss (Jack Shalloo), a man who failed to take precautions on vacation and got pregnant; and Eve Cicero (Suzanne Packer), a legendary general who is hiding a secret even from her own brother (Ben Bailey-Smith).
The Doctor doesn't particularly care about any of the personal drama. She just wants to find a way off the ship and back to her TARDIS. Then the Tsuranga's hull is breached by a Pting, a space creature that will eat literally anything non-organic - leaving the Doctor to try to find a way to get the creature off the ship before it eats them all into the vacuum of space!
CHARACTERS:
The Doctor: When she discovers she has awakened on a spaceship, and that she is now four days' flight from the TARDIS, she goes completely manic. She is determined to find a way to turn the Tsuranga around and fly it back to the scrap planet, and it takes more than a little effort for Astos to get through to her that such an action would endanger all the other patients on the ship. It's a moment of pure, adrenaline-fueled selfishness, it is the first time the Thirteenth Doctor has been allowed a moment to be genuinely unlikable... and it's exactly the sort of thing she needs more of, in my opinion.
Whittaker gets a number of good moments throughout the story. Her interplay with Brett Goldstein's Astos is particularly good; when the ship's hull is breached, they both go into problem-solving mode, bouncing next actions off each other in a way that just feels correct. This is an episode that has her working to solve problems throughout its runtime. She continually returns to the question of what the Pting wants, dismissing objections that it's just a killer creature. "Every living thing, from the tiniest to the largest, wants something," she insists - and when she realizes the answer, she finds one solution that covers multiple problems.
Ryan: He and Graham are largely relegated to dealing with the pregnant man, but more of Ryan's character emerges. As he tries to reassure the young man who is overwhelmed by the thought of being a father, he reflects that his own father would have been that young when he was born. Ryan reflects on how his father abandoned him after his mother's death, acknowledging that it must have been hard without giving up his anger at being abandoned. When Yoss frets that he can't be a father, Ryan stresses to him that "You don't have to be perfect - You just have to be there."
Yaz/Graham: Both very much in the background this episode. Bradley Walsh remains a steady presence, and gets some good reactions in to the insanity happening around him. Mandip Gill's performance is uneven. She horribly overacts several lines, such as her grinning comparison of the ship's sensors to the camera on her police uniform, or her observation that at least the Pting won't eat them. In both cases, her overly broad delivery is actively distracting from a scene that's otherwise flowing pretty well. She works much better in support, though - Her interactions with android Ronan (David Shields) as they protect the ship's engines work well, as does her interplay with the Doctor during the episode's climax. Overall, though, this is Gill's worst episode to date.
THOUGHTS
I definitely don't always agree with Fan Wisdom on which episodes are good and bad. There have been plenty of "bad" episodes I have enjoyed very much. But most of the time, I at least can see why they are considered bad: Poor guest performances, cheap-looking sets, weak endings, meandering story structures, or just sharp tonal clashes with the surrounding episodes. I may quite like The Two Doctors, but I understand why many don't; I may enjoy Robot of Sherwood, but I don't have to struggle to see why many others hate it.
But I am flummoxed by the reputation of The Tsuranga Conundrum. The story's structure holds up, with a resolution that fits with what's gone before and is dramatically satisfying - all of which immediately puts it above Arachnids in the UK. Whittaker's Doctor is on rather good form, and feels more traditionally "Doctorish" than in most of the preceding stories. The guest cast range from pretty good (Shalloo, Chimimba) to very good (Packer, Goldstein). The crises continually escalate, feeling ever more on the verge of getting completely out of control, right up until the resolution. Not only do I not see this is a bad episode - I see it as a rather good one!
I will acknowledge that I've always had a soft spot for the Irwin Allen disaster films of the 1970s, and this episode definitely borrows from that template. But it's not just nostalgia making me fond of this one. I think the story structure is genuinely effective. The first part of the episode sees the Doctor desperate to return to her TARDIS. Disoriented by the sonic mine, she is behaving selfishly and irrationally; she is effectively the villain of this 10 minutes, with Astos having to stop her from doing something that will endanger lives.
Even so, this entire sequence establishes so much that is key to the episode. First, though she is being irrational, the Doctor is already working to solve problems, which is paralleled when she is similarly working to solve problems later. We are also shown the structure of the ship while being introduced to all of the guest characters. We get to see the start of every character's subplot throughout this sequence, and we are introduced to the various security and navigation systems the Doctor and the other passengers will have to overcome to resolve the situation.
Also effective is how firmly these scenes establish Astos as somebody absolutely competent and in control, in a way that the Doctor isn't here... Which helps the next plot turn raise the stakes.
On the whole, I found this episode to be great fun, and a rather nice recovery from the genuinely weak outing that preceded it. Oh - And I like the design of the Pting, as well.
Rating: 7/10.
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