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| "Check out my Sandra Bullock impression." |
The previous two episodes of Doctor
Who series 10, Thin
Ice and Knock Knock,
both felt quite a bit like flashbacks to past eras of the show; Tom
Baker and Matt Smith-style adventures that seemed to dial back the
darkness of the previous two seasons and of Peter Capaldi's
characterization. Both were quite good in their own right (Thin
Ice more than Knock
Knock) and saw the dynamic
between The Doctor and Bill develop into something really fun and
interesting, but I had hoped that they weren't a sign that the show
wanted to altogether reverse the darker style that the 12th
Doctor era had developed over the past two seasons. With Oxygen
the show has proven that it has no such intentions. This is once
again a much more grim, much harder-edged episode, with a biting
social commentary just beneath its sci-fi/horror style. It is a very
Capaldi-era story, which shows that while this season is having
plenty of fun playing around with tone and style (to generally strong
effect), it hasn't lost sight of this era's overarching identity.
This is easily the best episode of series 10 so far.
Beginning
with an almost existentially dark monologue about the black void of
space and its desire to kill those who inhabit it, Oxygen
plunges The Doctor, Bill, and Nardole into a Dead
Space-esque nightmare
environment on a dark, uninviting space station filled with walking
corpses re-animated by technology. Thus begins a story that is half a
horror tale of deep-space survival, and half a cynically satirical
look at capitalism and corporate greed taken to its logical
conclusion: oxygen as a commodity that is treated as a privilege for
those who can afford it, rather than a right. This is dystopian
science fiction for the Donald Trump era of corporate sleaziness
creeping into politics, and for an era when it is considered up for
debate whether poor people deserve access to clean, safe drinking
water. It is the sort of story which holds a mirror up to the human
right issues we face today by showing a future where those things
have been taken to an extreme. Doctor Who really
takes the gloves off with the concepts at work in this one. Of
course, since this is Doctor Who and
not Black Mirror, it
isn't totally cynical: The Doctor's belief that people can fight
through the problems and find a better way, and that revolution can
always succeed against oppressive systems, certainly shows through.
But this is a tougher fight than most.
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| "Ok, who put on The Blue Man Group? It's not funny." |
As
such, it is totally a fight for Peter Capaldi's 12th
Doctor. While we have seen a kinder, gentler side of him over the
last couple episodes, Oxygen shows
that his fierceness and sometimes-frightening take-no-prisoners
attitude is still very much intact. This is the first time that Bill
really sees this side of him, and it very clearly scares her, as it
probably should. Things have gotten scary and dangerous on her
travels with The Doctor so far, but this is the first time things
have gotten really existentially grim, and Pearl Mackie does an
excellent job of showing how uncomfortable and genuinely afraid this
makes her. In fact, putting this episode after the last two probably
just further accentuates this feeling.
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| "Make space great again..." |
Score:
-
Christopher S. Jordan
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