10.5 Oxygen It started with a Star Trek line. It ended with a hell of a cliffhanger. It left us hoping that Chris Chibnall has already signed up writer Jamie Mathieson – returning to Doctor Who writing following the likes of Flatline and Mummy On The Orient Express – for series 11. It would be fair to say that Oxygen was something of a triumph. And I’m going to start at the end. There’s a running theory that series 10 is about a long, slow demise for Capaldi’s Doctor, that it’s the most prolonged regeneration we’ll have seen for a Time Lord (early teaser trailers helped fuel this, notwithstanding Steven Moffat’s past form in misdirection). We’re not even half way through the series, and the Doctor now can’t see, with seven episodes left to go. Is this a temporary, episode-long thing that’ll be utterly cured by the end of next week? My guess would be no. That we’re going to see a Doctor take more damage, until regeneration is his only option. But then that’s a guess. Yet the only tangible option for a Time Lord with a failing body, long term, is to regenerate. And this Doctor’s body may well be on the way out sooner than expected. That’s only a part of the ongoing mystery, too. The other part is that vault. The Doctor is guarding it, and if whatever’s in there gets out, then the Earth is in danger. Nardole makes this very clear. With every conversation the stakes get a little higher. “You need to be ready when that door opens”, Nardole says. The clues suggest we’re not going to have long to wait. All that’s just the stuff from the end of the episode. The first 40 minutes of Oxygen, though, is just as worthy of praise. I’d argue it was as good a standalone episode of Who as we’ve had this run. Given that there’s not been a duffer, that’s no small feat or backhanded compliment, either. It benefits from bringing Matt Lucas’ Nardole along for his first proper adventure of the series, as he, the Doctor and Bill end up on a space station. Bill’s excitement at heading properly into space naturally leads to her nearly dying. But then that’s Doctor Who for you. Anyway: regular Who fans know the basics here straight away, and you get no bonus points for calling out the words ‘base under siege’ once the foundations are put in place. And that’s the framework the story wraps around, certainly, but with a more mysterious edge. It is a base of sorts we all find ourselves at. They are most certainly under siege. And people seem to have disappeared. But what Mathieson does is wrap this, echoing the skill of a good McCoy-era Who story, with an underpinning – eventually overpinning – political message. About the commoditisation of the basics human beings need to exist. In this case, it’s oxygen. Oxygen that’s calculated as a resource, where efficiencies have to be made, and basically where Microsoft Excel seems to have conquered the world. Mathieson realises this with some genuinely creepy monsters, and unlike the creatures that the Doctor, Bill and Nardole have faced this series, they’re not ones who have a moment of redemption. They’re here to scare the bejesus out of you. There’s a feel of a zombie movie at times, one mixed with the thump against metal as if the Cybermen were coming to get you. The slumped heads, the dead eyes… these were effective foes, who I’d happily believe the Doctor and co would brave the outside of the space station to try and get away from. Believing the characters actions was certainly not a problem here. “At current levels of exertion, you have two and a half thousand breaths available” Back to Mathieson’s script, though. Doctor Who stories often spend 40 minutes putting the lead characters in deadly peril, before then engineering a way out. Yet that didn’t happen here. The Doctor has taken real damage. It took sacrifice to keep Bill alive. The internal logic of the story stood, there was no undue haste. Peter Capaldi, in the midst of it all, gives his acting masterclass that we take for granted. “The only way to argue with a ‘suit’, and save your life, is to reason on a case of expense”, he said, with an opposite dose of cold calculation. “About it’ll cost more if people die”. No wonder Nardole asked for a cuddle at the end of it all. “What’s this got to do with crop rotation?” But then Oxygen has unsettled everything just a little. Plus it still found time to slot in a blue-ish spin on discrimination, and a reference to Birmingham. You don’t get that in Star Trek. Back at the start of this series of Doctor Who, I wrote this piece, suggesting that the run ahead was the closest the show could get to a ‘free hit’. I said at the time that it was a phrase that vastly simplified matters, but I wondered if, liberated from threading plotlines into future series, that a straight 13-episode run (including Christmas) centred on a clear story could be to the benefit of the show. Five episodes in, I’d very much argue it is. Oxygen has raised the bar again. One last thing: to those who ran spoiler-free pieces ahead of this episode, declaring there’s a big cliffhanger? That’s still a spoiler. See you next week. A NOTE TO COMMENTERS: Our comments are a place for friendly chat about Doctor Who, and we’ll moderate them tightly to ensure that’s the case. Please, if you’re commenting below, make sure you’ve watched the episode (if it’s clear you haven’t, and you’re just stirring things up, your comments will be removed). Be excellent to each other. No name calling. Just constructive chat, speculation and old fashioned things like that. Thank you.
