"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.
These are all very good points, so fair enough. Like so much of this era it's not bad exactly, but it is kind of... there. The Chibnall's biggest achievement is highlighting quite how much craft had gone into most of the previous 10 seasons.
"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.
These are all very good points, so fair enough. Like so much of this era it's not bad exactly, but it is kind of... there. The Chibnall's biggest achievement is highlighting quite how much craft had gone into most of the previous 10 seasons.