Doctor Who: "Oxygen" Review

Doctor Who’s tenth series serves up another evergreen plot idea with “Oxygen” – the space station under siege. With the story assigned to a reliable writer (Jamie Mathieson, who previously gave us The One With The Mummy, The One With The 2D Monsters and The First One With Arya Stark) and director (Charles Palmer, whose past Who work includes The One With Shakespeare and The One Where The Doctor Becomes Human), I initially had a very positive response to it, but in retrospect I think the story works more on style than substance.

The episode looks absolutely beautiful; you wonder why the hell it took them a decade to get Palmer back. There’s a good solid sci-fi concept behind it, which gives rise to some great scenes with difficult decisions for our regulars, and unusually for the Moffat era it’s backed up pretty well by strong characterisation and a great guest cast. Space stations (or bases of any kind) under siege are Who’s bread and butter, and the story basically carries it off pretty well. Matt Lucas finally gets something to do as Nardole this year, and he does it brilliantly. There’s a great atmosphere, with plenty of spooky and scary moments, nicely balanced by humour (which feels much better than Moffat’s usual ‘dialogue that can go on a T-shirt’ quips). The episode does some interesting things with narrative (Bill’s blackout). And yet, and yet…

Every Series 10 episode so far is one I’ve largely enjoyed, and yet there’s one big problem that’s impeding that enjoyment to some extent. And my problem with “Oxygen” is that the plot doesn’t really stand up to close scrutiny. It’s obviously a rather heavy-handed anti-capitalism story, but that’s not necessarily a problem in itself. But the more you think about it… if oxygen itself is limited to what you can afford, why the hell does anyone volunteer for a mission in deep space? What’s the economic benefit exactly of murdering all your workers whilst getting some replacements in from the other side of the galaxy? The fact that the episode ends rather abruptly doesn’t help all of this… and I remain deeply unsure of the season’s story arc, both because of its tying the Doctor to Earth (which it has to ignore on a whim just about every week) and the development at the end of the episode – which I can see the show mishandling very, very badly.

But still. I think “Oxygen” is generally a good episode, it’s just got one or two shortcomings that prevent me from saying it’s a really great one.