The Tsuranga Conundrum

For fifteen minutes, my heart went out to Yaz. Poor Mandip Gill, regardless of Arachnids in the UK, has had so little to do this series. And then… and then, that scene with Ryan. It clicked: this is what the companions this year are all about. The relationships are starting to work in a vividly powerful, confident way. Their relative voyages through the Doctor’s adventures are evidently a calculated affair; this week Yaz helping Ryan come to terms with the facts of his absent father and deceased mother, last week Graham coming to terms with the loss of his wife. When choosing his favourite pieces of television three years ago, Chris Chibnall earmarked Our Friends in the North, of which I am an enormous fan. Doctor Who couldn’t be further away from Peter Flannery’s northern magnum opus but as near as dammit, Chibnall is trying to make it so. This is Doctor Who attempting desperately and for the most part succeeding to be about real people. This episode alone, despite being set in an outer space flying hospital complete with cute gremlin, features an intense brother-sister relationship, the birth of Baby Avocado and a working relationship which at the eleventh hour takes on a suddenly deeper meaning. I am also, perhaps for the first time, starting to trust that the character beats of our main cast have been carefully posited across the ten episodes, my wife now convinced that by the end of the series Ryan and Graham will finally share a fist pump. I wonder that the ten episodes of 2018 may be even richer when watched back to back as a whole, the threads in these characters’ lives slowly unfolding to form beautiful patterns across time and space.

Despite my romantic rekindling towards Chris Chibnall after this and last week’s thrilling schlock, I remain bemused by the casting of Jodie Whittaker. Here, I have no idea what she’s playing at. She holds her side as if she’s in pain for the best part of twenty minutes, even though this leads nowhere. It took me some time to realise why she’d come to this decision: she has no idea what to do with her hands. The last regular who didn’t have control of their upper limbs was Matthew Waterhouse who had an equally bewildering grasp of his lines. Whittaker cannot get a handle on the technobabble, clearly having missed a few sci-fi movies, or perhaps even Doctor Who episodes of the past. She fails to sound natural, even for an alien, and the moments of pathos and emoting feel even more overblown and tiresomely performed. I hate to say it, but she might be the single worst actor to ever inhabit the role of the Time Lord and I include the deliriously undisciplined (but completely charming) Sylvester McCoy. The early scenes between her and Astos (Brett Goldstein) are particularly painful even for hospital drama and leadenly directed, their finishing the lines at the doors before they go their separate ways feeling passé, obvious and deliberately “blocked.”

For this relatively new father, I found the story of Ryan and Jack Shalloo’s Yoss perhaps undeservedly moving. In fact, the pain with which Ryan views his relationship with his dad is becoming more and more acute. If the series isn’t moving towards a showdown and hopeful reconciliation between them, there’s no justice. Bringing to bear the very real lives of his regulars in sci-fi and extraordinary settings is one of the great successes of Chibnall’s vision of Doctor Who and I can’t wait to see how his writing team handle Pakistan next week. There are other moments of genuine pathos too: Astos’s brave last words and the - for once - restrained off-screen death of Eve Cicero.

The Pting is an unusual creature which really works: it’s cute but it’s been built up enough before we see it to represent the most hostile risk to life - absolute. Its defeat is cleverly orchestrated too, Chibnall using his base-under-siege against the monster in the same way Terrance Dicks uses his lighthouse or Russell T Davies the telescope of Torchwood House. My only worry is that, five episodes in, we’ve yet to see a truly memorable Big Scary Monster that isn’t a giant spider. But there are demons promised…

All told, despite some now characteristic but only occasional clod-hopping dialogue, this is a tight little chamber piece, Chibnall cleverly structuring his script around the teams of characters and allowing for increasing jeopardy and threat in each scenario. By the story’s conclusion, Voss and the Ciceros and Mabli and even Timelash’s Ronan felt real, memorable characters with lives beyond the story. It took a while to get there, and we had to endure those awful scenes with Astos and an injured Doctor as well as an ill-placed, massively pace-damaging lecture on anti-matter but we finish with a prayer to the universe, for thankfulness in the kindness of our fellow human beings and that’s a rather beautiful, wholesome message to send out. This story, in the end, is full of heart. Even the Pting makes it out of the Tsuranga with a full belly. 

7/10

JH