Written by Tom
[Previously: “Doctor Who: Knock Knock” vs. the British Housing Industry]
If you want to argue that Doctor Who Series 10 is a politically active show (and we do), then “Oxygen” is exhibit A. The villain is literally capitalism. Peter Capaldi’s Doctor spends half the episode making speeches about how society boils down to the workers vs. the suits. It ends with the event that will canonically end capitalism as a political system and bring on its replacement. It’s the single most blatantly anti-capitalist episode that Doctor Who has ever done.
From our perspective though, this leaves us with surprisingly little to talk about. You can pretty easily spin a few thousand words arguing that “Smile” is anti-neoliberal and you’re going to get something at least interestingly counter-intuitive out of it. You’re not getting any brownie points for noting that “Oxygen” is political though. My first plan for this entry was to just post a link to the script and leave it at that. There’s not a lot to do here.
This gets compounded by the fact that “Oxygen” isn’t actually doing anything much differently from the other episodes leading up to it. We noted the series’ anti-capitalist leanings when looking at “Smile”. It’s anti-exploitation angle and general alignment with anti-capitalist youth cultures is shared with “Thin Ice”. ‘People are being killed by the economic contexts around them’ is also the plot of “Knock Knock”. Sure, “Oxygen” might be the most blatant engagement with these themes – and its existence oddly helps things like the “Smile is anti-neoliberal” argument in that it proves that anti-capitalism was on the production teams’ minds at the time – but it’s not anything all too unique in itself.
What mostly separates it from the pack is how vicious it is: while “Smile” hides its messages behind sleek imagery and emoji jokes, “Oxygen” is a grim survival horror that temporarily kills a companion and ends by blinding the Doctor. This is mostly part and parcel of the episode being particularly blatant about its themes though: something that’s so willing to be a series of angry rants about the evils of capitalism needs things as heightened as spacesuit zombies, companion deaths and people getting blinded to justify the anger. Despite being the most openly anti-capitalist Doctor Who episode so far, it’s really just a particularly strong flavour of Series 10’s political angles in general.
Instead of looking at it from inside the context of Doctor Who then, “Oxygen” is best served by being taken as a cultural object, because the important thing to remember about this episode isn’t just that it’s a grimdark anti-capitalist rant, it’s that it’s a grimdark anti-capitalist rant first broadcast on a Saturday afternoon on BBC1 just before the Eurovision Song Contest. (more…)
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