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This is the Fusion Patrol podcast.
Each week, we look at a different science fiction TV episode or movie
and overanalyze it to within an inch of its life.
Welcome to the discussion.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Fusion Patrol. I'm Eugene.
And I'm Simon.
And tonight we're looking at the Doctor Who episode.
Praxeus by Pete McTighe and Chris Chibnall.
Episode Synopsis.
It's a tale of three threads.
In one thread, UK astronaut Adam Lang is lost on re-entry.
only for his estranged husband Jake, an ex-copper, to receive a text message from him asking for help.
The message originates from Hong Kong, where he meets Yaz and Graham,
who are investigating strange energy readings.
They find Lang strapped into an alien machine and rescue him from the hazmats, who have imprisoned him.
There's the thread of two travel vloggers, Gabriela and Jamila, visiting Peru,
who discover not only a lot of garbage, but birds that attack.
When Jamila goes missing, Ryan turns up investigating the mystery of the birds.
They discover Jamila, dead, sort of, in a nearby inexplicably deserted hospital.
She is soon covered with a strange alien skin condition and explodes into a pile of dust.
And finally, it's the threat of a missing U.S. submarine and the lone sailor the doctor rescues
after he washes up on the shore of Madagascar,
near a research facility looking into cleaning the oceans of microplastics.
And when I say rescues, I mean drags ashore only to watch him get covered in a strange alien skin condition and explode.
Also, the research facility is being watched by flocks of non-native birds.
In each of the first two threads, the doctor turns up to retrieve the team members
and takes them all, minus Yaz and Gabriela, back to the research facility in Madagascar,
where, with the help of scientist Suki, she tries to piece together the clues to the mystery.
Yaz and Gabriela stayed behind in Hong Kong to investigate the alien lab,
and later impulsively travel through a teleport where they find the missing U.S. submarine.
A dissection of one of the dead birds reveals that it is stuffed full of plastic,
and at this moment, the 2x4 swings forth from the television set,
smacking the viewer up the backside of the head with today's moralizing.
Humans are poisoning the planet with all their plastics.
These plastics break down into microplastics and are ingested into everything, even humans.
An alien bacteria that eats plastic has come to Earth, but instead of contenting itself on eating all of the plastic all over the place,
even in the planes that fly in the sky, they instead concentrate on eating the plastic in birds and in humans.
This has the unfortunate side effect of making birds die and fall from the sky, but making humans explode.
The doctor and Suki, along with some helpful Earth-based enzymes, seem to be on the verge of a breakthrough.
Gosh, it's quite the convenient coincidence that Suki has a well-equipped lab working on microplastic-related research.
That is, until Yaz reports in from the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
Readings on the alien doohickey thingy pinpoint a point right there in Madagascar.
And the gig is up.
Suki is an alien working to save her people from a nasty alien plastic-eating bacteria named Praxeus.
Now, just to be clear, the bacteria is named Praxeus.
Suki is still named Suki.
It was Suki who brought Praxeus to Earth because humans are a special kind of destructive monster.
It took her people scouring three galaxies to find a planet as screwed up as this is.
Suki disappears, but not before giving her thanks to the doctor and a warning.
Praxeus is a smart bacteria, and it's coming for her.
And indeed, the Praxeus-infected birds do a poor man's hitchcock on the gang,
attacking everyone, yet not managing a single scratch.
Back to the TARDIS, where she tests the experimental antidote on Adam.
If it doesn't kill him, she'll have found the cure.
They pop to the bottom of the ocean to retrieve Yaz and Gabriela.
They also find Suki, who dies, not entirely of Praxis, but rather the combination of the doctor's experimental cure,
which Suki tried on herself, Praxis, and her alien biology.
It makes things worse, and she explodes.
Too bad she already transmitted the cure back to her people.
I hope they don't try it.
Adam recovers, and with a clinical trial sample size of two, with one fatality,
The Doctor rushes to use Suki's spaceship to disperse the cure into the Earth's atmosphere.
Suki's ship has a malfunction and Jake has to fly it into space because being a spaceman is easy.
And he disperses the kill or cure into the atmosphere, spreading it to the entire planet.
And as the ship explodes, the Doctor rescues Jake.
The end.
Now I just want to ask a quick opening question.
Do they have 2x4s in the UK?
Okay. Do I have to explain what that is?
You mean like we're talking timber here?
Yes. Yes.
Okay. Yes.
Oh, okay. So yes, two by four, in case that's not common, because I know it's imperial measurement, sort of.
I mean, a two by four is really one and three quarters by three and a half because of capitalism.
But yeah, two by four. Okay. Yeah. A nice board that you could whack somebody with.
Okay. Just checking to make sure that that reference was not.
What do you think of Praxis?
Well, I wish this one had been about the talking cat in Ontario.
And I wish they'd never mentioned the talking cat in Ontario, but I see your point.
I'm still holding out my hopes that next week is going to be about the talking cat in Ontario,
who's going to say, can you hear me?
But maybe, I don't know.
I mean, when I started watching this for the first time...
Okay, I know where we're going.
Go ahead.
Sorry.
I was quite enjoying the fact that it has possibly the most X-Files vibe
of any Doctor Who episode to date.
And at that point, it hadn't quite...
I mean, it definitely falls apart towards the end.
And on the rewatching, you can see all of the sort of plot holes as they emerge.
But you don't necessarily realise at that point that they are going to be quite so disconnected and contradictory.
So I kind of quite like the atmosphere of that.
I thought it was badly directed again.
And yes, it turns out it's the same director as Spyfall part one.
But this time, I really don't think there's any getting away from the fact that the plot itself,
both on a kind of, you know, you look at something from 10 foot away and you kind of go,
you know, is the rough outline there? Is that roughly the right shape?
It doesn't really make any sense. I mean, what is this episode about?
And then when you look at it close up in detail, no, it definitely doesn't make any sense.
You're stealing my thunder.
You're stealing my thunder here.
That's my whole central premise of this is that I will say when I was watching the beginning of this episode.
And again, the directing didn't bother me.
But as we're in fact, in some places, I thought they were doing a fairly decent job.
As you go through the episode and you're building the mystery and you've got the three threads and you don't know what's going on.
on, I was genuinely, for the first time, I think all year, enjoying an episode of Doctor Who
wholeheartedly going, I'm quite, I like, they built an atmosphere here. I'm kind of, I don't
have a clue where this mystery is going. I want to know where this mystery is going. The whole,
And I'll tell you, actually, I kind of lied at what point that I got hit upside the head.
When they zonked the shot and showed the camera fly up through the huge patch of garbage in the Indian Ocean gyre,
I can't repeat the exact words that I said to my family.
But I said, oh, blank, blank, blank.
It's the blanking, blank, blank, fake, blanking, blank, Indian garbage patch gyre.
And then it all started to fall apart in my head.
And I'll just clarify, I'm not claiming that the garbage patch in the Indian gyre is fake.
But it don't look anything like that.
And that irritates me.
But anyway, we can come back to that later.
It was terribly, terribly badly realized.
I mean, what they showed on screen didn't look like anything.
Yeah, it looked like garbage going down a drain or something.
But yeah, it was...
I don't know what it was supposed to be.
But equally, I don't know why they bothered.
She just explained what it was.
We didn't have to see it if they weren't capable of realizing it.
I mean, obviously, in an ideal world, yes, we'd get a decent rendition of it.
But if you showed a picture of what it actually looked like, nobody would be impressed because it doesn't look like that.
It looks like not much.
In fact, try finding good pictures of it on the Internet.
I dare you because I spent some time trying.
But again, I'll come back to it.
But yes, this not only did the story fall apart at that point because I got whacked upside the head and I was now annoyed.
Literally irritated and annoyed that they had done this again.
but as you say when you watch this through the second time it's a complete shambles none of the
things they do fit with with what the ultimate resolution or what the ultimate problem is or
and i've got a list a mile long here of questions that i can just ramble through and go why is it
this why is that why is the hospital deserted why is that this today today we just none of it makes
any sense. And it, you know, and this, this comes back to, I know I've said it before, I'll say it
again. You know, it doesn't matter to me how a writer gets to the conclusion of a story, i.e.
do they, do they just sort of read through it in their mind as they're writing it, they come to the
conclusion or do they come to a conclusion and then work their way backwards or whatever? I don't
care how they do it. But when I know the conclusion to a story and I watch it again, everything going
up to that should work. It should make sense in context of what happened. And they can write the
greatest dialogue or the most emotional scenes ever, but none of that works for me if when the
story just, it's like it doesn't fit the pieces. They've got to go back and read it a second time.
And it's exactly what it feels like. It feels like they finished writing it, put the dot on it,
transmitted it off to Chibnall and said, I'm done.
I'm not even going to read it because it's amazing.
And Chibnall's co-writer on this.
I noticed that.
You say that as if writing dialogue and emotional scenes
isn't part of the story, but the story is the dialogue and the scenes.
Plot then.
Yeah, plot is something else.
And to me...
Well, no, dialogue by itself is not a story.
A story must have plot.
You know, if you're just going to write dialogue, go write speeches or something.
I'm not sure.
Well, it must have plot, but the plot can be incredibly minimal.
Yeah, okay.
I'm going to concede a point here.
It must have plot, and it doesn't necessarily have to have dialogue.
But usually a story has both.
And my overall point here is that there isn't any great dialogue and emotional scenes in this.
No, there isn't any of that either.
No.
So there's some genuine like, ooh, this is kind of,
tense isn't quite the right word,
but I at least had a sense of tension or something going into something.
It's atmosphere that you mentioned,
and it is the atmosphere that made me think about the X-Files
when they're sort of playing their torches
over the interior of that Hong Kong warehouse
or when they're all stranded in that base on Madagascar.
You know, there are direct links going off in my head.
Oh, yeah, this is, you know, it does have a nice atmosphere to it.
But the X-Files wasn't flawless.
No.
Particularly recently.
But nevertheless, I don't think they would have, you know,
there might be key details.
There might be even some fundamental things within the plot where you go, well, the science of that is just wrong.
But overall, the story has a trajectory to it.
Whereas I don't even know what the trajectory of this story is, what I kind of mean about the overall shape,
because it's like the plastic thing seems to have been almost bolted on.
it's as if in order to give this story depth we have to say something powerful and relevant oh
let's you know let's make this a story about another story about how humans are polluting
the planet now i'm not saying we shouldn't have another story about that we can't really have
enough stories about that until we bloody well stop doing it but that just bolting that on doesn't
automatically add depth to the story and in particular the moral doesn't tie in with what
we get in this story because it's it's it's half about the plastic pollution but it's the plastic
pollution in itself within this story isn't actually a problem it's only a problem when the
alien pathogen gets introduced and then starts somehow controlling the plastic and at some
points in the story appears to be acting as a sentient entity which is you know potentially
interesting except oh no this isn't actually about oh yeah except the doctor just wipes it out
so yeah but yeah and and wipes it out um it and and because it's alien it's nothing to do with
i think you probably deliberately made an allusion to doom watch in your in your i picked it up
because I was thinking the same thing.
But the point about the Doomwatch story,
which actually was a much more coherent story,
was that the plastic eating bacteria in that
was introduced by humans.
It wasn't that...
Trying to solve our plastics problem, though.
It wasn't that we had this benign plastic pollution
that was suddenly weaponized against us
by some pesky aliens.
It was that we had this terrible problem with the plastic pollution that was so terrible, it drove us to create another problem, which then was the subject of that storyline without wishing to go into any spoilers.
There is nothing that consistent in this.
Correct. I mean, it would be a big enough problem if indeed the alien bacteria was just eating all our plastic.
Yes.
We would be, you know, up a creek without a paddle.
if that happened so we and then there's then there's then there's all of the kind of
the biology that is associated with that so like like like you say it's only affecting the plastic
inside things which suggests to me that it's targeting the plastic it's going for which is
why i wonder and and when the birds attack it's as if they are behaving as a single entity which
is i wonder why why that is unless there is some sort of sentience to it and there is a reference
that i picked up the second time when i was going what what what's that when the the submariner on
the beach says it was already inside the sub yes i don't even know what it was because i think it's
because it's on my list yeah it's not and how and what what was what was it in the sea that the
plastic was that fish you know is it is it the same thing again is it plastic inside biological
entities because it wants to control or possess the biological entities for some reason whatever
that is and explanation would be nice but you know at least confirmation would be a start and then
the biology of the bird the the the bird's enzyme seems to be fighting back against the the oh god
the fighting back against the pathogen in the plastic and that allows them to uh with a little
bit of uh techno babble come up with some sort of um some sort of vaccine or whatever the hell it is
that they then decide to use on adam where the doctor says we can't possibly use it on adam
because it's too dangerous even though adam is dying and there's absolutely no hope of him living
if they don't try it on him and then they find one of suki's crewmates who is infected with the
praxeus and has it all over his face like we've seen with the other bodies but the doctor says
ah they have a different biology that's why they haven't exploded and then she says to suki i hope
you didn't try this vaccine on yourself because it's been designed for humans despite the fact
it was designed for birds and they've only just tried it on a human and then suki explodes even
though the doctor says that they don't explode because they have a different biology uh-huh
yeah it makes it it makes no sense i i'm just gonna i'm gonna do something different in this
podcast because I have another one that I have a deeper discussion that I want to talk about.
I'm just going to, I'm going to real quick list my, my list of questions. I'm not expecting any
answers for them, but if any of them interest you, we'll, we'll cycle back to them. But this is just
as I'm watching it the second time, I'm just writing stuff down and I have switched their
order a little bit in, in a logical order, but okay. So here they are. I'll tell you when the
list is done. How long have the aliens been working on Earth? How long has that submarine
been missing? It seemed very embedded in that Praxeus world. And it doesn't seem like the
sailor could have gotten out of the bottom of the Indian Ocean and made it to Madagascar in exactly
the same place as the lab. Why are the aliens where they are? Why is Peru in this equation at all?
It's nowhere near the Indian Ocean gyre. Why did the aliens need to snatch an astronaut when there
are millions of humans available in hong kong how did adam get a cell phone and contact jake
how who knows phone numbers by memory anymore is aramu an alien why is the hong kong lab filled
with alien tech but not suki's lab why is the virus attacking birds and humans but the results
of the virus is dissimilar in them why is that hospitals deserted why were the birds traveling
to non-native areas?
Those weren't seabirds, were they?
So were they eating plastics?
How are they able to crew the spaceship?
How is Yaz able to understand
alien scanning doohickey?
Is there something wrong with Yaz's
sea attitude about discovering alien colony?
Why did Praxeus, a bacteria,
build an undersea atmosphere bubble
for the aliens?
Are humans really the worst thing
in three galaxies?
Is the comment,
three idiots roaming,
it's snappy and accurate,
a really appropriate line for these people to say at the end. And just ask, is the TARDIS a cure-all?
This time it generates the antibacterial. I wish they'd been able to do that in the Silurians.
Okay. So-
That wasn't a question.
I know it wasn't because I think I was running out of questions at the end and I
wrote that note in the wrong spot. But yes.
It just kept rattling.
And some of them might be interesting.
But here's what I really want to talk about.
It's different.
We can come back.
Like I said, we've got some others there.
We can come back to those and look at.
This episode, and indeed this entire series, it hit me today.
Well, not today, but when I was watching it.
It hit me when I was watching it that the question, the thing that's bugging me is that
the whole series raises the question of evil.
And so for listeners who may not be familiar, the question of evil is a philosophical argument
concerning the existence or non-existence of God.
And it goes, and I'm summarizing, if God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibonelent,
then how can evil exist? And you can go into the whole theodysseys of free will or
I forget what some of the others are, but there are mental gymnastics that people perform to try
to get around that three point problem. Now, the doctor is not a god, is not God. But if you take
humans and you take god and you put the doctor on the scale of omniscient it's far greater than
humans the doctor is far more closer to omnipotent than our human and certainly far more towards
omnibenevolent the doctor omnibenevolent yes she's not omnibenevolent but she is benevolent
she's more benevolent than humans the others don't work she's more potent than humans okay
she's more yeah well i think yes being omnipotent being a bit omnipotent it's a bit like being yeah
right but on the scale between us and omnipotent it's further on the scale she knows more she's
got more power power and she's nicer and she's she's more proactive and probably the doctor
has always been the moral guidepost in this show russell t davis famously said that the doctor is
you know basically the the morality that comes into the story and sets things in action um
and she's always been kind of the poster child for getting out and doing things which is of course
the problem with evil is that if god can is all those things it shouldn't allow evil or it should
solve evil or it should whatever but and the doctor is always doing that wherever the doctor
goes, the Doctor lands, the Doctor, Jodie Whittaker's Doctor says, I'm the Doctor sorting
out fair play around the universe. I think that's almost her first line after she identifies
herself as the Doctor. She's out there, she's fixing things up. If all of these episodes week
after week are going to be telling us of how screwed up we are, why isn't the Doctor doing
anything about it? They walk away from these episodes. Oh, you're destroying your planet.
bye-bye oh you're messing up you're polluting things bye-bye like and why aren't uh graham
ryan and yes going hey doctor what can we do about these things and maybe do something because
certainly the doctor is not a non-interventionist right so because they have decided to take this
tack of moralizing at us and then the doctor is curiously not taking any action so the doctor is
losing her moral authority here, in my opinion. It doesn't jive. It doesn't fit with who the
Doctor is. I get why she's opposed to all these things, but she is not doing anything about them.
I think the answer is usually the web of time. It's a more difficult one in this case. I think
the problem of evil in Doctor Who arises with the sort of let's kill Hitler type thing.
any kind of any kind of historical where there are evils evils that take take place particularly
evils that led then lay down the foundations for massive social change um and you know you could
argue till the cows come home about the consequences i think that's a much more difficult
that's a much more difficult explanation for why the doctor wouldn't do something to stop
a race destroying the planet it lives on because if it were another planet she probably would
i think my feeling is that although i think i'm i'm not paying as much i'm not giving as much
weight to the utterances about setting things right around the universe or whatever, because
I don't like it. I don't think the doctor has a perfect moral compass. There are much
more interesting stories told when you actually think the doctor makes mistakes or acts in
a way that is quite, I don't want to say selfish, but is partisan, because it really is impossible
to be completely impartial. And then as soon as you have partiality, you can explore both sides.
And that includes exploring the side the Doctor is not on. And to me, that's interesting
storytelling. It's also much more interesting, i.e. because the jeopardy is greater, if you don't
present the Doctor as being massively, massively omnipotent. The Doctor is already very, very smart
and has a machine that can travel through time and space, which would give her a lot of power
if she were willing to use it in certain ways. But this idea that she could somehow save the
human race from itself, you'll say that the show has set up the premise that she can do that,
and maybe it has but i just don't like it so i prefer to ignore it well and i think that's
i think that's a fundamental structural flaw i mean that's the flaw with with uh the the problem
the question of evil is that people tend to self-justify it by ignoring some part of it
so that it fits with the the their idea and i don't disagree we are absolutely ignoring it
No, no, it's not a question of ignoring it. You can solve the problem of evil and you can solve
it very simply in an entirely consistent and rational way. Yes, you can, but...
But we're not... You know what it is. We're not here to convert people to atheism.
The Doctor is not a god. And when the show makes her a god, it creates the problem,
I grant you, but I prefer when it doesn't.
And so that's when I start ignoring evidence.
There is plenty of evidence that she is flawed and that she is not as powerful as she thinks.
And I'm clinging on to that and I'm ignoring the rest of it.
Yeah.
And I'm not saying that I'm recommending that she should go solve the problems on the planet.
I just think that because it's what the showrunner has decided to emphasize these problems to the audience,
then they're beginning to ignore the fact that they've got a, let's call God-like creature.
I mean, River Song literally called the doctor that at one point.
I guess something about it. Yeah. And from most people's perspective, she would she would appear like a god purely, you know, if you take the one fact that she can apparate from thin air.
Yeah. But I think the problem, the scope of the problem is fairly narrow.
It's not that we have episodes that highlight the ecological dangers that we are putting the planet in.
It's that we have the doctor giving speeches about it.
And she's making a big point of it, too. That's right.
We touched on it in Orphan 55, where it was particularly clunky because it came at the end and served no plot point.
But most of that speech that she gives in the lab in Madagascar, you could cut because when I watched it the second time, I can't remember what the lines were.
But she's explaining. She's explaining why it's a problem that we've all got microplastics in our body.
So she says, you know, she gives the facts we all have microplastics in the body.
And I was thinking, well, that's true. So why did I find this speech jarring so much?
And the reason was I'd forgotten that she then goes on to pontificate for two minutes about what a bloody mess everyone's made of it.
Which is, it could have been cut from the episode.
It wouldn't have made the episode any less impactful.
And it would have improved the pacing, especially when they're supposed to be in an urgent situation when moralising a great deal about the kind of generalised problems is probably not going to help.
especially to people who are going to agree with her anyway.
I mean, the people in the room,
as well as the people like you and me.
Yeah, it's just, yeah, they need to, I hate to say it,
if you want to tell a story about something
and you want to moralize a story about it,
you've got to lay it in integrally
and let the audience come to that conclusion,
not have the character stand up and tell you.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. And to labour the point we're making earlier, the plastic eaters does that.
This story doesn't do that because it doesn't tell a story where the actual peril is the plastic
itself. It's this alien pathogen. And the aliens are therefore the problem, not the plastic.
Well, but remember, this is by the guy who wrote Kerblam, the story we thought was going to be an amazing indictment against Amazon and in the end turned out to be a warning against Amazon.
Yeah.
He's just expanded from bubble wrap to plastic more generally.
Yes, that bubble wrap is part of the...
This guy's got a problem with plastic.
He's got a thing on for plastic here.
And yet he hasn't written an Auton story.
But he mentioned them.
Yes.
I'm thinking Chibnall probably did that, but that felt like a Chibnall ad.
I mean, if it had been an Auton story, it would have been better,
because you could at least have understood Autons controlling birds.
How would you like this one?
This is how the Autons came to be.
Yeah, yeah.
An intelligent creature formed up out of bacteria and plastic.
Could have been their origin story.
Yeah, it could be something there.
I don't know. There were things in this story that could have been a good story if they had been paired up with other things that made sense and were consistent.
Question on the morality of the thing. Do you think the doctor and the gang leave Earth and try to save Suki's people?
I don't get the sense that they do, no.
I don't either but we know Suki said she transmitted the the uh cure quote unquote cure
to her people and and then she blows up because it turns out it's a death sentence um but yeah
but I but I've got a much I've got a much more immediate moral problem that is similar okay it's
probably not on the same scale but because of its immediacy it's much more striking within the story
and that is you mentioned quite rightly i had the same question that we don't know whether
aramu is one of suki's people is is he also an alien but if we don't know the doctor and the fam
don't know either when aramu gets pecked to death by the birds and then the birds start attacking
the lab no one even mentions him let alone goes where's aramu or is he all right or i hope he's
right or oh my god aramu's being killed it's just literally they appear to have completely forgotten
about him so the idea they might forget about the rest of that race of whatever they were
is not especially surprising well and there were a few moments there
awkward that's that i consider that an awkward moment another one that i thought was when
they were out looking at the birds swarming and dangerous there on the beach and graham comes out
you know he's the old geezer in here is gonna die if you don't do something quick we need your help
quick are you just gonna stand around looking at those birds swirling around menacingly and
dangerously worrying us and he's completely ignoring the fact that he must know the birds
are a threat yeah and and he's trying to impose his priorities over of in and i mentioned that
because that scene is the immediate scene where armu says i'll stay out here i'll stay out and
then that's really the last thing that we care about him when we see him running he might as
well be putting a red shirt on at that point yeah and i also think you know the birds did a number
on him but when they burst into the lab one scratch and you're infected nobody nobody i don't
I think swinging a bat or a piece of wood at a bunch of birds is going to stop them from pecking you or scratching you.
It just, especially bacterially plastic controlled zombie birds.
No.
That was terrible direction, but also.
I'll agree.
In effects, yeah.
If I may pick up on a very similar piece of appalling direction.
These guys in their hazmat suits or whatever the hell they are with their alien guns are absolutely abysmal shots.
Yes, they are.
They're just firing all over the shop and not hitting anyone at all.
And then D.I. Willis picks one up, probably not firearms trained, given he's British anyway, but whatever.
He's not going to have used an alien gun before.
And suddenly he's a crack shot and he nails one in the head from the other side of the building.
i mean what yeah well that that was definitely a stormtrooper stormtrooper moment notoriously
worst shots in the in a galaxy far far away that but that could have been directed differently so
that yeah they they got closer and he got lucky or you know i or our heroes did something clever
to avoid being shot yes yes but but they they did not um so are we getting clues here to our
question of by fall that yaz is a plant or an undercover agent because she was acting really
weird in this episode i well i i i don't know i don't know i mean there have we we i don't think
it is that i don't think it is that i don't buy your theory from spy fall and i think there is
another reason for this in this episode which is that they are they're they're trying to they're
trying to develop yaz by showing her sort of standing up to the doctor and trying to explore
in her own right but it it ties in with the general problem in this series that none of the
companions are getting any development and even though i liked tesla and i liked the way that the
companions were written in that someone's actually done an episode an edit of that episode where they
have taken out every line of dialogue for all of the companions and it doesn't run much shorter
and it's very hard to notice where the cuts are oh i can yeah i so to to your comment in another
podcast and i can't remember which one it was but you know the doctor has a time machine it's a time
machine and so yes it's like no i'm not going with you i gotta go back in that room and i've gotta
i've gotta pull that thing out and the doctor's like we're in a hurry we gotta go wait it's quick
it's fast it's gone all right well i'll come back for you in an hour how right how does that jive
with the fact that you've got a time machine well i assume that's because yaz needs an hour to do
whatever she's going to do well they could have just hopped in the tardis pushed the button
forward one hour and gone blip and then been right back for her but they didn't bother to do that
that would have that would have been much better yes i agree why were they in a hurry they've got
a time machine well okay maybe adam's get into the time machine but yeah when they got into it
they should have they should have zipped forward an hour in time i mean again i think i think the
fact that the doctor is so good at piloting the tardis is causing a lot of problems and i don't
just mean with why she didn't save adrick in earth shock i just i just mean if you if you
all over the place yeah well yeah well yeah because suddenly she can save someone from an
exploding spaceship her precision is that that good the the the tardis the tardis is an excellent
story device i mean it's just absolutely brilliant if you use it as a way of arriving in any place
in space and time at the beginning of a story and then leaving and going somewhere else afterwards
And as we've discussed, you don't even need to be able to pilot it accurately or whatever.
If you don't take care of it during the story that you don't have access to it,
and both this one and Spyfall have this problem because they're using it as a kind of,
essentially as a terrestrial teleport, a space hopping device.
But it can do so much more than that.
there is and as soon as they have access to it you must ask the question why aren't why aren't
they doing more with that it needs to be taken out of the if you're going to have something like
that and as i say it's brilliant it needs to be taken out of the story during the story
yeah um yes just plunking around around on alien equipment understands it reads it makes perfect
I mean, I guess that's more of the fitting with your theory thing.
I, yeah, I can't really explain that.
But there is the scene at the end where they all seem to be able to understand how to,
even though they're trying to make a joke about they don't understand what they're doing,
they clearly do understand what they're doing because of the way they're speaking their dialogue.
I've inverted the polarity on the nuclear pile inverters.
It's like, or how about I push that button, doctor?
Yeah.
Yes.
Even Graham's faux pas is apparently him misspeaking
rather than him getting something wrong and quickly correcting it.
I agree.
I worry about Graham.
He doesn't get his directions wrong a lot nowadays.
But it's because he's been turned into the comic relief.
Yeah.
Rather than having his own personality like he did in Series 37.
I've got another piece of poor direction,
a couple of pieces of poor direction that I want to pick on
just to finish making my case on this.
the scene in the bar the first time that we see jake realize adam is missing it's not clear to me
whether that certainly from the first watching i think on the second watching it was the first
time he realizes adam is missing it's the first time we see any connection between he and him and
adam but his reaction is very strange it's not it's not yeah it's not it's not as if if
if you suddenly turned on the telly and saw that your life partner was crashing into the indian
ocean or was lost after re-entry or whatever you would have a very instant and sudden reaction
to it and it's and it's not he's just like turn the sound up mate it's not quite clear i mean he's
looking upset sure but it's it could be because this is someone he knew at school kind of thing
or it also because he just got kicked out of a job and he's drowning his sorrows too
it's why he looks upset i mean yeah yeah and then and and then at that very moment that he discovers
Adam is missing he gets a text
from Adam which is
kind of a weird coincidence
he gets a text from a Hong Kong
phone number that is not
in his address book
yes because presumably you don't get
to take a mobile into space
right and
I asked that in one of my quick questions
does anybody know anybody's phone number now
yeah do they
I mean do you think he would be able to
A. how the heck did he get
a mobile phone if he's been captured by aliens and strapped into a machine and well that's a
valid question and and then you know in that condition he remembers jake's phone number
complete with international dial codes and he sends him a text can you all right yep all right
well i guess you would know your own international dial code okay that's fine yeah and i and i know
phone numbers for close friends and family i i think very many of them are listening don't test
me on that yeah i think a lot some of you guys it's not personal i mean i i find that you know
even i know my wife's i have no clue what my kids phone numbers are i just don't because yeah yeah
that's what i mean you might you might know some of them because some people change their number
more often or whatever you ring some numbers more often doesn't mean you don't speak to the person
Maybe you just WhatsApp them instead.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
And since it's in your address book, it through lack, just from lack of doing it.
Yeah.
You know, call my dad.
Okay.
So I thought that was strange.
And then the fact, you know, the fact that it comes from somebody who doesn't know or a contact he doesn't know.
And, you know, he says, help me.
Who is this, Adam?
You would never in a million years get any emotional connection between those two people.
And so when they get to the point halfway through the episode and they're dragging around, how do you two guys know each other?
We're married.
Really?
But that's because the bar scene is so badly directed.
All of it up to that point is so badly directed or conveyed.
Well, yes.
But I'm just I'm picking on the examples.
I will also, because this is my final example,
when they say we're married or they say we're separated
and they say it at the same time,
you can't hear what either of them are saying.
I know I had to use the subtitles.
I mean, it's ridiculous because, first of all,
they should show us how they're related.
So as I've just been complaining,
we should already know at that point.
But then when we get this crucial revelation, it's impossible to make it out.
So you're still essentially in the dark.
You can make an intelligent guess at that point.
It's what I guessed.
But it seemed so contrary to what had gone before that I was still questioning myself rather than confirming it.
I mean, the closest I would have put is that they might have been brothers.
from the way we saw the scene,
but more likely just it's his friend.
That's what I thought.
At most.
That's what I thought.
Yeah.
So, yeah, it's all,
the characterization is not fantastic.
I was vaguely amused by Gabriela's,
you must have seen us throughout the course of the episode.
But I found that very strange.
The idea that she would expect to be recognized
because she did a vlog.
Oh, I agree that it's strange.
I just think it's amusing that she's so egotistical that she thinks that.
That would be like me going to somebody and saying,
you must have heard a Fusion Patrol.
Well, I'm just going to say, you don't recognize my voice, Fusion Patrol.
You must listen.
Okay.
To be fair, I was once recognized in a restaurant
from the old pre-podcast Fusion Patrol TV show.
That did happen to me once.
And that was freaky.
So after that, did you go around to everyone saying,
you must recognize me?
Recognize me?
No, no, no.
But it was a weird experience.
I was once recognized in a pub for being on a quiz show the night before,
but I hadn't been on the quiz show.
Oh, well, did you win?
Well, I don't know.
I didn't even watch it.
Was it a good quiz show?
I mean, was it like Mastermind or Eggheads or...
No.
What's the Connect the Dots?
What's the Victoria Corrin one?
It was that one.
Yeah, Victoria Corrin was the presenter.
That was the one I wasn't on.
Connections?
I mean, I wasn't on the other ones as well, but...
Oh, well.
Darn.
Yeah, it's weird.
Yeah, but yeah, I thought it was funny that somebody's...
they were just trying to portray her as having such an inflated sense of ego.
And who knows, maybe she gets 50 billion views on, you know,
she's cutie pie or cutie Kai or whatever.
Some of those big name YouTubers are,
even if you're in a game of Thrones, you wouldn't go around saying,
what do you mean? You don't recognize me. What's wrong with you people?
Because there are actually, believe it or not, people who haven't seen that.
I mean, whatever, whatever TV show, whatever it is,
there are still some people who haven't seen it.
Yeah, no, I absolutely agree.
I just think that it does kind of fit with a certain,
you know, there's sort of like the Big Bang Theory TV show
where some people love it and go,
yeah, I recognize those people as nerds I know.
And other people think the show is a horrible,
stereotypical presentation of them.
um i fall somewhere in between on that but the from the milieu of people i have known and met
and i can kind of see how certain stereotype vlogger would think that they are much more
popular than they are and i and and that was what was amusing me about that it was like this is
this is the the type personality it takes to get out there and do that to start with
then also might lead you to self-aggrandize your impact.
But yeah, that one was just one piece that popped up.
Let's see.
Were there any of the questions that you recall that I hit through that were worth talking about?
I think the one that bugged me the most is why was the hospital deserted?
Yeah, I have no idea.
I have no idea.
great tense scene but you know if you know i like i liked it when i thought we were getting an
explanation jamila you know if she's patient number one and she infected everybody else
why is her body still there's have theirs are all gone i mean that was
it would make more sense if everyone had run away in fear but we don't get any sense we did
see the bird so maybe maybe birds flew in and everybody ran away from the hospital and then
nobody came back it would yeah it would be nice to know so that was the and you know it's unclear
why the alien labs are where they are um i don't know if they actually went to madagascar and
hong kong i doubt that was really hong kong no they went to south africa again oh they
South Africa okay the the Hong Kong set looked remarkably like I need to re-watch it to check
if it actually is the same street but the the shots they the establishing shots they used in
the gathering episode nine of Torchwood Miracle Day in Shanghai because it's almost certainly a
street in Cardiff right and well okay yeah yeah I suppose I I I mean I suppose a fair amount of
miracle day was shot in la so it could be out there but i i bet it's the same street in cardiff
i actually thought it was possibly an indoor set it wasn't it wasn't convincing enough to me the
way it was shot that it was that i would have said they wasted their time to go out on location for
that those two or three shots yeah but but it was it wasn't it wasn't location in hong kong
it's probably located in grangetown or something um i'll say this my comments earlier about the
gyre the gyres are real obviously the garbage patch is a is a real thing um the the indian
ocean gyre takes about six years and swirling around from australia to to madagascar and
probably south africa which you know probably they could have uh just said we were in south
Africa instead of going to Madagascar.
But okay.
And yes, stuff that has been thrown in the ocean does tend to work its way towards the
center of the gyre.
But if you were floating through it, it isn't what they're portraying it to be in this.
Yes, it's trash suspended in the water column.
So that means it's not just floating on the surface.
goes down. I really did try to find some pictures of it. And the best I could find were really
close-up shots where you might get a little bit of garbage together so that you could,
but it's really dispersed. They estimate there are only 10,000 particles of microplastic per
square kilometer of water in that garbage patch because it's all breaking down and it's
into smaller bits. Yes, you might see some garbage on the surface, but it's just not the
thick layer that the environmentalists would really like you to think it is. I'm not saying
we shouldn't do something about it. That's totally, but you know, if it were a big patch of garbage,
you could trawl it up, right? You could net that stuff and make a difference, but it isn't. It
isn't what it's like. And in a way, it's a disservice to continue to perpetrate that myth.
It's kind of like when people used to think the Sargasso Sea was just this solid mat of seaweed, which incidentally is Atlantic Ocean gyre, brings all that stuff into that kind of location.
It just isn't like that.
I mean, it's a lot of water out there.
And it doesn't do any science literacy very good either for putting these things the way that they did in the situation.
Also, I do want to mention the whole thing about they had to go through three galaxies to find a planet like Earth that was polluted in this way.
That's a lot of space to traverse.
Sure, but we don't know.
I mean, how populated is space in the Doctor Who universe?
Who else shares the three galaxies?
Well, our galaxy and the two nearest.
it feels mighty it feels mighty populated throughout the galaxy and i admit you know
in the future earth is expanded out across the the galaxy so and that's just in our solar system
that's two planets in one solar system there's 100 billion solar systems in our galaxy who else
who else have we got who is in our galaxy the doctor has referred to ones in in our galaxy
but a lot of it is in the future of Earth. I will admit that. But the point is, is that not only are
galaxies really, really big for Suki's people to traverse, but the space between the galaxies
is really, really, really bigger. And Suki's technology didn't seem to be on par with that
task. That looked like, you know, kind of a little bit of a rockety thing with some organic fuel
cells, which was enormously convenient that organic fuel cells can handle anything.
But, you know, considering what we've seen of other planets, they all seem to be just
as bad as Earth, right?
I mean, I mean, they're all analogs for Earth.
So therefore, they're all just it.
Once again, it portrays, you know, you know, it really takes humans to screw stuff up.
All those other, I mean, sure, other galaxies or other planets, they created Daleks or Cybermen.
Cybermen, there's another one in our galaxy.
But to pollute your planet with plastic takes humans.
I certainly can't think of anything that serves as disproof of that.
Well, the doctor really likes humans.
A counter example.
No, no, I mean, I can't think of anyone,
of any of the planets that we've seen
that are in the neighboring galaxies
and are worse than Earth and are at this time,
which incidentally is a year in the future or later.
I don't know if this adds to the unit
dating controversy are you saying that because uh you think that the writer was smart enough to
know that the decade doesn't start until 2021 or i think the doctor is smart enough to know that
yeah but the doctor said the line the writer gave the line to the doctor and if the writer
doesn't know the difference between the start the end of a decade which most people don't
I totally believe that could be 2020 because the writer just didn't know any better.
But nevertheless, what the writer said, or the line the writer gave the doctor to say was that this is 2021 or later.
So in the third decade of the early 20th century.
Indeed.
Or 21st century.
Which is to say it's 2021 or later.
So that is what she says within the episode.
But my point being is that the writer may be an idiot.
That's my point.
The writer may have thought that was a fancy way to say 2020.
I understand that.
But that's not the line that he gave the doctor.
He didn't say 2020.
He said 2021.
He may have thought he was saying 2021.
Third decade of 2020.
But yeah.
And of course, it might not be.
It could be 2024 because it was the first half of it.
So it could be the future.
Which is why? Let's ask that question. Considering that the last few years of Doctor Who, and I think maybe even during Chibnall's era, but I can't put my finger on it just quite yet, even in Spyfall, that they have been making the dates of the modern day episodes pretty much on target with the actual air date of Doctor Who. Think of Amy's wedding.
and yes yes all that stuff they they have been tying it pretty darn close to today until and
then for until now and then they sort of do this poetic which she repeats reversed at the end yes
i thought it was just because the x-files ways does the kind of cheesy voiceover and
so they were trying to oh she's doing her fox molder okay exactly all right reading the report
that she's typing at the end or whatever i had not put that i had not put that two and two together
but yeah it is sort of i just what what is the significance of and i'm pretty sure i i'm not
going to watch it and i watched this three times um i'm pretty sure that she says in the first one
we're all connected from the depths of the ocean to the tip of the stratosphere and at the end
she says the same thing except we're all connected from the tips of the stratosphere to the depths
of the ocean. And is that because the virus is at the bottom of the ocean and it reaches up and
grabs the astronaut? Somebody reaches up and grabs the ship's engines somehow screw up the astronaut
and they happen to use him as a lab. Still doesn't make sense. But it's going, the virus is at the
depths of the earth, of the ocean, and it's reaching up into the atmosphere because it's
getting the birds and everything.
And at the end, they've put the antivirus in the atmosphere
and it will eventually reach the depths of the ocean.
Is that why that reversal?
No idea.
It just seemed like an odd, well,
amongst many other odd things in the course of this episode.
I don't know that I have anything else to say.
It just raised too many questions and just,
it's like it fell apart so badly on second viewing.
It just really pains me because I really, really was enjoying it at the beginning.
I was really sitting there going, I am finally, actually enjoying an episode of Doctor Who this year.
Really, genuinely enjoying it.
Not just like, yeah, all right, I'm amused.
But actually like, finally, finally whapped me.
Do you have anything else?
I want to mention that Warren Brown, who plays Jake in this episode,
is a regular in Unit alongside Osgood and Kate Stewart
in the Big Finish audio range, which is rather good.
Does he play a dim soldier?
He certainly plays an action hero.
He's the kind of globe-trotting lieutenant who, yeah, I guess Petronella supplies the smarts to the outfit.
So, yes, he is a soldier and he's not the brains of the organisation.
He's also the same character in the surprisingly good Lady Christina series.
So since he is a regular ongoing character,
I thought that was worth mentioning.
I've also got something else which is not connected with this episode,
but which is from Ade Rickson on Twitter,
who picked up that when we were talking about Fugitive of the Jadun,
One thing we didn't mention is that Lee and Ruth are living as husband and wife.
I thought of that after the podcast.
Like, is he taking advantage of her?
There is a massive issue of consent there.
Yeah.
And I think it's hugely worse because of the fact that he knows that she isn't in her own mind, as it were.
So, I mean, if you compare it to the Doctor and Joan Redfern, for a start, I don't think that they were.
Well, you don't compare it to Joan Redfern.
you compare it to Martha who was
pining away
from the Doctor
but what I'm saying is
whilst
chameleon arched
the Doctor was carrying on
a romantic liaison
in each of them but yes Martha was
the protector so you're quite right
to say
the difference here is Lee
is in the position of being
the protector he's the one who should be
stopping that sort of thing from happening
He is a caregiver in a way. So he is, I wouldn't say it's a parental role exactly, but I mean, it's, you know, it's very, it's very hard to imagine that's not happening. And, and, and as Abe rightly says, we don't know whether that is, whether that is intentionally written because we don't know whether we'll ever find anything more out about Lee and who he is and what his motivation is. So the jury will have to remain out.
My question that came up after the podcast was, you know, were we supposed to believe that this was the relationship that existed between the doctor and whatever Lee's original name was before they went into the chameleon arch?
Or did he then use her wiped memory to go after her and fulfill his unsated desires?
I think I don't I don't think either of them resolve the question of consent.
But and would even like her.
She's not the doctor.
This this is this is a completely different person.
I mean, that's one of the things.
I'm not sure it's him I'm concerned about.
One of the things that I am not on board with the Dr. Ruth personality, and, you know, I was rather harsh, and I'll maintain it, is that there is not enough of it there to know what the heck Dr. Ruth is like.
But the human character loved her, which is great.
Nothing like Ruth, Dr. Ruth, or didn't appear to be anything at all like Dr. Ruth.
No, she's very different.
You know, I would.
So, you know, would he, in fact, fall in love with that woman?
The human version.
And, you know, so what is Lee's mindset going on there?
In that he's like, oh, gosh, she got transformed into the woman I fell in love with.
Yeah, it's probably, yeah, it's definitely problematic at many levels.
Many levels.
Well, we're done with this episode.
We're done with the last episode, too.
Again.
Simon, thank you for joining me.
It's a pleasure, as always.
And listeners, I hope you'll join us all again next time.
Fusion Patrol.
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