Oxygen

Doctor: What do you want from me?
Nardole: The truth
Doctor: Don't be unreasonable.

Oxygen gives us the return of Jamie Mathieson, notable for the back-to-back Series Eight hits of Mummy on the Orient Express and Flatline. His Series Nine contribution was The Girl Who Died, which was a decent little story, although a bit overshadowed by other stories of the Series and especially with everyone's speculation about the nature of Ashildur. This time around it appears that we are getting spacesuit zombies, which would seem to be a decent premise for a story. The trailer at least gave me a strong Under the Lake vibe and I don't have any problem with that.

Plot Summary

On a far space station, two crewmen are on an EVA. The near the airlock but as they approach two dead bodies in spacesuits grab the trailing crewman from behind and rip her helmet off. As the first crewman opens the airlock, he sees three bodies approaching him.

Bored on Earth, the Doctor opts for another adventure in space with Bill. Nardole, annoyed with the Doctor's shirking of duty regarding the vault, tries to stop him by sabotaging the TARDIS. The attempt fails and the three of them are transported to a distant space station. The station is a mining colony and the workers are charged for the oxygen they breathe. As a result, the station detects the oxygen being extended by the TARDIS shell and opens the airlock to vent it into space.

The Doctor secures the door but it leaves the TARDIS trapped in a vacuum. In the room they are in is a dead body in a space suit. The Doctor notices that the station has forty crewmen and thirty-six are registered as dead. That suit comes to life and advances on them. The Doctor manages to short the suit out but it destroys his sonic screwdriver in the process.

The commotion attracts the attention of the other suits and they advance on them. The trio puts on three suits that had been put in for maintenance and contact the remaining crew. They radio down to follow the corridor where they will let them in. They rush down and the crew opens the door just before the suits grab them. The remaining crew inform them that the suits downloaded instructions to kill the organics inside and they were only spared because they were in a section where the information couldn't be downloaded.

Bill's suit develops a fault that causes her arms to raise but a crewman named Ivan resets her suit to correct the fault. Shortly afterward, the suits correct the fault that is locking the doors and they get in. They try to flee to another part of the station but the suits are there as well and they kill the crew leader, Tasker. With no other options, they decide to EVA to the unmapped section the crew were in before. As they are in the airlock, Bill's helmet develops a fault and will not work. The door opens and she is exposed to the vacuum of space. The lack of oxygen causes her to black out.

Bill wakes in the new section and finds that the Doctor used his helmet on her during the EVA. However, the vacuum of space damaged his eyes, rendering him blind. They discuss their options and one of the crew, Abby, finds a signal that seems to be from a rescue ship. While they are talking, the suits detect conversation between Nardole and Bill that allows them to map the new section into their system. They begin to advance into the section and kill the fourth crewman, Dahn-Ren.

The group runs to the reactor room but Bill's suit malfunctions again. They cannot get it working again and it magnetizes to prevent it from being lifted. With no options, the Doctor tells Bill to relax and this will feel bad but he will save her in the end. They flee, leaving Bill. The suits touch her and her suit upgrades and sends a power surge into her body.

Once inside the reactor room, the Doctor ties the life detection circuits in their suits to the reactor coolant. If they die, the coolant will be drained out and the entire station will be destroyed in five minutes. He then orders the door opened. Abby objects but the Doctor points out that there is no rescue ship. The whole thing was a set up by the company as people are too expensive and they intend to run the station using the suits alone.

They open the doors but as they advance, the Doctor notes that their deaths will be very expensive. The suits stop immediately and assess the situation. As they do, the Doctor reactivates Bill's suit and revives her. He noted that her suit lacked the battery power to kill her, only knocking her out but he couldn't say anything in case the suits overheard him. The suits then give everyone an oxygen pack to ensure their survival.

The whole group goes back to the TARDIS where Nardole uses medical equipment on the Doctor's eyes, seemingly restoring them. The Doctor transports Ivan and Abby in the TARDIS to corporate headquarters to file a major complaint, which the Doctor confides to Bill will result in a revolution. They return to Earth and Bill leaves for her apartment. Nardole exits to lecture the Doctor but the Doctor cuts him off noting that despite the medical treatment, the Doctor is still blind.

Analysis

I'm not one for the zombie genre, but this was a pretty enjoyable story. I was a little confused at the beginning by the focus as to what the balance between scary and funny they were going for, but I got my head around it fairly soon. I also liked that despite giving a couple of false flags about the potential wellness of our leads, there were some actual consequences to their actions.

The Doctor was quite good in this. He had that aloof nature where he would make jokes in the face of peril that was very natural for the Fourth Doctor. I also liked it that while he was pretty aware of the nature of the threat and how to deal with it, he was on his heels for most of the story. Unlike Nardole, he seemed to grasp fairly quickly the nature of the suits and their AI. Their ignorance was his greatest weapon and he exploited that, even though it meant dark things for Bill.

Both companions were quite good in this. Bill acted almost exactly like you would expect with the wonder of things at first and then the steady freakout as things went wrong. Of course she had the bad luck of a more faulty suit than the rest but seemed to handle it fairly well. I did think the racism bit between her and Dahh-Ren was a bit forced and the dialogue there never really felt natural. Nardole's joke line about having friends who are "blue-ish" was a real groaner as well.

I liked Nardole a lot in this one as he was finally given something to properly do. He was the conscience of the group in both trying to prevent the Doctor from going in the first place and then in trying to get them back to the TARDIS. But he also had a caring side and was genuinely concerned over Bill when it looked like she was going to be killed at several different points. Of course, he was also the one who nearly got them killed by not recognizing that the suit AI could hear him and learned to make the map based on his speech. So a slightly mixed bag but I enjoyed Nardole on the overall.

The guest cast didn't have much time to make much of an impression but they seemed alright. I was a little disappointed that Dahh-Ren was killed because even though I thought the racism bit was a bit forced, I enjoyed his dry delivery style. I found him more enjoyable than Abby, who was playing the I'm the stressed and angry woman clichéd role a bit much. I did like Ivan as he seemed more sympathetic in his practicality and you could feel for him, especially at the end where Bill was brought back but he could see that Ellie was still dead.

As for the villain, I have to say that having animated suits with corpses in them is a pretty good way to do zombies. The corpses are just there and it's the suits that are the issue (much like the robots in The Girl Who Waited) but having the decaying corpse in the suit adds that extra level of creep factor that you probably wouldn't get if you just showed an empty suit walking towards you. I also appreciated the fact that the "zombies" had an adaptable intelligence. Usually when you see a zombie move, it's some other faction of humans or a breakdown of dynamics within the survivors that allow the zombies to get in the base and swarm the protagonists. Here, you actually had something that would learn and didn't depend on a major mistake by the survivors and that was refreshing.

I also liked the fact that the suit AI was capable of learning was how the Doctor defeated it. The AI was upgraded to provide cost savings for the company but it could learn quickly enough that cost savings was a higher priority than it's base programing of deleting the organic portions. It was a clever way of defeating the enemy and using it's own weapons against it. Far better than the standard blow everything up method.

I also enjoyed the cinematography of this story. It was well shot with the different sun providing a different cast of light on the whole thing. It gave you the moody effect without resorting to the standard power failure and light's flickering that has become a staple of the horror genre. I also thought Bill's blackout just prior to the EVA was an excellent use of both heightening tension and avoiding what would have been expensive and probably less believable shots in crossing the station.

The EVA scene did point out one small point that wasn't really addressed. In Bill's brief moments of lucidity, we can see one or two of the crew members using weapons of some kind to clear the one or two suits in their way. You can see the weapons again when they breach the newly mapped section. According to the Doctor, there were 36 people who had been killed so far plus a few spare suits I would imagine. So in the entire base, there are probably less than 50 suits. If they have weapons, why don't they have a slow retreat with the weapons providing cover and steadily destroying the number of attackers? The suits would be limited by the corridors and they are naturally slow so picking off two or three each volley while maintaining a steady retreat shouldn't be too much of an issue. Picking off the suits that might be isolated would also solve the issue of getting extra oxygen as well. I can understand that weapons use might have been limited either by power available or rechargeability, but I would have liked a line that explained why the weapons use was so limited.

One other small problem I had was that through most of the episode, the threat was almost constantly to Bill. It was her suit that kept malfunctioning and her that kept being put in peril. Granted the Doctor ended up suffering but the constant focus on Bill made it that much more apparent (at least to me) that she would not be killed by the suits when they attacked her. Granted we already knew that since there was no way they would kill off a companion in the middle of a series, but the constant calling of attention to her made it just that much more obvious that she would be fine. The real twist was that she would be the only one and even someone not exposed to the vacuum of space, like Dahh-Ren, would stay dead because his suit was fully powered.

I am curious as to where they are going with the blindness of the Doctor. It's also an odd thing given that we've seen the Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors all voluntarily release regeneration energy to heal others. Can the Doctor not release regeneration energy to heal himself with carrying out the whole process? I can only guess that this must be a restriction in it's use, else we wouldn't have gotten the Handy Doctor in Journey's End. Still, I'm curious to see how this plays out over the next few stories and what it's ultimate consequence will be. I'm sure his eyes will be healed eventually since it seems like they are back to normal in the momentary clip from The Empress of Mars shown in the trailer. But we shall just have to see.

Overall, I would say that this was quite good. I think I liked both Mummy on the Orient Express and Flatline a bit better, but I suspect that's due to my overall disinterest in the zombie genre. At the very least, this is a good scary episode and also keeps things moving so that there is very little dead time. I shall look forward to revisiting this one in the near future and can only imagine how younger viewers (such as my own kids) would respond when watching it.

Overall personal score: 4.5 out of 5