“May the saints of all the stars and constellations bring you home, as they guide you out of the dark and into the light, on this voyage and the next, and all the journeys still to come, for now and evermore.”

First thing first, there’s the complicated authorship question.

“The Tsuranga Conundrum” is a Schrödingerian script, in that it’s both by Chris Chibnall and not by Chris Chibnall. As Doctor Who Magazine will tell you, it was originally supposed to be the work of guest writer Tim Price, still credited as the creator of the Pting, who subsequently dropped out, hence a slot having to be filled, probably quite late in the production calendar. While it’s hard to ascertain anything with certainty at the moment, this certainly feels like a casualty of the harsh contingencies of moviemaking – cue a cast that feels too big, with characters severed from their original purpose and left hanging about (here, the android, rather amazingly pointless), and a messy, confusing visual grammar. It’s very “Nightmare in Silver” that way – although, it doesn’t feel like a blunder of the same scale, which does speak rather highly of the skills of Chibnall and his team: there will be problems and issues on all TV sets, and, as damage control jobs go, this is honestly quite solid.

There, we encounter a bit of a dilemma. Ironically, a conundrum much like the one the characters face. This right here has a ton of issues – mostly technical, but not only. And it’s not nitpicking to point that out, because, through accumulation, the little things add up and form static that actively deters from the enjoyment of a non-negligible chunk of the audience. There’s a lot to be written about the failures of the visual storytelling here, especially regarding the use of space: a ton of shots just feel like they’re mostly made of white walls between which the characters wobble and oscillate, with no clear hierarchy of information; there’s no points of focus, with parasitic information everywhere (so many control screens!); the characters are framed in deeply artificial ways when they’re supposed to have naturalistic banter, which leaves a chunk of the cast struggling performance-wise.

But that’s only one aspect of it – and, with Chibnall pushing the scales towards a more serialized version of Who, it may not be the worst thing in the world. Direction problems are only an issue for the fifty minutes of the episode: if the story manages to do build enough thematic structures and meanings to connect to the rest of the series, then it can pretty much be shrugged off as the weaker part of a stronger whole instead of standing shamefully in a corner, a big dunce cap on the head. It’s an approach I happen to personally favor – so, let’s take it as a patient in dire need of a little redemptive reading, and see what we can administer.

First off, it really is rather symptomatic of a shift in the show’s inner structure – at least, if you do end up considering as a guest writer’s contribution. The Moffat era is not exactly short on good authors to examine, but if you look at the works of Cottrel-Boyce, Dollard, Cross or Mathieson, you’ll still find that they are very much writing from a source text that is very much Moffat’s. They do it in very different ways, but the focus on deconstructing the aesthetics of Who, the political fairytale, the female figures of power and agency … There’s an overarching throughline in their diverse and original contributions: sure, Mathieson might focus more on genre subversion and add a sense of darkness and peril; and Dollard will be brilliantly political and progressive – but it’s still Moffat’s show (if there’s are exceptions to this rule, they’re probably to be found with Gareth Roberts’ earlier scripts and Peter Harness, but the first one’s vision is deeply uninteresting and was rightly eventually ostracized, and the second still co-wrote two of his three scripts with the Scottish showrunner). And honestly, that was also true of Russell T. Davies. Chris Chibnall is really rather different – take a look back at “Rosa”: that’s a script that he very much couldn’t write; it’s (for better or worse, your mileage may vary) a story which is deeply and fundamentally Malorie Blackman’s. There’s a shift from an overarching thematic masterplan commandeered by an all-powerful showrunner, to something a lot subtler and discrete: Chibnall’s streak as an author is very much in the details, in his aesthetics, his portrayal of industry, humanity and absence – he dictates the pigments used rather than the subject of the painting. Which is, let’s be fair, a double-edged sword. On a good day, it gives the opportunity to writers, especially diverse new ones, to go explore corners of the Whoniverse we had never seen before, expanding the horizons of the show in a way that’s welcome, and, frankly, quite necessary. On a bad one, though … A strong focus point for the era gives weaker scripts something to hang onto, to tether themselves; losing that, you risk having stories that are just kind of about nothing, hanging about in the nether. Thin thin line between the aesthetics of absence and an absence of aesthetics.

Going the full way and branding “Tsuranga” with that seal of infamy does seem like a step too far, though – Chibnall’s work on the story does end up giving us something quite interesting. It ends up being kind of a mid-season break, a trek among the galaxy, which, dramatically speaking, is probably quite counter-intuitive and not what the audience expects, wants or needs. But at the same time, it’s an interesting slice of negative space, one into which tensions and themes that were bubbling about in the rest of the season can pour and be expressed, be it only if subtle and marginal ways. See for instance Ryan finally pouring out what he wanted to say about his dad and departed mum. It’s not like there’s much of a main threat: the Pting takes its sweet time to show up, and the direction and design are very clear that it isn’t to be taken too seriously. It’s not about the monster. What is it about, then?

Well, it’s set in a hospital. That alone is a big clue – it’s not a neutral choice. Especially in a season that has kind of kept the figure of the Doctor as a distance – she’s “just a traveler”, after all. She doesn’t explicitly refer to herself as a Time Lord, and she doesn’t exactly, until this episode at least, give a specific meaning to the word Doctor, the way her two predecessors, under the pen of the very, very theoretically-minded Moffat, did every chance they got. To say that it addresses the way the Doctor has changed, and how her gender has affected the show’s diegesis, that’s probably a step too far – bad PR, one guesses, which is why that discussion is conveniently moved towards Juno Dawson’s tie-in book for the season. But it at least works towards a more substantial definition of the term.

The early scenes with medical officer Astos are a very interesting example of that. The Doctor, ends up, functionally, as a patient – she is not able to interact with people in the same position of superiority she once was: the power dynamics in their relationship are something they have to establish and work towards, not something that is inherent given the basic premise of the show. Whittaker’s Doctor is in a conversation with the world around her – an honest conversation that has her having to face herself and her potential excesses in apologetic exorcism more often than before.

And sure, maybe there’s something problematic about her having to justify her methods to some random white dude – but well, he lasts about ten minutes before being, quite literally, jettisoned, after acting like a bloody idiot, too. The episode’s conundrum then becomes pretty much a question of what kind of Doctor, of medicine we need, to fill the vacuum left by the traditional authority figure, who departs leaving words of encouragement to his female, non-white successor, like a Peter Capaldi in “Twice Upon a Time”, except with none of Rachel Talalay’s flair for direction. The whole set-up even has a bunch of references to past series scattered through, as to make the past/present dichotomy more explicit: see for instance the brief screenshots of monsters showing up on the screens before the Pting; or, more interestingly, Eve Cicero, someone who’s introduced as being literally part of the same text as the Doctor (the Book of Celebrants), lies to the people closest to her in a destructive way, is described as a “control freak” and dies a heroic death saving a bunch of innocents. Reminds you of someone?

Because, really, there are two visions of medicine threaded throughout the episode. The Tsuranga ship is a cold, dispassionate machine, after all: patients are all in their little individual cells, not interacting with each other, there’s no pilot, the medics have cameras for eyes, and, if there’s any danger, it’s essentially a pre-determined algorithm which decides whether or not to blow the vessel and anyone without to pieces. The society in which the TARDIS team barges in is one which deems the execution of android servants who have “served their purpose” acceptable – moreover, the station for which the ship is heading is called Rhesus One: the whole system is basically a mechanical, automated bloodstream, ships like potentially explosive bloodcells adrift in the void. The Doctor embodies the antithesis of that: an organic, compassionate force smashing into the automatic processes. She’s no longer a Doctor of War, she’s a “Doctor of Hope”, and her actions basically amount to linking people together, make them work as an organic, living unit to solve a problem that’s articulated, within the dialogue, much like a medical quandary. Put people out of their little rooms and in a bit communal space to brainstorm; force them to tell the truth they’ve repressed about their past and medical history. The day is saved as people give birth or use their own flesh to link to a ship – the Body beats the System. And it’s not anyone’s body – it’s the body of Cicero: a political name for a Body Politic. You even get electrodes on hands and head, as if to mirror the unfortunate fate of the Roman orator, beheaded and behanded by the triumvirs.

The whole episode is structured around this dichotomy between medicine and technology – and in ways that prove interestingly non-Manichean, too. The Doctor initially raves about the technology of the antimatter drive (which, as a side note, is an incredibly Chibnall thing to focus on – this is a ship which is literally powered by absence), only to find out that it contains a bomb. Lovely commentary on the pitfalls of a positivist, linear view of history, which is indeed a trap laid by the system – but it’s made more complex by the way the narrative insists on the role of mechanics within the ship. Durkas Cicero is one, and is apparently “belittled” for it; and Ryan is one too: both get their show in the spotlight performing deeply organic acts – linking Eve to the ship’s framework, and, of course, delivering a baby, which leads to Ryan literally acting the part of his grandmother as a nurse. As if the typically male, “rational” job of a technician only found meaning when applied to the mechanics of life itself. It’s no coincidence if the episode ends up embracing a sort of hybridation (insert series 9 joke here) between the organic and the synthetic: Eve doing her thing, and the two threats, the biological Pting and the mechanical bomb, cancelling each other out. The Doctor is the principle which evens things out, allows for a point of balance between the two – and let’s not forget the presence of Yoss, who’s pretty much a signifier of the same dynamic applied to gender roles.

And how, exactly, does she manage that? She asks for imagination. She asks for belief. “Whole worlds pivot on acts of imagination”, she states, in what’s honestly the best line of the Chibnall era so far. And she is, of course, right, because you need to believe something is possible before you attempt it – but she is even righter in that the world of Who is one which is, fundamentally, metafictional, an ocean of narratives that people can touch and manipulate. That’s the Doctor’s power, her prerogative, occasionally shared with a chosen companion – Rose, River, Clara of course –, and it’s one Thirteen has decided to return to the people. The Doctor isn’t acting on their own, following the motto of their faith – “without hope, without witness, without reward” –. In her new incarnation, she makes her religion a communal act, a collectivist call to reshape the world. The episode, after all, does end with a prayer; and, even more meaningfully, by a woman called Eve, whose name is written in a sacred Book of the Celebrants, far from being deemed a villain, performing a heroic sacrifice which saves everyone on the ship.

Welcome to the Church of SJWho, ladies and gentlemen and those who lie betwixt. I hope you enjoy your stay with us.

Considering the nothingness which is still lurking – cue Ryan talking about his dad leaving a “void in his life”, it’s a rather appealing prospect.

The Pting, placed in that context, takes on a whole new meaning. What is he, essentially? Well, first thing first, he’s a gremlin – not the Joe Dante kind, the original myth born during World War II, about small supernatural critters eating at the RAF’s planes. In that way, he is perfectly integrated to the most classic of Who’s aesthetics, the Holmes/Hinchcliffe Gothic: take a legend, give it a sci-fi makeover, and integrate it as a striking visual within a collage of scattered and powerful images. But there’s a deep tie to the industrial subtext the season has had so far: he is an avatar of consummation, of blind hunger which places the satisfaction of selfish (something the Doctor refuses to be earlier in the episode) needs over the preservation of innocent lives, which are at risk of becoming other Graces, other innocent bystanders caught in the path of an accelerationist devouring force. Consumer’s society, embodied in a chubby gnome, literally crashes the place where the show is doing its soul-searching and attempting to create new meaning. Oh, symbolism.

That’s what the episode is about, really – symbolism and soul-searching. It’s Who taking a short, probably unscheduled break to ponder its midlife crisis, looking at its shoes, and wondering who exactly it is now. Just before, one assumes, hitting stronger than ever with a direct look British colonialism.

You know what? I’m inclined to indulge the silly old show for once. Go ahead and think, dear. You’ve earned some self-indulgent you time.