The Tsuranga Conundrum
(Season 11, Dr 13 Graham Ryan and Yaz, 4/11/2018, producer/showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Jennifer Perrott)
Rank: 306
'There’s not a mouse loose about this house but a p’ting thing in
this hospital ring much to our chagrin!’
There is, on the surface, much going for this episode. Hospital settings are always good for this series: they’re arguably the closest most of us get to being on the Tardis and space-time travelling for real, somewhere alien and strange that exists in parallel dimensions to ours, where life and death are tiny decisions away, the people walk around in strange costumes and we have to put our lives in the hands of strangers we’ve never met. And this character is a ‘Doctor’ after all, there to heal the sick and protect people from harm. It worked, sort of, in ‘New Earth’ ‘Spearhead From Space’ and ‘The Eleventh Hour’ (all notably stories where the Doctor is also not quite themselves for one reason or another – literally in the first case when Cassandra inhabits the 10th Dr’s body). Those stories were very much Dr Who ones that just happened to have a hospital setting for a change though, part of a bigger story about what the Doctor always does fighting injustice and enemies of innocent people. ‘Tsuranga’ is slightly different: it’s a medical drama that just happens to be set in the future, on a spaceship, filled with aliens. Now on paper that might seem a good idea too. After all, it’s one of the few popular genres Dr Who has never done and a format so elastic that its taken in Westerns, satire, out and out comedies and even gameshows while still feeling like Dr Who, so it ought to be able to balance out the scifi against this sort of thing too. But plots and structure are different in medical dramas to how Dr Who works. ‘Casualty’ ‘Holby City’ one time Russell T Davies-run series ‘Children’s Ward’ and the like are, by matter of course, a bit more routine and humdrum than Dr Who. They’re small stories about ordinary lived interrupted made to feel big only for the people who live them with no real outside repercussions and which while they might turn the characters’ lives upside down have no great impact on a wider sense of time or space. They also have to be self-contained, the characters coming and going and having a lifetime of issues solved in time for an advert break, with a motto of how a little hope and a bit of courage go a long way to healing bad news. They aren’t about saving all of time and space and they’re not about humanity at all, they’re about what it is to be human and unexpectedly frail at awkward moments. Dr Who is about how small and yet also how big we are in the grand scheme of things, about how everyone is human and flawed – even the aliens we haven’t met yet, with impossible things waited to be explored not tiny things waiting to trip us up, while for a kick-off the main character isn’t human: they don’t lead a life we’re meant to relate to at all. ‘Dr Who’ as a series is all about exploration and learning through other people; medical dramas are about understanding one’s self when things happen to characters like you. The only relationship between the two is that the main character is a ‘Doctor’ (and one with rather a grumpy beside manner in this era it has to be said) and wondering how you might cope if you were thrown into similar situations. As a result this story never really gets going because its always working against itself, the tiny human drama and big epic scifiness cancelling each other out: it tries its best to be big, but the stakes by Dr Who standards are small fry - a rodent-alien eats through a cable and sends a hospital ship with a handful of people on board hurtling into space. Used to saving whole worlds without blinking (literally when the Weeping Angels are around), this ought to be as easy an adventure as we’ve ever seen the Doctor have. I mean, all they need to solve this one is an intergalactic mousetrap.
Writer Chris Chibnall tries to get round this by doing a ‘Hartnell’ and having the Doctor suffer something similar to what many characters in medical dramas go through: the stress that they might never be able to get out and return ‘home’, that they might live out the rest of their days in an alien setting so weird and surreal compared to everyday life. The Doctor and her companions are knocked unconscious for four days by a ‘sonic mine’, the Tardis accidentally abandoned on a junkyard planet with the added drama of whether they can get back there or not, whether it’s still even there when they return to it (something that’s rather undercut by the fact that it’s just never mentioned again at episode’s end when everyone prepares to teleport back: presumably it is but it would be nice to be told that). It’s all part of series 11’s increasingly desperate attempts to hide the fact that they’ve saved set space by not building a Tardis interior (with the Doctor falling through a train after tumbling out of it in Jodie Whittaker’s debut, then having the Tardis nicked during ‘Ghost Monument' during a reasonably priced scuttle with a shuttle in a celestial version of ‘Top Gear’ and a few other delaying tactics). By the time the 13th Dr finally comes around she’s stranded far from home – although even that’s a bit odd. How come the Doctor, usually so great at bouncing back from injury when the plots need her to, takes so long to recover from the effects of a ‘sonic mine’, especially compared to her companions? She was nearer it when it went off but a simple line about what happened to her and how damaged she is would work wonders. It just looks on screen as if she fancied a bit of a snooze. The Doctor would normally solve this story with a wave of her sonic screwdriver too, so Chibnall has the sonic damaged, eaten by the alien in a scene that hits better than most comedy scenes in this era but is still deeply out of character (the Doctor already knows this being is a threat, so letting it anywhere near her sonic isn’t something she’d normally do. That really was quite some bang on the head). Perhaps the single most out of character thing we ever see the 13th Dr do though comes right at the end, when she kills the alien by basically giving them a ‘bomb’ to eat so that it blows up harmlessly in space. I mean, they’ve gone out of their way this episode to show how cute it is: the Doctor doesn’t usually do that sort thing to people who are intrinsically evil (unless they’re in a really bad mood or its part of a story arc about why he needs a companion there to stop him/her). Even the manipulative 7th Doctor was never that cruel to any actual thinking species and the modern series, especially, has been all about second chances and how even baddies can change. Surely it would be more in keeping in this series if the Doctor had just taken the p’ting home as a pet and fed it some of the Tardis’ near-endless stream of power?
It’s not just the Doctor acting out of sorts either: her companion are oddly unlike themselves this week. They don’t react with surprise or glee at all when the Doctor comes round (even though, by all accounts it’s taken a while longer than it did for them). They show no sign of stress that they, too, might be stranded on this hospital ship forever. This trio don’t usually seem that comfortable wandering around modern Sheffield, but they take to life on board a hospital ship as if everything is all quite normal and cosy. Graham, weirdly, is the only one whose properly awake, picking up on the skulking and furtive illicit drug use by some of the patients on board (even though, to put it mildly, he’s generally quite clueless as companions go). Ryan, meanwhile, gets to do the usual medical drama thing of having a big life announcement about something totally unrelated to the plot ( his dad) randomly delivered during a moment of great urgency and peril when everyone should be scared (because that’s what regulars do in medical series like this, with bitesize chunks of revelation even though they seem pretty meaningless compared to what the incidental cast only here for the day are going through; they’re the equivalent of a ‘Bad Wolf’ or ‘crack in the wall’ to keep viewers hooked week after week).
It’s the p’ting though that’s, well, p’ting awful. And to give him his due he’s not Chris Chibnall’s idea: Tim Price was all set to write this story and was in early discussions in the writer’s room bouncing ideas around coming up with animal and name, before getting a better offer and leaving Chibnall to write this story himself. Both the character and creature name are a little odd, to say the least (why the hyphen? It would make sense if the human names come with hyphens too in the 67th century, but they don’t – does this era only put hyphens in animal species? If so, why?) I see where they were going with the p’ting: this is, depending on how you look at it, either ‘The Sensorites/Galaxy Four’ part two (to keep the Hartnell theme) or ‘The Star Beast’ part one, about a cute furry little alien you’d love to reach out into the telly and take home as a pet who turns out to be vicious and monstrous. It’s a tale all about not judging by appearances all over again. Except, what does the p’ting do that’s so ‘wrong’? Sure, eating through the power supply puts everyone in danger and chewing through the lifepod support sends head nurse Astos (surely a reference to the Department of Work and Pensions’ then-team of useless ‘medical’ doctors ATOS, used to assess benefit claimants, who have absolutely no actual qualifications whatsoever) condemning him to a death drifting in space (and again, why does the Doctor not even try to get him back again? That’s so out of character) would be a cruel thing to do if the p’ting was sentient. But he isn’t. He’s just hungry. And this isn’t an infestation: it’s just one lone creature. We don’t even know how long its lifespan is: maybe its eating so much because it knows its about to die soon (given this story’s liberties with genders and mating habits anything could happen, but there are no other p’tings on board so unless it can replicate from itself the danger’s over once its dead). Plus the elephant or indeed any bigger-than-p’ting size animal in the room: why does nobody think to just reach out and grab at it? This is a mouse sized alien and sure its relatively fast but its not that fast they can’t at least try. This is a Tardis crew that have already faced big scary threats. Are they really all afraid of a hairy alien mouse? The same with the medical staff: they have the power of life and death in their hands. Getting hold of this furry rodent that puts so many lives in jeopardy is an obvious time to get a space-broom out the cupboard, but nobody even contemplates giving it a whack. Even CGI-wise he just looks ridiculous, obviously fake and ‘Disneyfied’ in a way no Dr Who alien has been before or since. He’s clearly not there when the actors are re-acting to him too. K9 might have been clunky and ruined many a scene he was in but at least he seemed ‘real’. The p’ting just adds to the feeling that nothing in this story is quite real.
There are plot holes big enough to get a herd of giant p’ting through this week too. You would have thought that if the p’ting really is the scourge of the universe in the 67th century like we’re old all these hospital ships would have mousetraps and bait as standard, not to mention protocols for what to do in the extent of an emergency. Surely The Doctor can’t be the first person to notice that the p’ting are more interested in power than people and is after the electricity (or whatever they have in this century) coursing round the ship: for a start ejecting dinner in a life support capsule is a bit of a clue he’s not interested in humans as food as they first think. Plus presumably there are never any corpses left behind after any of these cases. Perhaps the biggest problem with the P’ting, though, is one that he shares in common with many Chibnall ‘monsters’: he can’t speak, so the Doctor never gets to reason with it or point out its behaviour or discover its ‘motivation’. This isn’t a criminal genius mastermind who can destroy the Doctor in a straight fight – it’s a hungry alien gerbil. It’s unequal: we know the Doctor is impossibly clever with thousands of years now of experience on her side; we don’t know the first thing about these creatures, so we can’t judge the scale of threat. On its own that’s not such a problem, but coming after an episode that gave us alien spiders and will go on to feature holograms in the shape of talking frogs, it’s starting to seem as if the fights between the Doctor and foes are a tad uneven and this regeneration’s not being properly ‘tested’ yet. Plus, this is a hospital ship. In space. There’s no one else around for miles (which in itself is strange: you’d think someone would at least try to radio for help outside control). Surely the obvious thing to do, from a ‘control’ point of view, is to quarantine it – not blow it up into smitheroons to spread potential plague out into the universe?
This is a weird time period too, the 67th century: so like ours in 90% of ways and wildly different in the other 10%. Like all good medical dramas we get to know the characters on this space-hospital-ship, doing the tried and tested Dr Who trick of getting to know these people before they get bumped off (or so its threatened; actually only two characters in it die, which by Dr Who and medical drama standards both is actually a very light body count indeed). These people are just like those you see on ‘Holby City’ or ‘Peak Practice’, going through ordinary life happily before medical conditions get in the way. There’s an android whose struggling to be an android, a pilot whose losing her sight (which if diagnosed means she’ll have to give up the job she loves) and a man whose just got pregnant and doesn’t know if he wants to keep the baby or not. Sorry, what?! Yes, in the 61st century Gifftan biology means that men give birth to boys and women give birth to girls. It is a funny joke, once, about how normally in medical dramas the script would make the woman worried about her pregnancy and have men come along to sweep in put her mind at rest – only the Doctor’s a woman now and the pregnancy is in a man. Only they keep making the joke over and over to make sure we ‘get’ it so that it gets less funny every time we go back to it: Yoss’ waters break at just the wrong moment when the action in the plot is taking off, he calls for anaesthetics to numb the pain, he even asks for Graham and Ryan to be birth-partner ‘doolers’ because he ‘needs a man to be with him’ and doesn’t trust women to know what the pain’s like. It’s a worthy point: if men had to carry such a medical miracle as life around with them, which will inevitably end in pain and all the worry that goes along with whether they’ll survive and how to tell their partners they’re pregnant, it would change human society (or something very like human society) overnight and go some way to allowing the genders to empathise more with each other . But (and like many a medical drama I have to say – in this case ‘Call The Midwife’) they overplay that hand so much that, by the end, you just want the p’ting to get on with it and shut him up. It’s the moment when Yoss goes from acting hysterical, like all stereotypical women giving birth, then gets handed his baby and goes ‘alright mate!’ like a bloke down the pub that’s Dr Who at its stupidest. There is a nice bit of cultural detail whereby Yoss is so grateful to Graham and Ryan that he names the baby after a ‘good old fashioned Earth name’ and chooses ‘Avacado’, much to their shock and horror (a very Dr Who reference, like ‘Voyage Of The Damned’, to how things we take for granted in our culture seem alien and strange to other tongues – and would to us if we sat down and analysed them. After all, other languages have children’s names that take after fruit, why is that any dafter than being, say, named after a Graham’s cracker? )
There are lots of good and promising bits littered through this story, but they’re just bits, incidental details lost in a messier bigger picture and they’re just not enough to cauterise the whacking great gaping holes in the main plot, ignored for something noisier and sillier. There’s a frisson of interest when it looks as if we’re going to get a series about racism against androids (an old series standby, but this time in a medical setting: I can see it now! People given transplants as priorities over people, even though they’re effectively the ‘same as us!’) that sadly doesn’t go anywhere. I love the idea that the alien has eaten the sonic screwdriver and the Dr’s protests. There’s a nice scene where the Doctor talks to Yaz about the hospital ship being powered like the colossal experiment involving antimatter at CERN, only believably its ‘smaller, faster, cheaper’, a great sense of Dr Who taking the present and working to a logical progression of where we might end up in the future (the one big thing the 1960s Dr Who stories got wrong: they all thought inventions would get bigger and fill up rooms to incorporate more gizmos, not fit in our pockets and become more portable). Even that’s a little odd in itself though: you get sense Chibnall is actually far more interested in the ship than the people on it and this isn’t the time and place for that conversation when there are lives at stake. I can’t imagine the 2nd Doctor pausing invasion by Cybermen to discuss how the ships are powered to Jamie somehow, or the 3rd Doctor asking the Brigadier to pause on his Silurian bombardment while he discusses their energy sources.. The real trouble though is that, unlike a medical drama which can focus on just one person or family, there’s simply no time beyond the Dr Whoy-ness to truly get to know Yoss or General Eve or Eve’s synth partner Rowlan or Eve’s shifty brother Durkan. So these don’t feel like people we care about, with lives lived before and after the end credits, they’re just people who speak their lines and give the drama a frisson over what happens to the regulars.
Other parts are handed to us as big plot points, then ignored. For a moment there, especially with Graham eavesdropping, it feels as if the mystery of Eve is going to be a big development that changes the main plot, but it turns out to be a red herring about stealing drugs (because that’s another regular plot on medical dramas). At first, too, the opening scene’s scrabble around a junkyard for spare parts for…something or other feels like it’s going to be a big part of the plot also (who laid the trap of the sonic mines? I mean, it’s too elaborate and too painful for a practical joke and who else but the Doctor is going to be going through a junkyard planet anyway?). However we never return to that idea either: for all we know the teleport everyone takes at the end of this story could be taking the Doctor and ‘fam’ back into danger again, but it’s never referred to, even as a potential problem before they take of at the end. That’s a shame because, honestly, all those potential plots would have been more interesting than what we get. In the end ‘The Tsuranga Conundrum’ isn’t really a conundrum at all (why is it called that exactly?!) It doesn’t have the depth or humanity of most medical dramas, or even its closest Dr Who cousin ‘The Ark In Space’ (where the Wirrn, giant insects, get into a life support ship containing the last vestiges of humanity), no sense of mortality or doom or drama. It’s just an unusually drowsy Doctor running after a mouse in space down even more corridors than normal. Like ‘Tom and Jerry’ but with less imagination.
And yes those corridors: series eleven really does look horribly cheap at times, with budget saving everywhere you look. There are moments when the CGI is so obviously grafted on, when there are scenes calling out for computer animation or model shots we just don’t get, events that happen off screen or whole worlds that are meant to exist yet we only see one cave or field or building. ‘Tsuranga’ suffers from that more than most. The last time we had a hospital that wasn’t on Earth it was filled with talking cat-nuns and, thanks to a few sparing CGI shots, looked as if it ran forever. This is just a bunch of sterile corridors. I don’t actually remember seeing an establishing exterior of the ship at any time to know what it looks like (or perhaps I just fell asleep re-watching this story). The only location filming we get is in a junkyard: an apt place to be given that this is where the series started and all, but its not exactly giving us a frisson of the other-worldly and exotic. Running a series as imaginative and creative as Dr Who is hard, particularly if you’re the guy both responsible for the stories and the budget how everything looks on screen. I can see why Chibnall came in a bit too heavy-handed with the purse strings during his first year in charge, perhaps anxious that he’d get to the end with no money left. But there has to be something in each story to make the audience tune in and get a sense of that Dr Who marvel and spectacle, otherwise – this week particularly – it’s just a poor copy of a different genre, the ‘ordinary’ side of Dr Who without the ‘extraordinary’ parts. I mean, other dramas would struggle to pad out an episode of chasing a mouse loose around a house: given the sheer scale and size of Dr Who at its best it ought to be reaching for the stars a bit more than this. Just looking at it, compared to the stories being made in Dr Whos before and after and what was being made by other scifi series at the time (especially in America) it really does look awful at times: bland people in bland costumes chasing a bland CGI creation down a bland corridor. Honestly I’m surprised so many people still tuned in the following week (where they splash the cash by going to India…Oh no, except they don’t, that one was filmed in Spain ‘cos it’s cheaper).
This is perhaps Dr Who at its most childish (not childlike: that’s different) . By medical drama standards this story is amazingly free of any blood or gore, all the tension existential or from actors looking sad. The ‘threat’ is something most little children would run towards, not away from. All the odder when you consider that its source material just has to be ‘Aliens’, the one of the most gruesome and graphic scifi films of them al (although that’s nothing on the Dr Who’ story ‘Aliens’ got the idea from, ‘The Ark In Space’). You can’t help but feel that this is a story Chris Chibnall came up with when he was little himself and making up Dr Who stories for funw ith his toys. There’s nothing wrong with that at all: some of the best bits in Russell T’s and Steven Moffat’s eras were inspired by ideas they’d been carrying around since childhood just on the ‘off chance’ they might to get write for this series one day. But there’s been no re-thinking through these ideas in adulthood, no sub-plots written in to cover why the main plot wouldn’t quite work, no greater understanding of how drama is put together seen through adult eyes: things happen, then other things happen, then it gets resolved, with some characters who don’t have any real plot function except to need saving to be in there too as background detail. There are, at least, a few plus points compared to some other stories, particularly the 13th Dr’s era. There are some good lines, a few strong jokes and this story does at least attempt a style that the series had never thought to try before. But when your main scenario is this absurd and its realised on screen so badly you want the p’ting to come along and eat through your powerlines so you don’t have to watch it too. This is a story about patients, that ironically enough tested my patience past its limits, Dr Who so braindead and empty it might as well be on life support.
POSITIVES+ There’s a neat moment when the Doctor starts panicking about her Tardis and becomes egotistical and shouty, the way the 13th Dr can be at her worst. Usually when this happens it’s to one of her companions and Chibnall lets her get away with it without being ‘told off’ because they love her enough to accept and understand it (something responsible for many of the worst scenes of her era). But here she tries it with a stranger, a nurse who just doesn’t have time for that sort of talk when there are so many other people to save and he yells at her back that she’s just being selfish. You see the Doctor screw up her face about to fight back, then stop and realise that there are other people in this besides herself. ‘Of course. Yes. Quite right’ she says contritely, realising that it’s what a lot (though by no means all) of her earlier selves would have thought too, putting other people first. It’s one of the best bits of acting Jodie Whittaker gets to do during her time as the Doctor, a sudden realisation that her way might not always be the best way. It’s a shame we don’t get to see her contrite more often.
NEGATIVES – the ending must rank as one of the worst in the series. Not just because the Doctor blows up a defenceless little critter but because the means of blowing it up comes out of nowhere: you would have thought that, somewhere in the first 45minutes, someone somewhere would have mentioned that there was a detachable bomb on board. This isn’t the first story to have a neat ending come out of nowhere and solve what was an increasingly complex and convoluted plot at speed to tidy it out the way before next week – arguably Russell T and Moffat do this far more than Chibnall ever does. But this is one of the most blatant cases, because it isn’t even remotely a thing, until suddenly it is.
BEST QUOTE: The Doctor, referring back to Eve who remembers her being mentioned in a textbook she was reading ‘I’d say it was more of a volume than a chapter – just so you know’
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