Audio is streamed directly from the publisher (media.blubrry.com) as published in their RSS feed. Play Podcasts does not host this file. Rights-holders can request removal through the copyright & takedown page.
Show Notes
Thar’s plastic in them thar hills! (and oceans, and birds, and airplanes, and people.)
Simon and Eugene solve all of Earth’s pollution problems… or, failing that, they discuss Praxeus, the latest episode of Doctor Who from the folks who brought you Kablam!
Episode Synopsis:
It’s a tale of three threads. In one thread, UK astronaut Adam Lang is lost on re-entry, only for his estranged husband, Jake, an ex-copper, to receive a text message from him asking for help. The message originates from Hong Kong, where he meets Yaz and Graham, who are investigating strange energy readings. They find Lang, strapped into an alien machine, and rescue him from the Hazmats who have imprisoned him.
There’s the thread of two travel vloggers, Gabriela and Jamila, visiting Peru who discover not only a lot of garbage, but birds that attack. When Jamila goes missing, Ryan turns up investigating the mystery of the birds. They discover Jamila, dead – sort of- in a nearby inexplicably deserted hospital. She is soon covered with a strange, alien skin condition and explodes into a pile of dust.
And finally it’s the thread of a missing US submarine, and the lone sailor the Doctor rescues, after he washes up on the shore of Madagascar, near a research facility looking into cleaning the oceans of micro plastics. And when I say, “rescues,” I mean drags ashore only to watch him get covered in a strange, alien skin condition and explode. Also, the research facility is being watched by flocks on non-native birds.
In each of the first two threads, the Doctor turns up to retrieve the team members and takes them all, minus Yaz and Gabriela back to the research facility in Madagascar, where, with the help of scientist Suki she tries to piece together the clues to the mystery.
Yaz and Gabriela stayed behind in Hong Kong to investigate the alien lab, and later impulsively travel through a teleport where they find the missing US submarine.
A dissection of one of the dead birds reveals that it is stuffed full of plastic, and at this moment, the 2×4 swings forth from the television set, smacking the viewer up the back side of the head with today’s moralizing. Humans are poisoning the planet with all their plastics. These plastics break down into micro plastics and are ingested into everything, even humans. An alien bacteria that eats plastic has come to Earth. But instead of contenting itself on eating all of the plastic all over the place (even in the planes flying in the sky) they instead concentrate on eating the plastic in birds and in humans. This has the unfortunate side effect of making birds die and fall from the sky, but making humans explode.
The Doctor and Suki, along with some helpful Earth-based enzymes, seem to be on the verge of a breakthrough. Gosh it’s quite the convenient coincidence that Suki has a well-equipped lab working on micro plastic related research. That is until Yaz reports in from the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Readings on the alien dookicky thingy pinpoint a point right there in Madagascar.
And the gig is up! Suki is an alien working to save her people from the nasty alien plastic-earring bacteria named Praxeus. Just to be clear, the bacteria is named Praxeus, Suki is still named Suki.
It was Suki who brought Praxeus to Earth because humans are a special kind of destructive monster. It took her people scouring THREE galaxies to find a planet that had been screwed this badly.
Suki disappears but not before giving her thanks to the Doctor and a warning – Praxeus is a smart bacteria, and its coming for her. And indeed, the Praxeus infected birds do a poor man’s Hitchcock on the gang, attacking everyone yet not managing a single scratch.
Back to the TARDIS, where she tests the experimental antidote on Adam. If it doesn’t kill him, she’ll have found a cure. They pop to the bottom of the ocean to retrieve Yaz and Gabriela. They also find Suki, who dies, not entirely of Praxeus, but rather the combination of the Doctor’s experimental cure, which Suki tried on herself, Praxeus and her alien biology. It makes things worse and she explodes. Too bad she already transmitted the “cure” back to her people – I hope they don’t try it.
Adam recovers, and with a clinical trial sample size of two – with one fatality – the Doctor rushes to use Suki’s spaceship to disperse the “cure” into the Earth’s atmosphere. Suki’s ship has a malfunction and Jake has to fly it into space because being a space man is easy, and he disperses the kill or cure into the atmosphere, spreading it to entire planet. And as the ship explodes, the Doctor rescues Jake.