Doctor Who once again saved the day when confronted with Praxeus, but the infection has a few things in common with classic villains, the Autons. After last week’s series of shocking reveals, “Praxeus” might’ve been a somewhat less groundbreaking affair, but provided an entertaining modern adventure nonetheless. The episode stretched Team TARDIS across the globe in Earth’s near future, with a missing astronaut, deadly birds and strange aliens with gas masks all in need of Time Lord attention. The Doctor found that the infection plaguing the birds had also been implanted into the astronaut and was proving deadly to those afflicted.
The Doctor spends much of this week’s episode attempting to piece together the various emergencies going off across Earth, and during these deliberations, she ponders whether old foes the Autons might be responsible. Ultimately, the Thirteenth Doctor decides to rule out the Autons since the situation doesn’t match up against their usual modus operandi, but the fact she puts the famous villains in the frame highlights the similarities between the Autons and Praxeus.
What Is Doctor Who’s Praxeus?
The very beginnings of Praxeus are left unaddressed, but Doctor Who reveals it to be an infection that made its way to Suki’s planet and virtually wiped out her people. Bacterial in nature, Praxeus is attracted to plastic, feasting on the stuff and subsequently animating it. This is how the infection alters the birds’ behavior, briefly reanimates a dead body and creates a HQ under the ocean. In humans, the infection shows as a gray, brittle scaling over the skin than eventually consumes the organic matter and shatters the host into dust. The same happened to Suki’s people, but at a far slower rate, allowing them to still live while almost entirely covered in Praxeus scales.
Suki describes the Praxeus bacteria in almost sentient terms, fighting back against whatever might threaten its spread from one living organism to the other, but it remains merely a microscopic entity, rather than a fully-fledged alien villain. Due to the pollution on Earth, Praxeus found a paradise within which it could thrive and multiply, first using the plastic in the ocean, then moving into the birds, and finally into the human population via microplastics found in the food chain.
How Doctor Who’s Autons Are Different
The main factor in The Doctor ruling Autons from suspicion is that they don’t usually work with bacterial methods, but while this is certainly true, it’s easy to see why Whittaker’s Time Lord might’ve considered them culpable. Autons are the soldiers of an evil alien hive-mind called the Nestene Consciousness - an ethereal and powerful telepathic being that first troubled the Third Doctor. Usually operating outside of their natural form, the Nestene has the ability to transfer part of its consciousness into plastic, morphing and animating it at will. A common target of this ability in Doctor Who history has been shop window mannequins, with the Nestene effectively possessing the plastic models, turning their hands into guns and using them to attack humanity.
There are numerous similarities between Praxeus and the Autons, especially from an outside perspective. The Nestene seize control of plastic, so if The Doctor found that plastic within birds and humans was being weaponized and transformed, it’s only natural to automatically turn to the Autons. Furthermore, the Nestene’s primary goal is invasion, and the Praxeus virus spreading to human hosts could certainly have cleared the planet of its current occupants.
The main difference between the two, however, is that the Nestene’s link with plastic was psychic in nature, whereas The Doctor found Adam the astronaut and the dead birds were biologically infected with a plastic-loving pathogen. This is why The Doctor rules out Autons as the culprits. Additionally, it would be a stretch to say that the Praxeus bacteria was consciously invading Earth as the Nestene have. The infection was acting like any other pathogen and simply trying to survive and breed as best it could, but there was no planned strategy in place. With that said, the presence of microplastics in humans is a scary proposition if the Autons do ever return to Doctor Who.
More: Doctor Who: Where Ruth Can Fit In The Doctor’s Past Regenerations
Doctor Who continues with “Can You Hear Me?” February 9th on BBC and BBC America.
