‘It could get around the world incredibly fast, attacking and infecting every living thing. We may potentially have a cure, but we don’t know if it works.’ A pandemic story broadcast the month the pandemic began, in retrospect this looks both prescient and hopelessly naïve. The prescient bit: how quickly a new virus can spread in an interconnected world, and how relatively quickly, given the right focus, a cure can be found. The naïve bit: entirely missing the reaction of individuals and governments and the months of lockdown, fear and uncertainty. You’d never make it like this in 2023.

You’d probably not do something this globetrotting, for starters. Praxeus suffers from the same issue as Spyfall – Part Two, jumping from location to location for short scenes as a substitute for a tightly-constructed narrative (for instance, in this kind of structure it’s easy to miss that we never find out how Adam sent that text to Jake). It’s the opposite of the base under siege, more like Terry Nation on a tartrazine high.

Like The Chase (not that one, Bradley) it skips skittishly from place to place with the option of chucking in another page if the script is running short or they need to stitch things together in the edit. The result is curiously uninvolving, because we never land in any place long enough to care much for it and – unlike, say, The Keys of Marinus – none of the locations is an especially fascinating environment to explore, just another room on another continent.

To be fair, there is a story, but it’s more in the nature of a single strand that runs through each location than a sense of many converging. There’s another unsubtly-landed environmental message (microplastic pollution is the problem), and another bunch of underdeveloped new characters that still do more than the Fam (notably, despite the proliferation of locations, Chibnall still doesn’t effectively split the foursome into two double acts – although at least Yaz and Graham get a couple of moments together). Most of these are wider issues with the production of Series 12 than unique to Praxeus, but they make this a notably weaker proposition than Pete McTighe’s previous story, Kerblam! Underwhelming.

Next Time: Can You Hear Me?