Doctor Who Series 10 Recap: “Oxygen”
This week’s episode of Doctor Who hands us the largest twist of Moffat’s tenure–and indeed in the show’s history.
Last week, I posted that Moffat was lining up the classic clichés of Doctor Who for his last season and knocking them out of the park one by one. The “Companion Introduction” episode, the “Future” and “Past” episode, the “Haunted House”, etc. This week seemed to follow that pattern, as we hit the classic “Space Terror” episode. Think “The Waters of Mars” from Tennant’s last go round.
The Doctor: Space, the final frontier….Final because it wants to kill us—sometimes we forget that. Start taking it all for granted. The suits, the ships, the little bubbles of safety as they protect us from the void.”
What I didn’t consider is that Moffat was doing this deliberately–lulling us into a sense of security, that these were the episode tropes we know and love, in order to spring the biggest twist in Whovian history on us. He even deliberately picked a trope he’s done dozens of times with the spacesuit horror. How many empty space suit episodes have their been during his tenure? This has been one of his go-to horrors all the way back to “Silence in the Library,” which was before he took over the show.
