Who Review: "Oxygen" (Series 10, Episode 5)

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.

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.

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.

At least he's not wearing that orange number he's been reusing for ten years.

Final verdict: 7/10.

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!

Who Review: "Knock Knock" (Series 10, Episode 4)

WARNING: SPOILERS, sweetie.

"I'm afraid." "Don't be." "Why?" "It doesn't help."

The Doctor, everyone! Inspiring hope in all those he protects!

“Knock Knock” features Bill deciding to rent a house with some of her student friends. As luck would have it, a creepy landlord (played by veteran actor David Suchet) approaches them with an offer to stay in a large, old house for very cheap rent. But as the Doctor investigates this too-good-to-be-true scenario, the ugly reality comes to light: the house is eating people.

This is the first true “horror” episode of the season. No big sci-fi set pieces, no flashy CGI monstrosities. Just a haunted house, some doomed side characters, and the Doctor dealing with something that plays off of primal fears, in this case creaking floorboards. It brings back memories of other horror episodes like “Blink” and “Listen.” And it does a good job on the creep factor. The atmosphere is thoroughly unsettling, the haunted house theme is universal enough to easily connect with, and there’s plenty of mystery and suspense over what exactly is going on and who’s disappearing next.

One of the biggest benefactors to the episode’s scary edge is the villain known simply as the Landlord. He’s got that old school charming-yet-sinister vibe you always find in stories like this involving creepy mansions. When it’s revealed that he’s only doing all of this to prevent his daughter Eliza from dying – even going so far as to turn his daughter into a living wooden girl – he becomes an oddly sympathetic father figure; a real Mister Freeze-esque antagonist. Then it’s revealed that his daughter is actually his mother, and the Landlord becomes this sniveling man-child who never really grew up and is doing everything in the world to protect his mommy. Seeing this seventy-year-old man act like a weeping child is both heartbreaking and absolutely terrifying. Needless to say, David Suchet delivers a memorable performance in the role. In a series where one-off bad guys tend to overact even when played by veteran actors (looking at you, Anthony Stewart Head), Suchet really shines in a subtle, creepy, surprisingly tragic role.

The monsters themselves are also creepy. They’re a race of enlarged woodlice that live in the house’s walls and basically become the wood. And they eat people to absorb them into the wood to keep Eliza alive. The episode flip-flops on whether to call them woodlice – lice for short – or the Doctor’s more creative moniker of “Dryads.” I’m gonna call them Dryads because it sounds cooler and this is my blog. On the whole, abnormally sized bugs are just inherently skin-crawling. And what they do to Eliza is just plain unnerving. I’m still not convinced they didn’t just reuse the props for the tree people from “The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe”, but somehow combined it with the uncanny valley factor of the Autons.

Disney's Pinocchio (2019)

On the Moffat Monster Scare-o-meter™, the Dryads and all that come with them score 3.5 Moffs out of 5.

I always felt that the Twelfth Doctor, more than the others, felt more at home in these horror-type stories. There’s just something about his very intense, dark look and “creepy/kooky old man” persona that feels like he should be fighting the Weeping Angels more than the Daleks. So it’s no wonder than two of my favorite Twelfth Doctor episodes are “Listen” and “Heaven Sent”, both heavy with horror elements. But in addition to the reactions to the haunted mansion setting, the Doctor also gets some good lighthearted moments, like once again trying to fit in with Bill’s friends by acting young and hip.

I thought it was also a neat choice to split up the Doctor from his companion for this type of story. The Doctor is off with another one of Bill’s flatmates for a good portion of the story, leaving Bill to fend for herself and try to keep others from dying. Bill’s parts of the episode paly out like your traditional horror movie setting: young people in an unfamiliar, terrifying scenario trying to stay alive and outsmart the killer. The Doctor, on the other hand, acts like a veteran in these situations, and can almost see beyond the classic horror tropes.

We also get some foreshadowing for later this season when the Doctor off-handedly mentions regeneration to Bill, and then refuses to explain what it is. It almost seemed like the Doctor wanted to avoid talking about his next death as much as possible. Could it be possible that the Doctor knows when he is going to regenerate next? If so, could it be connected to whatever’s in the vault?

Oh, and update on the vault storyline: the Doctor enters at the end of the episode to talk with whatever’s inside. Apparently the Doctor is close enough with the vault prisoner to bring them take-out and tell them stories of his adventures. They seemed particularly interested in hearing stories where people die. Now who else do we know that loves human suffering?

["Hotel California" softly plays in the background]

Also, with that bit of exposition about the Time Lords at the beginning, I was almost sure the Landlord was going to turn out to be one. I mean, he has the name (like the Doctor, the Master, the Landlord, etc.), and for a moment it appeared that he didn’t age like normal humans. Kind of a clever ruse there.

But again, most of my problems with the episode come from the ending. The Landlord and his bugs are defeated when Eliza can all of a sudden control them. Um…how? Is it because she’s been wooden for so long that she has a better connection with the Dryads than her son, their so-called master?

Also, all of the Dryads victims are miraculously returned to life by the end of the episode, as the death of Eliza and the Landlord somehow causes the house’s walls to regurgitate them before the house collapses altogether. Not to sound like I’m out for blood or anything, but why couldn’t they all stay dead and allow the consequences of the episode be really felt? Is it because they’re kids? Because if that’s the case, what was their excuse last week when the river serpent ate children and they stayed dead? It’s just really jarring to have an “everybody lives” ending after this much terror and peril.

“Knock Knock” works well for Series 10’s first true horror episode. It’s got good atmosphere and a creepy premise, but the ending doesn’t exactly live up to what’s come before it. The best thing here, hands down, is the performance by David Suchet, giving the episode a surprisingly impactful villain. I’m not overly familiar with his body of work, but after this episode, I’ll have to check out what else he’s done. I don’t think this episode will become a Doctor Who horror classic like “Blink” or “Listen”, but it served its purpose.

"I'm going to explain this to you one more time: It's 'The Doctor', not 'Doctor Who.'"

Final verdict: 8/10.

NEXT WEEK: A spaceship where oxygen is a commodity, and the dead are still walking.