Story 270: Oxygen

In which the Doctor lectures his students about the dangers of outer space. 

On a remote space station, a man named Ivan and a woman named Ellie are making their way across the structure's hull, clad in spacesuits. They are being pursued by other members of their crew, some of whom aren't wearing their helmets. They are walking corpses, and one of them grabs Ellie - killing her with a powerful electric shock...

A short time later, the Doctor decides to make another trip in the TARDIS with Bill, and deep space is where he wishes to go. Nardole enters the ship to remind him about his vow to remain on Earth and guard the vault. He has removed one of the fluid links to disable the ship - only to find that the Doctor has bypassed this. The TARDIS dematerialises, and picks up a distress signal.

It arrives on the space station, which is named Chasm Forge and which is built into an asteroid. It is a mining complex, stripping the asteroid of its copper ore.

It has recently suffered some sort of disaster. The Doctor and his companions come across a space-suited figure - a man who is obviously long dead. His suit is holding him upright.

The computer reveals that the station is on shut-down, due to most of the crew being dead. It is no longer financially viable. They discover that the station does not have its own separate oxygen supply. This is provided only by the spacesuits, which the Doctor recognises as computer-controlled Smartsuits. The computer detects the air supply brought by the TARDIS and seals it off from them. They must obtain their oxygen from the suits, and find three of them in a maintenance area. The oxygen supply from each suit is limited, and its wearer has to pay for more.

They are attacked by more of the dead crew in their Smartsuits.

They then meet the surviving crew members - Ivan, Abby, Tasker and a blue-skinned humanoid named Dahh-Ren. From them they learn of recent events. The suits killed their occupiers with an electric charge - a process triggered by the company which runs Chasm Forge as a way of cutting costs.

Some sections of the station are not in the computer's schematics, and the survivors have found that they can hide here from the suits. Before they can reach a safe zone, one of the suits kills Tasker.

Whilst using an airlock to move to another area via the external superstructure of the station, Bill discovers that her suit is faulty. The helmet switches itself off. The Doctor saves her by giving her his own helmet, arguing that he can survive the environment of space better than a human.

However, Bill is horrified to discover that the Doctor's act of self-sacrifice has left him blind.

The pursuing suits discover their location and attack once more, this time killing Dahh-Ren.

The Doctor has Ivan lead them to a more heavily protected area - the station's power supply room. On her way there, however, Bill finds her suit malfunctioning further. It activates the magnetic boots, immobilising her in the corridor. The Doctor is powerless to help her. She is electrocuted and apparently killed.

The Doctor carries out some work in the power room, supposedly creating an independent oxygen supply, but he is really connecting up the life support registers of their suits to the power supply systems. If they die, their suits will trigger a coolant shut-down and the station will be destroyed. The Doctor then allows the pursuing suits to enter the room.

They do not attack them. The Doctor has deduced that the company behind Chasm Forge, whilst open to reducing its workforce if unprofitable, would draw the line at losing an expensive mining station. The suits give them their oxygen supplies - now ordered to keep them alive at all costs. Bill proves to have been only stunned by her suit. The Doctor had rightly guessed that it was low in power and could not deliver a fatal charge.

Back in the TARDIS, Nardole tells Bill that he has healed the Doctor's eyesight. Ivan and Abby will go to the headquarters of the mining company to raise a complaint. At St Luke's, the Doctor tells Bill that their action would prove successful. Nardole is later furious with the Doctor for having put their duty to the vault at risk. The Doctor reveals that his eyesight has not been repaired - he is still blind...

Oxygen was written by Jamie Mathieson, and was first broadcast on Saturday 13th May, 2017.

Mathieson had provided three scripts for Capaldi's Doctor, two of which had proven to amongst the most popular episodes of Series 8 - Mummy on the Orient Express and Flatline. For Series 9 he had provided the less successful The Girl Who Died.

The idea of a story set in space came from Steven Moffat. Some earlier episodes had reduced the threat of outer space - such as when River Song flies through space from the Byzantium to the TARDIS. Taking their cue from the 2013 film Gravity, Moffat and Mathieson wanted to make space dangerous again.

Settling on capitalism as the "enemy" led to the notion of the deadly suits - "Suits" being the generic term used to describe bankers and business people.

Unfortunately, a huge opportunity to build on an earlier story is missed. Mathieson had previously included the rather sadistic computer GUS in Mummy on the Orient Express - an operative for a ruthless, faceless capitalist organisation. It would have been so easy to have brought GUS back here, as this story is all about the deadly workings of a computer system belonging to a capitalist outfit. 

The suits are actually made by a company called 'Ganymede Systems', so only needed a word beginning with "U" between to confirm the link - e.g. 'Ganymede Universal Systems'.

The irony is that Mathieson intended all this - but then changed his mind.

By not making this link, it actually makes Mathieson's new story look less original, since we've seen this similar set-up before.

They could have looked even further back, and had the company turn out to be the Company - the Usurian-run organisation seen in The Sun Makers.

Another major quibble with this episode is the pre-credit segment. The character Ellie (played by Katie Brayben) is space-walking across the hull of the station, in a suit which has a rapidly depleting oxygen supply, and with a radio that doesn't work - yet she stops to have this big heart to heart conversation with partner Ivan. Maybe if she just shut up she might have survived a bit longer.

People in genuine life and death situations simply do not behave this way, and this sort of writing really annoys. As a viewer you are taken out of the drama whilst you shout at the character.

The guest cast is headed by Kieran Bew, who plays Ivan. He had been a regular in the fantasy series Da Vinci's Demons. He was nursing a back injury during filming, sustained whilst surfing in California.

Dahh-Ren is Peter Caulfield, who had featured in the Russell T Davies linked series Cucumber and Banana. He and Pearl Mackie had appeared on stage together in 2014.

Playing Tasker is Justin Salinger. Abby is played by Mimi Ndiweni. 

A new story arc is introduced, as the Doctor's blindness proves to be more than a temporary affliction. This may impact his ability to protect the vault, whose occupant is still unknown.

Overall, another very strong script from Mathieson, if hardly original. As mentioned above, nasty faceless capitalist companies caring little for their workers had been done before. What makes this a very good story are the performances (especially Capaldi and Mackie) and the creepy zombie space-suited dead.

Things you might like to know:

• The Doctor describes Space as "the final frontier" in his lecture - employing the well known opening phrase from the Star Trek franchise.
• Disabling a fluid link had previously been seen to halt the TARDIS dematerialising in The Daleks, when the fault locator had identified component K7. In this episode, it is K57 which Nardole has removed.
• Missy was going to be seen for the first time, playing the piano in the vault, but the reveal was held back until the following episode.
• DWM had previously published a comic strip in which people inhabited computerised spacesuits which continued to function after death - though in that case they were soldiers rather than workers.
• The ending of the main storyline copies that of The Rebel Flesh, as the survivors of corporate greed are taken in the TARDIS to their company HQ to register their grievances.
• An initial story idea had the setting of a "spaceship graveyard", with alien monsters scavenging from ship to ship and the Doctor and companions, with human survivors, having to stay one step ahead of them. One of the humans was a disguised alien.
• The name Chasm Forge was inspired by the Valley Forge - the spacecraft in the 1972 ecological sci-fi film Silent Running, which also deals with the consequences of capitalism in space. (That in turn was named because the movie was filmed on a US Navy aircraft carrier called USS Valley Forge, which was named after a battle in the American War of Independence).
• On set, Peter Caulfield was referred to as "Blue Peter" throughout filming.
• Dahh-Ren was named for a friend of Mathieson's named Darren, who had a son called Ivan.
• Despite having worked on the series since 2005, movement coach Ailsa Berk was credited as "Ailsa Burke" on this episode.