What the hell is that
P’Ting, asks Tony.
Doctor Who is of course a
science fantasy show. You expect a fair bit of imagination and made-up stuff,
it’s a fundamental part of the territory. That said, there’s a nagging thread
in fandom that demands that it should at least make some kind of consistent
internal sense.
Even if it’s a most
outrageous bit of technobabble hokum, if it’s there, fans will frequently take it as gospel and weave it into
their headcanon, to make otherwise entirely senseless things work. An example
of that might be 42, where having much of the episode devoted to answering pub
quiz-style questions in order to open doors is explained away by some
technobabble about the crew all throwing in questions and some of them being
drunk when they did so. Bingo – it’s not great, but it makes sense of why
Martha spends much of the episode stuck behind locked doors.
Then… there’s The Tsuranga
Conundrum.
When we start The Tsuranga
Conundrum, there’s such hope. The Doctor and her friends are having a good old
banter while combing a garbage-asteroid for particular bits of kit she needs,
for reasons never explained. The banter’s wonderful – it has a real old-school
feel about it, while also showing the uncommon reasonableness of Thirteen,
acquiescing to Graham’s point about them looking for needles in a
haystack-roid.
Then they uncover a sonic
mine, and wallop. Now…why they’re not immediately all dead, we don’t know, and
it’s certainly the second time so far in Series 11 that they’ve had a rescuing
ship appear with the kind of remarkable, life-saving rapidity that defies any
realistic logic, but they wake up some four days later, having been treated for
sonic mine wounds and internal organ displacement – a process that seems to
affect the Doctor significantly more than her human pals throughout the rest of
the episode (more organs to settle, presumably, though it’s anyone’s guess what
an ecto-spleen is).
That’s about the point
where The Tsuranga Conundrum scrunches up the very notion of sense, lobs it
into a recycle bin and says ‘Bugger it, let’s just see what happens.’
What happens is a very
pretty ship, a little pat family drama between siblings, a convenient pregnant
bloke to help Ryan find some peace with his absent father, and a cutesy alien
that eats anything and everything…except the thing the Doctor happens to need
in Act 3.
Seriously, if you even
approach The Tsuranga Conundrum with a feather of logic, it curls up into a
ball and begs you not to hurt it. They’re in a junk galaxy – not a star system, a galaxy,
but avoiding a bunch of asteroids makes an emergency medical ship with no crew
control divert just far enough to pick them up. Oh and while we’re at it, who
builds an emergency medical vehicle with a) no crew control, and b) no direct
communication channels to base? The Tsuranga is the outer space version of the
Docklands Light Railway, only it’s packing less communications technology. And
Pregno-Guy has only been on the ship three more days than the Doctor and her
team, but he was off on his holidays, getting knocked up. Where was he
holidaying within three days’ Tsuranga-travel of a junk galaxy, and how did he get on board? Did the emergency medical ship
uncontrolled by the crew of two medics just happen to swing past his holiday
destination? Come to that, if the crew have no control over the movement of the
ship, and no routine comms channels back to base, how did they pick anyone up
en route, the Doctor and her friends included? The story ends with them
arranging for Team Tardis to be teleported back to the junk-roid, from the
base, rather than from the ship, so…and I appreciate this is picky, but a), why
not just teleport them immediately from the junk-roid to the base, rather than
spend days on board the ship of the damned, and b) why is there no teleport
capability on the ship of the damned?
Seriously, no logic whatsoever has been used in the making
of this episode. The P’Ting (Oh we’re coming to that, believe me) is always
hungry for energy, but when it comes on board, rather than heading straight to any
of the big energy spots – the bridge, the engine – it stops off, Pac Man style
for a quick chomp around the escape pods? It eats the Doctor’s sonic, but,
having done this with nothing else, spits up the energy-depleted remnants of
it. The energy-depleted remnants…that magically recharge just in time to be
useful, with not a single line of technobabble to explain where that energy
recharge has come from, or why it should be such a surprise to the Doctor who
built the sonic…
Now, let’s stop whinging
for a minute, because there is some
good stuff in The Tsuranga Conundrum. While the continuing illness of the
Doctor is distracting, spawning internet-theories that she’s already, four
stories in, beginning her regeneration and is holding it off, Peter Davison
style, Jodie Whittaker seems more at home in this spacefaring environment than
she’s been to date. Her Doctor’s incredulity at the sheer ungovernable madness
of the Tsuranga set-up invites viewers to go with it, and while they’re
signposted whole days in advance, the sibling lovefest and the Pregno-Bloke lessons
on fatherhood are at least reasonable from Ryan’s perspective (though it’s
interesting that while everyone saw Kill The Moon as the thinly-veiled
anti-abortion tale it was, no-one seems to have batted an eye at the ‘keep your
child, even though you know you’ll be staggeringly unprepared for parenthood’
undertone here). The P’Ting is ludicrously cute-looking, but plays into the
Star Trek/Galaxy Quest rule that things that look cute might well be lethal. Nevertheless,
you have to reeeeally switch your brain off and engage with the premises being
thrown at you to see it as some devastatingly lethal monster on a par with the
other aliens in the Tsuranga’s database of interplanetary gittishness, like the
Sontarans, the Weeping Angels and the Zygons – with the result that you’ll
probably fail, and once you fail, it makes the whole of the story’s jeopardy
non-existent.
Overall in terms of the
division of labour (pun actually not intended, but hey, let’s run with it),
while Graham and Ryan are giving us their rendition of duelling doulas, and the
Doctor is mostly busy Being Very Careful Not To Drop A MacGuffin, Yaz is left
babysitting the dullest android in the cosmos and then, comically but to
absolutely no purpose, drop-kicking an alien down a corridor in a bag.
Perhaps the most telling
thing about The Tsuranga Conundrum is that there’s little about it that
requires the Doctor to be any kind of brilliant. You could – and probably
should – entirely remove the siblings from the equation, and have a much better
Doctor Who story. If it was the Doctor who had to a) rig up the equipment to
fly the ship home, and b) then fly it, having thrown away its engine, it would
feel much more like a Doctor Who story, with the Doctor saving the day, than it
does, and all you’d lose is some family drama that never really engages as a
central issue anyway.
If you don’t engage your
brain, there’s still fun to be had in The Tsuranga Conundrum, and it certainly
gives us one of Jodie Whittaker’s most ‘Doctorish’ performances to date, in
spite of her having little that’s Doctorish to do. But The Tsuranga Conundrum
has a tendency to irritate that’s rooted in how easy it would have been to make
the mental switch-off unnecessary, and how correspondingly little care was
taken to even attempt to plaster over the cracks in its storytelling. The
result is like watching an outer space version of a drawing-room farce, with
lots of running around, pointing and panic, to very little lasting effect.
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