This week after finding themselves transported onto a hospital spaceship, the TARDIS team finds themselves dealing with a handful of tricky situations – a ticking bomb, a hungry alien, a man on the verge of delivering a baby, and a pilot with a serious heart condition. Each of these components stands just fine on their own, and yet they never quite manage to mesh together to create a cohesive storyline.
The main plot revolves around the Pting – an invincible alien life form that devours inorganic matter and energy. When home base discovers there is a deadly alien threat on the ship returning home, a bomb is activated onboard, leaving two possibilities – death by having the spaceship eaten out from underneath them, or death by explosion.
The Pting is one of the few truly interesting alien threats so far in series 11, the other being the Stenza from ‘The Woman Who Fell to Earth’. Its design is maybe a little too cute for it to be properly scary, but it still offers an exciting problem for our cast to overcome. By feeding it the bomb the Doctor effectively solves two problems at once – the Pting absorbs the entire explosion, and its hunger is satiated enough for it to leave the rest of the ship alone. Perhaps a little tidy, but at least these two threads manage to tie together in the end.
Yoss Inkl (Jack Shalloo) provides some comic relief as a pregnant alien man who is hours away from giving birth, and has some doubts about his own ability to raise a child. While a little disconnected from the rest of the plot, his presence allows some prodding into Ryan’s relationship with his own father. By gaining insight into his backstory we take one step closer to him cementing his relationship with Graham, who is gradually becoming more of a paternal figure for him.
As the troubled brother-sister duo, Eve and Durkas Cicero (Suzanne Packer and Doc Brown) take on the least engaging part of the episode trying to navigate the spaceship through an asteroid belt. There is some vague link to the rest of the plot as to why this has come about, but it is easily forgotten when we look more into their distrustful relationship with each other. The Doctor quickly recognises Eve Cicero as a renowned space pilot from “history” (i.e. our future), and although this is a small detail it goes a long way to establish the idea that there are complex future societies existing outside of Earth that have their own famous icons. While there is an arc for Eve and Durkas that reaches an emotional conclusion, it still feels a little forced into the story when everything else going on is much more exhilarating.
In this episode Whittaker feels well and truly comfortable as the Doctor, and rather than establishing new major parts of her personality she simply reinforces those aspects we have seen before. One particular moment involving an anti-matter particle accelerator sees her deliver a speech that captures her pure fascination with technological advancements. This is proving to be a trademark of her Doctor, as we saw her special affinity for engineering in both ‘The Woman Who Fell to Earth’ and ‘Rosa’. We also see her take a step back after accidentally falling into the harsh attitude of her predecessor, feeling genuine remorse when she realises how insensitive she was being.
‘The Tsuranga Conundrum’ is the fifth episode of series 11, and is also the fifth to be either written or co-written by showrunner Chris Chibnall. While Chibnall is certainly not a weak writer, Doctor Who thrives on its ability to jump from one style to another, episode to episode. As a result, the series is starting to feel a little bogged down by the same repetitive story beats that we have come to expect from Chibnall. However, it is confirmed that completely new writers will pen the next four episodes, and so this may be the breath of fresh air that this series needs before it starts feeling too familiar. While it may have fared better as a two-parter, ‘The Tsuranga Conundrum’ was still a fun filler episode that will hopefully be the end the run of character-driven stories for now, and see in more plot-centric episodes in the second half of this series.
