Praxeus: Rank - 286

              Praxeus

(Season 12, Dr 13 with Graham Ryan and Yaz,  2/2/2020, producer/showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writers: Pete McTighe and Chris Chibnall, director: Jamie Magnus Stone)

Rank: 286

 

   'Hello Doctor it’s Frobisher – no, not the minister from ‘Torchwood: Children Of Earth’ (do I look like Peter Capaldi to you?!) but the shape-shifting Whifferdill stuck in the shape of a penguin. I went to the 21^st century for a holiday and now suddenly I have this urge to bite your neck. Chomp!’

 

Though ‘Praxeus’ is a made-up word ‘praxis’ means ‘taking something you’ve learnt and using it in a meaningful way’. A suitable name, then, for one of the 13^th Doctor’s darker, deeper adventures, one about the impact of humanity on climate change and micro-plastics on the planet and how everyone and everything on Earth is connected, so that what affects one of us affects us all. It's uncharacteristically joke-free and sombre, perhaps the darkest non-regenerational story of the sixty-odd year run, performed with such relentless urgency that we even join the story after it starts, as if to underline the fact we’re running out of time to put the things in this story right before they destroy us for good. A lot of Dr Who stories ask us to think about the plot long after the story ends, to show us things that we might not have come across in any other way and think about how to use them in our daily lives. Few stories do that more than ‘Praxeus’ though, a howl of protest that we need to change direction now because the events on screen are about to hit us any day now, with a repair job that takes place across half the world. For the threat this time isn’t alien invasion so much as Human clumsiness, as a virus from space coupled with our micro-plastics spreads across the globe, affecting all creatures and turning the bird population crazy. The warning signs are clear: climate change is a global catastrophe with global consequences and something big is about to happen soon. Any day now.

So it was more than a bit eerie when we sat down to watch this story, written across the second half of 2019 and filmed mostly in January 2020, to the backdrop of covid. There was something in the air when they were making this bit of fortune telling…literally as it happened. The story even – get this – takes an ailing astronaut infected with the virus to a laboratory in the far East to try to prevent a ‘leak’: admittedly Hong Kong rather than Wuhan, but close enough to stop you in your tracks. We were two months away from an official national lockdown in Britain but stories were circling across the globe. My guess is that writer Peter McTighe had bird flu as his starting point, given that back in 2019 that seemed the most likely epidemic that was going to happen in ‘our’ world, but of course it’s Dr Who so the threat is exaggerated, to the point where the mystery virus doesn’t just kill humans but makes birds become aggressive. There are some very clever shots of poultry in motion that are, well, poetry in motion – even if they do look a bit like a sombre version of the ‘Worzel Gummidge’ titles. Even so, watching this the first time round we couldn’t help but think of a virus closer to home, formed from bats/pangolins/laboratory leaks. ‘Praxeus’ views of a population slowly succumbing to a crusty virus that turned them into a bird as their loved ones looked on helpless was just a little bit too close to the bone for most viewers to take when this story first went out on air on February 2^nd. The whole story is about how we are completely unprepared for a major worldwide pandemic breaking out – and watching that happen in real time while the warning came true was one of my more surreal experiences watching Who. There are a few Dr Who stories out there that predict the future in this era  (see ‘The Lie Of The Land’ for more) but this one truly was eerie: it’s not just the virus itself (an alien virus that lives off the microplastics mankind has been pumping into the air) but the panic that went with it, individual people making discoveries and trying to get the word out but being shut down, made worse by cover-ups and disinformation, as countries lock down and try to deal with things on their own instead of treating this as a global phenomenon and working together. Only The Doctor, with a time machine that can travel the globe (and, mercifully, doesn’t go wrong once despite multiple trips and all evidence to the contrary) has enough of a worldwide view to see what’s going on and put it right.

As you can probably tell this story has a very different feel to most Who stories, even though it started life as a very different kind of Who history. Tighe, starting with the idea of micro-plastics, came up with the idea of an Auton environmental story where the plastics inside Humans became strong enough to turn us all into plastic and The Doctor had to run around saving us – a sort of cross between ‘Terror Of The Autons’ and the ‘we really shouldn’t be doing this to ourselves’ feel of ‘The Green Death’.  Gradually, though, Tighe changed his mind: he already had a built-in baddy in the sense that what Humans had done was plenty bad enough and the more he researched the subject the more concerned he got that throwing a typical Who baddy at this story would water down the point he was trying to make. So instead of what was planned as series twelve’s retro fun runaround we got a far darker story that felt like it was part of a completely different show. To give him credit showrunner Chris Chibnall totally ran with it: this was exactly the sort of message he wanted the show to be making. He also allocated funds for overseas filming, to suit the global stakes of this story, arranging to have it recorded in South Africa back-to-back with ‘Spyfall’ (although in true ‘Planet Of Fire’ tradition Cape Town doubles as Hong Kong, Madagascar and Peru, in the hopes that most Brit viewers haven’t the first clue what the countryside of those planets actually looks like. It’s very beautiful though and gives a different flavour than simply filming it in Wales would have done, even with another shoot affected by bad weather: a fierce windstorm that meant most of the dialogue had to be re-dubbed. Just check out how much Jodie Whittaker’s hair flies all over the place). For those of you on your gap years trying to go to as many Who locations as possible: that’s Stellenboch filling in as a beach in Peru, Kogel Bay round the corner is a beach in Madagascar, SBH Cotton Mills in Cape Town’s Epping (yes, they have one too) as Cusco Hospital, Gabriela has pitched her tent in Century City and Lido Bar – a real place in Cape Town – becomes Lido Bar, a fictional place in Hong Kong. The warehouse, though, was taped back home in Pontypool with the supermarket actually in Cardiff, like old times. The scenery is easily this story’s strongest suit: it manages to convey a sense of global worldwide catastrophe without resorting to the Russell T Davies technique of news broadcasts from around the world and is used as more than just background scenery, as micro-plastics are found everywhere at once, by separate companions in separate countries. What’s more the colonies of birds all start acting twitchily at once, in what’s one of the scariest and most gruesome scenes of modern Who, like a ‘Blair Witch’ version of a Hitchcock film. The result is an intense moody dark story (most of it is shot under cover of night, without lights – an irritant in a lot of stories but quite atmospheric here), one that’s a whole new genre of its own. For a while even The Doctor can’t fix this one and becomes as panicked as we ever see Dr 13. 

The people we meet, too, are different to your usual Who companions: they’re bloggers, backpackers, environmentalist campaigners, medical researchers, astronauts: each one going against the grain of society and set up as being the polar opposites of the corporations causing all the trouble. They’re infinitely younger, cooler, trendier and sexier than the usual run of supporting characters, all in their late teens and twenties (making Graham stick out like even more of a sore thumb on a three-tentacles five mile wide squid than usual). The fact that we follow them individually before the Doctor’s mob start turning up also gives this story a very different flavour: usually we only spend that much of a pre-credits sequence with a stranger if they’re about to die just before the credits. They’re an odd bunch though and we don’t really get to know them that well. McTighe doesn’t seem to know whether he wants them to be young idealists off travelling the world to change it or disillusioned old heads on young shoulders, seeing The Earth before it dies. Though they come from and are indeed in three different corners of the globe (plus outer space) they all come over as more or else the same: spiky and defensive. We never really find out why either. The story even starts weirdly with a bit of Jake’s backstory before we know who he is rugby-tackling a shoplifter at his local British supermarket and losing his job; next time we see him he’s travelling the globe without a scene in between.
Still, that decision to mix up the plot by following different strands has mixed success: on the plus side we get to see ‘Team Tardis’ as individuals in a way we’re not used to seeing, with Ryan especially getting a decent lot of screentime at last. His conversations with Gabriela is as close as we see to him ever becoming a character outside of being ‘Graham’s stepson’ and easily the closest Ryan ever comes to getting laid both in the series and outside it you suspect, even if it’s hardly a two-way street: he’s more of a rabbit caught in headlights when she starts flirting with him of gives him a quick kiss. Best line of the episode comes when she asks him if he works out and Ryan thinks for a moment how to explain his adventurous lifestyle before coming up with ‘well, I do a lot of running…’ On the minus side it’s really hard to get a handle on what’s going on: in keeping with a lot of Chibnall stories but more so we’re hit over the head with so much information from so many different sources at once that it’s hard to keep a track of what’s going on. At least this time that information is coming from lots of global sources at least, rather than lots of timezones, but even so: I got totally lost the first time I saw this story. I only vaguely understood what was happening the next few times too. It’s only now, on a seventh or eighth repeat showing, that I even vaguely know what’s going on – and still have the feeling I’m probably missing something. It’s a very messy sprawling script this one, unlike McTighe’s usual more streamlined approach: we know the filming was a bit last-minute, closer to the gap between transmissions in the 1970s and 1980s than the 2020s. Did the wholesale changes to the script mean they were delivered late too?

There are elements of the plot, too, that however worthy they are don’t quite work. As if the environmental doom and destruction wasn’t enough for one episode we get astronaut Adam, dying after contracting the virus in outer space and the pining of gay lover Jake as The Doctor rescues him long enough for them to have their final goodbyes. As ever in this era it’s a pay-off that has no setup: we don’t get to know Adam at all (surely the character who should have been given the backstory and pre-credits sequence to set the tone of what’s happening – more than just ‘random man we don’t know yet burning up in space’ I mean) and only know him through Jake’s sniping. The plot places  a lot of emphasis on him and their emotional bond but we don’t see any of that, just a lost gruff man boasting ‘I don’t do emotions’ and trying not to cry. We know – and thankfully Graham is alert enough to know – that all that anger is really misplaced love, the lover resenting the fact that his boyfriend chose his dream and his adventurous life over a stable home with him and it probably got him killed, even though that adventurous side was what made him fall for Adam in the first place. But to work that out, that Jake is insecure rather than cold (and Graham’s line that Jake’s anger is really ‘punishing himself’) takes a real leap of faith and understanding of human emotions because Jake doesn’t seem to have any: all we see is a surly bloke rugby-tackling kids in shops because he’s lost his job. Frankly, Adam can do better, however much the script wants us to understand where Jake is coming from (and however common it was and is for the spouses of astronauts to feel no Earthly good for their hero partners even though that tether and roots is exactly what most of them needed). Dr Who’s target audience can handle a lot of things (arguably more than it’s assumed they can, given how many stories dumb down to them) but this is asking a lot even from adult audiences who don’t know these characters. The finale too is botched in the extreme: McTighe does well to spend forty minutes pointing out that ‘we’ are the problem, that if Humans treated the planet properly there wouldn’t be a crisis for alien bacteria to infect. But then we find out that it is all an alien’s fault after all (albeit accidentally when – spoilers – it turns out that medical researcher Suki is really an alien trying to learn enough about Earth science to repair the damage her ship caused when it crash-landed and a virus got out). So ‘Praxeus’, after promising to be a different kind of story altogether, ends with another sheepish alien asking The Doctor for help and mad running around trying to find a cure (see ‘The Ark’, which at least had the decency to make it one of the Doctor’s companions who accidentally spread a virus, and ‘Dr Who and The Silurians’). That’s a real let down (especially for those of us looking for clues for a cure to covid – ‘wave a sonic screwdriver at it’ sadly didn’t work. Believe me, I tried).

There are lots of other little clumsy mistakes this episode too. Once again Chibnall makes Ryan dyspraxic with a wave of his hand but utterly misunderstands what that means (despite having a nephew with the condition), happily handing over the very important job of dissecting dead birds to a person who has motor co-ordination issues (Ryan does a decent job despite warning The Doctor ‘I hope you don’t expect it to be elegant…because it won’t be’). The Doctor materialises the Tardis round Adam’s spaceship in ‘the nick of time’ because that’s what you do to create drama in Dr Who, even though she could have done it ages ago (also no thought seems to be given to what happens to the spaceship up there without Adam to pilot it; I kept expecting a big crash later in the episode).  There’s a lengthy scene with a ‘garbage patch’ under the pacific ocean that defies all logic and science, even for a Praxeus alien and a timelord, that looks to all the world as if we’re in ‘The Little Mermaid’ or ‘Spongebob Squarepants’ and a group of fish wearing beer-can plastic necklaces are about to swim past any day. The dialogue too, usually one of McTighe’s strengths, is tin-eared this week with no one having anything much of interest to say. You would have thought an astronaut, a video bloggers and a scientist would be able to talk more intelligently to The Doctor than most, but instead it’s Graham who becomes the only person acting as a real person ever would (and even then his ‘wise old uncle’ act to everyone he meets and assuming he can offer advice despite knowing a tenth of the stuff they do is wearing a bit thin by now. As this is also one of only two episodes where he spends any significant time with Yaz it’s also apparent just how little these two have in common and how much they wind each other up the wrong way, his dad jokes and homespun philosophy rubbing against her by-the-rulebook approach). There’s no way The Doctor would let one of her companions walk off into danger the way Yaz does here either, no matter how anti-social and awkward this incarnation happens to be (given all the similarities to ‘The Green Death’ just imagine the 3^rd Doctor letting Jo wander off to investigate. Frankly Jo had her head screwed on a lot more than Yaz ever did to boot).  Yaz fares better when she’s with Gabriela but even then putting her alongside someone her own age who feels far more ‘real’  and assertive and as if she’s been investigating alien anomalies all her life just shows up what a bland character Yaz is by comparison.

It’s a very worthy episode this one, with some great ideas and an important message and some beautiful scenery to boot, but in many ways it’s also an unwatchable unlikeable mess. It’s hard to care about these people and the plight they’re in, even when it’s one that affects us – and never more so than in the month of transmission. But ‘Praxeus’ has too much happening to latch on to and isn’t endearing in the way it does it, demanding the audience work hard to find out what’s going on. What is on paper a thrilling story about fending off infection around the globe ends up ten minutes of Bradley Walsh propping up a man in an astronaut suit as they walk around different cities (why can’t the Tardis be more direct than this? The real answer seems to be that they want to show off the scenery, but in story terms it makes no sense). As ever with the Chibnall years it feels as if we’re being lectured too, in a way no other era of the show’s done (‘You’re poisoning yourselves as well as your planet!’): I end the episode feeling as if I’m meant to say sorry to The Doctor for my behaviour, even when I’m on the side of the environmentalists trying to do good and scratching their heads why the rest of the world isn’t. I never felt with other showrunners: even in similarly ecological stories like ‘Planet Of Giants’ ‘The Green Death’ or ‘Gridlock’ I felt I was part of the solution, not the problem. I mean, The Doctor even takes time out of her busy time-travelling schedule to record yet another voiceover at the beginning and end (seriously, have they not worked out how weird that is for a series we’re meant to ‘overhear’ yet?)

Suki, too, is handled oddly. You’re meant to think she’s just another quirky misfit Human for the first half, one that’s secretly gooey-eyed over her co-researcher Amaru with shades of Jo Grant and Cliff Jones (apparently romances go hand in hand with solving these sorts of things). Yet the revelation that she’s alien feels less like the almighty revelation it should be than ‘yeah, that figures’. After all, if someone in Dr Who can talk with The Doctor openly about things we at home don’t readily understand they’re either a fellow timelord, a God, an alien or a specialist scientist – and there’s no way someone that young would be able to afford all that equipment. McTighe can’t quite work out how to pitch her so she’s not arrogant the way most aliens visiting our backwater planet are and yet she’s not really repentant either. She’s pleased The Doctor has made a cure and oblivious to her remark about making Earth a ‘petri dish’. It’s more kind of ‘oops, my bad, I thought someone would come along and save us’. It’s a real shame too: the story would have arguably have been better if the alien mutation had been an accident, a mutation too far due to Human carelessness: having it be part of an alien plan to undo what they’d done to themselves just shifts the blame. Plus if you’re going to do all that why not have Suki be an Auton duplicate made out of plastic all along? Suki is also the easy choice: she barely says a word all the way through, as if to hide her true background; far braver would have been to have one of the others turn out to be the alien having ‘assimilated’ Human details more. It wouldn’t surprise me if Suki only turned up in a later draft; it just doesn’t feel like a natural extension to the plot the way the best Who resolutions are – more that no one could work out how to solve the story without a readymade biolab full of alien tech so one of the characters had to become alien.   

 
Predictably there was an outcry at the time about Dr Who doing a story about climate change, as if that was something Dr Who shouldn’t be doing, scaring children with what was happening to the planet (presumably from people who'd never seen 'The Green Death' in 1973 or even ‘Planet Of Giants’ in 1964, which is basically this story without the shrinking part and the pesticides). Far from it: ‘Praxeus’ feels like exactly the sort of thing Dr Who should have been doing and I praise it to the skies for doing it, for saying something that even as late as 2020 most programmes shied away from talking about for fear of controversy. It feels like what Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis would be writing in the 21^st century in fact (at times this story is more ‘Doomwatch’ than ‘Dr Who’: specifically a bend of two of its best remembered episodes ‘The Plastic Eaters’ where an airborne chemical virus causes plastics in planes to melt and ‘Tomorrow The Rat’ where the overgrown vermin basically do what the birds to here. If you accept that ‘posing in skimpy t-shirts while running a blog’ is the 2020s equivalent of strutting around posing while wearing a cravat then you pretty much have the episodes down pat). I love the fact that this story is also one of the few set ‘now’, in this decade at least, rather than being in the ‘distant future’ the way writers usually do when they want to get away with something. I love the idea of wildlife growing out of control, with the shots of angry birds surrounding the Tardis an iconic image I’m surprised hasn’t been remembered by the collective more than it has. I adore the way this story takes such a global feel for what’s such a global problem, uniting people from different countries without the need for a global conference or politicians or companies, because each of these individuals has more similarities than differences and all know that it’s the ‘right’ thing to do. I just wish it felt more like Dr Who when it was doing it, with a story that we could follow that didn’t need multiple re-watches and an ending to this most complex of problems that tidies everything away again so simply. Fun as it is to have an episode with a ‘different’ feel, so 2020 is this story in the way it’s filmed and made (like a sitcom, without laughs, shot in the dark, with everyone running around spouting dialogue) that this story already feels more dated today than some stories twelve times it’s age. Having The Autons would have been a solution to a lot of its problems I think: though a ‘safer’ bet in many ways they would have anchored the story into something the audience could understand without losing the environmental impact (especially if we ‘accidentally’ created them with our environmental bungling – we never do find out how the Nestene conscious ‘discovered’ them after all). Unfortunately, unlike micro-plastics, too little of ‘Praxeus’ lingers inside your brain the way the best Who stories do and it’s message, though brilliant, ends up seeming largely unremarkable and goes largely unheeded. Still, at least it tried.

POSITIVES + The last time someone tried to show someone turning into a bird it was Peri in ‘Vengeance on Varos’ and the results were laughable. This time around they’re really rather good: the Praxeus virus is a kind of cross between eczema and bubonic plague with just a hint of petrifaction, as sufferers turn grey and stiff, wooden-like, before crumbling to dust. The point where Camilla, the first dead body we see, suddenly wakes up is one of modern Who’s great jump-scare moments too. They don’t look that much like birds admittedly, but there’s something feathery about their appearance too. It’s a most impressive CGI effect, one I wished we’d seen more (the rest of the story is quite effects-lite – but then they were also skirting scarily close to transmission by this point).

NEGATIVES – So, how did the Tardis fam get involved in this story again exactly? While I can think of a fair few Who stories that would benefit from joining the plot partway through (anything involving comedy yokels in the UNIT era for instance) ‘Praxeus’ isn’t one of them. We’re there in different countries when suddenly, boom, the four of them keep turning up behind random bits of Cape Town scenery. What brought this story to the Doctor’s attention though? And how come she’s separated a team that, with all the will in the world, need a lot of direction and struggle to tie their own shoelaces never mind think for themselves or use their own initiative. Was it the crashing spaceship that alerted the Doctor? In which case what is everyone else doing a third of the globe away from each other? How come Yaz and Graham know Jake is linked to Adam when the spaceman is too sick to speak? How come the Doctor drops Ryan off to see Gabriela, who has no connection to the storyline at all except for noticing some of the strange anomalies that have been going on? All this could have been explained in a scene (even one told in flashback) and adding it would have meant we could have done without the twenty minutes of padding and ‘I love him yet I hate him’ dialogue in the middle of the story too as a bonus.  

BEST QUOTE: ‘Planet Earth in the third decade of the 21^st century. Population seven billion. Seven billion lives, separate and connected, from the depths of the oceans to the edge of the atmosphere’.

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