Extremis: Ranking - 140

                                                               Extremis

(Series 10, Dr 12 with Bill and Nardole, 20/5/2017, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, Daniel Nettheim)

Rank: 140

'Yes it's number one, it's top of the Popes...It's The Monks!'

 🎵 Hey Hey We're The Monks

And People say we monk around

But we're too busy sinning

And turning your planet upside down! 🎵

Right here’s the ‘other’ big one, so big in fact that this three-parter is going to be separated into three reviews because this story jumps around so much from one episode to another there’s too much ground to cover in one day (honestly even separating them there’s more going on than there would normally be for a single episode). And I mean a lot: before the next three weeks are out we start in the Vatican, end up in The White House, hop across to the CERN institute, jump to Egyptian pyramids, take a detour to a laboratory that might as well be in Wuhan, fall sideways into a simulated extension somewhere along the line and end up roughly back where we started (give or take a parallel universe). It’s a big fat whacking Steven Moffat epic, rather thrown away in the middle of series 10 (probably to keep it separate from the just as epic two-part finale) and a story that oddly never gets much interest from fans even though it’s the longest continuously-running week-by-week story so far of the modern run (give or take the ‘Utopia’ cliffhanger into ‘Last Of The Timelords/The Sound Of Drums’ though really only the last few minutes of that story connects up to the next two and even its writer Russell T Davies wasn’t sure whether it was a two or three parter). It’s a trilogy all about illusions, where everything we thought we safely knew about the world at the very start is turned on its head and where science and religion both come to the same conclusion about the world we live in. And when these two famously so diametrically opposed ways of looking at the world agree on something scary you know you’re in trouble. 

It’s all a bit fragmentary though, especially at first which is bitty even by Moffat standards. For now it feels as if this is going to be one of those multi-parters that explains everything by the end (for Moffat, of all the writers who’ve worked on the show is the one who believes most that the devil is in the detail), except most of this first part is ignored by the time we get there and only the revelation at the end is carried through. All three are however loosely connected by the themes of illusion, of people going through life blind to the truth and how they’re not equipped to cope with the reality of the situation they live in. ‘Extremis’ is the first part with a title derived from Latin meaning ‘in an extreme situation’ and it certainly is: so serious the Pope’s got involved and sent a summons (goodness knows how given that the Vatican never has before and there are plenty of times in the past when you’d assume that having an impossibly long-lived timelord who can see the future would have been of great use. Maybe the Pope’s been flicking through the files and found mention of ‘The Daemons’ or ‘Satan’s Pit’?) This part of the story leads on nicely from ‘Oxygen’ with the Doctor still blind after giving his sight to save Bill in that story. Rather than being a noble sacrifice though the Doctor is in denial and is acting like a wally again, just as he did at the start of series 8 – only worse, because Bill’s a gentler character all round not experienced enough to cope with it the way Clara was. The lack of sight, weirdly, wasn’t in the first draft until the ‘Oxygen’ script came back from Jamie Matheson and Steven Moffat realised he could use it in this story even though that lack of sight is the drive for practically all that happens in this three-parter; a story that should be (by Doctor standards) relatively simple becomes increasingly complicated not just because he can’t see but because he doesn’t let on that he can’t see to anyone and won’t let people help him. Which is a bit of a sticking point given that the Pope’s summoned him because of an ancient text that’s just been re-discovered and which made the people who read it all those years ago commit suicide. 

That’s a neat metaphor for a story that’s all about trust and illusion and being blind to certain things you don’t want to see, about the differences between the world that’s actually around us and how we perceive it – and how people perceive us. The Doctor, now blind, mostly takes it on trust that he can sense what he needs to know and that other people are being truthful when they tell him things, but without the full information he keeps ‘missing’ things he needs to know to get to the bottom of the truth. The moral of this story is that you need to see things from every angle to properly understand them, which is a neat twist for a story that’s partly about the divide between church and state even though we’ve seen before in past Who stories that maybe there isn’t one – that religious texts about spirits and demons might simply have been describing aliens at a time when language didn’t fully understand what they were. By its very nature as a science-fiction show Dr Who tends to err towards the science side of the debate and religion tends to be the butt of the jokes, usually when some alien civilisation has created a whole faith out of misunderstood scientific principles. But this is a rare story where both religion and science come together and discover the same thing independently, that (spoilers) the world we live in is not the real one, that it’s all a simulation created by an alien race known as The Monks who rather aptly come with a lot of quasi-religious imagery of their own behind their scientific technology. Only by learning from religious texts and combining them with scientific knowhow can the Doctor solve this problem and work this all out – but even so part three ‘The Lie Of The Land’ will still end up with the solution coming, like ‘The Daemons’ before it, not from science but from faith. The question is, when did we end up in a simulated world? It’s generally agreed by the fanbase that it was somewhere between getting the summons and arriving in the Vatican, otherwise everything that has ever happened in Dr Who could potentially be a simulation. And yet that’s never actually stated and it still means in our world the real Pope still has the same crisis and is somewhere waiting for the Doctor to come and sort it all out. 

 It’s a brave place for Dr Who to go, given the Church is still one of the last no-go areas for television that it’s not allowed to make pot-shots at. Notably This is an unnamed Pope who looks nothing like Pope Francis, the one we’ve had in ‘real’ life (as much as anything is real…this story has me worried now) since 2013. There are far more rules for depicting the Pope on television than you’d think, especially compared to monarchs and celebrities, and the BBC had to have the script specially okayed by BBC bosses before it was made. In some scenes you can tell that lifelong atheist Steven Moffat is struggling to say something about religion, taking pot-shots at an institution that doesn’t live in the modern world and is dismissive of life on other planets and homosexual relationships (summed up nicely in the scene where the Pope interrupts Bill’s date with Penny) and yet in others is extra-sympathetic: the Vatican vaults have things in them even the Doctor hasn’t seen and this Pope is far moe open to scientific ideas and time travel than the majority of people we meet in the series (it’s been a running joke since the Russell T years that, left to their own devices, ordinary humans believe the maddest of cover-ups about alien invasions). This story also fits with a growing trend, albeit more of a 2000s one than a 2010s one, that there was a hidden message in the Bible that actually meant it was ahead of its time not behind. Dr Who has a sort-of hand in this: Henry Lincoln, half of the writing duo behind ‘The Abominable Snowmen’ ‘The Web Of Fear’ and ‘The Dominators’ had a colossal falling out with the BBC over how the last story was messed around and cut into bits and negotiations to try and hold on to the licensing rights of the Quarks. Vowing not have anything more to do with TV writing Lincoln turned to ‘factual’ books that had a sort of sci-fi element to them, hinting that there was more to Biblical texts than could be read on the surface and that centuries of censorship from the Catholic Church and making sure peasants couldn’t read meant that the truth had been hidden from us all. That book, ‘The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail’ (a co-write with fellow authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh) made quite a splash when it came out in 1982, standing on the shoulders of Erich Van Dannikken’s seminal works about ufos being responsible for most of the things in ancient texts that couldn’t yet be explained by man, with the theory that Jesus was a man who had children by Mary Megdelene and that even now their descendents are walking amongst us, known only to the VCatholic Chuch and the Vatican vaults, a truth so scandalous that it’s been hushed up repeatedly by successive Popes in case it ends the church. It was one of those five minute shock fests everyone read then more or less forgotten about soon afterwards, though it inspired two very key texts of the late 1990s/early 2000s that everyone seems to have read. The most obvious one is Dan Brown’s ‘The Da Vinci Code’ (2003), technically fiction but raising issues that the painter (seen on Dr Who in ‘The City Of Death’) had been paving the way for the ‘truth’ of our living in an alien world to be revealed at the right time in such a way that the Church would never find it. The Doctor himself refers to it in this story and admits it’s ‘a dreadful book’ that ‘wouldn’t make me want to kill myself, though I did consider a hit of self harm’ (he’s quite right; certainly it’s not a patch on Lincoln’s book). 

 More plausible is ‘The Bible Code’ (1997, plus two sequels) which had the very Dr Whoy claim that the Bible is really a computer code, passed on by a higher being/alien/God who could see all of time and has been leaving us ‘clues’ for thousands of years that could only be uncovered in the ‘end of days’ (i.e. now) when humanity was smart enough to use it (and dumb enough to blow ourselves up). It’s a compelling case, with ‘skips’ between letters that spell out a message, even though to understand it you have to – there’s that word again – take it on trust that the Hebrew graphics used in the book are the ’right’ ones and not made up by the authors. The twist here is that the Bible Code was ‘discovered’ by an actual scientist who was also a Catholic, Eliyahu Rips, who was used to cracking codes and tried it with the holy text in his spare time for fun not expecting to find what he did. Though the man who wrote the code into a book, journalist Michael Drosnin, was not a believer in God Rips clearly was and a lot of the book is the scientist explaining why his views aren’t necessarily that different from science, reiterating the point Dr Who once made in ‘The Daemons’ that magic, faith and sufficiently advanced science looks much the same anyway and that God could be an alien or aliens Gods. One major factor in why it was taken seriously is the fact that God tells his messengers to make the Bible in his words exactly, to the letter and punctuation: that any single mistake would render the whole text useless so it would have to be thrown away. Though something of a five minute wonder itself the code came out at just the right time, with the feeling of doom in the air for the end of the millennia (and the Biblical vision of an ‘end of days’) and a second volume released hot on the heels of 9/11 it’s precisely the sort of thing that would have featured in a Dr Who story had the series still been on the air in the 1990s. Though dismissed by many, including Rips according to some accounts who claims a lot of the science is manipulated or at least misinterpreted and others who claim that if you stare hard enough at any text it has the same patterns simply as a quirk of human language (the example always quoated is Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’, which might be why the Doctor mentions it here: he’s not a fan and says its too slow, which frankly is a laugh given how Moffaty a book it is, full of symbolism for darker things and the way the whalers are forever on the verge of catching a whale without ever quite catching it), and the butt of jokes nowadays along the lines of ‘why did we ever take this seriously? We’re still here aren’t we?’, it did shape the world in one key way: Benjamin Netanyahu, for one, is convinced that it’s real and allegedly modified Israel’s foreign policy directly because of it (even if recent events suggest he’s mislaid his copy somewhere). 

 Even the idea of the Pope using email is quite a good joke, defying everything we think we ow about the Pontiff and his relevance to our everyday life. It’s worth pausing here for a few in-jokes you might have noticed, given that they’re tiny print on the Pope’s email inbox. Subject headings include 'The world is not what we think it is', 'The devil's work has been done', 'We have been tricked', and 'Please follow suit.' The names are closer to home: Christina Tom is the real name of Who’s second art director, Daryn McLaughlan was the art director on Broadchurch a series with many Who links and a religious setting that also featured this same director, Phillip Bond played Ganasus in ‘The Daleks’, Bill Pulman played Oswald Danes in the final series of Torchwood and best of all Rob Hull is in the Guinness Book Of World Records for having the largest collection of model Daleks in the world. While we’re on the bitty pieces there’s an odd moment where the Pope talks in Italian and Bill can’t translate what he says despite the Tardis’ gifts to enable anyone who travels inside to understand alien tongues. This scene was originally scripted with dialogue but it was deleted because everyone thought seeing it through Penny’s uncomprehending eyes (not Bill’s) made it funnier: The Pope actually says ‘What’s going on? Who are you two girls? How did I end up here in this house? I thought we were returning to the Vatican – this is madness. Doctor, why did you bring me here?!’ 

 Clearly Moffat can’t turn round and say the Bible is a text created by aliens (he was in enough trouble for poking fun at the idea of an afterlife in ‘Death In Heaven’, still the most complained about Dr Who story ever), so instead he invents a new fictional text, ‘Veritas’, while skirting over why the Pope’s suddenly come into possession of it (has it just been discovered or was it in the impressive but heavily guarded Vatican vaults all this time? Seriously if I had access to a space machine – as opposed to a space-time machine like the Tardis – that’s the first place I’d go. The most obvious Dr Who story they’ve not done yet by the way: the children of Fatima who claim to have seen Jesus return from a spaceship on the eve of the First World war, with a message that allegedly contained warnings for the next two – yes two! – world wars to follow after that, a message which is one of many buried in the Vatican archives). The idea of the Pope himself finding the equivalent of ‘The Bible Code’ covers a, if you’ll pardon the expression, multitude of sins and makes the Pope pro-active and savvy, calling in the only person who could possibly help (there’s a funny line where the Doctor’s recommendation comes from Benedict IX; anyone half-hearing assumes they pope before Francis, who stood down in suspicious circumstances despite the papacy supposedly being a job you have for life; he’s actually Benedict XVI and the 9th regeneration actually lived in the 11th century. Moffat gets in another sly dig about the Catholic Church still not recognising homosexual relationships by claiming she was a girl). The thought of a book containing infinite wisdom and power enough to make people kill themselves is a great nod back to the unfinished Who episode ‘Shada’ and fitting for a series that’s always plugged literacy and knowledge as the universe’s secret weapons. The twist, that it isn’t some brainwashing order from an alien but a revelation about the true state of the world, is a great moment and there’s a fantastic cliffhanger about what the truth is which, though simple, is really well handled. I mean, could it be that we are really all simulations on some mystery God’s hard-drive? It’s a question worth asking in a series like Who even if, alas, the answers are somewhat disappointing in the following two instalments. 

 In many ways I love the way the story keeps jumping, twisting and turning every time you think you’ve got a handle on how it works so that what seems at first like a one-pipe problem becomes bigger and bigger until it ends up a conundrum as big as any the Doctor has ever faced. It seems obvious to say that the Doctor himself turns out to be in a simulation after reading the revelation that nothing in this lie is real and we’ve had no end of parallel worlds in Who before, but the way it’s handled is very clever: Nardole disappears roughly halfway through, exploded into pixels, but he was always a mysterious alien character anyway. Next we assume Bill, ‘our’ representative and wonderfully human in all our best and worst ways (brave-scared, bright-confused and sarcastic-serious) must be real, especially given her shock at what happens to Nardole, but she turns out to be a ‘fake’ too. Next it’s the Doctor’s turn, but even he turns out to be a simulation, albeit one with just enough free will to send his real self a message as to what’s going on. It’s the sort of story that makes us question everything we’ve been told from the start and perhaps the best use of Moffat’s ability to rip the rug out from under our feet just when we think we’ve got a handle on how this world works. 

 Perhaps the cleverest twist is when we arrive at CERN, the real-life European Organisation For Nuclear Research based in Geneva and as scientific a bunch of scientists as any institution in our ‘real’ world. They are, in fact, exactly the sort of place a sceptical no-nonsense scientists like Liz Shaw would have ended up after leaving UNIT, which is indeed what happens in the Big Finish spin-offs (and the excellent ‘Companion Chronicles’ story ‘Blue Tooth’, one of my favourites in the long running series). They’re also in the show as a bit of an in-Joke: it happened that while writing this story Moffat’s eldest son was accepted on an internship over there and dad tagged along for an open day, afraid that he’d be laughed at as a peddler of ‘science-fiction’ – to his delight he found that a lot of the scientists found their career after falling in love with the show and that they respected a lot of the science in it as being at least vaguely plausible. So Moffat wrote them into his script. When they first turn up you think Dr Who is going to do the usual switcheroo, the ‘Daemons’ style message that science is based in fact and religion superstition, but no: just as Miss Hawthorne turns out to be as right as the Doctor is about what’s going on in that story so here do they come to the exact same conclusions: that our world is a simulation. Instead they have the very un-scientific reaction to the real state of the world by getting blind drunk , while the Vatican turns to science, a sly comment on how in desperate times, when pushed ‘in extremis’, everyone turns to every coping method they can find to get through it – even those that they would normally eschew as part of every day life. There’s a particularly strong and creepy scene where Bill and Nardole try to pas the ‘shadow test’ and guess a ‘random’ number in a room full of scientists only to find out that everyone calls the exact same number at the exact same time. We know that it’s just a bunch of extras shouting our pre-ordained numbers outlined in the script simultaneously, but in context it’s really eerie and unsettling.

 There’s a side-step over to The White House too, for scenes that recall the similar ones with Richard Nixon in Moffat’s ‘other’ epic ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ et sequence. It would be unusual indeed if Dr Who started backing politicians over scientists and religion but for a moment Moffat pulls the same trick again, that the people in power have been in collusion all along and are the ones who really know what they’re doing. Only of course they really really don’t. It’s worth remembering where the world was in 2017 when this story was being written, when we still didn’t know who as going to win in the close race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. There had never been an election like it: we’d been used to rivals before but these two were bitter enemies, blaming each other for the world’s problems and for making up ‘fake news’ about each other that their supporters lapped up as if it was, well, gospel. To this day a lot of Trump supporters can’t get it through their head that their president lied his way into office on a blanket of untruths that, had this been any other time, would have ended a politician’s career after being so blatantly caught out for cheating but which only made all his supporters love him more. It became so that, for us in the UK, we didn’t know who to trust (though most of us were at least far enough removed to know that the Hillary Clinton’s claims ‘but her emails’ were nothing compared to the way that trump filled his speeches with more lies and half-truths per speech than most politicians tend to tell in one career). To us it was obvious which one was a cheating melted oompah-loompa with more hair than sense but a lot of Americans, who’d been brought up not to question anything, took it all hookline and sinker. It wasn’t as if we could be smug and immune either: Jeremy Corbyn’s career was destroyed by his own party over comments that he didn’t even make and castigated in every right-wing media in the land and some of the left ones that were secretly owned by the right-wing businessmen on the quiet anyway. For us both in 2017 the truth wasn’t a set thing in stone but a set of shifting pixels that left us not knowing which way was up anymore. This is where ‘Extremis’ excels: it captures than any other single piece of fiction around that time just what it felt like to be living in a world where lies were being presented as the truth and left us unable and unwilling to trust the evidence of our own eyes. We were all blinded in plain sight and even The Doctor, the person we trust more than anyone else in this series to see through everything and speak the truth, has lost his ability to see. 

 Had we stayed with that story – had we even, say, had that story in a linear order so it would be easier to follow – ‘Extremis’ might well have been one of my favourite 12th Doctor stories. It’s sassy, smart, complex takes no prisoners in who it targets and thought not original per se (as well as the sources mentioned above it’s clearly heavily modelled on ‘The Matrix’ film series; which I guess is only fair, given that their idea for a matrix was nicked from the Who story ‘The Deadly Assassin’ to begin with) does at least travel to places no other Who story has ever been. The Vatican is re-created well as is CERN, The White House set is as good as before and the contrast between the locations (CERN all bright lines and clinicalness, the Vatican vault all dark and mysterious, The White House half in shadow) is well handled. But there’s just too much going on, much of it left unexplained for so many episodes to come you end up a bit numb to every reveal. The worst excess are the flashbacks to Missy and how she ended up in the vault, something that has nothing to do with this story and will only really become a thing in the two-part finale in five whole episodes’ time. Missy’s execution, for reasons un-shown (but which we’re led to believe will be revealed at some point that never quite comes) and The Doctor waiting to take her remains as the only other living timelord has been done before in ‘The TV Movie’ and though it makes a lot more sense and is handled a lot better than in 196 it really doesn’t belong here. It’s also the flimsiest ‘mystery’ Moffat ever wrote: most fans had guessed it was Missy in the vault and it’s not that big a surprise he locked her up to keep her safe from execution as much as to keep humanity safe from her. The Doctor-master relationship has been one long criss-crossing of locking each other up and saving each other at the last minute so the moment the Doctor knocks out the executioners to save her life is moe of a surprise on first viewing that it doesn’t come with another surprise layered on top. We also don’t know why the Doctor decides to open the vault now, after vowing to guard her for a thousand years or why the Doctor seems to be happy to confide about his blindness in Missy someone he barely trusts rather than Bill, someone he trusts implicitly. I can sort of see why it’s there and maybe where the starting point for these three episodes came from: the idea of trust, of taking Missy’s promises to turnover a new leaf at face value. But handled the way it is, where it keeps interrupting the  action and is told in the ‘wrong’ order, simply interrupts the flow. 

 Nardole is handled well though and we finally learn how he ended up tagging along after previous glimpses of him in ‘The Return Of Dr Mysterioso’ and ‘The Husbands Of River Song’. It’s a sweet gesture that he’s been sent by River Song to keep an eye on the Doctor and ‘kick his arse’ when he needs it and Nardole fulfils that function well here, treated by creator Moffat as more than the comedy relief of other writers this year. In some respects he knows more than the Doctor and, like Vila in terry Nation’s Blake’s 7, we see that a lot os his jokey nonchalant manner is a cover-up for a figure much more stern and calculating, who tells jokes so everyone ignores him and therefore doesn’t try to kill him. It’s a shame they write Nardole out of this episode so early as his very Doctory speech to Bill about who to trust and what’s ‘really’ going on is his best scene: as a simulated bunch of pixels, talking more freely than his ‘real’ self would ever feel able to, he’s even more interesting than he usually is. Nardole gets all the best lines this week too, such as the line when an admiring Bill asks him ‘are you a secretly a badass?!’ to which he replies ‘nothing secret it about it baby doll’, then immediately screams on seeing a dead body. Mind you everyone’s on good form for one liners this week, with other highlights being Missy’s ‘I’ve just been executed – show a little respect!’ and Bill reacting to the Cardinals turning up in her bedroom and interrupting her date with the line ‘you’re all going to hell!’, before giving a double-take as she realises the incongruity of what she’s just said. 

 Alas nobody else in this story comes out of it quite as well in terms of full-on plot and general dialogue. What stops this episode from really soaring though is the lack of chemistry between the leads and the lack of sweet little moments in between the running down corridors. The 12th Dr and Bill have become a great team across the past few episodes, his experience and her compassion a good fit for each other. As much as Bill has always looked up to this older, wiser Doctor he’s really begun to look up to her too, relying on her compassion to temper his logic and see things he can’t. Suddenly it feels as if we’ve lost all that and gone backwards and while you can see why after the events of ‘Oxygen’ (that really wasn’t Bill’s fault) it’s sad to see such a gulf between the two that will only get worse in the next two parts and is a little like how the first series of Dr Who would have been had the 1st Dr gone back to treating Ian and Barbara the way he originally did after Susan leaves, even after all those years of learning how to trust them. The hint is that the Doctor is keeping his distance because he doesn’t want his best friend to pity him, which is a neat idea in principle but in practice means lots of shouting and moody looks. Poor Bill is bamboozled: she’s one of Dr Who’s few innocents who never did anything to anyone and seeing her looking sad as the Doctor snaps at her feels worse than, say, when he did the same thing to Clara or Donna who always gave as good as they got. The 12th Doctor wass never meant to be likeable and sometimes that’s his best trait, the comedy that comes from his inability to understand human feelings and the drama that comes from an alien who really does seem alien, a neat contrast to the rather touchy-feely previous two regenerations. But sometimes, as here, it’s taken too far: the Doctor is absent to us too: throughout this story we can’t fully tell what the Doctor’s thinking. It doesn’t help, either, that peter Capaldi plays so much of this story from behind dark glasses not looking at anyone: always a very visual,, restless performer standing stock still and staring robs him of a lot of his character and leaves him with no one to play off the way he usually does. Even by his standards his performance here varies, with a lot of lines that just completely miss. 

 Once you’ve seen all three episodes you have to question why so much of this episode if left dangling and unexplained too – after all, everything up to the jump through the portal is supposedly ‘real’, yet the book that caused it all in the first place is left in the Vatican causing mayhem for the future too and never referred to again. The basic central conceit, that The Monks have created an artificial simulation of earth to prepare to take it over, is just the plan The Kraals had in ‘The Android Invasion’ that most fans agree was rubbish, however much it’s been dressed up to hide that fact. You’d think The Pope would have at least ex-communicated the Doctor for running out on him like that. There are no scenes here that really resolve anything and even by Moffat standards this one suffers from the writer being so distracted by all the new ideas coming into his head that he never properly has time to explore his first thoughts. There’s a great story to be had about the Doctor getting emails from the Pope and a religious text that scientists agree has mega repercussions for the world and parts of this story fulfil on that promise with some genuinely creepy and unsettling scenes. Extremis indeed: there’s never been another episode of Dr Who quite like this one and that alone makes it something to cherish. Unfortunately that great story isn’t told in a linear order so its near-enough incomprehensible and keeps being interrupted by another four lesser stories all competing for space within it. The result is a story that, while admirable, is too clever for its own good and lacks the flow of Moffat’s best work. As it happens extremis’ ends up being arguably the best part of the three, but it’s the promise you remember this story for more than anything that actually happens and the hints that are far less appealing when Moffat reveals what’s really going on and turns them into facts. For now we have to take a lot of this story on faith that it’s all going to work out in the end – and largely it doesn’t. Still, I’d rather have a Dr Who story with too much imagination than too little and this is one of those stories with such big fish to fry it seems unfair to complain that a few of the minnows are burnt. ‘Extremis’ has ambition galore and manages to match its reach enough to make it a great story, if not a perfect one. After all in scope there are very few Who stories like it: this one truly is ‘Biblical’, in every sense of the word. 

 POSITIVES +The best scene by far is the one great comedy moment in this oddly serious story is the opening, where poor Bill is trying to have a nice normal night off from university and time-travelling and show a prospective new girlfriend round her humble flat, only for the Tardis to materialise. And then The Pope walks through her door, scaring off her date. One of the best lines of the series comes when Bill complains to the Doctor that she’s told him before about her need to have a private life and ‘when a rare and special thing happens in my life do not put The Pope in my bedroom!’ Peter Capaldi’s off-handed comment ‘So now I know’ sums up the off-handedness of the 12th Doctor only too well. This story would have been better still with more scenes like that one in it to break up the tension and grumpy vibes. It’s a clever, way, too of lightly ribbing the Church for believing in seventeen impossible things before breakfast but not accepting the very real world of homosexual couples (still unrecognised officially by the Vatican until as recently as 2023), not directly but in having the Doctor act equally oblivious and having the two plotlines exists side by side, in parallel. There’s also a great dig from Bill at her adopted mum when she acts relieved that Bill is having a girl round because ‘she has strict orders about having men in my house’ to which Bill, whose never been able to talk openly about her sexuality, complains ‘yeah, probably not as strict as mine’. 

 NEGATIVES - We’ve seen monsters like The Monks before and quite recently too. They’re part the Mummy on the Orient Express and part the Silence and though they don’t look like the headless monks from the Matt Smith era or the Meddling Monk from the Hartnell era the monk thing has been rather done to death too. Why are they dressed as monks? We don’t know. These monks are easily the weakest of the lot and though their faces are quite scary, looking like someone left The Abzorbaloff under a waffle iron, their hoarse whispering voices and weedy complexion make them seem like a monster even I could push over and run away from rather than one of the greatest threats to the universe. Even as the story progresses and their powers are shown to be greater they’re never really as much of a threat as really they ought to be – we’re told what they can do with their impossible powers but never really see it - and especially here, in part one, you wonder what all the fuss is all about. 

 BEST QUOTE: Simulation Nardole: ‘Only in darkness are we revealed. Goodness is not goodness that seeks advantage. Good is good in the final hour, in the deepest pit, without hope, without witness, without reward. Virtue is only virtue in extremis’.

 Previous ‘Oxygen’ next ‘The Pyramid At The End Of The World’