Doctor Who Series 10: Ranking Every Episode From Worst To Best
4. Oxygen
"The bottom line where human life has no value at all. We’re fighting an algorithm, a spreadsheet -- like every worker everywhere! We’re fighting the suits." - The Doctor
Steven Moffat’s brief to writer Jamie Mathieson was to make outer space dangerous and scary again. Mathieson’s script does the job early on in the university lecture hall, as the Doctor graphically describes the effects of oxygen starvation, and it’s comes as no surprise when Bill has her near death experience. Bill’s disorientation as she pictures her mother was an effective way of conveying just how close she was to dying, unsettling the audience and reminding us of our own mortality.
With the Doctor narrating the start of the episode from a god like perspective we were misled into expecting him to be above the laws of time and space, but by the end even the Time Lord has suffered lasting damage with his blindness.
One of the overarching themes of the series is that the big bad is rarely a physical monster from another world. Oxygen like Thin Ice was another anti-capitalist narrative but one built around the satirical notion of the workers having to pay for their individual supply of oxygen. The Doctor might have been blinded but the episode opens our eyes to the real dangers of treating each other and ourselves as commodities.