Doctor Who Series 10 First Impressions: Episode 5 (Oxygen)

(Doctor Who post. Spoilers.)

Holy mother of fuck.

You've got red on you.

What's that? We did the "one sentence synopsis" gag last week? Shit. Okay I guess we do have to talk more about that episode of Doctor Who, then. Nah, I'm just heckin' with ya, I was going to elaborate on it any way. You know my time wasting/stalling shenanigans by now, but unfortunately they have run out. Run out right about now. At the end of this sentence. Period. That was also a smart joke but what we have here is a very smart episode of Doctor Who! Oxygen, by Jamie Mathieson, who is perhaps Doctor Who's most consistent writer in the Capaldi era. His previous three episodes were all highlights of their respective series. Mummy On The Orient Express was a solid episode with a lot of cool tricks and puzzle solving. Flatline brought Clara Oswald full-on into her role as a mirror of the Doctor. The Girl Who Died was an oasis of high-quality Doctor Who after wading through an underwater base of shit. That's where we are yet again. Knock Knock was no Before The Flood, but it was a letdown from a really good run of three in a row. Oxygen not only climbs back up to those peaks, but it may even surpass them. I haven't decided if it's beaten out Thin Ice as the best S10 episode so far, but we'll see how I feel about that once I get all of the words out on the page.



The cheeky invocation of the opening to Star Trek by the Doctor is personally effective for me because I've been working my way through The Next Generation, on and off, since like November. So there's that, plus the fact that Space channel aired Star Trek IV right before Doctor Who on this Saturday. Y'know, the one with the whales. Anyway after the cold open we get a whole neat monologue from him about what happens when a human being is exposed to the cold airless death of space. Bad shit happens. REMEMBER THIS FOR LATER. Our Doctor is restless for space and ends up taking Bill to a space station in distress... with a lovely line about answering distress calls. Mathieson has a dozen lovely lines for Peter Capaldi in this episode, just so you know. Also Nardole is here, being his tut-tut SIR YOUR OATH self. He tried to sabotage the TARDIS by removing a fluid link but that didn't work. That's a sneaky reference to The Daleks! Well, Nardole's along for this adventure in space. He's fine during it, taking on a lot of the same "eeeeep I don't like it" personality he had in Return Of Doctor Mysterio, mixed with being a grump about the Doctor breaking his oath and being offworld. That's about all to say about Nardole right now. He's there and not too annoying, but he's basically just helpful.


The really interesting stuff comes from the setting, conflict, and resolution. A mining station in deep space that has descended into its own mini-apocalypse as the AI on the worker's space suits has received an order to terminate their organic components. The only reason people have survived up until now is that their suits were "off the network" and didn't get the order to destroy their fleshy bits. In addition to all of that, the suits ration out air like a currency. How you pay for it and whatnot isn't explained, but it doesn't really need to be. Rationed air. This is a SPACE CAPITALISM story, and the monsters this time are the suits. Dead people shambling around in automatic space suits, looking to touch other suits and spread the program order to eradicate the organic part. To kill and make the suit its own autonomous unit. It's zombies. It's space zombies. It's a metaphor for capitalism and wage slaves and working for THE MAN and being a mindless consumer and all that other shit. Thankfully, this being Doctor Who, we're not in a traditional zombie movie. We're in Doctor Who. Doctor Who has more to say and do than, oh... Dawn Of The Dead? 2 hours of "HAHAH THEY'RE DEAD BUT THEY STILL COME TO THE MALL, WE ARE ALL SLAVES TO CAPITALISM"? That ain't Doctor Who's scene, and thank God for it. To pick at that Star Trek analogy again, the walking suits also have a Borg-like quality to them? They get you and make you like them (a dark mirror!), and they have adaptive AI. Of course, the similarities end there because the Borg are explicit dark mirrors of Star Trek's Federation. Not the apotheosis of space capitalism, but of space imperialism. Told you we'd just pick at it for a bit. We'll come back to the space capitalism thing.


What really stands out about this episode is just how brutal it is. Not just the deaths of the remaining crew members/cannon fodder, but that's some brutal shit. Being electrocuted while your suit's chipper lady voice happily informs you that your central nervous system is being shut down and that "your life is in our hands". Quite literally, but getting ahead of myself again! No, this episode, more than any other in recent memory, absolutely beats the utter shit out of the Doctor and Bill. Nardole gets out of it all without going through the wringer, but the Doctor and Bill go through some shit. We'll start with the Doctor, who loses almost everything that makes him the Doctor. First he loses access to his TARDIS, and then one of the suits fucking force pulls his sonic from him and crushes it. Then you have a trauma that occurs to both Bill and the Doctor. Bill's space suit goes faulty as the airlock is about to open for everyone to do a space walk, and she can't put on her helmet. This leads to a horrible scene of Bill's face slowly freezing as her vision blurs and fades while she suffocates in the void of space. Bill ends up being okay, though, as the Doctor gives her his helmet and does a hack on her suit... but the price the Doctor pays for saving Bill like this is losing his vision. No TARDIS, no sonic, with limited air sold to him by the system and no eyesight. Beat to utter shit. Amazingly things get worse as Bill's suit glitches out again and the Doctor is forced to leave her behind, telling her it will all be okay. All Bill wants to hear is one of those witty jokes the Doctor keeps telling, but there is none. There's only Bill crying for her mother as the pulse electrifies her, and her body shuffles forward in an automatic suit.


So, then, we come to the endgame and the revelation of the plot. Why did everything go bad? Capitalism. Profits and productivity were down on the mining station, so the powers that be literally gave the order to murder everyone in their suits and send in a new team of happy workers to do better. Your life is in our hands... and we choose to crush it to save 3% on mining costs and a couple thousand breaths of air. The Doctor's solution to this, even though he is without most of the things that make him the Doctor now, is to flip the situation around. What sounds like a desperate suicidal gambit of keying everyone's life signs to the reactor turns out to be the solution. He doesn't break the rules this time; he plays within them to turn things around. The suits and those in charge will happily murder workers to get their profits up. They're just workers! Any old idiot can be a worker, and can be replaced at the drop of a hat and killed casually. Who gives a shit about "human life" when the almighty profits are down? The answer is when the profits are threatened further. The Doctor takes the threat of meaningless death at the hands of capitalism and gives it meaning. Their deaths will now mean the destruction of the space station. The very expensive to replace space station. Faced with that prospect, the suits stop their assault and share their oxygen. These people have value in the system now, as they are tied to the product. Oh, and Bill's okay even! Her glitchy suit wasn't powerful enough to deliver a lethal shock! Hooray!


The one disappointment of sorts is that the two surviving crew members ask to go to the Head Office to complain. Not that this is a bad idea of sorts, but just an ill-advised one. Given what we know about these capitalists so far, the minute these two come in and start complaining? They'd be shot and their relatives would be billed for the fucking cost of the laser bolts and body disposal. That being said, the Doctor does tell us that within six months the whole thing comes crashing down and that it's the end of capitalism in the world of Doctor Who. Good... but there's still the wistful sense of, having watched everyone die for fucking nothing, to want to see the money shot of the whole fucking thing crashing down. To paraphrase Jack Graham on Twitter, Doctor Who used to show these revolutions ending with the capitalists being thrown off of a fucking roof. Given that the show gave us such a satisfying look into the comeuppance of a shitty racist, imperialist, and capitalist piece of shit just two weeks ago, it's a little bit of a letdown. Still, things aren't all hunky dory. The Doctor's still blind, and who knows how long that little thread is going to last? Regardless... the hell with it. Oxygen is the best S10 episode so far. Even if it doesn't have such a satisfying takedown of the capitalists, opting to tell instead of show, it's still just a brutal beatdown of our main characters and tense as all hell. Mathieson is four for four. Well done!


Next time: The Doctor meets with the Pope to give him a copy of Undertale solve a mystery about a book or some shit.