Every season has one. The episode that exists because thirteen weeks is a lot of television and somebody has to fill week five. “The Tsuranga Conundrum” is that episode, and it’s the flimsiest hour of a season that already had a flimsiness problem. The setup is fine. The Doctor and the fam get caught in a sonic mine blast while junk-hunting, wake up on an automated medical transport, and find a creature loose on board that eats energy and is heading for the antimatter drive. Base under siege, small cast, one monster. This is the most reliable format the show has. It doesn’t work, and it’s worth being precise about why.
The Pting is good
Let’s start with what lands, because it’s the only thing that does. The Pting is a lovely piece of design: small, grey, wide-eyed, vaguely like a gremlin crossed with a dumpling, and completely indestructible. It isn’t malicious. It just eats, and what it eats is energy, and it will chew through a spacecraft to get some. The show is smart enough to make it non-verbal and non-negotiable. There’s a good idea buried in the resolution, too. You can’t kill it, reason with it or outrun it, so the Doctor feeds it the bomb. Give the thing what it actually wants, on your terms, and it goes away happy. That’s a proper Doctor Who solution and it’s genuinely satisfying. The problem is that a monster this simple needs a ship worth defending, and the ship is cardboard.
Nobody on board is a person
The guest cast is a list of functions. Astos is the competent senior medic, and he’s killed off in the first fifteen minutes, which is the episode’s one real surprise and also removes the only guest character with any weight. Mabli is the junior medic who lacks confidence, gains confidence, and is congratulated for gaining confidence. General Cicero is a famous war hero who is dying and doesn’t want her brother to know. Her brother Durkas is bitter about their mother. Yoss is a pregnant man. None of them get past the one-line description. The episode keeps stopping to tell you how remarkable they all are, and then gives them nothing to do that would demonstrate it. When Cicero dies, the show plays it as an enormous loss for a character we’ve known for thirty minutes and learned two facts about. The male pregnancy subplot is the weakest thread: introduced as a joke, treated as a curiosity, resolved with a delivery scene and a gag about naming the baby, and with no bearing on the crisis at all. It’s there to be a talking point, not a story.
There’s a moment where the Doctor delivers a rapturous speech about the antimatter drive, and it crystallises everything wrong with this run. It’s an enthusiastic, technically detailed monologue about how brilliant the engine is. Whittaker performs it with total commitment. It’s also completely inert, because nothing in the episode depends on understanding how the drive works. The speech exists so the Doctor can be seen being clever, rather than because being clever accomplishes anything. That’s this season’s habit in miniature: tell you what the character is, rather than build a situation that proves it. Something else is going wrong here too, and it took me until week five to name it. Thirteen spends this episode being told what to do. She’s a patient, she’s confined to the medical bay, she’s overruled by protocol, and her main activity is explaining things to people who then act on them. When the crisis peaks she solves it, but the route there is passive in a way this character almost never is. Part of that is the three-companion problem. With four regulars in every scene, the Doctor has to share dialogue that would previously have been hers, and what gets cut is the connective tissue: the noticing, the poking at things, the moment where she works out what’s wrong before anyone else does. What’s left is a lot of announcing conclusions. Whittaker is good enough that you don’t feel it in any single scene. Stacked across a season, you feel it constantly.
Where’s the tension?
A base-under-siege story lives or dies on geography and dread. You need to know the layout, feel the walls closing, believe the crew might not make it. This ship has corridors that all look the same and a floor plan nobody establishes. The Pting is never genuinely hunting anyone. There’s no sequence where the fam are cornered, no moment where the thing gets close enough to be frightening. It bounces around eating cables while people talk about their families in adjacent rooms. Compare it to Midnight, which had one room, no monster you could see, and more tension in five minutes than this manages in fifty. Or the Sanctuary Base two-parter, which understood that a base under siege needs the base to feel like a real place first.
The format deserved better, and it’s instructive to look at why the good ones work. “The Ark in Space” gave you a sealed environment, a slow reveal of what had happened to the crew, and a threat that transformed people. “Horror of Fang Rock” put nine people in a lighthouse and killed them one at a time. The Impossible Planet spent half its runtime just establishing the base and the people on it before anything went wrong. All of them front-load the place. You learn the layout, the rules, who’s competent and who isn’t, and only then does the threat arrive to break it. Tension comes from knowing what’s at risk and how the walls are arranged. This episode inverts that. The Pting is loose within about ten minutes, before you know the ship or the crew, so every subsequent scare has nothing to land on. You can’t fear for people you’ve just met in rooms you can’t picture.
Ryan and Yaz do get a decent scene where he talks about his mother dying and his father not showing up, and Tosin Cole plays it without straining. Graham and Ryan helping deliver a baby is fine comedy. The four of them remain likeable company. But five episodes in, that likeability is being asked to carry entire hours on its own, and it can’t. You can’t build a season on a cast being pleasant. At some point the stories have to be worth their time.
What it leaves behind is the Pting, a genuinely good creature design, indestructible and indifferent, resolved with a properly clever bit of Doctor thinking. It leaves Astos dying early, the one shock in the episode, which removes the only guest with any presence. It leaves a ship with no map, identical corridors and no established geography and no dread, missing the format’s most basic requirement. It leaves the antimatter speech, enthusiasm as a substitute for consequence, the season’s core flaw in one monologue. And it leaves a subplot that’s a talking point, since the pregnancy thread is disconnected from the crisis and exists to be discussed rather than to matter.
Rating: 1.5/5. A reliable format, a good monster and a cast I like, wasted on a script with no tension, no geography and a guest list of single traits. The Pting deserved a better ship to eat. The weakest hour of the Whittaker era so far, and that’s a competitive field. Something small and hungry got loose on a hospital ship, and the most memorable thing about the hour was a speech about an engine. That tells you where the priorities were.