In which the TARDIS crew split up to investigate multiple alerts spanning the entire planet Earth.
Meanwhile, an orbiting space capsule piloted by astronaut Adam Lang is having difficulties and losing altitude.
Adam's husband is ex-police officer Jake Willis. He learns from a news bulletin that the capsule has fallen into the sea somewhere in the Far East, and sets off for Hong Kong to help in the search.
A pair of travel vloggers - Gabriela and Jamila - visit a region of Peru renowned for its beauty, only to find it terribly polluted. They notice a large flock of birds circling above.
That night, Jamila leaves their tent and is attacked in the darkness. The following morning her friend is looking for her when she sees one of the birds drop dead at her feet. As she reaches down to touch it, she is stopped by Ryan. He bags the bird up and agrees to help Gabriela find her companion.
In Hong Kong, Jake receives a text from Adam's phone which leads him to a warehouse. In the alley outside he meets Yaz and Graham, who have been tracking strange energy signals.
The Doctor, meanwhile, is on the coast of Madagascar, where a US submarine has been reported missing. Scientist Suki Cheng and her lab assistant Aramu, see the Doctor drag a sailor out of the surf - sole survivor of the submarine. His body is rapidly being engulfed in a crystalline substance. As it totally covers him, he perishes as his body crumbles to dust.
She tells them of the similar death she has just witnessed.
Graham, Yaz and Jake enter the warehouse, observed by two armed men wearing hazmat suits. They discover Adam, connected up to some medical equipment. He is showing early signs of the deadly infection. The men attack, their weaponry clearly of alien design. Worried about damaging their own equipment, they teleport away. Yaz contacts the Doctor who brings the TARDIS to them, with Ryan still accompanied by Gabriela.
A message comes through from Madagascar, and the Doctor prepares to leave when Yaz decides to remain and investigate the warehouse further. Intent on learning what happened to Jamila, Gabriela elects to stay with her.
Yaz thinks that they can get the teleport working and so follow the masked men.
At Suki's laboratory, they discover that the birds are acting just like Ryan had seen in Peru, flocking together and circling their location. The Doctor has Ryan carry out a post mortem on the dead bird he had brought, and they discover that its insides are full of plastic.
Yaz and Gabriela use the teleport and find themselves in a strange tunnel. Yaz initially thinks they are in some alien base, until they spot parts of the missing submarine. They realise that they are in a complex deep beneath the Indian Ocean, surrounded by plastic debris. There is an alien spacecraft positioned here.
The Doctor works out that some extra-terrestrial pathogen is attacking the plastic ingested by the birds, and their natural defences are fighting this - causing their odd behaviour.
Adam is given broad-spectrum antibiotics to try to keep the infection at bay. Graham learns that he and Jake have drifted apart recently.
The Doctor becomes suspicious that Suki's laboratory appears to have exactly the types of equipment needed for them to investigate this pathogen.
Realising that a counter virus is possible, Suki reveals that she is not what she seems. She knows the pathogen as "Praxeus", and is aware of its origins. Knowing now how to cure it, she teleports away as the birds attack - killing Aramu.
Everyone retreats to the TARDIS and the Doctor takes the ship to Yaz's location, where Suki has arrived. It transpires that she belongs to an alien race whose planet has been wrecked by Praxeus - a genetically engineered pathogen designed to destroy plastic waste, which has mutated and become uncontrollable. Suki and her people have deliberately introduced it into Earth's ecosystem to use the planet as a laboratory, to find a cure. She is already infected, and dies from it.
The Doctor creates the cure in the TARDIS, which must be introduced into the atmosphere to spread across the planet. They will use the spaceship - but discover that it can only be piloted manually. This will be a suicide mission. With Adam still recovering, Jake decides to sacrifice himself to pilot the ship.
The Doctor manages to save him at the last moment.
Now reconciled, he and Adam decide to go travelling for a while, joined by Gabriela.
Praxeus was written by Pete McTighe, and first broadcast on Sunday 2nd February 2020.
McTighe, who now produces the trailer sequences for The Collection Blu-ray box-sets, had written Kerblam! for the previous series, which had proven popular with both fans and critics.
Prior to broadcast of Series 12, the BBC had announced that the new series would feature stories which dealt with topical concerns - specifically mentioning the pollution of the oceans by plastic waste.
This was leading to problems further along the food chain, as birds ate fish which contained microplastics - as did human beings.
The audience will have been well aware of images of the huge gyres developing in the world's oceans - islands of floating plastic waste, created by tide and current, some of which measure miles in diameter. Picturesque beaches have also been seen to be polluted with plastics, and there have been stories about where microplastics have been turning up.
A story dealing with global concerns needed an international reach, and so it was decided to make this a globe-trotting adventure. With filming taking place in South Africa again this year, that country was able to stand in for Madagascar, Peru and parts of downtown Hong Kong.
There are no monsters this week - other than human ones. The villains are a humanoid race who are amoral scientists, using a populated planet to carry out their experiments - despite their dabbling with nature bringing about the near destruction of their own world.
The story has a significant number of additional characters, as the TARDIS team are split up and interacting with others at each location. It's always been a problem since Chibnall took over - the return of the "overcrowded TARDIS". Even an issue when you had four and six part stories, but more problematic with 50 minute stories.
This episode really has too many additional characters.
The other big problem of this era is noticeable here - the messaging. It's no problem to have a message. It's the manner in which this is delivered that too often lets the series down under Chibnall. Instead of treating viewers as clever enough to get what's going going on by themselves, we have the message wrapped around a brick and are bludgeoned with it.
It's not quite as hectoring as in Orphan 55, but the Doctor's lecture at the conclusion of the episode is annoying.
Leading the guest cast is Warren Brown, who first came to fame in C4's Shameless and soap opera Hollyoaks. He's often called upon to play police officers, judging from his CV.
Playing his husband Adam is Matthew McNulty, who was fresh from starring opposite David Tennant in the thriller Deadwater Fell. Other roles for him included soap Emmerdale and period dramas Domina, The Musketeers and Jamaica Inn.
Gabriela is Joana Borja, recently seen with Peter Capaldi in Criminal Records.
Suki is Molly Harris, of Disney's Artemis Fowl, and Aruma is played by Thapelo Maropefela. Tragically, the latter died in his sleep following a violent incident in his native South Africa in October 2021, just before his 25th birthday.
Tristan de Beer plays the US submariner, Zach Olson.
Overall, its a story that certainly looks good, with some beautiful sets and locations, but perhaps it's a little too convoluted, with too many characters. The messaging went down like a lead balloon with fans, who regularly vote this the second worst episode of the season.
Things you might like to know:
- The episode was originally called "Hush" as this was the name of the pathogen before they settled on the more exotic Praxeus.
- An original draft had Jake track Adam's phone to an apartment block in Hong Kong - home of a nurse. He then followed her to the warehouse where he met Yaz and Graham and found Adam. The hazmat-suited men were going to be plastic people - clones created by Suki and her colleague Sanya - to experiment on to find the cure they sought. The story ended with Adam sacrificing himself to use the spaceship to spread the cure, which threatened only Hong Kong.
- The Autons do get a mention by the Doctor as she speculates on the pathogen, this being a story about plastic pollution. It's surprising that they were not used as the main threat here. (As it was, Big Finish later ran a Torchwood audio story involving ocean gyres and Nestenes).
- Doctor Who is hugely popular in Brazil. (The world tour promoting Peter Capaldi's first series included the country). There was therefore much interest there at the casting of Brazilian actress Gabriela Toloi as Jamila.
- This was the final story on which Neil Gorton's Millennium FX worked as a company. Gorton himself has continued to be associated with the series individually.
No comments:
Post a Comment