Doctor Who Series 10: 7 Big Questions We're Asking After 'Oxygen'
3. How Did The Doctor Survive?
Steven Moffat’s brief to Jamie Mathieson was to make outer space
dangerous again, and boy did they achieve that with this chilling and
claustrophobic tale. It’s a definite reaction against a growing trend in Doctor
Who to forget the dangers caused by a non-terrestrial environment. Fantasy has often
played loosely with science in the last few years of the show, in a manner that
would have shocked its creators. For example, who could forget the sight of River
Song leaping through space into the TARDIS?
The Doctor can survive a lack of oxygen much longer than any human (The Ark in Space, Smith and Jones, Mummy on the Orient Express) and has even made the odd foray into space without a space helmet before. In The Caves of Androzani the Fifth Doctor says that he can store oxygen for a few minutes. He is also able to effect a trance-like state enabling him to stay alive without breathing.
But is the final frontier, the one area of logic that the series ultimately can never cross, the invulnerability of the Doctor? Here it is of great surprise to the human crew that the Doctor didn’t die when he gave Bill his space helmet. Yes, there seems to be lasting damage to his eyesight, but surely even a man with Gallifreyan physiology and Time Lord powers should have been destroyed by the vacuum of space?