Doctor Who - The Pting from Another World

Well.

It's easier to review something you hate than something you like. And it's easier to review something you like than something you don't care about. This is why The Caves of Androzani and The Twin Dilemma end up on either end of the great Doctor Who polls whereas Terminus, The Faceless Ones and Underworld float forgotten.

Of course, judging a story is a very subjective experience. Arguably The Twin Dilemma is the worst possible story, yet it must surely rank higher than The Monster of Peladon. No matter how horrific or tasteless Colin's debut is, at least it isn't boring. No critic ever watched Romulus, Remus, Mestor and Hugo and has gone "Wow, this is dull and unsurprising." Some critics, myself included, can barely tell one episode of the Peladon sequel from another.

So, The Tsungara Conundrum isn't a failure in that sense. Like the more recent series of Family Guy, I was diverted, interested and entertained for the run time though certainly my brain felt no desire to retain any of it afterwards. Were my OCD not compelling me to review the damn episode, it would have vanished from the windmills of my mind soon enough. Especially as the ABC is no longer advertising the series at all!

OK. The Tsungara Conundrum, easily destined to be the most mispelt title since The Crystal Bucephalus, kicks off with the classic sci-fi setting of a junkyard planet full of scrap at night, and you can easily imagine the crews from Futurama, Farscape, Lexx or Red Dwarf picking through the debris as well as Team TARDIS. Unfortunately, whatever the hell the Doctor is looking for, she finds a "sonic mine" instead. Could this be a deliberate trap for the Time Lady? Is this revenge from the Stenza? Or maybe Not-Ben-Chatham the Racist Time Meddler?

Before we can find out precisely who put a landmine in a tip and why, it goes off and the next thing our dazed protagonists know, they're safely in a hospital. So far, so irritatingly familiar to BF listeners (though in fairness, this isn't World War One this time). Our crew were rescued by a Tsungara spaceship, a combined ambulance and uber service who scooped up the crew and are now taking them to Space Hospital UK.

So we meet our cast of Calm Experienced Medic, Panicky Inexperienced Medic, Old Woman With Heart Trouble, Her Android PA, Her Resentful Little Brother, and Yoss The Pregnant Man. Oh, then something halfway between Nibbler and Stitch arrives and starts to eat the spaceship. This little pixar-style alien, clearly inspired by the hellbeast munchkins from Galaxy Quest, is of course the most divisive aspect of the program. A CGI masterpiece, undoubtedly, the problem is that most viewers are unable to cope with any DW monster not trying to be Ripley's Xenomorph and consider such differences outright failure. This vicious little critter, the Pting, is not trying to be an omnicidal serial killer from the darkest of nightmares, and more like MiniMe from Austen Powers.

Now, people might find that a ghastly idea, but surely a successful comedy alien like the Adipose is better than an unsuccessful scary one like the Myrka or the Taran Wood-Beast?

Anyway, added to this is that Tsungara have a string no-tolerance to Pting policy and threaten to blow up the space ambulance which the Doctor fiendishly holds back by hitting the snooze button. Not Danger UXB, it must be said, but buying time by swiping left has to be a very 21st Century way of thinking. She twigs that the Pting is only eating the spaceship to suck up power, so she tricks the ugly little bastard into eating the bomb and jettisoning him into space. It worked for Jim Carrey in Mask and does pretty much the same here.

Meanwhile, Old Woman With Heart Trouble reconciles with Her Resentful Little Brother then dies heroically steering the spaceship. And then Her Resentful Little Brother takes over steering because he could be a pilot like her, but chose not to be, and he wasn't bulshitting. Yoss has a beautiful baby boy. Calm Experienced Medic dies, but Panicky Inexperienced Medic takes charge and learns and grows. Having survived the journey, the cast hold hands and give Dead Old Woman a proper space funeral.

So.

Quite.

50 minutes of broadcastable entertainment on a Sunday evening. Inoffensive, bread-and-butter, acceptable Doctor Who. Of course, it's got a lot of haters but mainly for complaining what it wasn't rather than what it was. Like, say, Mr. Colchester from Sparacus...


3/10. Childish and very forgettable. Similar set, similar spaceship setting. Shame this childish run-around had none of 'The Ark in Space''s menace, tension or gripping drama. That was just a childish little thing , ridiculous joke alien. The Meep was an excellent alien. Genuinely unnerving at the time. I'd very much like to see the Meep in the televised series, but I doubt it will ever happen. The fish people are totally underrated.

See? It's one step away from "It was rubbish, it didn't have Charlie Sheen in it."

So what can be said about what it actually was?

Well, firstly this story feels rather like the sort of adventure we would normally never see but hear about.

"You sure you know what you're doing?"
"Course I know what I'm doing. Remember on that space ambulance where I defeated the alien by tricking it into eating the bomb?"
"We were too busy helping that bloke give birth, remember?"
"Oh yeah. Well, it still worked out, though!"

It's an adventure up there with the Medusoids or Jim the Fish or anything with Samson and Gemma, something that was better left off-screen. Seeing it in detail robs it of the quality you can imagine, like many a BF prequel. Yes, Magnus Greel had an amazing life, but the revelation he was just lusting after Nyssa and got all his toys from Findecker the alien git removes any mystique and makes it all feel pedestrian.

Also, this is a story where the direction is a tad schizophrenic. The quiet character scenes are much better than anything attempting drama or excitement. Ryan and Yaz discussing family, the android's passive-aggression with the nurse, the Doctor's cultural lust for antimatter, all work great whereas chasing alien monsters down corridors, flying through asteroids or defusing bombs seems tedious and uninvolving. The climax with the Pting and the bomb is utterly unengaging, yet is interspersed with the Doctor and Yaz's arguments over how stupid the plan is (which feels a very traditional Doctor/companion scene than any other Yaz has had so far) which keeps the attention. When a gormless bloke showing ultrasounds is more thrilling than an alien biting the sonic screwdriver out of the Doctor's hand, something has gone wrong.

It's interesting to compare with Chibber's own 42. There's a roughly similar plot, a race against time to save a beleagured spaceship from an alien threat and provide some emotional closure for all involved. But that story was focused entirely on the adventure, the cast got some pencil-faint characterization between monster fodder, and there were exciting space-walks and freezing sequences. Here, there's not the same rush. It isn't a slasher killer episode, and only one character dies like the sacrificial lion mentor of old, inspiring his protege because if he stayed alive there wouldn't be any tension. When Tennant was possessed by the sun, his agony and torment were a dramatic peak; here, Jodie's spleen trouble is entirely her own fault and if she'd just stayed still for an hour wouldn't have any problems. (Still thank god no one at the Daily Mail highlighted scenes of the Doctor clutching her stomach in agony and claimed "It's That Time (Lord) Of The Month!") Tennant's obsessive desire to save the day was the only thing to keep a hopeless situation together; Jodie spends the first half of her episode being told to calm the hell down.

Yet such a scene is played for drama rather than comedy (something I can only recall happening in Scherzo or The Stolen Earth) and has the Doctor admit she's letting her insecurity and selfishness endanger others. It's a scene few other Doctors would have had, with even the nice ones probably saying "Sorry, you're right" and changing the subject. Capaldi would probably have ignored it completely, screwed everyone over and stood over the corpses brooding about the pointlessness of existence. Here, Jodie's Doctor chastises herself for putting her desires over other people's - seemingly unique in modern society with "every man for itself" mentality.

Similarly, this scene - one that an action adventure would skip entirely - is a standout. Yoss' pregnancy is a crude excuse to give two companions something to do, and if you removed the fact Yoss is a bloke, the story would be exactly the same with no doubt a teenage redneck girl with a Texan accent wanting to give up her baby. That probably would have offended someone, I suppose. That said, if Yoss had been a more traditional underage mum, it would have sorted out some logistical problems (Yoss has only been pregnant for three days, yet must be over eight to be overdue for his species, and it's odd that if males become pregnant they require C-sections because they cannot birth them naturally which is surely counter-intuitive evolutionarily-speaking).

Either way, the beats are still the same, from Yoss getting people to feel the baby kick to going into labor at an awkward moment and then deciding to keep the baby. Yoss has no real link to the rest of the plot. He didn't sabotage the engines or get knocked up the Old Lady. He has nothing to do with the plot, not even being threatened by being eaten by the Pting (even though it would be interested in his "birth pod" technology). Even the bloke being pregnant is only a visual gag. The only jokes made are that Yoss is so stupid he thinks "Avocado Pear" is a heroic name from Earth history. Maybe there is a famous au pair known as Ava Card?

Ava Card au pair?

No?

No.

This is a straightforward linear A-to-B storyline with no real surprises (bar the Doctor's eagerness to blow up the bomb she should be defusing). We can imagine that the sonic mine might be a clue to a future storyline. We can pretend these "dark times" of the 67th Century have something to do with the Stenza. We can, if we use the pause control very well, laugh hysterically at the idea that Davros has been barred from using Tsungara space ambulances and been chucked out (along with Slitheen, Zygons, Sontarans, Ood, the Silence, Old Skool Silurians and Cybermen) for bad behavior. But even the panic that the TARDIS might again be stolen turns out to be damp squib.

Ultimately we have an episode that's just as hard to hate as to love.

Which is damn inconvenient when you're trying to review these things!

What do the DWADs have to say?

I've given Whitticker (sic) 5 episodes now and it just isn't working for me. Dull dull, zero character beyond the superficial. I'm afraid it is getting to the point where my opinion is solidifying and that even a good performance (if she is capable of it) will not register. There comes a point where it becomes "Too Late".

Yeah, well, at least she can pronounce "TARDIS" properly, ya jerk!


In the meantime, some mini reviews:

The Woman Who Fell To Earth - just like Terminator, only less time paradoxes and more drunks with kebabs

The Ghost Monument - one of those Blake's 7 episodes trying to be Star Wars

Rosa - The Time Meddler only this time, more racist!

Arachnids in the UK - Donald Trump versus Eight-Legged Freaks

The Tsungara Conundrum - that Electric Dream episode about the conmen taking the old lady and the android to Earth, only the pregnant man from the title sequence is actually part of the plot

Demons of the Punjab - Fathers Day meets Goodness Gracious Me!

Kerblam! - remember that BF with the Seventh Doctor and Mel, The Warehouse? No, me neither

The Witch Finders - the perfect Halloween episode, a whole month after Halloween!

It Takes You Away - reverse the polarity of the M Night Shamalayan!