Oxygen

 

Chapter The 186th, remember capitalism = bad, kids.

Plot:

Answering a distress call, the Doctor, Bill and Nardole visit a space station in the future. They are rapidly separated from TARDIS and sonic, and have to don spacesuits to breathe. These are smart suits that can walk around on their own and have some artificial intelligence built in, but they've gone wrong, Gromit! 36 casualties out of the 40 person crew are roaming the station: dead bodies having been electrocuted, animated only by their suits, trying to zap anyone still alive. The TARDIS team meet up with the final four survivors, whose suits were offline when the kill command came through (which they believe to have been down to someone hacking the system). Evading their attackers, with limited oxygen left, they have to take a space walk. In the air-lock when just about to be exposed to the vacuum of space, Bill's suit malfunctions, taking off her defective helmet. The Doctor gives her his helmet and survives the harsh conditions of space, but at the cost of his eyesight. They return to the interior of the station. Bill is then apparently killed, but it later transpires that there wasn't enough juice in her suit to do more than knock her out. Despite being blind, the Doctor works out that the suits have been deliberately programmed to kill everyone, so that the company running the station can dispose of an unprofitable crew. He wires something up so that any attempt to kill him or his friends will cause expensive damage to the station, so the suit zombies cannot attack. Back home, after dropping off the surviving crew, the Doctor pretends to Bill that his sight has returned, but confides to Nardole that it has not.   

Context:

Sat down on my own to watch the story from the Blu-ray on the Series 10 box set one afternoon during the long Easter weekend of 2021. I was soon joined by middle child (boy of 11) who watched through to the end. His sister (girl of  8) came in a few times and watched short sections too. Interestingly, there are no comments from them to relate, as whenever they were watching they were rapt and silent. You could hear a pin drop. This is usually a good sign that an episode is working for them.

First Time Round:

Watched this go out live on 13th May 2017 with all the family, not that the two youngest could remember that they'd already seen it on this latest watch. I'd published a blog post on previous story Knock Knock earlier that Saturday, but apart from that I can't remember much about that time. Based on my comments about the episode the previous week, I was enjoying the series as a whole, and Oxygen didn't stand out as being much different from Knock Knock in terms of quality. I was probably intrigued at the end as to how long they could keep the Doctor blinded, and I probably cynically expected it to be all sorted out by the following week, rather than, as it turned out, the week after.

Reaction:

It would be great to be able to do a pun and say that watching Oxygen was like a breath of fresh air (ho ho); but, it's too archetypal a story for that. It's not to say that it wasn't a fun watch both this time and when first shown, but it is written to be a straight-ahead action adventure in space, and it delivers on that promise. There's not much that's surprising. The only plot twist  - the cause of the spacesuits' malfunction - is screamingly obvious to everyone watching from early on. That leaves a linear progression through the expected story beats, with only the Doctor's exposure to the vacuum and subsequent blinding being in any way unexpected. What stops this from being dull is the conviction of everyone in front of and behind the camera. The space walk on the outside of the station, for example, shown in impressionistic gasps fading in and out, to depict Bill's POV as she drops in and out of consciousness, is a bravura sequence. In this part, and throughout, there is great production design and sound displayed, to sell the reality of the situation.

Another key element in selling the reality of the situation is the performances, and the best of them - an astonishingly powerful performance without being too showy - is Pearl Mackie as Bill. This is the first time the three main characters have been together for a full adventure, with Matt Lucas's Nardole having been kept mostly for cameos in the previous episodes. The new dynamic is good, Nardole and the Doctor are seasoned travellers taking all the dangers in their stride, demonstrating some of the glib, comedy super-heroics that the lead roles in showrunner Steven Moffat's era often tend to do. Bill, though, grounds everything, displaying a real and palpable fear without ever straying into the hackneyed old Doctor Who territory of the companion that needs to be rescued. Bill is a resourceful person put in an impossibly hostile environment. The scene in the air lock of rising tension as the small group is about to be exposed to the vacuum of space with one helmet too few is one of the best of the series; Mackie's heightened fear, but underlying bravery as she refuses to panic, is so well conveyed. The scene later on when Bill faces her imminent death, asks the Doctor to tell her a joke, and finally calls out for her Mum is wonderful too. The story's only 45 minutes long and there's lots of running around, so these great scenes come at the cost of leaving no time for the guest characters to be fleshed out. They aren't very distinct: there's the female one, the blue one, and two un-blue male ones that you can barely tell apart. One of those last two is given the tiniest of backstories (his girlfriend gets killed early on when trying to tell him she wanted to start a family, then they exchange a glance at the end), that's about it.

The satire at the story's heart is a bit toothless, but this probably doesn't matter too much: it's just a bit of window dressing really. The trouble, as mentioned above, is that the real villains are very obvious from the start. It's rare in the genre for any company running sci-fi operations not to be evil. If we were in any doubt, the early foregrounding that the company doesn't allow oxygen on the station, except that which it provides to its workers for a price, because it wants to keep that price high, is a hell of a giveaway. It might have been more sinister if the company was presented as caring and supportive right up until the moment when the team became less efficient, and then they kill 'em. The Doctor's solution at the end is a good one: he make's it unprofitable for the company algorithm to kill him and the other remaining crew members, thereby neutralising the danger. Capaldi gives it all he's got on the groan-some Dad joke line of "We're fighting the suits!" and it's almost a punch the air moment. It's also nice that there's a coda where the Doctor remembers the future history that the events we've witnessed are the beginning of the end for the company. Shades of the Duncan Jones's film Moon in that moment, I think.

Like most stories in this era there's good dialogue and great gags. I can't remember where I heard this, but I think the line "Some of my best friends are blueish" was ad-libbed by Matt Lucas; whoever wrote it, it's a funny line. The music is good too. All the elements are there, and it is effective in achieving its aim: excitement and some urgent, dramatic moments. It just doesn't achieve, but probably doesn't aspire to, anything more than that.

Connectivity: 

Both Oxygen and Colony in Space feature commercial organisations involved in mining that have a lax attitude towards the sanctity of human life. 

Deeper Thoughts:

It's like Alien never happened. There seems to be a constant refrain in Doctor Who interviews and articles where a member of the production team talks about the difference between science fiction's gleaming antiseptic environs and the grimy, dangerous realities of space exploration. I remember it being a particular selling point of some early new series episodes (The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit, for example) with the refrain coming from various production personnel on the Doctor Who Confidential making-of show. There's an echo of it in the beginning voice-over in Oxygen, with the Doctor stating that sometimes "we" take space for granted with its "suits, ships" and "little bubbles of safety". Did "we", whoever we are, really take it for granted? Did anyone ever imagine that space travel was safe and shiny? Were they given such an impression by the popular sci-fi of the time? I don't think so. I think the people talking about this are thinking of one source text only, Star Trek. At least in its original TV series, Gene Roddenberry's famous creation did present space travel as sleek and shiny and safe. It did that. though, as its dramatic focus was on exploration rather than survival; it would have changed the nature of the show if there were too many stories where a broken dilithium crystal, or whatever, caused half the crew to die. As the years went by and Trek proliferated in different forms and media, it did get darker, dirtier and more dangerous on occasion anyway.

All three series of the original Star Trek were made and first broadcast before man set foot on the moon. I'm tempted to therefore give them and any TV or films before them a free pass. Until that point, nobody really knew what it was going to be like out there, and so everything was speculative. Something like 2001: A Space Odyssey was informed by space race intel, and could be seen as the epitome of sleek, shiny and safe sci-fi. But, though it has commercial space flights elegantly docking with space stations like a well choreographed ballet, it also has famous scenes of terror and survival as a crew have to deal with the sort of intransigent AI also seen in Oxygen as it tries to eject them into cold, unforgiving space. A few years later, you have the film Dark Star depicting space travel as grimy, dark and haphazard, and this is more than thirty years before The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit. Even if one argues that not enough people saw Dark Star for it to have shifted perceptions, its creators refined this take in their next script, Alien. Nobody can argue that Alien didn't have cultural impact. Anyone in the 21st century saying that sci-fi presents too clean a vision of space travel has to ignore perhaps the most influential sci-fi film of the late 20th century. Even for the younger demographic that might not have been able to get into a cinema to see Alien, Star Wars has the broken down, grimy past-its-prime Millennium Falcon and lots of people getting blown up WW2 dogfight style.

In Doctor Who, these films and other trends, both fictional and based on real world space exploration, influenced. Sometimes it just made Who move in a completely different direction, as it couldn't compete, sometimes external influences did steer what appeared on screen, at least as filtered through tiny BBC budgets. In a show like The Moonbase, broadcast in 1967 when the production team were learning from ongoing news about cosmonauts and NASA, there are reasonably realistic spacesuits and weightlessness, but the moon's atmospheric pressure can be kept out by a thin plastic tray. A couple of years later, The Seeds of Death has a dangerous rocket journey to the moon which could give Apollo 13 a run for its money (ish). Even in the very first season of Doctor Who in 1963/64 there is a bleak and reasonably graphic depiction of our heroes succumbing to sickness on a radioactive planet as early as the second story, as well as visiting a more Thunderbirds / Dan Dare efficient spacecraft in the sixth. It could and did do both extremes of story, and all the permutations in between. Any debate seems to be based on a false premise; in fiction and in Doctor Who, space can be shown as safe and sleek and shiny or it can be shown as dirty and grimy and hazardous. It just depends entirely on what story is being told that particular week. Long may the show continue in all its inconsistent glory.

 

In Summary:

Not quite a breath of fresh air, but it will make you gasp in places.