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“The Tsuranga Conundrum” raises these stakes once the Pting accidentally kills Astos after he follows it into an escape pod that prematurely jettisons. Such paradoxes and perambulations are Who staples, for the franchise has always melded the quotidian with the fantastic-and the serious with the silly-into a unique mixture of mundane madness. By episode’s end, viewers may forget just how odd is its ability to combine extraterrestrial attack, ecological concern, and pregnant-man comedy. The women take charge effortlessly, while Ryan and Graham express no disgust-or even much surprise-at Yoss’s impending childbirth. Perhaps this outing’s best feature is how it overturns-or attempts to overturn-many taken-for-granted science-fiction tropes by having Ryan and Graham assist Yoss’s birth pangs while the Doctor, Yaz, and Eve Cicero deal with the Tsuranga’s dire straits.

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“The Tsuranga Conundrum” is a worthy successor, not only full of spooky tension thanks to the Pting’s depredations but also boasting an unconventional narrative thanks to Yoss’s pregnancy.

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This plot came to prominence during the Third Doctor’s (Jon Pertwee’s) Classic Who tenure from 1970-1974, but New Who, in 2006, perfected it in Series 2’s Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) adventures “The Impossible Planet” and “The Satan Pit,” still among the franchise’s best two-part episodes.

The ship’s multi-room, futuristic, and sterile medical set evokes feelings of claustrophobia and terror in the tradition of Doctor Who’s best base-under-siege stories, which find the Doctor trapped in confined quarters battling a mysterious enemy that threatens to destroy everything and everyone in its path. Apart from its opening scene, “The Tsuranga Conundrum” takes place entirely aboard the Tsuranga, making this episode a venerable example of that old television staple, the bottle show. Here we go again, longtime viewers will say. Resembling a greyish version of the extraterrestrial “dog” Stitch in Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois’s 2002 animated film Lilo & Stitch, the Pting is similarly talented at causing chaos, to wit, the creature immediately begins eating every inorganic component-including solid metal-that it can find. If Chibnall’s plot does not sound busy enough, the automatically piloted Tsuranga, while travelling toward its space-station hub to offload all patients for full medical treatment, finds itself attacked by a small, yet ferocious creature known as a Pting.

That is good news for the Tsuranga crew, which boasts only two physicians, Astos (Brett Goldstein) and Mabli (Lois Chimimba), to assist Team TARDIS “neuro-pilot” General Eve Cicero (Suzanne Packer), suffering from adrenaline surges that will eventually destroy her heart and a pregnant male member of the Gifftan species named Yoss (Jack Shalloo). They awaken four days later on the hospital ship Tsuranga to discover that the Doctor is more seriously injured than everyone else, with her ectospleen causing enough pain to double her over once or twice, but never long enough to slow her down. The Thirteenth Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) and companions Ryan Sinclair (Tosin Cole), Yasmin “Yaz” Khan (Mandip Gill), and Graham O’Brien (Bradley Walsh) begin this adventure in the 67 th Century, prospecting for metal on Planet Seffilun 27, located in an unnamed junk galaxy, but instead discover a sonic mine that explodes and knocks everyone unconscious. “The Tsuranga Conundrum” takes viewers on a trip to Crazytown without pauses, delays, or stops-all of which have been pulled so far out that they may never again get pushed back in.

For anyone who thought that Doctor Who Series 11’s fourth episode, “Arachnids in the UK,” was pure insanity, showrunner Chris Chibnall, with the season’s fifth outing, offers this response: You ain’t seen nothing yet.

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