This was, by and large, an extremely competent episode, which is not intended as a backhanded compliment. There was none of the frenetic pace of Orphan 55 or the dissatisfying plot developments of Spyfall. It was instead just a solid episode of Doctor Who.

It’s striking that thematic cohesion is something novel in the Chibnall era, but it’s clear how much stronger an episode can be when it’s actually about something. And not about in the same way that Orphan 55 was ‘about’ climate change – by telling us multiple times that the episode is about climate change, even if that doesn’t jive with the plot or characters – but by subtly drawing together character and theme.

The episode creates a dichotomy between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, the former a profit-seeking businessman and the latter an ideas-driven inventor. While both have gone down in history as inventors, their characters are very different: Tesla enters the TARDIS marvelling at its brilliance; Edison wants to replicate it and sell it. Their workshops, too, speak to their character. Tesla’s is barebones, all of his ideas stored in his head. Edison’s, on the other hand, is grand, vain – with his name plastered everywhere – and, most importantly, staffed by other people. He sits back in his office – or showboats outside to the general public – while the hard graft is done by others. But I appreciated that the episode did not caricature Edison. He quickly picked up on the significance of the Doctor’s desire for zinc when she was brewing a concoction to trap their pursuer, and he expressed regret at his workers’ deaths, insisting that he inform their families. So it was clear that Edison, while primarily a greedy businessman, still had the mind of a scientist, and still had some heart.

While some work is done to humanise Edison, it is Tesla we sympathise with. His characterisation was almost bipolar, by turns manic and depressed, and we quickly see the connection between him and the Doctor. She too is, in a sense, an immigrant, with a superior mind and the feeling that she’s different. They work well together, and it’s satisfying to see them team up to defeat the alien threat.

The Skithra work, primarily, because of the way they mirror Edison. They are scavengers, stealing the technology of other and cleverer races, insisting on their superiority while unable to actually prove it. And this reliance on the work of others is their downfall – when the Doctor tricks the Queen in to grabbing the teleport device, someone more inventive and clever, more familiar with building their own technology, might have worked out what it was about to do. We might even take the chase scene as a metaphor for their weakness – the individual Skithra are so concerned with their own personal victory that they keep knocking into each other, leaving Yaz and Edison to ultimately escape despite being far slower. If they had worked together, they would have won.

Whittaker is being given better and more complex material this series. It is nice to finally see some bite; having given the Skithra a chance and been rejected, the Doctor feels no compunction in killing them, even commenting ‘When you die, there will be nothing left behind. Just a trail of blood and other people’s brilliance. No one will even know you existed.’ There’s a sense of grim victory here, that the Skithra deserve this death, and this is much preferred to the nicey-nice democratic ‘beacon of hope’ Doctor of Chibnall’s mind – it’s good, at least, that he allows guest writers to depart from that.

So, all in all a solid episode, rooted in some terrific guest performances as well as an actual sense of structure and theme.

Stray Thoughts

• The Gang are woefully utilised, as ever. Yaz gets some screentime with Tesla only to deliver some terribly generic lines. Much of the episode has them simply following the Doctor around as she exposits and solves problems. It leads to the question – who actually are these people, beyond their races and genders? Every writer has struggled with them because they are so ill-defined. Chibnall seems to think circumstance is personality – Yaz is a police officer, Graham a cancer survivor and bus driver, Ryan a dyspraxic teenager. But what drives them? What do they believe?
• I was surprised that no reference was made to the Racnoss – the Skithra are clearly very similar. It even looked like re-used head prosthetics. They must, I suppose, be some sort of sister race.
• The Silurians aren’t strictly aliens, but I suppose that’s difficult to explain in the heat of the moment.
• New York was excellently realised – the outside street locations looked expansive and not at all like sets.
• Some nice direction in the TARDIS – for once – when the changing lights dance across the Doctor’s face as she realises her plan has failed.
• On that note, it’s nice to actually follow the rules of drama again. Instead of the Doctor triumphantly swaggering up and declaring she’d saved the day offscreen, we watch as, right at the moment of victory, her plan fails and she’s forced to improvise quickly. We see her actually be clever – with the teleportation device she uses having already been established earlier in the episode – and it is infinitely more satisfying as a result.
• Some of the usual bugbears are present in this episode, though – the presence of ‘hacking’  and ‘tech’ again (the latter slightly more excusable in the context of the episode), as well as some scene description when the Doctor sonics a door – while being chased – and has to announce that she’s just locked it. It happens again when she tries to unhook the train carriages – ‘ugh, it’s rusted together’, she declares, despite being alone. Luckily that tails off as the episode goes on and we have to go back to actually watching and thinking.
• This era’s hilarious mishandling of gender and racial politics – despite being oh-so-PC – continues as Tesla and Edison are allowed to leave with their memories intact, while Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan protest as the Doctor wipes their minds. The programme had already dealt with those unethical implications back with Clara and Bill, and it’s sad that we’ve regressed back to the Donna-style begging-and-pleading mind-wipe – but only for women!