O'BSERVATIONS - "THE TSURANGA CONUNDRUM"

EPISODE REVIEW #5
“THE TSURANGA CONUNDRUM”

With the fifth episode, ‘Doctor Who’ had its first episode this season that didn’t grip the attention span tightly.  At least for me.  I just couldn’t get involved in the storyline or the characters.  (The only one who had promise was Ronan but there wasn’t much for him to do and his participation had an unsatisfying conclusion.)

It was mostly a collection of interesting tidbits – that they were in the 67th Century; and little linguistic differences like the notion that “Avocado Pear” was a good name for a baby, and that “Chalice” and “Beetroot” were threat level designations.

But the main point of interest was the alien threat of the week, the Pting.

The Pting, at first glance, was like a few aliens out of the RTD era – the Adipose, the Raxicoricofallipatorians, and the Absorbaloff.  Basically just a visual design that may not have been thought out thoroughly. 

COMPUTER: 
Few facts are known about the organism Pting. 
The species, if it is a species, birth or creation, many studies having failed due to the fatally violent nature of the Pting.

Here’s my speculation – the Pting were created by an ancient race as their answer to the Ultimate Doomsday Weapon which the crew of the Enterprise had disabled about forty centuries before this episode took place (give or take.)  Whether that ancient civilization was the original antagonists to the civilization that built the Doomsday Machine or were later potential victims in the path of its onslaught through the galaxies is unknown.  I think the Pting were probably bio-engineered members of that race who were adapted to survive in the vacuum of space without need of whatever it was they breathed.  Their digestive systems were reconstructed so that they subsisted on inorganic matter, with the hopes that they would eat their way through the weapon to disable it.  And their lifespans were augmented to render them basically immortal.  Afterwards, they were blasted into space in all directions in hopes that at least some of them might finally encounter the Doomsday Weapon.  

As Time marched inexorably on, the Pting, like the Macra, devolved to become even more bestial in nature, probably losing the abitlity to think rationally and communicate.  And their prime directive – to destroy the doomsday weapon - became forgotten over the eons.  And so they became a bane to the universe at large.

So even though I wasn’t impressed with the Pting upon its presentation in this episode, I thought there was a good way to bring one of them back for another encounter – What were the chances for the TARDIS to survive an attack by a Pting?  It could be argued that a TARDIS is organic and so a Pting might not bother with it.  But could the same be said for the ship’s inner workings?  Would a Pting want to digest the ship’s temporal energy?

As for ‘The Tsuranga Conundrum’, I was hoping that if Ronan the android was going to be decommissioned upon the death of its master, that perhaps the Doctor could have taken it aboard the TARDIS.  Of course the crew is already big enough each week, but Ronan would have been a more interesting companion.  At the very least, the Doctor could have offered Ronan a lift to some other planet where it could lead its own life.

So that’s all I have about that episode.  Like I said, I didn’t get very involved in it as it stood…..

Oh!  One last note as the Curator of Toobworld.  Graham mentioned that he and Grace watched ‘Call The Midwife’.  This is not a Zonk; instead it’s a reference to a TV show within a TV show, a period drama based on actual historical events in Toobworld.  So as a Toobworld TV show, ‘Call The Midwife’ falls into the same category as ‘Downton Abbey’, ‘Gunsmoke’, ‘Combat!’, and ‘Marco Polo’ – recreations of Toobworld history.

BCnU!