Praxeus - Review

Frankly, I'm not entirely sure why it took two writers to deliver us Praxeus. Chibnall's inclusion in the opening credits did make me think that we might get a little bit more story arc development. As of last night I was sure a lot of people tuned in because of the big revelations of last week - and would have been disappointed to see no mention of them whatsoever. However, on seeing the overnight ratings for Praxeus I don't understand what went wrong. 240,000 less people tuned in.
This was a perfectly okay story, but hardly a classic. There are obvious comparisons with Orphan 55 which I should get out of the way right from the start. As with that earlier episode, there were rather too many people cluttering things up. We could easily have done away with the Peruvian ladies, or the astronaut and his husband, without damaging the main plot - probably the former, as the inclusion of the astronaut at least kept us guessing for a while that he might have brought the alien infection down with him when he crashed. As with Spyfall, we had a lot of globetrotting - which again wasn't totally necessary. Back in 1970, The Silurians managed to convey the potential dangers of a global pandemic without setting foot outside Marylebone Station. We also had the big environmental issue - this time specifically plastics in the world's oceans. At least this time the story didn't preach to quite the same extent that Orphan 55 did. Two stories in the same short season, so close together, on the same theme was a mistake. In my review of Orphan 55 I mentioned that I believed that we fans are a generally enlightened lot, who already care about such things - so it was merely preaching to the converted. Defenders might argue that Doctor Who is a family show, watched by a lot of children, but I'm afraid under 4 million viewership probably means it is primarily fans who are watching - not a sizeable general TV audience. (If you want an environmental message to reach the widest possible audience, then you have to somehow get it into Love Island or I'm A Celebrity... Good luck with that...).
I could say a lot of nice things about the various exotic locations and sets - but if you're looking at the scenery then the story has big problems. I could comment on how nasty the deaths were, as people became petrified before exploding - except Quatermass did it far more shockingly back in 1979 (the John Mills one).
We didn't even get any decent aliens - just human-looking / human-sounding ones.
If you really wanted to do a story about the pollution of the Earth's oceans, then that should have been a job for the Sea Devils. They live there, after all, and we could have heard about the problem from their perspective, rather than listen to another lecture from the Doctor.
One of the best things about last week's episode was seeing the Doctor put on the back foot - not knowing what was going on for a change. Last night, we were back in know-it-all mode, which I find increasingly annoying.
Looking at some comments on-line today about this story, I see some people seem to think that having a married same sex couple is enough to render this story some kind of elevated status. Lesbian and gay couples get married all the time. It happens. Get over it. If you think that people should get a special pat on the back for including this then you aren't paying very much attention to the real world, or to dozens of other TV programmes, including soaps, which are already showing this.
I can just picture the writers sitting back when they had finished, smugly thinking how enlightened they were...
If all this sounds as if I hated Praxeus, that's not the case at all. Honest! I just found it ordinary.