13.17: Praxeus
In which plastic is horrible.
Broadcast: February 2020
Watched: July 2022
“That’s why you smell of dead bird! I thought you’d changed your shower gel.”
Alternatively, “We’ve literally got the most exciting rotting bird that I’ve ever seen.”
The opening is pretty exciting, coming as it does with more exotic travel via caption (“PERU”, “HONG KONG”, “MADAGASCAR”). We’re also starting in media res, again, with the companions already investigating. It’s very like an NA – a Cartmel one – only instead of the master chessplayer Time’s Champion Doctor we’ve got, er, a bit of a shambles.
The interesting thing about this one is that it’s woke, for want a better word, but not preachy. It’s one of the most international stories yet, in both setting and cast; the two white members of the guest cast are gay men; and it seems to be about the environment.
But also, it weirdly sort of... isn’t. The Doctor doesn’t deliver a lecture on the dangers of plastic or pollution, we’re left to infer it. Also the message is confused: Suki’s people brought Praxeus to Earth deliberately and, okay, this only worked because Earth was marinated in plastic, but still, feels a bit weird, thematically? It’s about pollution, but also aliens did this to us?
(The effects of the praxeus virus, of someone spouting plastic, is utterly horrible, btw.)
It’s also extremely hard to remember what the plot is. The sprawling nature of this one is fun, but does mean it lacks focus, it’s just a lot of... stuff. So I’d entirely forgotten Warren Brown on the beach talking about how his self-hatred has messed up his relationship: it’s a good scene, well written and well played… but it doesn’t connect to anything. It also feels like maybe Jake should die at the end: there’s no sacrifice to balance the victory.
Maybe that’s why I honestly couldn’t recall what this episode was about.
Other things:
The Doctor’s opening voiceover (“Planet Earth, early in the third decade of the 21st century...”) Is this an attempt to make an album track episode seem important, after last week’s revelations?
It’s a rare episode these days where assorted members of the guest cast *don’t* end up in the TARDIS. This week there are more people in the TARDIS than on the Liberator again.
Ooh scary gas masks, that takes us all back.
“Except I don’t go around announcing I’m police” – Yaz explains the writing team’s repeated failure to remember that she has a job.
I had remembered the African guy completely disappearing from the narrative... but he doesn’t, we see him die. The thing that’s weird is that no one mentions it. Just like Lee, the previous week. (Incidentally, I googled the actor and he was *literally murdered*. Fuuuuck.)
Some questions... 1) Why do the girls camp in the rubbish heap? 2) How does Adam the astronaut get a phone to text for help? 3) Is the travel vlog meant to be a success that the regulars don’t know about and think is silly, or is Gabriela delusional?
A good bit! “Whatever is giving off those weird readings is on the other side of that wall.” [Yaz turns the device the right way up] “Is on the other side of that door”.
A bad bit: “Hey, it’s okay” Ryan says to a girl who just watched her friend explode. It very obviously isn’t, is it?
A character bit: Yaz wanting to stick around to look at some mysterious “device” is the first hint that she’s trying to impress the Doctor. Also, I do love how annoyed she is when she realises she hasn’t discovered an alien planet on her own after all.
This week, Graham can do an IV drip, but at least he doesn’t say he learned it being a bus driver.
"It also feels like maybe Jake should die at the end: there’s no sacrifice to balance the victory."
On the whole it's pretty good that he didn't, IMO - the Chibnall era already had a terrible reputation for randomly offing queer characters (every single queer character in S11/Resolution is either killed before they really get much of a character, or has a dead spouse; King James is the one exception). It's a bad look in the era of the Bury Your Gays trope. One thing Praxeus almost gained extra tension by doing towards the end is 'will-they-won't-they' commit to that trope again, as yet another iteration in sequence, so it was kinda cathartic when they didn't and there was a queer happy ending for once.
Wild thing to realise but Jake/Adam get the first gay male kiss on-screen in DW since 2005 (Jack/9), and the first ever of an actual gay male couple. I agree about the scene on the beach being quite affecting. I've also seen people read a light AIDS subtext into this, given there's a gay relationship and it helps defeat a killer virus. But I don't know how that really fits with everything else, to be honest.