Doctor Who Series 12: Ten Huge Questions After Praxeus
7. What Is Praxeus And Is It Still A Threat?
Praxeus is a bacterial infection that feeds and spreads through microplastics. It takes over human hosts and transforms them until they explode into dust – sending more microplastics into the atmosphere. The humanoid Suki, whose planet of origin is unknown, also undergoes a sudden transformation that results in her death, but for her people, the deadly effects are usually slower to take hold. Meanwhile. overcome by the disease, birds are dropping dead out of the sky, but they are also finding human hosts to pass the illness on to.
We know nothing about the disease’s origins, but for once this is a threat that was not of our own making (in contrast to Arachnids in the UK and Orphan 55). We shouldn’t be too pleased with ourselves though, and though not at fourth-wall breaking as in previous episodes, the Doctor still needs to teach us a lesson. Praxeus is capitalising on our careless spread of plastic waste. Suki has done her research and condemned our planet as the most suitable test subject in her attempts at finding a cure.
The Doctor finds the cure in scenes reminiscent of Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor working in his UNIT lab and the early Tom Baker stories such as Robot, and Earth is saved from the threat when Jake flies Suki’s ship and disperses the antivirus into the stratosphere. But the cure is only effective on humans, so not only is it still a threat to other worlds like Suki’s, those we share our planet with can’t exactly be marked as safe either.