The fifth episode of New Who season eleven, The Tsuranga Conundrum
I'm sick of this sonic. |
Be warned,
now comes the first spoiler: the monster.
The
episode was working extremely well – not perfectly, after all this
is Doctor Who – but very well. I loved that the Doctor and her
companions were on a junk planet, looking for something, but that
cold have been better fleshed out, in my opinion. The Doctor spends a
few minutes explaining antimatter at one point, which has no bearing
on the plot beyond the fact that the monster is attracted to energy,
so why not cut most of that and have the Doctor talk about why they
need whatever the hell it was they were looking for. It was too
perfunctory, but I still liked it. The idea of planet covered in
space junk is so evocative, it is exactly hat sci-fi should be about.
Unfortunately
the junk planet visuals were super disappointing. A junk planet in a
sci-fi setting should have the carcasses of spaceship hulls ranging
out of it, robots half submerged in it, and a bunch of other
inventive stuff. This junk planet, however was covered in piles of
pipes, metal sheets, and cables. It was less interesting, even, than
a junk yard here on Earth, in our modern times. Junk yards have old
cars, washing machines, and all kinds of strange things poking out of
them, with beautiful, makeshift buildings, crushers, and tall cranes,
sorting through the jagged mess. This environment could have set the
tone for the rest of the show, but instead it just sat there,
inertly, before we are whisked off to a whole new location – but
without the TARDIS – eeks.
The new
location is much better, a sterile, white, hospital ship that feels
real, and large, and unique. The story could have really taken off
here, and things started out well. An intruder is detected breaking
through the shields of the hospital ship, and tension starts to
mount. The Doctor and one of the characters are in an automated
control room when this happens, and we see a dot representing the
intruder move through the ship, but this is where what little tension
had built up starts to drain away.
The Doctor
talks about how the intruder is moving very quickly, and we see the
dot scampering around the schematic of the spaceship. Immediately it
became obvious that this threat, whatever it was, is not a real
monster, like a Cyberman or a Dalek, because they move slowly and are
a real threat. The Doctor goes looking for the creature, along with
one of the medics from the hospita ship, and the tension mounts, a
little, when the creature tricks the medic into an escape pod,
launches it, and blows it up. Okay, I thought, this may be a real
threat after all, but then we see the creature, and it is ridiculous.
It is a tiny little thing, that has only an animal level of
intelligence, like a gremlin. In fact, very, very much like a
gremlin. Too much like a gremlin.
> A
gremlin is a folkloric mischievous creature that causes malfunctions
in aircraft or other machinery. They have large strange eyes, and
small clawed frames that feature sharp teeth. The slang term
originated in the Royal Air Force in the 1920s. The concept of
gremlins was popularized during World War II where crews blamed
gremlins for otherwise inexplicable accidents which sometimes
occurred during their flights.
To
make this small creature frightening we have to be told in an
exposition dump that the creature can not be killed, can not be
harmed by weapons, except to be stunned for a few seconds. We are not
told why this might be the case – this is not an energy creature or
anything – except that this is obviously necessary to spin this
thin story out for the length of the show. But the creature is still
not in the least frightening. It is easily stunned the only time the
Doctor’s companions engage it, and other than that leaves them all
completely alone, to wander the spaceship unmolested, or ignores
them, apart from some hissing, when it is encountered. If not for its
magical invulnerability, it could be easily dealt with by being
stepped on with a sturdy boot.
But
even with the creature being given its inexplicable, magical powers,
there still isn’t enough there to last an entire episode, so a few
more story elements get thrown in. We get a man who is pregnant,
simply so we can spend some time with Ryan, as he comes to grips with
his absent-dad backstory, yet again. We also get a pilot, who learns
to value her brother, as the spaceship is taken off automatic for no
good reason other than to give these characters something to do. The
brother builds a pilot interface, and the sister uses it. There is
also a young nurse who is introduced as indecisive, and there is a
perfunctory plot where she is given encouragement, and gets a bit
more confident, but basically doesn’t change much at all. It is
super patronizing and not at all interesting.
It’s
all a big shame because I was looking forward to this episode. I was
expecting it to be something like the Ark in Space, where a space
station is threatened by an enemy, and there were echoes, I guess. It
is just that the choice of monster was such a letdown that it was
impossible for the writer to build any tension, or any real sense of
threat. And without that, it was hard to care about the other bits of
business – all the plot padding and feels – necessary to hit the
show’s run time.
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