WARNING: SPOILERS, sweetie.
“Space, the final frontier…” Oh, thanks for reminding me, Doctor Who. When is that new Star Trek
series supposed to come out?
In “Oxygen”, the Doctor is feeling wistful about space. But
Nardole continues to be adamant about the Doctor not leaving Earth due to his
still-to-be-revealed oath. But never mind that, there’s adventurin’ to do! The
TARDIS crew arrives on a space station in the future, where capitalism has
gotten so bad that we have actually found a way to charge people to breathe. And that’s not all: the
high-tech spacesuits are killing their wearers. With no TARDIS, no sonic
screwdriver, and a limited supply of oxygen, the Doctor, Bill, and Nardole
can’t waste their breaths as they try to escape and save the survivors.
If last week’s episode was a horror story along the same
lines as episodes like “Blink”, this week’s is akin to futuristic horror
episodes like “Sleep no More” and “The Waters of Mars” – stories that showcase
how humanity’s foray into technological advancement can lead to unimaginable terrors.
And this episode definitely hits you hard with the “humanity
is stupid” hammer, especially in the department of how capitalism is bad. It’s
a science fiction trope that you see a ton of now and it’s a tad played out,
but I somehow never really get sick of seeing it, especially when new spins are
put on it. This episode in particular gives us the interesting concept of
corporations somehow monopolizing oxygen and charging you by the breath.
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| So the new season of The Walking Dead looks weird. |
The “smartsuits” also prove to be a clever idea for a
monster: spacesuits that can move and operate even without their owners, but
are also programmed to kill their owners. Meaning that the suits are walking
around with dead bodies inside of them, giving them the appearance of zombies
without really referring to them as such. Suitably
creepy, if you’ll forgive the pun.
However, the overall look of the “zombies” kind of
undermines the scariness factor. Sometimes the makeup on the corpses doesn’t
really look convincing, looking more like mannequins than real people. Also,
the shambling, jerky zombie gait is a trope I’m a little sick of. I know that
it probably makes more sense for these supposedly advanced suits to move around
in a janky, robotic fashion, but when it comes to the walking dead, I always
find them scarier when they’re crawling at you with the frantic pace of a
hungry predator. This is more of a personal preference than anything – and not
really a nock on the monsters as a whole – but a pet peeve nonetheless.
On the Moffat Monster Scare-o-meter™, the smartsuit
zombies score 2.5 Moffs out of 5.
So let’s talk about the big development in the episode: the
Doctor is now blind. When the episode was wrapping up, and the Doctor’s
blindness was seemingly cured by the technology onboard the TARDIS, I was
disappointed that this ailment didn’t have a bigger focus or impact on the
plot. But now that his lack of sight is here to stay (for now), this opens up
more possibilities for future episodes.
Still, it doesn’t feel like a bombshell like this should
have been dropped in the second half of the episode. Even with how the
blindness isn’t going away, the handling of its introduction still feels
rushed. I guess that’s the main problem I had with the episode: it feels like
there’s not enough time for everything. Honestly, this probably should have
been a two-parter. The way it is, the new characters (a.k.a. the “doomed crew”
of this type of episode), don’t really get a whole lot of personality or, well,
character. The only one of them I really remember is the blue guy, but what I
mainly remember is the “space racism” bit between him and Bill, not the
character himself. Two-parter “base under siege” stories like “The Impossible
Planet”/”The Satan Pit” and “Under the Lake”/”Before the Flood” give us plenty
of time to get to know these characters, and occasionally we even care when
they die. Applied to “Oxygen”, this method would allow every concept,
character, and plot point in the episode to breathe more.
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| This summer: Peter Capaldi is...Mister Magoo. |
Going back to the Doctor’s blindness, there are a few plot
holes to be found within it. Specially, the ways the Doctor can fix it. He
mentions having a few extra eyes on the TARDIS that he could use in place of
his failed ones, but that doesn’t seem to be an option by the end. Even if
these eyes wouldn’t be compatible with his Time Lord biology (he did say they
were lizard eyes after all), couldn’t he find some robotic eyes to use? He was
able to apparently rebuild Nardole’s body, but can’t do the same to his own
eyes? Also, wasn’t it already established in previous episodes that the Doctor
can use his own regenerative energy even if he’s not dying? He couldn’t spare
some of that stuff to fix his sight? Maybe I just don’t understand how this
stuff works, but there seem to be plenty of ways he could cure this.
Also, another plot point kept bugging me throughout the
episode and is never addressed. The whole race against time in the episode
involves running out of oxygen. Sure, this is a threat to the Doctor and Bill
and the rest of the crew. But…isn’t Nardole a robot now? Wasn’t it implied at
the beginning of the season that the Doctor had rebuilt Nardole as a robot? Doesn’t
that mean he doesn’t need oxygen to live anymore? Or is he still organic? Or,
if he is a robot, does he have organic components that require oxygen to
survive? Maybe I just missed a really simple explanation for this, but at this
point, I kind of need them to spell it out for me just what the hell Nardole’s
deal is.
“Oxygen” is an episode with a lot of good ideas, but not
necessarily a lot of time to flesh them out. There aren’t any new developments
in the Vault story arc, but the inclusions of the Doctor’s new blindness
certainly makes me curious as to where it’s going.
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| At least he's not wearing that orange number he's been reusing for ten years. |
NEXT WEEK: The first episode in the season’s three-parter!
The Vatican calls for the Doctor’s help! A book that causes people to take
their own lives! And Missy returns!
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