Compared to the previous episode, Praxeus falls quite flat and doesn’t live up to what was before it. In the previous episode, there was mystery and excitement and to follow such an amazing episode was always going to be difficult but this episode just falls back into old habits.
Praxeus begins with a mystery surrounding dead birds, an attack and a deadly infection which causes anyone who catches it to disintegrate. In this episode, there are multiple locations and very large cast. With a large cast it is difficult to gain a connection with the new characters but as a result we at the end of the episode we are left still wondering why these people were involved and what made them so special. We are left wanting to know more about the vloggers Gabriela and Jamila. Our alien in this episode is called Suki, but we don't really learn much about her and where she is from. It is quite sad that we don't really get to know much about Suki means she is quite forgettable and doesn’t make the impact that maybe she should have.
Not all the new characters we meet are undeveloped, suspended police officer Jake and his British astronaut husband Jake are developed but their chemistry together doesn’t really work. Jake and Adam have a dysfunctional relationship with an imbalance of power. Warren Brown and Matthew McNulty who play Jake and Adam don’t put across the most convincing performance as this couple. Their chemistry is quite off as if they feel uncomfortable around each other and seems like quite an odd pairing.
There is a lot of jumping in this episode, we hop around the world from Peru to Madagascar and then Hong Kong. It feels like this series, each episode has a message for us to think about from like climate change. This episode is no different, this episode is all about pollution, particularly plastic pollution and the effect it has on the environment like the sea and wildlife (birds). It is starting to become annoying that every message has to have a message, it makes us miss previous series and episodes where we were meeting new aliens/monsters and just watching the Doctor save the day without having environmental or political thrown into our face. It was nice to see a couple of episodes with these kinds of messages embedded into but it becomes annoying and less enjoyable when it is almost every episode.
It is also a shame that we still haven’t properly left Earth yet for an episode. Maybe this episode would have been more enjoyable if we weren’t on Earth. It feels as if Chibnall is scared to take the Doctor and her friends away from their home planet yet we are now wanting this as is it becoming tiresome to always be on Earth and have environmental message told to us over and over. The enjoyment starts to decrease as it is tiresome that the same thing keeps happening in the same place.
With a lot of locations to cover, the Doctor and her friends have to split up to cover everything. We see Yas (Mandip Gill) in a different light this week, she insists on remaining in Hong Kong to investigate solo. She believes she found an alien world or colony but it turns out just to be pollution. We see a kind of darker side to Yas, in the sense we see how annoyed she is when she is told she is wrong and the way she reacts is something we haven’t seen before. It makes us question why does Yas want to prove she can do things alone so badly.
In the end, Praxeus is concerned with pollution and micro plastic particles getting into our food chain with alien pathogens to give a reason for the Doctor to take notice. The deaths in this episode are shocking but we don't get to actually know who Suki is and we aren't given the chance to discover more. Likewise, this episode doesn’t have the strongest performances but we do get to see a new side to Yas which is interesting. Overall, this episode is a disappointment compared with the previous episode. It now makes us crave a more traditional episode which we had become accustomed to, in the sense on an alien planet focusing on the Doctor stopping the invasion without some kind of message begin the main narrative point.
