The Tsuranga Conundrum - S11E5 - The Doctor Who Review

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WARNING! SPOILER ALERT! Welcome back to the Doctor Who Review, where I recap the week’s episode and give some thoughts and opinions on it. Please do not read if you have not seen this week’s episode. There are major spoilers ahead. You have been warned. Check out the rest of the Doctor Who Reviews here.

Title: The Tsuranga Conundrum

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Now that the team is fully on board with adventuring around and ready to take on the universe, we’re greeted by scenes of Team TARDIS rummaging around a planet made of junk with metal-detectors. Suddenly Graham find something of interest, and the Doctor discovers it’s a sonic mine and then boom, it goes off and they wake on a hospital space ship headed for Rhesus 1. The TARDIS is no where in sight and they’ve been out of it for four days.

There are two medics on the ship as well as fighter pilot Eve Cicero and her engineer brother, Durkas, android Ronan, and a pregnant man, Yoss, whom Graham and Ryan have to assist in labour later on in the episode. Enter the problem: there’s a creature on the ship and it’s eating everything in sight. With a little research, they discover it’s called a Pting and it literally eats and absorbs everything. This is problem when you’re flying through space. The head medic man, Astos, and the Doctor go running after it, but Astos gets locked in an evacuation pod and gets evicted from the ship and blows up. Bye Astos.

The rest of the team have to figure out how to get rid of the Pting, without alerting Rhesus 1 that there’s trouble or else they’ll be blown up. There was also something to do with an antimatter chamber at the heart of the ship, and that was going to be bad bad bad if the Pting got to it. Eventually the Doctor and Yas lure the Pting into a chamber with Yoss’ birthing pod generator, which the Pting eats, the Doctor pushes the door button, and out flies the Pting into space.

By the end of the episode, they still don’t have the TARDIS, two people are dead, and the Doc’s sonic is no longer sonicing.

My thoughts on The Tsuranga Conundrum

There’s more to it than that but the episode in itself wasn’t much to be remembered for (other than the Pting), so I’m finding hard to write a cohesive synopsis.

The best bit of the episode was adorable Pting, which reminded me of the Adipose but if it had a baby with a Slitheen. It was vicious but naw. So cute. There was also a sweet moment between Ryan and Yas after they go into Yoss’ room to tell him to get to an important gathering in 6 minutes. Ryan tells Yas about his father and his mother, and it’s all very nice and character developing for them. But it was kind of random, and it didn’t seem time pertinent – you have 4 minutes left, people! Get going!

I’m concerned for the TARDIS (and also it’s barely featured in this season at all, I feel), and also about this Timeless Child thing that was raised in a previous episode. Is that going somewhere? When do we get more of that?

Overall

The Tsuranga Conundrum was okay. Not wonderful, but okay. The set was pretty clean and simple – mostly white, hospital like, as to be expected – and the story line was fine but not heart stopping, freaky or overly complicated.

With five episode down and five to go, it’ll be interesting to see what comes next. Speaking of next, episode 6 we’re in 1947 Pakistan with Yas’ grandma in Demons of the Punjab.

What did you think of this week’s episode?