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BBC The Tsuranga Conundrum |
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| Story No. | 307 | 
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| Production Code | Series 11, Episode 5 | |
| Dates | November 4, 2018 |
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With Jodie Whittaker, Bradley Walsh, Tosin Cole, Mandip Gill
Written by Chris Chibnall Directed by Jennifer Perrott Executive Producers: Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens, Sam Hoyle |
| Synopsis: The TARDIS fam are caught on an ambulance about to explode while a creature eats through metal. |
I said a puzzler, not a death sentence by Hugh Sturgess 10/7/24
I was going to do a review of Kerblam!, but I read Aristide Twain's review and it managed to say everything I wanted to say -- and more insightfully to boot. So go read that and then read my review of a somehow even less beloved episode.
This episode got a pasting from fans at the time and got a shocking (by the standards of New Who up to that point) AI of 79. In short, this was an episode that is both despised by fans and went over like a wet fart with the general public. For the life of me, I have no idea why. At the time I thought it was just fine and upon rewatch (the first time I'd even considered rewatching it since 2018) I thought it was... just fine. It's not remotely ambitious, but it's got the Pting and even gestures at theme and character, which is unusual in a Chibnall episode.
The Tsuranga Conundrum isn't remotely the worst episode of Series 11. It isn't even the worst episode of the first half of the season - surely Arachnids in the UK and The Ghost Monument are at least not noticeably better? Maybe it's just the straw that broke the camel's back. This was the fourth Chibnall-authored bland and pointless runaround out of five episodes, dropping around the time it was getting impossible to think the season would ever find a gear other than neutral.
I wonder if fans just don't like the Pting? There's a lot of mockery of the Pting in commentary around the episode, making the (deserved) comparison to Stitch and generally acting like this is a prima facie reason to dismiss the episode as rubbish (see, for example, Jay Exci's YouTube video criticising WatchMojo's defence of Series 11 which includes Jay just cackling "remember the Pting???" and evidently expecting us to share the joke). Frankly, if that's your view you should go away and be a fan of something else. I love the Pting. It's sufficiently far from Stitch to be its own design, while still evoking the obvious inspiration enough to be a reference rather than a rip-off. It's to Stitch what the Kandyman is to Bertie Bassett. There are some (perhaps unintentionally) hilarious shots of the Pting wagging its little bum around at it rips apart the ship, and the aggrieved cry of rage it makes when Yaz kicks it down the corridor wrapped in a blanket is laugh-out-loud funny. The original plan was for a larger, more threatening monster and budgetary restrictions forced them to opt for something that wouldn't have to be in very many shots, but it's absolutely a case of the production team reacting to a necessity with inspiration.
There is a type of Doctor Who fan who is appalled at anything that carries the whiff of the silly. One assumes it's because they can imagine the humiliation they'd feel if their non-fan friends caught the Pting on the telly and guffawed the next day at their love for something so silly and childish. It's like when everyone went apoplectic at the idea of the moon being an egg. Pointing out that something is silly is not a criticism if it's intentionally silly.
The very idea of a standard Doctor Who base-under-siege story, somewhere between a Troughton plodder and a Saward action-flick, but with the monster being an absurdly cute unthreatening-looking little guy who is nevertheless an indestructible omnivorous alien is brilliant. By itself, that sells the episode to me as worth doing. Doctor Who is exactly the place you can earnestly tell this story. I wouldn't want every episode to have an antagonist like the Pting. But if you dismiss this out of hand for having the Pting in the first place, you're saying that Doctor Who can never have an antagonist like this. And that's wrong and stupid.
There are, however, some flaws in the realisation of the Pting. Firstly, there really isn't any awareness from the cast that the creature looks cute and hilarious. This is undoubtedly because they had no design for the Pting when the episode was shot, but it does mean that the episode's central appeal is less fully embraced that it would be otherwise. Secondly, Chibnall just can't resist loading his trademark anti-Chekhov's Gun, as the script repeatedly emphasises the Pting's toxic skin, especially in connection to Ronan being an android and thus the only one who can touch it. That the episode has a monster that eats all inorganic material but can't be touched by anything organic and one of the characters is an inorganic android is immediately suggestive to the audience -- and yet, Ronan never touches it! It never tries to eat him!
This is a routine error in Chibnall's writing when he's in a hurry (which seems to be 99% of the time during his era). He'll introduce plot point after plot point and then forget about them, apparently because he didn't have the time for a redraft to remove things that might once have been going somewhere but didn't.
The episode makes good use of the stylistic strengths of Series 11: namely, its more relaxed pacing. The Pting doesn't even turn up until at least ten minutes into the episode. In the meantime, the closest the episode has to a villain is... the Doctor. She staggers around demanding to be let off the ship to reclaim the TARDIS, unheeding of Astos's warnings that this is endangering the other passengers, until he finally corners her and convinces her she's being selfish. It's a legitimately good character beat for the thirteenth Doctor in a season that gives her precious few; it's the first spiky, flawed moment Whittaker gets a chance to play. Brett Goldstein's Astos doesn't get much to do beyond this, but his moral victory over the Doctor gives him a curious power over the episode, and as usual Whittaker thrives on scenes with another charismatic actor rather than constant exposition, forced quirky monologues and running around (shame that these three things amount to virtually all of her material).
By putting the Doctor in the role of unwitting villain at the top of the episode, the story is implicitly paralleling her with the Pting, itself an unwitting villain. It also, in presenting the Doctor as flawed and short-sighted and needing to get some perspective, reflects back the Doctor's ultimate solution to the titular "conundrum" (What conundrum? That there's a monster on a spaceship? That's most of Doctor Who!), which is to stop treating the Pting as a monster to be defeated but as a solution in itself to the problem of the antimatter bomb. Themes! OK, it isn't Shakespeare but this sort of mirroring -- never explicitly acknowledged and not serving any plot purpose -- is really rare with Chibnall. It's actually rather elegant and is a good use of the depowered, de-centred Doctor of Series 11.
As usual, Chibnall introduces a bunch of new characters who suck up the oxygen that could go to the companions, but also as usual he's got a cast that manages to elevate the material. He manages to pick out two actors - Brett Goldstein and Lois Chimimba - who've gone on to bigger and better things since and gives them incredibly thin roles to play, which they do with aplomb. Suzanne Packer, Ben Bailey-Smith and even David Shields all manage to imbue a bit of life into their rote characters, though Yoss is probably too much of a caricature for Jack Shalloo (whose name sound rather like a Chibnall alien in itself) to do much with. It is probably Chibnall's greatest strength as a showrunner that he is so committed to casting actors a notch above what's needed for the material, and it's frequently the saving grace of an episode (or at least the only good feature of an episode).
What's really remarkable about this episode is that it actually manages to make time for Ryan, who gets a subplot about his own feelings of abandonment contrasted with Yoss's plan to adopt out his baby. These character moments, forced as they are (Ryan and Yaz's conversation as they stroll around the ship in the midst of the crisis is painfully slow), get rarer and rarer as the Chibnall era goes on, so to see one here is incredibly refreshing. It's typically clunky Chibnall dialogue, notably Yaz's weirdly invasive questions about Ryan's mum ("How did your mum die? Who found her? How old were you?"), but it's better than nothing. It's another rare moment of actually complex writing by Chibnall. He uses the experience of Yoss to inform our understanding of Ryan. This is incredibly basic character writing, but it's something the show mostly forgets how to do between Twice Upon a Time and The Star Beast.
However, it's a truly terrible episode for Yaz. She goes for about five minutes with no dialogue whatsoever when they arrive on the Tsuranga, and when she does speak it's mostly comparing outer space things to mundane things at home. The Tsuranga is "like the Red Cross" and the medics carry "a posh version of my uniform camera". In this, she really feels like a poorly developed Classic Series companion who is purely there to ask questions and dumb down the explanations. It's a mark of Mandip Gill's dedication to the part that she stuck around for three soul-crushing seasons while Tosin Cole, who gets actual character development and focus in Series 11, very obviously checks out halfway through the first season.
Look, I don't think The Tsuranga Conundrum is a great episode. It's not even a great premise ruined by its execution. I think it's an average premise partially elevated by a good cast and a quirky design decision. But I'd say that solidly puts it ahead of every other Chibnall-penned episode this season except the premiere. This was never going to be the season highlight, but it manages to be perfectly decent.
I recall Gareth Roberts once saying that even the worst Classic Who story (the example he used was Arc of Infinity, which, fair enough) was only one RTD rewrite away from being a classic. While that's surely an exaggeration for something like The Tsuranga Conundrum, it's definitely only a rewrite away from fixing all its remaining problems. The Doctor on an out of control hospital spaceship being eaten from the inside by a cute little alien while a bomb is about to go off and a patient is giving birth sounds like a fun romp.
I rather enjoyed The Tsuranga Conundrum and I'd gladly watch it a dozen times before I willingly watched Spyfall or The Timeless Children again.