Doctor Who: The Tsuranga Conundrum

[andraste]

I enjoyed that a lot more that the last monster-of-the-week runaround, and I am giving it a whole extra point for containing the cutest monster in Doctor Who history. Although, actually, 'creature' might be a better description - the Pting doesn't show any signs of being sapient or evil, it's just hungry. I mean, it nearly eats the ship our heroes are on, but that's hardly its fault if it's just an animal looking for food. (Recalling to mind not only the spiders from last week but also the Twelfth Doctor's 'hardly anything is evil, lots of things are hungry' explanation from The Pilot.)

There are a few too many subplots going on among the guest cast for any of them to quite come together - the clone doesn't really need to be there at all, and piloting a space ship through an asteroid field should really look a lot more exciting than it did. Still, a fun episode on the whole. And of course Graham has watched every episode of Call the Midwife but looked away whenever there was any blood.

Apart from the Pting, my favourite thing about it is the way the sort of people who complain about Cultural Marxism as if that were a real thing are decrying the presence of a pregnant man, as if that weren't a common speculative fiction trope that has shown up in the Whoniverse before. Just ask Jack Harkness. But then, people who think that Doctor Who became leftist propaganda last week - as opposed to the Seventies at the absolute latest - always crack me up. Sorry, dudes, the Doctor is One Of Us and has been for decades. If you don't like it you can always leave. (They never leave.)