I have no argument with an episode of Doctor Who being about plastic in the ocean. The show has been doing this since the Silurians and the Green Death, and a series about a person who loves the Earth is entitled to notice what is being done to it. My argument is with how “Praxeus” goes about it, which is to decide what it wants to say in the first ten minutes, say it, and then spend forty more minutes moving people between continents while the plot catches up to a conclusion the audience reached before the titles. After the genuine thrill of Fugitive of the Judoon the previous week, this is a hard landing.
Four locations and no urgency
The structure is ambitious and it sinks the thing.
The episode opens in Madagascar, Hong Kong and Peru more or less at once, splits the fam across all three, and adds a fourth strand at sea. That means the first twenty minutes are pure logistics: four sets of characters being introduced, four sets of circumstances being established, and the Doctor teleporting between them to keep the plates spinning. Nothing has time to build. By the point where the threat should be tightening, the story is still finding its cast.
It also means the guest characters get almost nothing. Suki Cheng is a scientist with a secret that the episode signals early and then treats as a surprise. Jake Willis and Adam Lang are an estranged married couple, and the material between them is easily the best writing here: Jake believing he was left behind because he was not enough, Adam having gone to space rather than have the conversation. Warren Brown plays it with real hurt. Two scenes, and then the plot needs him to drive a boat.
Gabriela and Jamila, the vloggers in Peru, are engaging and disappear from consequence entirely. Every one of these people is sketched rather than drawn, and with four locations to service there was never room to do otherwise. Compare it to Kerblam!, which had one place, established it properly, and generated more dread from a warehouse floor than this manages from an entire planet.
A monster made of homework
The threat itself is where the episode loses me completely.
Praxeus is a bacteria that binds to microplastics, and since microplastics are now in every organism on the planet, it can infect anyone. Victims crust over, turn grey and shatter. That’s a decent, grim image and the makeup work is good. What it lacks is any behaviour. The infection has no rules you can play against, no loophole to exploit, no moment where a character does something clever to avoid it. It simply spreads at whatever rate the scene requires and kills whoever the script needs dead.
There’s a proper idea buried underneath, and the episode states it rather than using it: that the aliens seeded Praxeus here specifically because Earth is the most contaminated place they could find, using our pollution as a laboratory. Humanity has made itself the ideal test subject. That is genuinely nasty, and it should be the spine of the hour. It gets a couple of lines near the end. The birds full of plastic, dying on a beach, are the strongest single image in the episode and they turn up in the first five minutes, before you have any reason to care.
The resolution is a straightforward antidote requiring a sacrifice, and Jake volunteers to fly the plane because Adam has already done it once. It should land. It does not, quite, because the episode has not earned enough time with either of them, and because the Doctor’s alternative is never seriously in doubt.
The Doctor herself is oddly diminished here too. She spends most of the hour as a courier, teleporting between continents to carry information from one group of guest characters to another, and the plot never asks her to work anything out that the audience has not already assembled. Whittaker is good at urgency and the script keeps giving her lines that demand it, so you get a lot of running and shouting attached to very little actual jeopardy. Her best moment is a quiet one, standing on the beach looking at the birds, and it lasts about four seconds before somebody arrives with more plot.
What frustrates me most is that the premise had a genuinely frightening version available. A disease that only exists because of what we have already done to the planet, that cannot be avoided because the contamination is already inside every living thing, is a properly bleak idea. There is no cure you can refuse and nowhere clean to run to. Lean into that and you have something close to horror. Instead the episode treats it as a puzzle to be solved with a serum, and the solution is available within the hour, which quietly undoes the whole argument it spent forty minutes making.
Where the era keeps going wrong
This is the fourth time I have written a version of the same complaint and I am starting to think it is the defining habit of the period.
The show has decided what an episode means before it has decided what happens in it. So the meaning gets delivered directly, in speeches and in images placed where you cannot miss them, and the story becomes a vehicle for carrying it. When the story is strong enough to survive that, you get something worth watching. When it is not, you get this: an hour where the most memorable thing is a shot of dead birds and the least memorable thing is everything that happens to the characters.
I’d rather have the Silurians. The Green Death had giant maggots and a mad computer and a message about industrial waste, and it understood that the maggots had to come first. Reviewers at CultBox and elsewhere were split on this one at the time, and the defence usually amounts to the subject being important. It is important. The episode still has to work.
None of this means the episode is contemptible. It is competently made, the location work is more ambitious than the budget should allow, and the cast are giving it everything. There is a real attempt here to make an adventure story out of something that genuinely matters, and I would rather the show tried and missed than never tried. But wanting to say something is not the same as having built something worth watching, and this is the clearest case in the era of a script that mistook the first for the second.
What it leaves behind is a genuinely horrible bit of prosthetic work, bodies crusting grey and breaking apart. It leaves Jake and Adam, the only two people here written as though they have an interior life, and a marriage that gets two scenes and a sacrifice. It leaves a beach full of dead birds, deployed as a thesis statement before there is a story to attach it to. It leaves four locations that between them add up to less tension than one warehouse did. And it leaves an idea about humanity poisoning itself into becoming the perfect test subject, mentioned twice and used never.
Rating: 2/5. Well intentioned, competently made, and almost entirely inert. The globe-trotting structure starves every character of the room they needed, the threat has no rules to play against, and the point arrives so early that the remaining forty minutes have nothing left to reveal. The message is fine. The episode around it is not.