Television Review Dr Who Oxygen

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Spoiler alerts Zombie astronauts on a space-station seems a chilling idea and it works very effectively in an episode that was very scary for such an early airing (earlier than usual due to being followed by the even scarier live Eurovision Song Contest). Except the astronauts were just dead and it was the robotized space suits that were relentlessly pursuing the shrinking band of survivors. The Doctor and Bill discover that the workers on the space-station have very restricted oxygen supplies that they have to pay for, and that the company are prepared to cut off the supply rather than pay the workers anything. It takes capitalism to the level of cold blooded murder by an enemy we never even see. The ‘suits’ being the problem means both the space suits and the distant suit wearing company management. Bill’s close encounter with the vacuum of space and the Doctor blinding himself to save her (a blindness maintained for at least one more story) was very well handled though it was the very candid political message about corporate greed that made this one of Who’ most outstanding stories to date. I just wish we had seen the exposure when the Doctor dropped the surviving crew members off at their head office to address their grievances. Arthur Chappell