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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.
All Hail the Mighty Pting! by Niall Jones 21/12/24
Why do Doctor Who fans seem to hate The Tsuranga Conundrum so much? In a recent Doctor Who Magazine poll, conducted to coincide with Doctor Who's 60th anniversary, readers voted it the fourth worst story of the Thirteenth Doctor's era, ahead of only Legend of the Sea Devils, The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos and Orphan 55. Five years earlier, it ranked even more poorly, coming last in the magazine's Series 11 poll.
Given this, the most surprising thing about The Tsuranga Conundrum is how unmemorable it is. Before re-watching the episode to write this review, I could only clearly recall two things.
The first of these was, of course, the Pting. In a series that generally lacks interesting villains or alien species, the Pting stands out. It's cute, small and surprisingly deadly. An insatiable appetite for non-organic substances, such as metal, have led it to decimate whole fleets and claim countless lives. Despite this, the Pting comes across as innocent. Dangerous, but not dastardly, it has no malign intent: it's just hungry.
Although The Tsuranga Conundrum was written by Chris Chibnall, the Pting was created by Tim Price, who joined the series' writers' room, but was unfortunately unable to contribute a script. Still, given that Price's new play, Nye, about Aneurin Bevan, founder of the NHS, launched at the National Theatre on 24 February with Michael Sheen in the lead role, his failure to have written properly for Doctor Who doesn't seem to have harmed his career. He can be proud of having come up with the Pting, however. It's a genuinely great creation. Based around a simple, but unusual concept, it is distinctive and well-designed. It also has a great name: short, memorable and slightly silly. It's almost onomatopoeic, as if Ptings really might go 'pting' when they spot a particularly tasty-looking spaceship. Coming up with a good name may sound like a relatively straightforward task, but it's something that Chibnall clearly struggled with while writing for the show. You only need to look at this episode's title for confirmation.
The second thing I remembered about The Tsuranga Conundrum was a single joke at the episode's end. After Yoss gives birth to his son, assisted by Graham and Ryan in their roles as doulas, he declares that he will name him in honour of their Earth origins. The boy is to be called Avocado, 'after the old Earth hero, Avocado Pear'.
The joke may be silly, but it is also genuinely funny. Despite this, the fact that it comes at the end of the episode makes it feel tacked on, suggesting that, for Chibnall, humour isn't central to Doctor Who. Whereas both Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat mix comedy into even their darkest works, seeing it as a key ingredient of all drama, Chibnall's comedy feels more throwaway. It's as if he writes jokes only because he knows that the audience expects Doctor Who to be funny sometimes. Scenes such as Graham's laser-enhanced 'soft shoe shuffle' in Spyfall Part 2 feel as if they have been added solely to appeal to children. To be clear, this isn't necessarily a bad thing --- after all, children make up a large part of the show's audience --- but it does show the extent to which his approach to writing Doctor Who is less sophisticated than that of either of his predecessors.
While these are the two aspects that stand out most for me in this episode, they may also be factors in why so many fans rate it so poorly. In her TARDIS Eruditorum blog, Elizabeth Sandifer argues that the "cute" and therefore "silly" design of the Pting, combined with the fact that this is 'the first episode of the Chibnall era to go hard on the gender thing', proved to be anathema to conservative fans. Although the era's progressive credentials are often exaggerated in the media --- in fact, critics such as Sandifer frequently lambast it for its conservatism --- it is true that The Tsuranga Conundrum does challenge gender norms through its supporting cast. For example, General Cicero is a woman, while the pregnant Yoss is a man. Although Yoss is not presented as a transgender character, instead coming from a species where men give birth to boys and women to girls, his presence feels like an open-hearted gesture. By presenting his pregnancy as normal, rather than as something odd or sci-fi (he simply failed to take precautions during a holiday romance), the episode acknowledges that there are alternatives to conventional gender identities, even if it stops short of actual transgender representation.
To me, the things that seem to annoy so many fans are what make the episode interesting. If anything, the problem is that it doesn't go far enough. Despite the joke at the end, it doesn't present itself as a comedy. The trailer highlights threat, with the line 'It's going to kill us all, isn't it?' playing as a voiceover. The episode itself begins as a serious piece of sci-fi, emphasising the Doctor's outrage at the sonic mines that she and her companions fall victim to. From then on, her reactions to events remain furious. The problem here is that the serious parts of the episode are quite generic. Remove the Pting and Yoss, and there's very little left. In fact, these are what save The Tsuranga Conundrum from blandness, suggesting that it would have been a better, more memorable episode had it leaned further into comedy.
While The Tsuranga Conundrum is better than its poor poll ratings suggest, it nevertheless has its flaws.
The most glaring of these is the use of technobabble and contextual allusion. For an example, consider these lines said by the Doctor when she first encounters General Cicero: 'General Cicero? Eve Cicero? Keeba Galaxy? Neuro pilot? You're mentioned in the Book of Celebrants. You helped defeat the Army of the Aeons at the Battle of the Underkind'. Of all the things mentioned here, only one of them is relevant to the plot.
As with many of the flaws that bedevil Series 11, the problem here is the execution. After all, one of the beautiful things about The Lord of the Rings is the way in which JRR Tolkien includes evocative, but often unexplained allusions to create a sense of depth and scale. To take an example from Doctor Who, Davies' allusions to the Time War --- the Skaro Degradations, the Horde of Travesties, the Nightmare Child --- evoke the madness and horror of that conflict more effectively than any visual representation could. In both cases, allusion may not advance the plot, but it does contribute greatly to the feel of the stories. Although the number of allusions in The Tsuranga Conundrum is excessive, given the episode's small scale, the biggest problem is that the names Chibnall comes up with are just boring. 'The Army of the Aeons' and 'the Battle of the Underkind' are too generic to inspire the audience's imaginations and are destined to be quickly forgotten.
Other flaws in the episode include the fact that the companions are given almost nothing to do in the first half. They just stand there, asking the Doctor questions or making contemporary references. Similarly, Ryan's staccato dialogue makes his every line feel like an attempt to end the conversation as quickly as possible. Although there are a couple of nice moments, such as the Doctor's enthusiasm for pentagonal numbers, the dialogue is generally uninspired and the exposition clunky. However, none of these problems are unique to The Tsuranga Conundrum.
Almost everything that is wrong with the episode is also a problem in other scripts written by Chibnall. There is nothing about it that is uniquely bad and it has several redeeming features. This makes The Tsuranga Conundrum a fair representative of its era. Like Series 11 as a whole, it may be only partly successful, but it shines brightest when it tries to do something different.