Doctor Who: Season 11, Episode 5 – “The Tsuranga Conundrum” (2018)

Not a remarkable episode, but a pretty solid one.  The Doctor does what she does best, and all the companions get something to do, which is important – the more we can see of their individual contributions, the more we’ll get to know them as separate people.

After finding themselves on the unfortunate end of a sonic explosion, the Doctor, Yaz (I’d thought it was “Yas,” since her name is Yasmin, but the BBC website says “Yaz,” so I’m fixing it now,) Ryan, and Graham get picked up by a medical transport ship.  It’s taking them away from the TARDIS, which is bad, and it’s just been beset by a nigh-indestructible little creature bent on eating the ship from the inside out, which is worse.  The goal?  Keep everyone alive, neutralize the creature, and safely make planetfall so our heroes can be teleported back to the TARDIS.

All the main characters are in pretty good form here.  Being stuck with a dangerous creature on a moving spaceship stuck in a preprogrammed flightpath is a classic “rally the troops” scenario, and the Doctor is more than up to the task.  She’s of course brave and inquisitive, insistent on taking risks despite some injuries sustained and constantly trying to deduce the reason for what’s happening.  She does a splendid job dividing and conquering when it comes to the one-shot characters, finding their useful skills as well as keeping up their dwindling reserves of hope.  We get a couple absolutely-lovely “inspirational Doctor” speeches here, and Jodie Whittaker plays them wonderfully.

We also get some really concrete stuff for the companions, which is nice.  Differentiating them is something of an ongoing issue for the show, so this episode is a step in the right direction.  Yaz, as the police officer, gets a little more of the action stuff this week, which seems fitting, and Graham and Ryan are challenged by a surprising complication that particularly resonates for Ryan.  All them of them are getting better at navigating sci-fi environments; here, on a 67^th-century spaceshiup, they’re naturally taken aback by some things they’ve never imagined before, but they manage to roll with it (side note:  interesting that most of the aliens they’ve personally interacted with have looked humanoid, even if there have been internal biological differences.  Wonder if that’ll continue, or if they’ll spend time with more alien-looking aliens.)

The story itself is mostly good:  important stakes, a clear objective that’s resolved in a satisfying way, and several engaging one-shot characters.  While it gets a bit crowded at times with subplots, it largely clips along at a decent pace and only occasionally feels too busy.