Doctor Who: The Tsuranga Conundrum

November 4, 2018 11:56 AM - Season 11, Episode 5

The Doctor, Yaz, Graham and Ryan must band together with a group of strangers to survive against one of the universe’s most deadly and unusual creatures.
posted by fearfulsymmetry (64 comments total)

Alien on an ambulance
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 11:59 AM on November 4, 2018 [4 favorites]

So.... this was kind of ... bad ? I liked the alien but the pacing was just.. off ? They showed the alien much to soon, keep it out off sight a bit longer to create a bit more suspense.

Also, what's wrong with giving your baby up for adoption ? They really pushed the "keep the baby" angle.
posted by Pendragon at 12:14 PM on November 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

I thought this was better than last week's, but not by much. At least they fully resolved the story this time.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 12:15 PM on November 4, 2018

Also, so much exposition....
posted by Pendragon at 12:16 PM on November 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

I liked last week's episode more, but as I said last week, I'm a sucker for big spiders in movies and tv-shows.
posted by Pendragon at 12:17 PM on November 4, 2018

I really liked this one. Maybe best of the series so far for me. A bunch of people on a spaceship in peril, thats more like it. There's a lot of Doctor Who episodes with 'people on a spaceship in peril' - e.g. there was two in the last series - so you need an unusual threat, and so they had a really good one here with a comical but threatening and apparently unstoppable alien. All the people on the ship had interesting character arcs and all the companions had enough to do. And the resolution was to combine the remote-self-destruct threat with the energy-seeking-alien threat. Lovely. I liked the chit-chat with the Doctor and Yaz - 'you should have picked a higher number!'.

I also really liked the male pregnancy subplot. Its been done before obviously but they had a good spin on it here, with just how normal it was for the pregnant dude. And gestation only being 1 week.

Oh... Would you two be my doulas? I haven't got any doulas!
Do what?
Doulas. Birth partners.
She's brilliant, but I need some men with me.

So Ryan and Graham are completely bewildered but they tie it in to Ryans relationship with his father and so he turns out to be a good Doula. Now that we're a few episodes in, having all the different character arcs for the companions is paying dividends in terms of making the events meaningful. Its still not clear where they're going with Yaz but she has some good lines.
posted by memebake at 2:27 PM on November 4, 2018 [14 favorites]

THE PTANG WAS AN EVIL VERSION OF STITCH AND NO ONE CAN TELL ME DIFFERENT
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:23 PM on November 4, 2018 [41 favorites]

I may be easily pleased, but I liked it. I'm a sucker for those brief character sketches, the resolution wasn't pointlessly complicated, various characters had things to do... Yeah, they hit the Ryan's Dad Abandonment Thing really hard, but the space dad was a charming goof, which kind of counteracted the drama.

Was the pilot's ailment just called "pilot's heart"? OK, that's silly. There, that's a thing.
posted by cage and aquarium at 6:24 PM on November 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

The Pting reminded me of Nibbler from Futurama, but I can see Evil Stitch, too.
posted by sarcasticah at 6:57 PM on November 4, 2018 [17 favorites]

I liked the Pting, it didn't seem at all evil... we're used to being the ones who kill stuff and eat it, out in the big bad universe sometimes you run into something that does the same thing to you. Doctor not only saved the humanoids from it, but managed to feed it a nice dinner before sending it on its way!
posted by lefty lucky cat at 7:01 PM on November 4, 2018 [9 favorites]

The Pting reminded me of Nibbler from Futurama, but I can see Evil Stitch, too.

It's got the indestructibility and aggressiveness of Stitch with the appetite of Nibbler
posted by numaner at 8:15 PM on November 4, 2018

yeah I liked this one, it's a classic NuWho of "running around on a spaceship with a very specific set of problems" (couldn't help but think: "we've got a hostile alien onboard, people in charge might blow us up, that guy's giving birth, and prom's tomorrow!"

what I also enjoyed was the dad-to-be pulling in Ryan and Graham a way a woman would pull her girls in with her for the ride, like subverting that toxic masculinity aspect of "men can't be emotional support for other men!", and Ryan and Graham being totally on board.
posted by numaner at 8:19 PM on November 4, 2018 [15 favorites]

I thought this episode was honestly pretty good. Key to it was a sense of pace and peril, by having the alien plus the automated craft to deal with, there was enough going on that despite only killing one character, it worked for me. I also thought the mini arcs were mostly decent: the male birth was surprisingly not awful, and used for some good character notes for Ryan. While fairly basic, I thought the war hero plus brother dynamic worked ok. I also think Bradley Walsh is just consistently great.

I really liked the Doctor being initially all angry then calming down, actually being in the wrong and realising it was pretty great, and made the male medic's death at least slightly affecting.

There are some bad notes though. It really feels like the show struggles to give Yas anything useful to do. While both Ryan and Graham have strong characters, defined by recent grief but also their back histories (particularly in Ryan's case), Yas is just kind of there, which feels a shame, as I like the actor, but just don't feel like she needed to be part of the episode at all. The female medics arc was similarly non descript, but it's a shame when one of the companions has the same level of depth as a minor side character.

I was honestly quite impressed for once with the creature and how it worked, it felt new an inventive in a way Chris Chibnall just hasn't been so far, and the solution was, for once, reasonable smart, solving the problem with the tools at hand in a fairly neat way.
posted by Cannon Fodder at 12:05 AM on November 5, 2018 [7 favorites]

what I also enjoyed was the dad-to-be pulling in Ryan and Graham a way a woman would pull her girls in with her for the ride, like subverting that toxic masculinity aspect of "men can't be emotional support for other men!", and Ryan and Graham being totally on board.

Yeah that was the punchline really. 'Man being pregnant' is fairly unsurprising these days but 'pregnant man wanting other men to support him during his birth' is hilarious and subversive and - hey - it actually worked out. Graham and Ryan had a good mix of 'bewildered' and 'giving it their best shot' for that scene.
posted by memebake at 2:07 AM on November 5, 2018 [4 favorites]

This was definitely the bottle episode - well there may be more - with lots of corridor running and no location filming so they could afford all the location filming for Ghost Monument, Rosa and presumably next week's India episode
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:03 AM on November 5, 2018 [2 favorites]

I was just thing thinking that if the Pting was, as they say strictly non-carnivorous, but can eat anything else they could have just stuck it in that dude's now vacated birth sac and stitched it up.

It wouldn't even hurt because, as stated, birth sac's have no nerve endings.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 3:04 AM on November 5, 2018 [8 favorites]

Oh, secondarily I briefly wondered if the whole rapid ageing if the child thing was because some writer has a bugbear about newborn children on tv generally being portrayed by massive several-month-old babies (as they tend to be, for obvious reasons) so wrote an accelerated growth schedule to get around that issue.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 3:05 AM on November 5, 2018 [4 favorites]

Oh and I soon as I heard PTing I thought of this... apparently one of the writers in the writer's room came up with name but I wonder if there was a conscious/unconscious influence
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:06 AM on November 5, 2018

Putting the PTing into the bewildered Father's Birth Sack would kill the poor man as the creature briefing given by the ship noted that any touch from the Pting is deadly to all other organic life.

I really loved the satisfied look on the PTing's face after it ate the bomb. It had such a 'Ahh I'm full' expression of joy.
posted by Faintdreams at 3:12 AM on November 5, 2018 [8 favorites]

I really loved the satisfied look on the PTing's face after it ate the bomb. It had such a 'Ahh I'm full' expression of joy.

Yep the Pting was quite cute (people are going wild about it on Twitter) and the way it looked and moved and threw things aside had a lot of baby/toddler vibes. So perhaps the whole episode was about child-rearing. The pregnant dude was coming to terms with being full term, and the antics of the Pting represented a certain aspect of what child rearing is like. Sure, babies are cuddly, but if you put the cuddliness aside you're basically left with the Pting.
posted by memebake at 3:41 AM on November 5, 2018 [9 favorites]

Is it just me or did they borrow the "lure the alien off the spaceship with with a bomb" thing from The Expanse?
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 3:58 AM on November 5, 2018

Like above, I liked this episode a lot, although there was a bit of a loose thread early on - when the medics identify themselves as "Tsurangi", the Doctor looks worried for a moment and asks herself where she heard that name before. This never really pays off. I was expecting her to suddenly exclaim that they were famous murderers, or the precursors of an all-robot civilization, or something. But she never did.

Also, my closed captioning had no idea what a doula was, and transcribed Ryan and Graham's role as "Dhulas", possibly reasoning that it was an alien proper noun.
posted by Mogur at 4:48 AM on November 5, 2018 [3 favorites]

...when the medics identify themselves as "Tsurangi", the Doctor looks worried for a moment and asks herself where she heard that name before. This never really pays off.

That was odd. The Doctor running around for half the show in pain and holding her side wasn't addressed either. No one else seemed to be suffering aftereffects. It just seemed like it was being played-up as "a very important thing" and then she was better.

Observation...So far, the TARDIS really isn't much of a player this season.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:33 AM on November 5, 2018 [5 favorites]

I had fun with this episode, but there was a LOT of plot going on. The captain and her clone person and the other guy who have...issues! And she has medical problems! And the two medics, one of whom dies because ... something! And the pregnant guy about to give birth! And the SUPER ADORABLE menacing alien who eats a bomb and then looks totally cute as it floats away! And some parent abandonment issues! And Yaz is also there!

I'd rather a few less plot threads and more focus on the companions, but this was a romp, and I can't argue with a Doctor Who romp.
posted by xingcat at 6:36 AM on November 5, 2018 [3 favorites]

The Pting reminded me of Nibbler from Futurama, but I can see Evil Stitch, too.

Yeah, the roommate saw Evil Stitch and Nibbler, and a little bit of Adipose too.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:05 AM on November 5, 2018

Oh, Lin-Manuel Miranda had a little fun with the throwaway Hamilton shout-out.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:47 AM on November 5, 2018 [10 favorites]

The main control room of the new Tardis is so small and cramped compared to the 11th and 12th Doctor versions. I'm guessing Chibnall isn't planning on doing a lot of Tardis interior scenes.
posted by He Is Only The Imposter at 8:38 AM on November 5, 2018

I really like how they've handled Graham. Before the season started I was worried that with a female Doctor they would make him the older guy on the ship who explained everything. At the other extreme, I'm also glad he's isn't some curmudgeon who has to be shown the error of his ways at every point. He's just a generally good person who is sometimes comic relief and sometimes really resourceful.

So it was kind of annoying that Ryan was having this big empathetic moment about his dad and then refused to give Graham a fist bump. I totally get not wanting to call him granddad. But when you're off in space delivering babies together you can at least treat him like a friend.

I've also seen enough Doctor Who well to know that the "granddad" moment is going to come right before Graham has to launch himself into an exploding star to save the rest of them. So I'm ok holding off on that.
posted by Gary at 11:10 AM on November 5, 2018 [5 favorites]

So it was kind of annoying that Ryan was having this big empathetic moment about his dad and then refused to give Graham a fist bump.

The feeling I got from that was that Ryan acknowledged that they had shared a special moment, he just doesn't think fist bumping is cool.
posted by memebake at 11:24 AM on November 5, 2018 [7 favorites]

So it was kind of annoying that Ryan was having this big empathetic moment about his dad and then refused to give Graham a fist bump. I totally get not wanting to call him granddad. But when you're off in space delivering babies together you can at least treat him like a friend.

I'm guessing there is going to be some payoff on these "give me a fist bump!" "nah" exchanges later in the season. Being a show drenched in pathos, it'll probably be the last thing Graham does before dying and Ryan will of course not refuse him.
posted by lefty lucky cat at 11:26 AM on November 5, 2018 [2 favorites]

...when the medics identify themselves as "Tsurangi", the Doctor looks worried for a moment and asks herself where she heard that name before. This never really pays off.

My recollection was that she ultimately recognized Tsuranga as the operators of spaceship hospitals, which is partially how she figured out she was on a spaceship.

My only real complaint about this season so far is that I miss cold opens. :)
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 11:37 AM on November 5, 2018 [5 favorites]

Is it just me or did they borrow the "lure the alien off the spaceship with with a bomb" thing from The Expanse?

I thought about that too, but the tone was definitely different. I think they're probably not the first do that though.
posted by numaner at 1:02 PM on November 5, 2018

This was the first bum one of the season, for me; not terrible, but just not particularly good. It felt like a lot of little bits of character and plot glued together into a not very cohesive whole.

The "pregnant man" subplot seemed custom-built to send the Daily Mail and its readers into an indignant froth. I approve.

The Doctor running around for half the show in pain and holding her side wasn't addressed either.

Yes, that was odd. There were a lot of "ow, still hurts" bits which seemed like they were leading to something significant and then... didn't?
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 1:57 PM on November 5, 2018

I preferred this one to the spider episode.

The main control room of the new Tardis is so small and cramped compared to the 11th and 12th Doctor versions. I'm guessing Chibnall isn't planning on doing a lot of Tardis interior scenes.


It really is disappointingly tiny.
posted by oh yeah! at 5:08 PM on November 5, 2018

I just watched it. I really liked it. In some way, it reminded me of a classic (pre-nuWho) serial. I thought all of the subplots came together in the end. And, I liked that the alien was basically Matter Eater Lad. I watch Dr. Who to be entertained, and this entertained me.
posted by wittgenstein at 6:23 PM on November 5, 2018 [2 favorites]

I loved it, too, and it really hearkened back to the classic series. The spaceship made me think of "The Ark in Space," and the situation, the side characters, the running through corridors, the lack of Tardis, the cheesy but imaginative effects and set design. I just really love the way this version feels like the Doctor Who that made me love the show.

Add to that the positive masculinity, the general (who's a woman) with a secret (which doesn't turn out to be nefarious), the Doctor's fallibility and apologizing--all the other good stuff as mentioned above. No one Doctor Who episode is ever perfect, but this run is giving me so much fun and so many feels!

I'm surprised that Chibnall has had a writing credit on every episode so far (and full credit on all but one). I guess the rest except for the season finale are by others. But considering how meh most people rate previous Chibnall episodes, I've been surprised and impressed.

I'm a bit worried about next week again tackling a very touchy subject (I'll say no more, because previews are considered spoilers), but I was impressed at how Rosa turned out, and again, looks like a writer who can handle the material. Kudos to the show for taking on human history at our worst. This is a show built for our times, but building on the same bones of the show from 1963.
posted by rikschell at 7:13 PM on November 5, 2018 [7 favorites]

The "pregnant man" subplot seemed custom-built to send the Daily Mail and its readers into an indignant froth. I approve.

Yup
posted by Pendragon at 6:17 AM on November 6, 2018 [3 favorites]

After they dumped the PTing I thought, "food coma time."
posted by Karmakaze at 12:03 PM on November 6, 2018 [1 favorite]

I preferred this to the spider episode, perhaps because I’m more willing to suspend disbelief for alien life forms. “Cute tetrapod space-dwelling alien with pointy teeth who lives on energy” is probably objectively even more ridiculous than “spider the size of a car because of toxic waste”; but apparently it doesn’t bother me in the same way.
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 1:58 PM on November 6, 2018

The one plotline that didn't really come off is that they could have just left the ship on its assigned course, and things would have worked out better for the pilot and the PTing would still have been neutralized. Her sacrifice didn't really help out, right? They could have gone the long way around.
posted by BungaDunga at 5:43 PM on November 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

I liked the episode.

It's true in retrospect about the course-change sub-plot: it didn't help in the end, and without it Eve might have survived.

However, I think it makes sense. The doctor has several plans in motion, and doesn't know which one will work out. The plan with Eve is to get within teleportation range of whatever the headquarters hospital was, get all the people to safety that way, while the gutted ship's momentum carries the PTing back out into the uncharted territories or whatever.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 6:08 PM on November 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

I really liked this episode. Thought it was quite crisp and fast paced, had dramatic tension without having a real baddie or real violence, the doula subplot gently subverted gender roles without getting too preachy. Classic Doctor Who.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 4:51 AM on November 7, 2018 [3 favorites]

I'm half-excited, half-dreading the next episode set in Partition. The American civil rights movement is pretty cosy ground for Britons, and it can be presented as having good guys and a happy ending. Partition is raw, brutal, living-memory, directly relevant history. I'm amazed that they're doing it but find it hard to imagine how it can be done well in a family TV show.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 5:16 AM on November 7, 2018 [2 favorites]

RE: to fist-bump or not to fist-bump . . . .

I gotta admit I'm a little surprised at the reaction so far. I mean, c'mon, y'all - while the UK may not have quite the same racist history as the US, having an old white guy try to fist-bump a young black guy is . . . . . maybe not full-on cultural appropriation but could certainly be considered within spitting distance of culturally inappropriate. Ryan's totally justified in regularly deciding, "Yeah, no, fist-bumping is not a thing we are going to do. It's a black thing. You ain't black." (And that's even besides the other element of where despite Graham & Ryan clearly getting along better than they have in the past, their step-dad/step-son relationship is still in flux and a fist-bump is totally a Dork Dad thing to try to do in an attempt to Be Cool. "Nope" would also be a totally normal reaction for that reason.)


I do like how Graham is generally turning out as a character, and I like the interplay between him and Ryan in general so far. Yaz was pretty underutilized this episode - I don't think Chibnall has a handle yet on how to balance three companions.
posted by soundguy99 at 5:25 PM on November 7, 2018 [5 favorites]

Also, I'm betting the Doctor's injuries come into play later in the season - like she's taken some real damage, is toughing her way through it for a while but that won't last forever.
posted by soundguy99 at 5:28 PM on November 7, 2018

I’m in the positive camp, but was I the only one who was troubled by that bit with Ronan and Eve’s brother at the end where Ronan was all, “Now that my consort/owner/client/??? is dead, I’m going to be shut down, oh well” and Eve’s brother was like, “Welp, that’s sad,” and that was...it? I mean, that’s kind of creepy, right? Is this an Ood situation or what?

Even though Chibnall writes and casts good oneshot characters, I’m getting frustrated that he keeps throwing so many of them in while Yaz remains this underdeveloped. I like what we see of her, but I feel like we only know her a little better than Grace right now.
posted by bettafish at 6:27 PM on November 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

This was my least favorite of the season so far—It just couldn't hook me. Though to be fair, I was watching it while the US midterm election results were coming in, so I was extremely distracted.

But really, I was turned off the episode at the very beginning by the sonic mine situation. Hey, good thing sonic mines aren't actually lethal (unlike every other mine in the history of warfare), because the Doctor and her three pet humans would all be dead. The fact that the sonic mine is the only threat the Doctor ever couldn't neutralize was an off-putting and forced contrivance to separate the Doctor from the TARDIS. (How does the Doctor not have a key fob that will summon the TARDIS to her with a click of a button?) And there certainly wasn't any payoff in the Doctor figuring out they were on a spaceship—Did anyone not assume they were from the beginning? They were in space already!

Then I was turned off further when the death of the medic guy turned out to be just a startlingly unfortunate series of malfunctions rather than maliciously intended. Also when it turns out that the standard Tsurungi method of dealing with trouble is immediately detonating their hospital ships FULL OF INNOCENT SICK PEOPLE. But I guess the Tsurungi are just explosive-happy, since somehow even a malfunctioning life pod can explode! Those really should be the last things on your ship that can accidentally explode.

The Pting was fun to watch (I immediately thought of Nibbler when it swallowed a flange its own height) but jettisoning it into space where it will cutely destroy another fleet of ships and murder thousands was an unsatisfactory handling of the threat.

The guest characters and their subplots were enjoyable enough but all the contrivances employed to make this setup into a story left me cold. The pilot's brother reconciling with her clone servant was sweet.
posted by ejs at 6:32 PM on November 7, 2018

I liked the parts that I could understand what anyone was saying. Is it just me or is the sound mixing still very bad?
posted by bleep at 6:33 PM on November 7, 2018

Oh and also I liked that they revealed the alien early on and were like, here it is, it's a creepy little guy. It seemed a lot more realistic than their usual alien types, like a big threatening warrior guy, or a lot of guys wearing masks. Or an AI-powered ship going around scooping up humans for parts. I was SO glad it wasn't a human-eating alien this time.
posted by bleep at 6:35 PM on November 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

Also I enjoyed the reference to Call the Midwife bc I was already thinking about it.
posted by bleep at 7:13 PM on November 7, 2018 [2 favorites]

I liked the parts that I could understand what anyone was saying. Is it just me or is the sound mixing still very bad?

The music seems to be very stereo. If you watch with headphones, it’s easy to separate it from the music because the audio is near the center and different bits of the incidental music are planned out to the left or right. On my tv speakers, the dialogue and music step all over each other. I usually watch with either headphones or subtitles.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 10:33 PM on November 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

Also when it turns out that the standard Tsurungi method of dealing with trouble is immediately detonating their hospital ships FULL OF INNOCENT SICK PEOPLE.

jettisoning [the Pting] into space where it will cutely destroy another fleet of ships and murder thousands was an unsatisfactory handling of the threat.

It explained that the Pting was basically indestructible and one of them had previously destroyed a whole fleet of the general's ships. The Tsurungi knew they had a Pting on board due to all their remote sensors - they wanted to detonate the ship for that specific reason. The Pting could not be allowed to reach a planet. Blasting it out the airlock with a full happy tummy was the only option really.
posted by memebake at 2:00 AM on November 8, 2018 [2 favorites]

I liked that while there was still some edutainment going on in this episode, it wasn't quite so up front and in your face about it. My wife didn't even notice, and I had a hard time articulating where it was other than the antimatter propulsion system.

I think I do prefer my scenarios more science futuristic than recent historic, but it's still too early to get on that crank train.
posted by Kyol at 8:44 AM on November 8, 2018

while the UK may not have quite the same racist history as the US, having an old white guy try to fist-bump a young black guy is . . . . . maybe not full-on cultural appropriation but could certainly be considered within spitting distance of culturally inappropriate.

I considered that in the first episode when we didn't know much about Graham. But it would be weird for them to keep coming back to it if that was the reason Ryan was saying no. I think if there were any racial discomfort there Grace would have shut it down immediately.

I'm on board with the reason being that it's uncool, because while I like Graham he is definitely not cool. I still think Ryan should get over himself and humour the old guy. None of your friends will see you. You're off in space and in a century where they're all dead.
posted by Gary at 10:24 AM on November 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

The Pting could not be allowed to reach a planet. Blasting it out the airlock with a full happy tummy was the only option really.

And now they know how to make them go away! One shows up and now you can be all, "Hey there little buddy, wanna snack? Here you go, now go take a nap somewhere else."
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 1:02 PM on November 8, 2018

I was a bit annoyed by the ships engine description.

Because running the particle accelerator to create antimatter would consume energy. Then annihilating the antimatter would create the same energy. It's a classic perpetual motion machine gag.

Antimatter is a storage medium, not a power source.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 5:20 AM on November 9, 2018

For what it's worth (and I accept that it's probably not much), this is exactly the sort of thing I was afraid of when the show runner changed. The script largely consisted of content-free feel good platitudes ("I always believed in you", blah blah blah, that sort of thing - there's no character there, so why are we supposed to give a shit about what they are feeling?), I think every week so far one of the undistinguished and barely distinguishable characters has been a Generic Actor Guy With Stubble (which annoys me for some reason, perhaps because it's a synecdoche for the absence of imagination), and the cast are generally people reciting words that were written down somewhere rather than performing characters with believable psychologies, or even unbelievable ones. I was one of the few people who reliably enjoyed the last few seasons: wildly inconsistent, yes, but lurching off into all sorts of extraordinary places; the characters broadly drawn but, y'know, characters - that the actors could take to make a one-and-a-half, two or even two-and-a-half dimensional performance. This is just dull. Not really a plot, or even a story, but a bunch of things that happen one after another. It's like a mid-level restaurant chain, where you meet up with distant acquaintances over a uninspired but predicably edible salad that can be counted on to offend nobody but not satisfy anyone either. Not even spicy enough to be Nandos.

Worst of all, where eccentric (and I assume with all the shouting she's supposed to be eccentric) Doctors in the past - Troughton, Baker I, McCoy, Smith - have had energy, this one is just a combination of exposition and arsing about and nothing else. Those actors took the role and ran off with it, and that was what made them compelling to watch - give them a nothing line and they could make something enjoyable out of it. Whittaker has either not cared to or not been allowed to do the same thing. The character barely registers when she's onscreen, and when she's not I often forget she's missing. To give the actor the benefit of the doubt, Chris Chibnall has treated her badly here, almost as badly as he's treated the character he's supposed to be shepherding.

I'm not a part of fandom, but I have been watching the series for over fifty years now. I lost interest a few stories into Davison, when the Tardis seemed to turn into a student hostel for a bit, and I wonder whether this isn't going to go wander off into the mists of apathy in the same way.

Maybe it will get less dull.

Ah well. Rant over. I'll not comment again, just wanted to get it out of my system. My turn to not like it, and probably about time too. I'm glad you're all enjoying it. I still have old episodes which most of you are probably glad to be shot of to watch if I want a Dr Who fix (and I did watch the last three episodes of the season before last and a couple of Christmas shows to see if it was just me being jaded and, no, it wasn't. In fact I like them even more now than I did then).
posted by Grangousier at 11:25 AM on November 9, 2018 [3 favorites]

I also have been meh on a lot of this season.

The Doctor seems awfully lightly sketched, for someone who's been around a couple episodes. I get that they're trying to unburden the character of the pathos that the other ones ended up stuck with, but she still seems weirdly unformed. I'm probably back-projecting onto the previous regenerations but I feel like I had a better sense of who the previous ones were by now.

It's quite likely the gender change is throwing me more than I had expected (and I was for it) but I'm still not fully on board this season and I wish I were more so.
posted by BungaDunga at 12:43 PM on November 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

The music seems to be very stereo. If you watch with headphones, it’s easy to separate it from the music because the audio is near the center and different bits of the incidental music are planned out to the left or right. On my tv speakers, the dialogue and music step all over each other. I usually watch with either headphones or subtitles.

Ah, that makes sense. The underscoring in this particular episode was driving me insane, distracting me from everything else. I'll try the headphones thing.
posted by Lokheed at 5:04 PM on November 9, 2018

THE PTANG WAS AN EVIL VERSION OF STITCH AND NO ONE CAN TELL ME DIFFERENT

Stitch crossed with the baby alien from Men in Black, specifically.

Oh, secondarily I briefly wondered if the whole rapid ageing if the child thing was because some writer has a bugbear about newborn children on tv generally being portrayed by massive several-month-old babies (as they tend to be, for obvious reasons) so wrote an accelerated growth schedule to get around that issue.

That'd be pretty clever. The baby was a day overdue, as well, which with the accelerated gestation might translate to being over a month old rather than strictly speaking a newborn. Yeah, I'm just going to assume that was on purpose.
posted by tobascodagama at 9:53 AM on November 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

Grangousier, I feel like you’re watching a different show than I am. But I guess that’s par for the course. Still, the fairly cardboard character-of-the-week thing you mention, I’ll give you that. But for me, it just makes it feel more like proper Doctor Who. Those stock interchangeables were the bread and butter of 1980s Who (and well before that).

It may be toxic nostalgia, but when Doctor Who is too slick and “Golden Age of Television”-y it starts to feel like a different show, and I’d rather have a wonkier cheesier version.

I think this Doctor has tons of energy and personality, though. I just don’t get how you could read her performance as weak. Unless you only like the sharpish rude Doctors.
posted by rikschell at 4:21 PM on November 16, 2018 [1 favorite]

FanFare: I feel like you're watching a different show than I am.
posted by numaner at 5:19 PM on November 16, 2018 [8 favorites]

The one plotline that didn't really come off is that they could have just left the ship on its assigned course, and things would have worked out better for the pilot and the PTing would still have been neutralized. Her sacrifice didn't really help out, right? They could have gone the long way around.

That confused me too, until I remembered their life support system was knocked out, so they had a deadline until their oxygen and heat ran out. (They should have played that up more, instead of mentioning it once and then forgetting about it.)
posted by mbrubeck at 3:10 PM on May 12, 2019

The American civil rights movement is pretty cosy ground for Britons, and it can be presented as having good guys and a happy ending. Partition is raw, brutal, living-memory, directly relevant history.


Um... Yes, there are definite good guys and bad guys in the story of the Civil Rights Movement, but a happy ending -- or any ending -- there is not. And it is pretty raw, brutal, alive, and directly relevant too.
posted by Saxon Kane at 8:31 PM on February 13, 2023