Oxygen: Rank - 305

                                                              Oxygen

(Season 10, Dr 12 Bill and Nardole, 13/5/2017, producer/showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Jamie Mathieson, director: Charles Palmer)

Rank: 305

‘You took my breath away…That’ll be £3.10 please’

If ever a Doctor Who story fell to near the bottom of this ranking for not delivering on its promise it’s ‘Oxygen’. For the first half, for twenty odd minutes or so, it takes your breath away by having some of the most stunning visuals and neat ideas in the whole series, as we visit space in all its beautiful, limitless glory – and then, for the second half, it hands you a bill for it, confining us to a gloomy space station and a silly subplot about zombies. And talking of Bills that’s what’s really wrong with it. We’ve seen companions suffer before, either through their own hands or those of the villains, or even sometimes through the Doctor’s negligence, but this one looks as if it really hurts through nothing more than her (very characteristic) bad luck. And then, just when you think she’s safe, the story does it to her all over again a second time. Much as the Doctor goes above and beyond rescuing her, he also lets her know it repeatedly, with vocal sparring that borders on bullying. A lot of the 12th Doctor’s first season was about asking whether he was a ‘good man’ or not – most stories would say yes, but this is one of the few ones that make you think well, actually, no you’re not and what am I even watching? It’s like being safe in the arms of Apollo 11, a story about mankind’s ingenuity and brilliance, before the story suddenly violently turns into Apollo 13 about how space is cruel and merciless, defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. Never before has a Dr Who story suffered so much from going from an opening that offers the universe to ending up just another Dr Who story. It makes you want to scream – if only screaming didn’t cost extra in space. 

You see, the genius at the heart of this story, the story it wants to tell and the bit that keeps you watching, is not the plot with zombies marching around in spacesuits that seems designed to give Bill a hard time. It’s the one where capitalism has run so out of control that astronauts are now having to pay for the very Oxygen they breathe, with people dying because they can’t afford to pay to live. In a Britain that was still undergoing the after-effects of a worldwide recession David Cameron was making a quadzillion times worse, this story really hits home, about how expendable we are as people to a company that just sees us as a workforce to exploit. All the more so because they throw in the added sting that of course social media use from the spacesuits are free; a world with priorities wrong, where necessities are treated like luxuries and luxuries treated like necessities – the oxygen of publicity now more important than the oxygen that keeps you alive. Space, which was once this bright great wonderful pioneering thing that brought out the best in humanity, where presidents said that money was no object in our quest to explore our neighbourhood and which inspired our courage and tenacity, has been reduced to a commodity for profit. Anyone whose grown up disappointed at the lack of a space programme in their generation will feel this episode deeply too; no wonder it effectively ended when people stopped watching the moon landings, not because there was nothing left to learn but because it didn’t pay its way anymore. NASA had done its job and wasn’t needed anymore, so what should have been our glorious future became a past to be remembered fondly, that first step for man never turned into a stride. That’s so very Dr Who. It’s ‘The Sunmakers’ in spacesuits, or ‘The B-ark-ley’s Bank In Space’. 

 The trouble is, where do you go once that revelation has been made? It’s not like that’s a whole plot waiting in that sentence. In fact they try to sell that revelation to us twice unnecessarily to keep the momentum going – once when the Doctor comes across the spacesuit and works what’s going on in an early scene and another when he realises that, far from being an anomaly, it’s ‘business as usual’ in a future where big business has gotten so out of hand it hasn’t learnt to mind its own business. So they go one stage too far and up the ante with a gaping plothole: the people on board this ship were never going to be rescued by their employers – that’s their replacements coming they can see on the radar, the ‘rescue’ ship that never had any intention of rescuing them at all. But if these workers are no longer needed for the job why do they need replacements at all? Isn’t it cheaper to keep one lot of humans alive, stranded, mining copper ore than send up another lot? And if not why not just swap shifts: there’s a shuttle heading there anyway why not use it to send people home to rest and be just as cost effective? (especially if they’re then charged money to get home so its docked off their wages). Presumably this isn’t a one-way trip or the space station would be clogged up with shuttles by now. And isn’t walking on board and seeing a dead crew still upright in spacesuits going to make everyone run back to their shuttle, over-ride the controls and go home again? Frustratingly, too, the real people don’t pay the way they do in all the best Dr Who stories. There’s no on-screen overthrow of the system that’s hurt these people, no sight of the Tardis arriving in the company headquarters for him to rant and rave at, no sense that anyone has learned anything (he doesn’t even go with the base staff when they try to register a ‘complaint’ – knowing what happens on this world they’ll probably be eaten by something nasty in the complaints department, like a black hole). There’s a line about how this all leads to a ‘revolution’ is months later, but even that’s a bit of weak plotting: if the Doctor knew all that already, if it’s a key part of established history, then he must have known what the suits were doing in the first place. There was no need for discovery because he already knew it. 

It’s more than just the weak ending though: even in the middle this is just another story about survival and running away from monsters and there are lots of those in Dr Who. This isn’t a particularly well done one either: the zombie makeup is unconvincing and the sight of lots of spacesuits clunkily walking in slow motion is more comical than dramatic. Reportedly they toned down the horror in the edit because they thought it was ‘too strong’ – but it’s not really strong enough. They’d have done better to keep the spacesuit visors down, as in ‘The Ambassadors Of death’ or ‘Silence In the Library’, and left it all as a mystery for our imaginations to fill in instead of making it blatant (because its scarier being stalked by the unknown than the known). The thrill of the base under siege stories in Dr Who is the threat getting nearer and nearer, stage by stage, person by person, but there’s no dramatic tension in this story, no real sense of threat or peril from the suits. We don’t get to know the people on this base properly at all and care for them less, while the plot beats are all wrong: they do the usual thing of not trusting the Doctor and puling a gun on him, but halfway through the episode rather than at the start. Even when people die they don’t react properly: they’re as closeknit a community as you can get being stuck up in space and only survive because of their deep founded trust in each other, so when one of them dies it should be devastating especially when it’s one half of a couple. Instead it’s treated with all the alarm of someone finding they’ve gone mildly overdrawn. It’s almost as if you get charged for having emotions in this time period as well (which might have made for a better story). 

 In the end its space that delivers the horrors a little too convincingly. When Bill chooses the faulty suit and gets sucked out into space, her head ringing and vision blurred, we get three of the most surreal minutes in the series, all concussion and heavy breathing. It’s absolutely terrifying: honestly they’d have done better dampening this sequence down instead of the zombies. And after doing this to Bill once they do it to her again: she’s stuck in a spacesuit, unable to move, while a bunch of zombies move in on her. She’s terrified out of her skin, convinced she’s going to die and the Doctor lets her believe it. Pearl Mackie is a little bit too convincing, pleading for her life and for the Doctor to stand there pontificating about how everyone has to die sometime and not even telling her the joke she asks for, to let her know everything’s going to be alright, is one of the cruellest things we ever see him do. It is alright of course (spoilers) – the Doctor’s doing this because he doesn’t want to let the suits know that she’s only going to be knocked unconscious and not killed – but this is one of those occasions when he’d be better off telling Bill anyway, that it’s more important she feel that she’s safe because what are the suits going to do with that knowledge anyway? They can’t change her oxygen supply and kill her outright. Bill still goes through one hell of a lot (including electrocution) and very much could have died: it’s an improvised guess that the lack of Oxygen won’t actually kill her and could well leave her with brain damage (there’s absolutely no plot reason why he can’t just tell her a joke at least – it’s not as if the suits would understand what that meant). The Doctor is blind in worse ways than losing his sight in this story: he’s oblivious and has forgotten his humanity in a way that’s on a par with ‘The Twin Dilemma’ or ‘An Unearthly Child’, but with less excuse than either of those stories because it’s pretty much out of nowhere. Not a natural reaction to the drama. Bill goes through more in the middle of this story that most companions do in a series – so it’s weird to see her sitting round in the Doctor’s university rooms later, as if nothing’s happened, in a scene that’s more than a little tone deaf as well as being blind. ‘Do people ever hate you?’ asks Bill at one point ‘Only when I’m talking’ replies the Doctor. Let’s just say he does a lot of talking in this one. 

 It isn’t the same of course – but it’s the Doctor who sustains lasting damage, not Bill, ending up blind despite lying to everyone that his sight’s returned. He’ll be like that for the next run of stories ‘Extremis’ and ‘The Pyramid At The End Of the World’ too. Quite apart from being odd (timelord eyes are sturdier than a lot of parts of their bodies and we know from ‘Four To Doomsday’ that the Doctor can survive six minutes in space’s sub zero temperatures before damage of a very different kind sets in) the big question is why he lies. Does he not want Bill to feel guilty about damaging his sight because he was busy saving her? This is the 12th Doctor I suppose – it’s hard to imagine he wants people’s pity when he won’t even do hugs. But there’s no scene where he admits that even to us, to make it clear, even though he does admit it to Nardole (which is even odder: he has legitimate reason to keep it from Nardole, whose already cross with him to the point of leaving that the Doctor risked their lives when he’s meant to be guarding ‘the vault’ – why reveal then that he can’t see? And after letting Nardole think his medical intervention’s worked). Honestly there’s no sense in this story that he even likes Bill. It all feels extra manipulative, for dramatic effect. Far from being breathless, too, it’s all painfully slow, a little too closely modelled on ‘Apollo 13’ and ‘Gravity’s insistence on showing horror unfolding in real time – and it’s not that kind of a story (by its final draft anyway). 

It makes sense on all counts when you learn how messed around with this script really was. Jamie Mathieson wrote this story without knowing who the companion would be. With no one else to go on he was clearly writing for a Clara-type, with whom this story would have worked so much better – especially if it was part of her series nine character arc about biting off more than she could chew, thinking she could be just like the Doctor. This plot needs it to be the character’s fault, a companion who is proactive but foolhardy, putting people in danger. Bill, though, is the victim in most of her stories, who has stuff done to her because she’s always in the wrong place in the wrong time: her biggest mistake is in being the last person to pick a spacesuit and finding hers is faulty. Bill’s a naturally cautious soul who gets pushed into doing things by the people around her. That in itself could have been a great starting point: Bill’s the uni dinner lady. She’s used to being thought of as disposable, as much for her class as for her skin colour. If she’d reacted as if this was just another job that was putting her in danger and not caring about her wellbeing that would have made more of a comment and tied into the story’s capitalist rant. Instead her main character feature this week is to be scared out of her wits. Also, the number one rule of drama is broken: nobody learns from this, particularly the Doctor. Everyone growls at Bill as it it’s her fault for being a bit hopeless rather than just being unlucky and then there’s a cringeworthy scene where she stammers a thankyou to the Doctor for saving her who all but rebuffs it, despite being so hard to deliver, when he was the one at fault for putting her in danger in the first place. She’s our audience identification person and when the Doctor growls at her it feels like the Doctor’s growling at us (at least when the 7th Doctor did it to Ace it was part of the plot, while the 6th Doctor had just given up his regeneration to save Peri so was entitled to be a bit grouchy with her, while the 1st Doctor didn’t know any better. There’s no good reason for the 12th Doctor to be like this). Even then, till late in the day, Nardole stayed at home tut-tutting and his addition to the script as a whole fulltime, when Matt Lucas became free for longer than he expected, while welcome, changes the story again. Originally it was Tasker who went through the horror of being trapped in a suit over-run by zombies while the base grew angry with the Doctor for submitting him to pain, before his revelation that actually he was okay –but giving so many lines over to Nardole meant there were two people standing around so much so they decided to give the sad plotline to Bill again, even though she was still suffering from the misery of the first half (I guess they couldn’t really give it over to Nardole, as we didn’t know him that well yet – and as an alien who reacts in so many odd ways all the time and expressed so little actual emotion it wouldn’t have had the same impact, plus he seems to find it a bit easier to repair himself). So we end up with two big climaxes that resemble each other. 

 Originally the story was much more about the cruel realities of life space and how many things can go wrong without warning– which is a surprise in a series that once gave us the 5th Doctor surviving by hurling a cricket ball at the side of a shuttle for thrust to get him back to safety, but there you go (in many ways its long overdue the idea that things can go wrong in space in this series: we’ve seen it on moonbases and outposts often enough but never actually in space). Initially the plot followed on more closely from its very clever opening scenes, of two individuals on a spacewalk, with only their spacesuits between them and certain death. It was Steven Moffat’s idea to add the capitalism element and thus turn it into a very different kind of story (perhaps, ironically enough, because of the restrictions of capitalism: they’d surely have gone bankrupt if they’d kept up the beautiful scenes of the opening for much longer). The trouble is, once added, the story had to change from being about the dangers of space to being about the dangers of men and you can tell that the ending doesn’t link up with the beginning: these are two very different stories rather clumsily stuck together. The blindness, too, is something that Mathieson added fully expecting Moffat to change it and so it was half written out to cover all possibilities, but as it happened Moffat was writing the first draft of ‘Pyramid At the End Of The World’ at the time and having the Doctor still blind helped get him out of a plothole, bringing up a whole element about the Doctor endangering humanity through his own arrogance, not telling anyone he was still blind. I just wish that, given these revelations, someone somewhere had gone through this story again for another draft, joining up the cracks, filling up the gaps, tweaking the dialogue to reflect this – it feels too much as if someone came along and changed things for the sake of what came later, but never went back to see that, actually, the whole story needed to change slightly to accommodate these alterations. 

 Goodness knows there are so many stages of making a TV programme that things can go wrong in and there are other examples at the bottom of this ranking of stories that went wrong in the first drafts with a daft idea, in the casting, in the studio with sub-par performances and lowkey sets, even in post-production with grafted-on CSO or CGI. ‘Oxygen’ is frustrating not because it could never ever have worked in a month of Sundays but because it just didn’t quite come together in time for Saturday teatime, a story unique in the sense that it seemed to go wrong in the final re-drafting stage, a single re-write away from potential greatness. Once again with a Jamie Mathieson script it’s not his fault: the production team should have learnt by now that he’s one of those writers fizzing with ideas who struggles to work on other people’s. Had they left him to his own devices, given him enough rope to go on a proper spacewalk and delivered the story he wanted to tell it could have been brilliant. Asking him to pare things down to basics in the re-writes is like asking Robert Holmes to cut down on the social commentary or Douglas Adams to cut down on the jokes: if Steven Moffat just wanted a straightforward morality tale in space he should have written this one himself and allowed his imaginative collaborator let his imagination run free instead of keeping him tethered to Earth and then thrown some really difficult re-writes at him into the bargain. 

 You have to, say, too, that even for a series that wears its hearts on its sleeve this one sails a little too close to it’s obvious inspirations. In Dr Who terms this is just ‘The Wheel In Space’ on a bigger budget and with walking corpses standing in for the Cybermen (who, after all, are pretty much all walking corpses anyway). It’s a re-make right down to a lot of the little details, such as the shot of the circular space station, The Doctor being knocked unconscious and the regulars being split off from their Tardis. You have to say though, despite that story’s lowly reputation, it delivers practically everything better or at least more naturally than this one does in everything but the expensive space shots: you feel for the characters on that base and the increased sense of claustrophobia, while the Cybermen at least have a plan even if it a convoluted one. The stakes in ‘Oxygen’ don’t seem as high somehow, even when they are. Away from Dr Who there are clear parallels with ‘Apollo13’ and the sense of plucky humans doing extraordinary things with ordinary household utensils in a desperate attempt to stay alive – worthy ground for Dr Who to cover, but a lot of these scenes seem remarkably familiar, without really adding anything new. The film ‘Gravity’, too, is this story practically scene by scene (until the zombies turn up anyway), a similar tale of human ingenuity that counts for nothing against the harsh realities of space, right down to the love story between crew members – and this is a problem given that the film came out a mere three years before this one and if I remember rightly the UK TV premiere was mere weeks before this story was on, when it would have been fresh in people’s minds. ‘Oxygen’ is the better of the two in many ways (it’s pacier for one thing and while it has less money to spend it splashes out more wisely – rather suitably given the moral of the story) but Dr Who stories that also try to ape Hollywood blockbusters tend to be the ones that are always asking for trouble, feeling secondhand somehow, pale imitations rather than pioneers (‘Voyage Of the Damned’ and ‘The Doctor The Widow and The Wardrobe’ are two others that spring to mind). A series that once felt like a breathe of fresh air every week is suddenly feeling stale. 

One last quick point: the acting is all over the place this week. Pearl Mackie is an always reliable actress, but when she’s given nothing more to do than look scared and pull faces for half of it even she’s having trouble. Peter Capaldi is, as we’ve said many times, the most variable actor to play the Doctor: sometimes he’s amazing and indeed the scene in the university lecture is him at his best: imperious, oblivious, hysterically funny in a way that makes you wonder whether he’s in on the joke or not. The rest of this story though is him at his worst: he’s not very good with anger (odd for someone chosen partly because of his starring role in ‘The Thick Of It’), he struggles with simmering tension that’s meant to build and if anything he’s a little good at feeling distant and remote. To be fair, he’s written as a right bastard in this one so there’s not much he can do to make this Doctor likeable. There are quite a few stories where the 12th Doctor feels like he needs a good slap but none more than here, when he’s getting everyone intro trouble but the scenes of him pretending he can’t go anywhere without the Tardis’ fluid link (to trick Nardole) are a little too reminiscent too of the early Hartnell years when he was an anti-villain; which would be alright if we had an Ian and a Barbara as our moral compass, but we don’t. The closest we have is a scared teen out of her depth and Nardole, whoever he is. It’s a good job they did add Nardole at the last minute as Matt Lucas is the most natural one here, despite playing such a decidedly odd character and he gets all the best lines, bringing everything down to Earth no mater how far out in space we travel. As for the supporting cast at the base, there’s no real sense that any of them are living breathing real people, no sense of why they gave everything up on Earth to become astronauts, not even a sense of how long they’ve been up there in space. For a base under siege story to work you really need to care about the people who are there before they die, or you’ve just got things happening to people rather than drama. 

 Oh well, it’s too late now – maybe I should save my breath (breathing is so costly nowadays after all). It’s true, too, that there are several scenes that do soar quite brilliantly. The university setting is under-used across series ten but it really suits this most pontificating of Doctors and there’s a great opening scene where he’s delivering a lecture on the dangers of space, clearly bored with being trapped on Earth for too long, even though in a great punchline it turns out he was billed to give a speech on crop rotation (it makes a sense that the Doctor wouldn’t be too fussed about following a curriculum when they change every few years anyway – he has bigger things on his mind). Even earlier we get more characterisation inside a minute than the rest of the story, as astronaut Ellie confesses her undying love for fellow astronaut Ivan and her desire to have children with him – safe in the knowledge that he can’t hear her because the spacesuit has stopped working, a clever bit of exposition that sets up these characters and the situation while seeming like a throwaway joke. The script is littered with great lines (‘The world is your…crustacean’). It’s a story where so much is going right that you hold your breath waiting for it to come right by the end – but it doesn’t. 

The result is an often uncomfortable watch in all the worst ways that ends up feeling quite suffocating (apt given the circumstances I guess). The great ideas that are squandered in favour of silly ones, the offhand cruelty and suffering, the ugly jokes that don’t quite come off, the rushed ending, the undead, the acting. The idea something breathing down your neck is chasing you and then charging you for breathing is very Dr Who. You can’t help but feel that this story should work and frustrated when it doesn’t. Mostly though it’s what happens to Bill that puts me off this story. Basically I like the idea of a story where human life isn’t worth much in the future. But I don’t like that it’s Bill who has to be that human. There’s none of the joy and hope and wonder that’s present in the best Dr Who stories and while there are lots of Dr Who episodes that are every bit as grim and melancholic as this one, they’re an emotional rollercoaster that keeps you on the edge of your seat as you suffer with these character and live and breathe as they do. You don’t get that in this story: just the sense that people have to die sometimes, get over it. By the end you’re gasping for something uplifting after all that misery that never comes. I’m all for emotion in this series. I’m all for drama, I’m all for the realism of things not always going to plan. I’m all for the Doctor being callously alien sometimes when the plot needs it, but this is a rare Dr Who story that makes me feel worse after watching, not better. Instead you end up breathing a sigh of relief that it’s over at last. 

 POSITIVES + You really do get the feeling that we’re in space in the opening sequences, this show delivering on a shoe-string budget something that looks every bit as good as the big budget Hollywood blockbuster films do. We’ve come a long way from the days when actors used to bounce up and down on trampolines to look as if they were floating in space – you really can’t see the join in some of these shots and the opening scenes go a long way to explaining why so many people risk so much to be u there in space when it’s as beautiful and mysterious as this. You can almost feel the stars calling to you here and even though the people we follow are doing mundane routine tasks, there’s still just the right sense of awe at where they’re doing them. 

 NEGATIVES – There’s a really odd ‘comedy’ scene that doesn’t quite work, as a blue-faced alien tells Bill off for being ‘racist’ and staring at him. The ’joke’ is that he hasn’t noticed Bill’s darker skin tones are any different to the rest of this pale-skinned space station because for his time this is all normal. Except…he only seems to be there for this very weak joke (which, so soon after ‘Thin Ice’ did so much in speaking out against racism, feels like it belongs in an entirely different series). There are no other blue aliens at this space station and as far as we can tell we’re in the near future, so he’s clearly one of the first of his kind to be on Earth; these are humans - he’d be open to far worse prejudice than being stared at by now. Not to mention the fact that he’s plainly staring at the three newcomers just as hard if not harder than they’re staring at him. Then it’s never referred to again. What Bill should have said back: ‘Well, pardon me for breathing!...’ 

BEST QUOTE: ‘You can only really see the true face of the universe when it’s asking for your help…then we show ours in how we respond’