This week on Doctor Who, the team splits up to investigate strange birds and mysterious disappearances, and the show is very not subtle about the state of our polluted earth.
Welcome back to our ongoing Doctor Who discussion. This week, Emmet (still in recovery from surgery) and Sylas sit down to talk about “Praxeus.”
Sylas: I love the team companion format, but sometimes I feel like it can make the episodes too crowded, too quickly. In this case we have three companions and five additional characters, and none of them really get the time they need. If you spend too much time on the new people, you neglect the actual companions. But once you give all the companions their proper due, there’s very little time left to flesh out new individuals and still have time for a plot.
Emmet: I don’t think I’d agree with that. I mean, there were plenty of characters in previous eras where you only get to know a few things about them. Especially when they’d land places and get mixed up with a crew or something. 45 minutes isn’t a long time even if there’s only a few people to get to know. And the thing I love about the team dynamic is letting Ryan and Graham and Yaz have their own “be the Doctor” time, where they basically take on her role for other people.
Sylas: Oh, yeah, for sure. I agree with that. I loved having Ryan pop up just in time to stop Gabriela from touching the dead bird (also, never touch dead birds—they’re probably riddled with at least earth diseases, if not alien ones). It was very the Doctor. And then Yaz and Graham getting to chat with Jake and be all knowingly mysterious like the Doctor always is. So smug, confusing people by just dropping words like “alien tech” and “teleport” and what not. And I liked Gabriela a lot.
Emmet: Yes, and she was such a great companion-type for Yaz. I loved how into everything she was, volunteering to go with Yaz because she wants to punch something, and being in awe when she realizes she’s under the ocean.
Sylas: I mean, she’s the perfect “companion” because she’s all about traveling! And I agree, her enthusiasm was perfect. But she wasn’t as crucial to the actual plot as Adam and Jake, and I feel like that’s where the character development really fell down.
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Emmet: That’s because Jake is an asshole, and we’re supposed to believe by the end that he becomes not an asshole? But we never see that happen. He and Adam (his husband) don’t even really get to talk.
Sylas: Jake makes this big deal about talking to Graham about how he’s not a people person and “doesn’t do emotions” but we never get him to do emotions. We just get one mini conversation when Adam’s dying wish is that Jake will stop “just touching” life. And then Jake quickly apologizes for not coming to his launch when he’s about to die. That doesn’t really tell me they’re going to be better about talking, going forward.
Emmet: I thought that it was weird and not good that they open the door with Jake being a really terrible cop like they mean to address that issue, and then they just drop it? He doesn’t know how to act when he’s not on duty, but also… did he aggressively tackle people and kick in doors and fire random weapons like that when he was a cop, too?
Sylas: And why is he ‘on sabbatical’ which I’m pretty sure means suspended? Or fired?
Emmet: Adam corrects it to “ex-cop” and tells them not to trust anything Jake says, so I think he got fired. It’s implied that he’s too violent and he got the boot.
Sylas: And he hates people, and hates traveling, and apparently has nothing whatsoever in common with Adam, but the problem is that he only “touches” life? Which I guess means like, you’re only touching the surface of life and not really living it?
Emmet: Yeah, I guess. I liked that Yaz called him out with her adding that she doesn’t say she’s a cop when she’s not on duty. But then they just drop it.
Sylas: I really thought they were going to kill him off. I mean I’m glad they didn’t.
Emmet: Don’t kill your gays.
Sylas: Right! But it seemed like they would because it was all set up thematically as this redeeming moment. Adam tells him to stop avoiding life, or whatever, and then he’s like “This is me not avoiding it”, but… he believes he’s going to die. So he is avoiding life, because even if this is a noble or heroic act, he’s leaving life behind. Being willing to die, even for an important reason, isn’t the same as being willing to live for one.
Emmet: Which leaves us with this question of what has actually changed.
Sylas: I guess the fact that he’s willing to travel now implies that he’s going to keep working on himself, but I didn’t really see that in anything that happened with him. And apologizing for something when you’re about to do something that will get you killed is kind of a low blow. Adam would have had to live with the fact that his “dying wish” immediately got his husband killed.
Emmet: I think that’s why you’re feeling unsatisfied. It’s not the format, it’s that the episode tries to tell us there was a big change and big development there, but it doesn’t hold up.
Sylas: But you know, yay because Gabriela gets new friends for vlogging.
Emmet: Okay, but Gabriela and Jamila were famous, so famous that Gabriela’s shocked that no one recognizes her instantly, and Jamila just… disappeared? There’s not even a body left to be discovered, and Gabriela’s just going to go off and change the name of her vlog and run it with these two guys? There’s no way she’s not getting seriously investigated for murder.
Sylas: Jake will try to protect her as though him being an ex-cop from England will give him any power over something that happened in Peru.
Emmet: Also, did anyone ever say anything about Aramu getting murdered by the birds?
Sylas: Nope. It was never addressed. It was kind of gross, honestly. Like even Tennant’s Doctor would have said something about how he’s sorry and should have done better by him. And we find out that Suki is really an alien scientist using Earth and all of us for her experiments, so it makes it feel even more gross, somehow. I don’t love it.
Emmet: You know, I really really love how Yaz and Ryan and Graham are this really great team for the Doctor, and they love her and are there for her and tell her that they believe in her even when she doesn’t, but they also don’t really seem aware of the bad things that happen the way that other companions are. They just seem to have accepted the idea that being with the Doctor is like this; it’s dangerous, people die. They never question it, or whether it’s okay for things to work that way.
Sylas: There’s part of me that wants that to be addressed more, to bring back this concept that one of the jobs of the companions is to keep the Doctor grounded and “human” so to speak. Not literally human but, you know, empathetic and connected to people and aware of the small things.
Emmet: Well, she is though. That’s the thing about this Doctor, she’s literally born out of this beautiful moment of self-reflection and understanding. She’s very empathetic and much less selfish and inwardly-focused than most of the other Doctors were.
Sylas: Yeah. The other part of me almost sees her as a reward, for everything that the Doctor has been through, for all the hard work on their PTSD and the bad habits that came with it. Like, you’ve unpacked so much of that and stopped doing so many of those bad and selfish things, and you’ve grown so much: here, be the literal embodiment of a happy rainbow.
Emmet: And I feel like what happened with Aramu was sloppy scripting, not a deliberate thematic thing.
Sylas: Oh yeah, I agree. There’s been those in every episode this season, little bits that fell by the wayside. Some of them bother me more than others. And overall it’s not worse than Russell’s era, and better than Moffat’s later seasons.
Emmet: One thing that the script did handle really well is the theme of plastic litter. They set it up really seamlessly, starting on the beach that Gabriela says was beautiful only three years ago, and then moving on to talk about microplastics, and the fact that it’s in the birds, but it’s also in us, and then finishing it with the Indian Ocean garbage patch. It’s very tight, very neat.
Sylas: I also liked how they structured the whole script around the problem of microplastics and what we’re doing to the Earth, but at the same time gave us a very typical Doctor Who plot that both went alongside it and fit into it. The alien plot part—a scientist from a dying world experimenting on humans and the Earth to save their own home—was a whole Doctor Who episode unto itself, but rather than it just be random, or because the aliens were dismissive of human life in a more general way, it turned on the fact that we have so badly polluted our planets and oceans. And the alien part is still a Doctor problem, while the plastics part is a human problem—she could build some science to fix the plastics, if she wanted to. But she protects us from aliens, not from ourselves. At the end you have Gabriela, Adam, and Jake literally standing on the beach telling the Doctor to get out of here, and “leave the Earth to us.”
Emmet: Also this episode totally implies that Brexit doesn’t stick.
Sylas: What do you mean?
Emmet: Well, it’s a little over a decade in the future and the group Adam is a part of is called the European Space Agency. So maybe when they wrote this they were hoping Brexit wouldn’t actually happen, but now that it has, I guess this means that Britain will rejoin the E.U. again soon, because otherwise Adam couldn’t be a British astronaut in a European spaceship.
Sylas: Oooh, you’re right. Also, in the world of things they couldn’t have known when they were making the episode, I kept thinking about the coronavirus since it’s on everyone’s mind right now and I think they believe that it passed to people from animals.
Emmet: Yikes. Although I do think the bird thing was just so they could homage Hitchcock.
Sylas: That and they’re one of the species most at risk from microplastics. You know, besides fish.
Emmet: I mean, I would have loved if they’d been attacked by fish in this episode instead of birds. All leaping out of the water and flopping around.
Sylas: Trying to bite them with their weird little fishy teeth.
Emmet: That would take it to a very different place, I think!
Emmet Asher-Perrin has eaten so many micro plastics just today alone.
Sylas K Barrett would like to remind everyone not to touch dead birds with their bare hands.
I read somewhere that Yaz will have a problem this season with being too much like the Doctor to the point of stupidity. Essentially, Clara in her last season. So, yeah. I hope Yaz survives the last few episodes.
And, no, on the fish. That sounds like an sillier version of SHARKNADO. Gummed to death by guppies is not terrifying unless it’s you being gummed. Birds, however, are scary when they dive bomb. I’ve had the misfortune of walking near a mockingbird nest, and being straffed by a bird creates primal fear.
Aramu’s death was so downplayed that it took me a while to realize he was missing. But, then, absolutely no one on screen did, either. Very poor writing. So was the “point” of the episode. Being slammed in the face with stated dialogue about plastic says they think the audience is stupid.
I miss the days when the lessons in Doctor Who were metaphorical instead of straight up saying “You lot are poisoning the planet and yourselves” to make us feel guilty and worthless.
Yes, I get that the moral message is important, but I was distracted by getting scolded for the state of the planet and did not enjoy the episode. And if I don’t enjoy a show, I stop watching it.
I’m going to start waiting for reviews to find out if it’s a morality episode or a good story episode before watching. And I haven’t missed an episode since the 1980s.
Part of representation means shoe-horned romances that don’t really make any sense but you still get the kiss at the end. I was still happy to see terrible ex-cop and the astronaut rekindling their romance.
Aramu getting taken out by the birds feels like a scene they added after they sorted out the twist of the alien scientist and realized they didn’t know what to do with him.
Dubious moments aside, I liked this episode and not just for gratuitously gay and cute characters. The combo of subtle long-term human threat and immediate alien one feels particularly Dr Who-ish.
I agree with Sylas’ comment at the beginning. As much as I enjoy the current companions, four “main” characters don’t make a whole lot of room for guest characters to be explored.
Just two quick things;
1. I’m think Jake and Adam were talking about how he was dodging life, not touching it?
2. The European Space Agency isn’t an off-shoot of the EU, it’s got members from all over Europe. No reason for the UK to leave it after Brexit.
I guess the theme of this season is destroying your own planet. I wonder where that will lead.
@2, Remember The Green Death? That wasn’t subtle.
I feel like this season is being written by people who imprinted on Captain Planet when they were young. Also, while I enjoy this TARDIS Team very much, the death rate around them is not enjoyable for me. (I can’t remember reacting this way to Classic Who, so this may be my filters changing with age.)
As always, I enjoy the article. Thank you.
p.s. “Well, it’s a little over a decade in the future” = The voice over says beginning of the third decade, which is right now if you’re with those who start decades on the 0s instead of the 1s. So it is set anywhere from now to the next year or two.
Worth noting it’s actually less than ten years in the future.
The third decade of the 21st century starts next year. (Or arguably this year). The first is ’01-’10, the second ’11-’20, and the third ’21-’30. So if it’s early in the third decade, it is set very close to right now.
Edit: And I see @7 beat me to it.
#4 You are correct. There have been many astronauts on US spacecraft that were from other countries.
I think there was too much plot for one episode. It’s a pity, since the theme of plastic pollution was handled in a really Whovian way: not necessarily well, and certainly not with subtlety, but at least it wasn’t forgotten about after the first few scenes, as it so often happens. With so little time, it’s not even clear whether Aramu was an alien too or if it was just Suki. And if he’s not an alien, how was he recruited? And why?
@6: Ah, The Green Death…
Well, we get our second environment-themed episode this season, but at least I found this one better than “Orphan 55”. Should the similarity of theme/moral be caught by the showrunner, or is this part of the larger message/agenda?
I’m starting to lean towards the same idea as @2 James Mendur, and I’ve been watching since the mid-1970s. I miss the older notion of travel for travel’s sake in all of space & all of time.
I always wanted Star Trek to do more environmentally themed stories, given that it is the big challenge of our time. Now Doctor Who does them instead. I guess that’s fine too.
@7, There are a few Classic Who episodes that end up with everybody dead but Doctor and companions. I can remember at least a couple of 4th Doctors and of of course Tegan’s infamous exit episode with Doctor Five.
Good educational message in the Who tradition. But I cringed when Graham said, “I don’t want to sound stupid, but what’s a pathogen?” Come on! Way to actually make your companions sound stupid, show. There’s no way Graham doesn’t know what a pathogen is and needs an alien to explain it to him.
Also, don’t remember if it was explained, but how’s the ship at the bottom of the ocean create a bubble of air around it? Obviously, the actors need to run around in a cave system without drowning, but how is it not filled with water? The engine cone the Doctor fires up from outside the ship looks Earth rocket equivalent.
Another nitpick: the science in this SF show is never rigorous, but… why do aliens from several galaxies over look exactly like humans? And if you have a ship that can traverse from one galaxy to another, you don’t have the scientific knowledge to cure a virus? These are some wildly disparate science and tech evolutions. Maybe they know all about physics and engineering, but hardly anything about the biological sciences.
(I know this is expecting too much from writing that often dumbs down serious issues, or has to deflect to plots saying “it’s really alien doing it.”
I agree with a lot of what’s been said. We get another environmental message but this one actually feels like part of the plot and inserted as natural exposition rather than tacked on as a heavy-handed sermon without even the advantage of being self-aware enough to have the Brigadier roll his eyes at it.
Like everyone here, I hated what they did with Aramu. It’s bad enough that they leave him alone on guard as if they want him to get killed, but when they then get attacked by the birds, no-one even thinks to mention the fact that he was out there with them or wonder what happened to him. Very callous. Maybe something was cut (shades of the disappearing crewmember in “The Curse of the Black Spot”) but if so they cut the wrong thing.
Traces of resentment from Yaz here? It feels like she’s given up the most to be with the Doctor (Graham doesn’t have any other family, Ryan hates his job, but she’s being kept away from both) and maybe she’s starting to feel that, as she kind of acknowledges she’s not a police officer at the moment. This isn’t the first time recently that she’s gone off on her own, as if to prove she can handle things without the Doctor to tell her what to do.
What was the significance of Peru? The Indian Ocean was where the alien base was, Hong Kong was where Adam was being experimented on, Madagascar was where Suki was based, but Peru? Was it just that there was a high concentration of plastic waste there that attracted praxeus?
The Doctor finds a cute friendly scientist to geek with…who turns out to be an evil alien spy. Who then dies right in the middle of the Doctor giving a big speech about how they can all work together. Nice subversion of expectations there.
As a lot of people have said, the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century is…next year. (Possibly it was intended to be this year but I refuse to believe the Doctor doesn’t know when centuries start.) So yes, nothing to do with Brexit, which contrary to what some people believe, means leaving the European Union, not leaving Europe, which merely puts us on the same footing as other non-EU European countries like Norway and Switzerland. You’ll be saying we’ll have to give up Gibraltar next. Of course, someone will look silly if Liverpool or Manchester City has a rapid decline. Shame it wasn’t set the weekend it was broadcast because that would have worked quite well!
Was I alone in being bewildered by Adam claiming he and Jake couldn’t have a honeymoon because Jake wouldn’t travel abroad? What’s wrong with Skegness? Millennials. Think it’s not a real holiday unless they go on a plane…
And it’s suddenly occurred to me that I knew the actor who played Jake from somewhere but forgot to look him up. Hang on while I check IMDb… Aargh! He was that serial rapist in Hollyoaks about 15 years ago that Russell T Davies apparently based Owen Harper from Torchwood on!
@cap: he was also on Luther as the loyal junior detective, which may explain some of his bad cop habits here.
The hopping around the world bit was nonsensical. Maybe a leftover from the Bond pastiche of the first couple episodes. And who sent Jake that text if Adam was bound up in that rig? Would an astronaut even have his cell with him?
I rather liked the setup. The notion that all of the fam are out on their own errands and are capable feels pretty different from prior Doctor crews. The Peru abandoned hospital was a nicely creepy setting as well. After that it seemed to go careening around.
Also seems like the gross facial prosthesis designers really love bone/teeth accoutrements. The scaly thing reminded me very strongly of Tim Shaw from the prior season.
Microplastics are an interesting environmental problem to use, because while they sound gross it’s very difficult to prove that they harm humans at all.
The Fifth Doctor positively dripped with companions and guests early on, and that generally worked out alright. I know I sound heartless, but I was not sad to see Adric go, though.
If Jake was totally an asshole at the beginning, he would not have schlepped half way around the world to Hong Kong to look for Adam based on a text.
I don’t mind the rather didactic social messages. My only concern is that it might turn off some viewers. I want Jodie’s tenure to be a ratings smash.
@1 Clara in her last season was exceptionally irritating. In fact, she’s my least favorite companion ever, except for the late Adric. Granted, Amy Pond, Karen having terrific comic chops (I even watched her short-lived US sitcom Selfie, and I’m not a US sitcom guy), was a really tough act to follow.
@19 The Fifth Doctor had serialized storytelling which involved hours to tell a story. This Doctor has at most two hourlong time slots or, like this episode, an hour to tell a story. Showing the worldbuilding, the plot, and the new characters is time intensive so giving time in that to each established character is frinkin’ difficult.
There was a lot of arguing about the new millennium starting in 2000 or 2001. By common consent and general usage it started in 2000. So now each decade starts on the zero year. So according to everything important we are in the first year of the third decade.
As someone else said the European Space Agency is a European organisation and not an EU one.
It’s also implied that Aramu is also an alien so The Doctor doesn’t really care what happens to the bad guys.
@21: So which decade only had nine years then? By any sensible calculation, this is the last year of the second decade. People were getting it wrong long before 2000.
I didn’t see anything to suggest Aramu was an alien (Why would he stand around outside and get killed by birds if he was the one who infected them?) and the Doctor seemed pretty shaken by Suki’s death.
Sorry, that was a bit dismissive. It never occurred to me while watching the episode that Aramu might be an alien, and I’m not convinced, but I guess it’s a possibility.
@cap: why, the very first decade of the Current Era. There was no Year Zero, went from Year Minus one to Year Plus One. (This may not be a serious answer.)
It’s all arbitrary, anyway. Timekeeping, or at least imposing divisions of time, is a consensus construct.
The ‘it’s aliens’ part surprised me, because for a while I was assuming that Praxeus was something that humans had created themselves to ‘eat’ plastic waste, but which had got out of hand. Possibly humans from whatever year the episode was set in, possibly from the future, and possibly to defeat the Autons.
(I dimly remember another scifi story that featured a bacteria that ate plastic, but ended up eating everything made of plastic, but I can’t remember what it was now).
@25: You’re not thinking of the first episode of Doomwatch (“The Plastic Eaters”), are you? That did cross my mind, although more as a real life solution than anything else… The show definitely seems to be mining that well at the moment, expect Quist did these speeches better than the Doctor does…
Did they ever explain why praxeus was infecting living beings and altering them rather than going for all the lovely plastic just lying around everywhere?
This would have been a better episode if it hadn’t happened so close to Orphan 55. Two “Whack you over the head” episodes close together are too many.
Yaz is going to leave Team Tardis at some point. I hope she leaves alive and voluntarily to do something interesting and fulfilling rather than getting herself killed, nobly or otherwise.
@15 I wondered about the honeymoon issue, too–was Adam so inflexible that it had to be “abroad or nowhere”? That relationship is doomed.