Some ‘Doctor Who’ fans are a little confused, even miffed, at the climax of the most recent episode “Praxeus,” in which Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor manages to save policeman Jake (Warren Brown) with a tricky, last-split-second maneuver. Jake had volunteered to pilot a ship in order to spread an antivirus to prevent a deadly outbreak, but the ship started falling apart around him. The Doctor’s precision rescue involved materializing the TARDIS around him.
This got fans thinking, why didn’t The Doctor use this same technique to save former companion Adric (Matthew Waterhouse) who died during the “Earthshock” storyline, in a very similar manner. This was Season 19 of the classic series, which aired in 1982, with Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor, and Adric is one of the few companions who was shown to have actually and definitively died. However, his death came in a way that was close to Jake’s near-death, in a spacecraft that crashed into Earth before The Doctor could save him. So longtime fans are curious as to how the Thirteenth Doctor could pull off this rescue when the Fifth couldn’t.
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Poor Adric. #DoctorWho #Praxeus pic.twitter.com/VO13xoDnrz
— ɢᴀᴠɪɴ ⌬ (@gavinworby) February 2, 2020
i wonder how Adric would feel about the Doctor saving that random dude from the exploding spaceship 👀
— Zoey (@MistressOfNull) February 2, 2020
Shame she didn’t do that for Adric…#Earthshock #DoctorWho #Praxeus pic.twitter.com/bGpRCIkj2L
— WhoHats (@WhoHats) February 2, 2020
I was only thinking of one thing at the end of that episode …… poor Adric #DoctorWho pic.twitter.com/Z2QQMuGbXq
— Dean Stephenson (@DeanBStephenson) February 2, 2020
However, some fans have come up with their own solutions, including that the controls of the TARDIS had been damaged by the Cybermen prior to Adric’s death, so the Fifth Doctor couldn’t employ it that way, or simply that the Thirteenth Doctor is over a thousand years older than the Fifth and has learned more skill in that time.
Overall, “Praxeus” seems to have been a successful episode, and has received positive reactions. How did you enjoy it? Are you upset that Adric couldn’t be saved, while a one-off guest star was?
Source: Digital Spy
