Lie Of The Land
(Series 10, Dr 12 with Bill and Nardole, 3/6/2017, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Toby Whithouse, director: Wayne Yip)
Rank: 138
'Yes it's number one, it's top of the Popes...It's The Monks!'
🎵 It's another parallel valley Sunday
Pyramids building everywhere
Rows of Humans that are all the same
And even the Doc doesn't seem to care🎵
It’s the big finale of
modern Dr Who’s only full three-parter and everyone is surprised, including the
Doctor. There he was, fully expecting to have died out trying to save humanity
from a virus when, due to the blindness caused in the story ‘Oxygen’, he couldn’t open a door and get to
safety (the ultimate in the ordinary colliding with the extraordinary head on).
Bill, too, is suffering from shell-shock for a full 45 minutes as she tries to
get her head round the fact that she’s just saved the world – and then doomed
it. No one, though, is more surprised than the audience: Dr Who just didn’t do
three episode stories, ever (well you could sort of link ‘Utopia’ and ‘The
Sound Of Drums/Last Of The Timelords’ I suppose, but really that’s more of a
separate story and a cliffhanger that then sets up the finale). They certainly
didn’t do this sort of thing mid-season, in episodes six to eight out of
thirteen. And they certainly do so in stories that were by different authors,
with Toby Whithouse now following scripts by Steven Moffat and Peter Harness.
For all we knew, when this story went out, it was a plot that was set to run to
the end of the year or even beyond and we hadn’t got a clue where this trilogy
was all going to end. Dr Who was taking bigger risks than ever, with an
ambition that had been lacking for most of the 12th Doctor’s run, as
the surprise series ten Moffat was never expecting to make and with a bit of
extra time to make it pushes him into new areas and do things he’d never
considered before.
At least one of those risks has a precedent: this is the longest extended ‘The Doctor’s gone bad’ story since ‘The Invasion Of Time’ in 1978 (a story that seems to have haunted a then-seventeen year old Moffat in all sorts of ways – see ‘Journey To The Centre Of The Tardis’ for more) and Peter Capaldi is very nearly almost as good as Tom Baker in that story. After playing so many baddies throughout his career and the debate that’s been running throughout the series arc so far about whether the Doctor has become ‘bad’ or not you really do believe it when the story starts with a grim voiceover and a Lord Haw-haw like informercial/party political broadcast for how wonderful The Monks are and humanity should fall into line, honest, going from being physically blind to being – apparently – morally blind. It’s a voiceover that was written in the script for a senior BBC announcer to deliver (the script suggests John Humphreys, who at the time hosted ‘Mastermind’ and ‘The Today Programme’; it’s not recorded whether he was asked and decided not to or if Moffat and Whithouse changed their minds) but works perfectly for the Doctor. He’s not just a side effect of a world turned against him, playing along for the time the way we’ve seen a few of the other Doctors do down the years, he’s the mastermind behind it, a Lord Haw-Haw voice messing with people’s heads and telling us that our memories are at fault because The Monks have always been in our history and they’ve always been wonderful, honest, with such directness it half makes you check for your collection of radio Times and episode guides just to check he isn’t right. And if we’re beginning to doubt it that’s nothing on Bill who seems to be the only person who remembers what life was really like (or at least the only one brave enough to say so out loud) and the story is at it’s best in the early stages when it’s being tough and as Orwellian as any Dr Who episode has ever been, ‘1984’ revisited in 2017.
Though a Whithouse script
this was very much a Moffat plan and what seems to be something of a personal
crusade the showrunner took personally (so much so that might be why he asked
his friend to write it for him so his feelings didn’t spill over and get in the
way). Written against the backdrop of
the 2016 American election and Donald Trump’s catchphrase of ‘fake news’ (an
ironic phrase given that he used it every time one of his opponents pointed out
the actual truth of what happened and questioned his version), not to mention the
lies of Brexit and the EU referendum of 2016 (lies no longer just said in speeches like
most politicians painted on the side of a red London bus no less) it explores
what happens when the people in charge of you insist on an ‘alternate version’
of the truth that you know to be real and how much danger this puts you in when
you object to it. Trump was is and always will be a divisive figure who played
on the insecurities and suspicions of his followers, telling them that they’re
miserable because someone out there was out to get them and how he’s the only
thing that stops things getting worse because ‘to get to you they have to get
through me’. But he’s the one who was causing all the hurt, helping out his
rich buddies at the cost of the ordinary working class people who voted for him
and hailed him as their champion, hiding behind a cloud of murky doublespeak
that meant he could get away with doing pretty much anything and then blaming
it on his opponents. As I re-write this, in July 2024, he’s even using his own
assassination attempt, which he clearly staged himself, to make himself look
better in a move straight out of the little book of dictators (when Hitler
caused the fire in the Reichstag building which he blamed on his communist
rivals and then claimed to be the only leader who could keep the German people
safe from this ever happening again). It’s the perfect scenario for a writer
who clearly know his history and is so afraid of it happening again (he is a Dr
Who fan after all, a lot of us are historians thanks to this programme) and
who, across his career not just his time on Dr Who, has been debating back and
forth how clever or stupid humanity is and our ability to separate reality and
fantasy or be fooled by a pretty face. That’s what ‘Press Gang’ was all about
(journalists learning to see the truth behind the game-playing, both in the
outer world and in their own relationships), ‘Chalk’ (about teaching pupils to
see the world in more complex terms as adults), ‘Joking Apart’ (about hanging
on to the truth when your ex lover starts making stuff behind your back) and
‘Sherlock’ (in which a detective deuced what really happened, not just what the
murderer wants you to think happened). ‘Lie Of The Land’ though is Moffat at
his most depressed and all but throwing the towel in, despairing at how easily
mankind is to dupe and how easily the tyrants get away with what they do.
There’s a cynicism here for the story’s first half that makes you think they’re
really going to do it and have the Doctor side with The Monks.
After all, it’s not as
obvious a divide as between good and evil this week. The big question this week
is about freedom versus safety and continues the debate Bill faced at the end
of ‘The Pyramid At The End Of The World’ offering the permission that submitted
all Humans to the monks as slaves in return for our lives, the Doctor’s
especially. Which sounds like the perfect bargain in so many ways and one we
agreed with last week– I mean, we all know if the Doctor’s alive then there is
a chance to save the day, right? He’s someone whose always telling us that
while there’s life there’ hope, that there will always be second chances. And
heck, at least the Monks have overthrown all the governments we’re already in
slavery to for a race that’s far more benevolent. Plus they’ve eradicated the
covid-like virus killing us off rather than simply ignoring it and going
la-la-la nothing to see here the way they have in our world in the present day.
A cut scene has The Doctor comparing The Monks to the Romans: did they enslave
Ancient Brits or did they bring them the gift of civilisation, running water
and straight roads? And you can guarantee that, like The Nazis, they make the
trains run on time. I say, I for one welcome our Monk overlords and sign me up
right now! I mean, we’re not happy and anyone who protests has been sent to a
labour camp, but at least we’re still alive, right? The way this story handles
the fall out is very clever though and genuinely unsettling. We see it in the
Doctor’s informercial set to sights of The Monks across time, there at the
greatest moments of our history (including lots in the camera script that never
made the final version: the Zapruder film of the assassination of JFK and a WW2
air raid as well as works of fiction, ‘Oliver Twist’ asking for more from a
Monk and saves the day in the Bourne Trilogy). We see it when an actress we
know quite well from other programmes and we assume is going to be a full
incidental character get’s carted off to a labour camp for – shock horror –
owning DVDs from the before times (Emma Handy, star of ‘Doctors’ ‘Wire In The
Blood’ and ‘The Worst Witch’). We see it in the broken, beaten, shuffling
Humans who all wear the same pale blues colours that might as well be prison
jump suits and the same haircuts, with no individuality at all. We could have
seen it in a cut scene, recorded and featured in the trailer but not in the
final edit, where the characters in TV show Casualty’ discuss their benevolent
monk overlords and look utterly crushed. It feels like Moffat pleading to the
American voters (who at the time this story was being written were heading to
the polls) please make the right choice and don’t believe the hype, because the
man who promises to keep you safe doesn’t care about you, he’ll enslave you and
then wipe out the thought that life had ever been different, that there had
ever been hope or alternatives or debate. I’m just surprised in context that,
in the middle of all this abject misery, one of the Humans doesn’t stand up and
say ‘I love the monks, they kept us safe from…her emails!’
These are the best parts
of the episodes by far, when everything is bleak the Doctor seems to have gone
over to the dark side and Bill feels as alone as any Who companion ever has.
The punnily titled ‘Lie Of The Land’ is the closest than modern Who have ever
come to re-making the classic 1970s stories
‘Inferno’ and ‘Invasion Of Time’,
two of my favourite stories of the decade in which everything that once seemed
safe and cosy and predictable has been turned on its head, and while Peter
Capaldi doesn’t get to wear an eye-patch in every other respect he makes for a
chillingly believable variation of the Doctor whose turned ‘bad’. Capaldi is
rarely better actually – he suits being bad and his disdain at Bill’s protests
when she finally get to reunite with him are far more convincing and in
character than his really quite nasty put-downs in a few other stories, ‘Oxygen’
especially. It feels as if he’s been ‘got at’, the timelord turned puppet
master and we know what a force of nature the Doctor is and how hard he is to
beat. A lot of Doctors get the chance to act as ‘bad’ versions of themselves
somewhere down the line and really enjoy it (Hartnell in ‘The Massacre’, Troughton in ‘Enemy Of the World’, Tom Baker in ‘Invasion Of Time’) but few seem to be
enjoying it with quite so much gusto, as if Peter’s back playing his shouty
sweary ‘Thick Of It’ character. This is a Doctor whose never gone in much for
social niceties and now all the excuses have been taken away you really get a
sense of the darkness peeking through this incarnation.
What’s more, it suits the
early 12th Doctor arc of his worry about whether he’s a ‘good man’ or not; this
story, like ‘The Christmas Invasion’
and ‘Turn Left’, is all about his absence and how quickly things go wrong
without him there to save us. It’s all too believable that the dark side that’s
been gnawing away at him, making him cross and cynical, has finally won out –
the way Moffat seems to fear it might have won out inside him too (his Dr Who
stories get a lot darker across their run: just look at where we start with
‘The Eleventh Hour’ where there’s the feeling that anything is possible
compared to where we end with ‘Twice Upon A Time’ where WW1 and death into
regeneration are both inevitable and inescapable; this story ends with Bill
trying to find a moral in there somewhere, that Humans can club together and throw
out dictators, an idea fully in keeping with the rest of New Who, but the Doctor
snappily rejects this idea out of hand as wishful thinking because we’ll all
have forgotten when the next dictator comes along). It’s cleverly mirrored by
Missy’s arc across series ten, with this the story that properly comes out and
shows that it’s her in the vault. To an extent it’s an underwhelming moment:
unlike practically all of Moffat’s other teases it was quite obvious (what
other psychopath would be hidden away in a vault for safe keeping that he
didn’t want to banish or kill or shrink down to an egg?) and the constant
teasing of who it might be had been getting in the way of most of the stories
across 2017. When Bill finds out who it is even she’s underwhelmed that it’s
just a woman in a box and honestly Missy doesn’t do anything in this episode to
make her think otherwise; plotwise she might as well not be here at all. It’s
actually daft for the Doctor to break his cover the way he does in going to
visit her, Bill in tow, to ask for Missy’s advice (especially as she doesn’t
really give any). Aesthetically it should have been Missy at the end of the
episode putting things right and atoning for all her previous sins to humanity,
before someone (Moffatt? Whithouse?) seems to have had second thoughts and made
it Bill. And yet symbolically it’s great
and really adds to the sense that the world has gone upside down. I mean, The Master,
a goody? Whatever next? It also adds to the one last bit of hope across this
episode, that even dictators who’ve clearly got a screw loose are redeemable
and that maybe things won’t be as bad as we feared. Some hope as things turn
out, but I appreciate the gesture.
Unfortunately Missy, who
plays a much bigger role in the first draft of the script, is badly underused. In
the original storyline she does much more than mention that she defeated the
Monks before (‘in my goatee phase’ that could refer to either Delgado or
Ainley): she talks in detail about an event on Riga-Priam when she took them
down by worming her way into their affections, much like the Doctor has, then
turning on them from the inside out. Surely I can’t be the only fan eagerly
awaiting a Big Finish tie in with that very story and help explain this one, or
a comic in Dr Who Magazine? But so far, even seven years on, nothing. In the
original there’s also a rather touching moment when Missy also recalls how she
used to have fun back when it was the Doctor she was jousting against, the two
fondly recalling their swordfights from ‘The Sea Devils’ and ‘The King’s Demons’
and reminiscing while explaining their relationship to Bill (‘The Doctor would
say ours was a 2000 year old feud; I’d call it flirting’) before a panicked
Bill interrupts them to the job in hand. It makes a lot more sense, especially
why The Doctor only goes to visit Missy now. But then again a lot of ‘Lie’
seems to have been lost at the draft stage, with lots of ideas that really
should have made the final edit (including possibly the best line in the whole
story, the heart of what this episode is all about: the Doctor’s line about
humanity that ‘you’ll swallow a thousand comforting lies and choke on one ugly
truth’). I love three of the details in Missy’s new character though. She
bargains her advice in return for a ‘particle accelerator, a 3D printer and a
pony’ before the Doctor’s lecture that good people help without having to
bargain, starts to feel genuine remorse for all the people’s she’s killed, berating
the Doctor for the fact she feels this way even though he says her going cold
turkey is ‘working’ and then plays Scott Joplin, the obvious soulless fake
happy music choice of an emotionless psychopath (the only music beyond The
Spice Girls to set my teeth on edge). Mostly,
though, Missy is underused compared to what this story could have been and it’s
a bit weird she mostly goes to sleep again for the next few stories.
That’s not the only problem. Alas, the second half of the story goes downhill fast and they take it just that little bit too far. Anyone who knows their Dr Who knows that ultimately the Doctor’s bluffing, just as he is every other time they pull this stunt on us, but they take it to extremes, for no apparent reason storywise, until the plot comes to a standstill for lots of talking and not enough action (The Monks themselves aren’t seen the entire episode until a few minutes before the end so you lose any sense of scale about what we’re fighting). Why would The Monks, if they are keeping tabs on the Doctor, stop listening when Bill pulls the trigger? It’s not like the Doctor pretends in ‘character’ moaning and groaning either – he’s laughing his head off and congratulating her for being brave enough to do it, as he knew she would (which was, after all, more than I knew watching this scene for the first time). And if the monks aren’t listening at all then why push Bill to such extremes first?The Doctor is, once again, quite horrible to Bill whose still struggling to come to terms with everything and how this world that’s been created is her ‘fault’ for trying to save her best friend – a best friend whose turned on her. If anything Pearl Mackie is too darn good at playing Bill as being broken and bamboozled and oh so hurt, betrayed in a way we haven’t seen since the 4th Doctor banished Leela to the wilderness. And for less immediate reason: the Doctor says later that he had make the Monks feel they could ‘trust’ him (this is a story all about trust and betrayal after all) and to check that Bill wasn’t under control and to some extent it’s no different to the scene where Bill is testing Nardole for proof that he’s the same person she’s travelled with. But it’s obvious she’s hurt and in shock. A lot of fans don’t like the scene where (spoilers) she finally snaps and fires a gun at him, causing a half-regeneration (until he stops it), in a last-ditch attempt to put the universe back the way it was because its something they say Bill would never ever do but it’s perfectly in character: their entire relationship has been about him leaving the hard choices up to her whatever they do to him and Bill is one of those companions brave enough to do the right thing while still being slightly doubtful of who and what the Doctor is. You’d never get any of the earlier companions doing this (though Ace comes closest even she trusts the 7th Dr too much to hold a grudge against him when he ‘uses’ her), but Bill isn’t like any earlier companion – and this really isn’t like any previous Doctor at this point in his life. Bill has spent six months thinking the enslavement of humanity is all her fault and she, for one, would rather be dead than trapped so it makes perfect sense to me that she would vow to do whatever it took to put things right and if that means killing the person she saved only an episode, so be it. However I hate this scene for plenty of other reasons. The Doctor really doesn’t have to take it this far: he could have disarmed Bill as easily as letting her shot him and go through all the emotions of thinking she’s murdered her friends for real. There’s no reason for him to let things go this far:whose this benefitting? Not Bill whose sobbing, not just his soldier friends who are laughing, or the Monks to whom he gives the game away to. Honestly it makes the Doctor look as if he’s doing it for his own amusement, which is somehow a worse betrayal than giving mankind over to The Monks. Why take the risk when something could easily have gone wrong with his plan?
And how does he do it and save himself from regenerating completely? Either Bill uses a fake gun with fake bullets (which wouldn’t cause a regeneration) or a real gun with real bullets (which The Doctor wouldn’t have been able to prevent causing a regeneration). Let’s assume it’s the latter: the fact that the Doctor can ‘control’ his regeneration contradicts every other regeneration sequence we’ve ever seen (except, possibly Romana’s offscreen one at the start of ‘Destiny Of The Daleks’): if he really had control over when he changed’ there’s no way William Hartnell’s Doctor would have let anyone else take over, ever and the Doctor would still be a white haired old man now. It is also a big fat cheat in an era that’s been cheating us quite a lot lately and in a story about the importance of truth over all things it feels wrong in this story. We all knew Capaldi was leaving at the end of the year and so Moffat does what Russell T did during his year of ‘specials’, teasing us with the idea that the Doctor might be leaving early, so they create a clip that looks good in the season trailer but turns out to be a complete ruse that only lasts a few seconds. ‘Regeneration too much?’ enquires the Doctor to a round of applause: well, frankly, yes. Plus the moment when the Doctor actively laughs at Bill (and us at home) for not realising it was all a ruse, feel like worse betrayal than siding with The Monks: of course Bill’s going to be bewildered. It’s hard to imagine any other Doctor (even 6) behaving like this, whose first thought is to gloat with their new friends (de-conditioned soldiers, though the script never mentions how the Doctor did this) rather than his faithful companion. It’s unnecessarily cruel.
It’s all solved so easily
too. Three episodes we’ve spent wondering how the heck they’re ever going to
get out of this, with the stakes rising higher and higher, and yet it turns out
that The Monks must be the least curious race going despite their constant surveillance.
They don’t bat an eyelid when the Doctor takes his prisoner out to a vault
nearby to where they used to live, instead of shooting or deporting her. They
don’t seem interested at all when a lady shows up out of nowhere in eccentric
dress. The Monks don’t put up much of a fight when the end comes either, being
one of the few alien races apparently not impervious to bullets (the Brigadier
would have been thrilled. Which brings up another idea: where is UNIT while all
this is going on? Where is Torchwood? Both seem unlikely to fall prey to The
Monks and both organisations surely have a protocol for this sort of thing,
probably in coordination with The Doctor about blowing up alien races intent on
slavery). They don’t even try the obvious: a second broadcast from another
pyramid – they just slink off, bored. As the story stands there’s little to
prevent them just sneaking back the next time the Doctor and Bill leave the
planet – which they do quite a lot, thanks to the Tardis. It’s an unsatisfying
conclusion that rips whole-safe off ‘The Daemons’ but that story sort-of worked
because Jo’s unbreakable bond was with The Doctor, a bond we saw forged on
screen across several stories, and love is kind of the opposite of Devilish
hate anyway. Whereas the opposite of love isn’t slavery. Or at least it isn’t
in the Dr Who universe. The Doctor is knocked out but Bill takes over and
defeats The Monks’ great plan by…thinking of her imaginary mum, who isn’t
really there. Eh? How does Bill’s plan even work? Defeating fiction with
fiction seems…odd. While it’s a sort of
mirroring of the main storyline (some lies we tell ourselves can be good, such
as inventing people we can talk too) and it’s tempting to see this scene as an
increasingly desperate Moffat wishing the Democrats would fight back with some
of the venom of the Republicans and playing them at their own game, it’s an
incredibly disappointing and disjointed ending, as this previously impenetrable
all-powerful undefeated race - just shuffle off, defeated: there’s no scene of
outrage or rebellion or Humanity getting revenge by enslaving them, there’s no
second attempt to take mankind over, they just up and run: if only it was that
simple (as we know now they’d just hang around for a bit and come back four
years later, crueller and more full of lies than ever. Perhaps now Moffat is
back writing for the series again intermittently we’ll get a sequel?) There’s
also an obvious solution that given the charged times Moffat was writing in,
would have sent a real message: have The Monks get too cocky and overestimate
the ‘love; Humanity has for them (something they craved much more than fear in
the previous two episodes), have them think they’ve fooled Humanity with their
lies and that they can be ‘voted’ into power democratically, only for Bill’s
broadcast to counteract the lies and have The Monks kicked out, with a resurrection
if they refused to go. A bit too on the nose? Maybe, but better than Bill
picturing her dead mum.
It’s not just the finale
that weakens the story though. What this story doesn’t have compared to other
episodes is much of a sense of a changed world beyond the Doctor’s ‘prison
ship’: we hear about gulags and labour camps for those who object to the monks’
control (places that would normally be where the Doctor would go first but
which are treated as ‘the enemy’ here while he’s being ’bad’, which in many
ways is a bigger shock than his testing of Bill) but never see them properly. As
a result while we’re told this is one of the biggest invasions of Earth we’ve
ever had on Dr Who it all feels very smallscale; even allowing for the fact
that the budget is particularly tight this year you’d think it would stretch to
some extras, or failing that some real news footage of something else, a mass
panic or a riot. The other problem too is that a story that in so many ways
feels so different and new still comes off as feeling like something else we’ve
already seen with arguments that have already taken place elsewhere. Almost all
of series 10 features the 12th Doctor forcing Bill to make difficult choices
she feels ill equipped to make on behalf of humanity and usually chastises her
for them too – this story is just that on a grander scale, with more at stake.
It’s also very slow and talky and oddly static: despite a near-record nine shooting locations beyond
TV studio mostly we just see the Doctor’s ‘office’ (plus a scene each in a
pyramid Bill’s house and Missy’s vault – an empty warehouse with heaters added
into the set not as a character touch but because it was freezing on the day of
filming - and cameos elsewhere) and they’re not the most interesting of
locations to stare at either. There’s no variety here, just that big
conversation in the middle and the bits leading up to it and out of it, that’s
it.
The Monks, too, are a
disappointing race all round. They’re set up as a really intriguing alien
species in ‘Extremis’ when they’re in the shadows, with their abilities to
create simulated worlds, but when we see them in ‘Pyramid’ it’s notable how
little they actually do; here in their
third appearance you expect them to be fully in command of the show but instead
they’re noises off. What do they even want with Humanity? At least when other
races enslave us they want to tunnel out the core of the Earth and fly the
planet as a giant spaceship or something (no really: see ‘The Dalek Invasion Of
Earth’) but this lot don’t need anything and don’t do anything with us – they’re
a rare villain that doesn’t even gloat. They’re also a poor retread of The
Silence all over again, not least because we never actually see a Monk say
anything either, but whereas that lot stole your memories this lot re-write
them with false memories. They’re the ultimate Moffat creation in so many ways:
they look scary and we’re told they’re scary but they never do anything that
actually is scary, they just sort of hang around blankly staring. Their biggest
threat towards humanity as far as we can tell is propaganda: not that scary
with a world who mostly don’t listen to the news anyway. No one ever seems to
have tried an en mass rebellion: had we seen news stories about mass executions
resulting from a riot we might be more scared. When George Orwell wrote ‘1984’
the threat was gradual, so slow that people didn’t notice it happening and had
no chance to prepare to rebel, while Big Brother was relentless in taking out
people who even vaguely looked as if they had thoughts of their own. But The
Monks only do this to one person for a ‘crime’ that even in the middle of a
takeover everyone would find silly and which makes The Monks figures of fun
rather than anything really bad (although that said I did get a shiver
yesterday when I read about the North Korean school class that was beheaded for
watching Western television without permission). This takeover is sudden and
arrived in an instant: they can’t have built their propaganda pyramids that
quickly (basically big TVs: an inversion of The Silence who were instead beaten
by television) and in that one moment of waking up enslaved there’s no way
humanity would just give in – there should be a massacre of millions; it’s
later as time goes by The Monks’ hold would be as great as it is now. And how
do their propaganda pyramids work anyway? Human brainwaves? Subliminal
messaging? Magic? It would be nice if somewhere in this three-parter we’d
actually found out. Oh and surely I can’t be the only fan disappointed that it
was Missy in the vault and not The Meddling Monk (from ‘The Time Meddler’ and ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’), secretly
in command of his own race of beings who are ‘meddling’ with time? That seemed
a much more interesting story…
‘Lie Of The Land’ out to
be a huge moment, the finale to the longest sort-of story Dr Who have run since
‘Trial Of A Timelord’ back in 1986 (without other episodes in the way as per the
astronaut arc at the heart of series six anyway), but it feels like an
anticlimax. It’s all very slow, certainly compared to the pacier similar epic
at the heart of series six. The viewing figures were poor too, falling to less
than 3 million for a first broadcast the first time in the 21st
century, the lowest since ‘Battlefield’
a full twenty-eight years earlier . Though not quote the calamity reported
gleefully in the press – streaming figures pushed it closer to 5 million and
all main channels had been rapidly losing viewers with so much competition from
Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus et al – it was a worrying statistic and it
didn’t help that, rather than being talked about round every water cooler in
the land, most fan reaction was ‘meh’. To an extent I can see why: this isn’t
so much a story as two big shock moments (the beginning and middle) stuck
together with the hope that everything else will follow suit. Toby Whithouse,
usually such a strong writer when it comes to plot and character, never feels
as if he ‘gets’ this world in the way the other writers do (Moffatt having a
much bigger hand in the previous two episodes and quite a lot of fingerprints
on this) and struggles with a Doctor turned bad and a companion he’s never seen
on screen bar an audition tape. This is his weakest Who script in many ways,
despite some really good individual scenes, some really good bits of character
(he nails Bill’s sense of loneliness early on, pouring things out to her
imaginary mum in a clever way that both allows her to talk about the plot
safely without anyone else hearing – something Orwell actually struggles with a
lot in ‘1984’ – and have it set up the denouement) and some excellent lines (by
and large Whithouse hasn’t got a clue what to do with Nardole and leaves him on
the sidelines but he gets one great line, perfectly in character ;I used to
have an imaginary friend – then they ran away to be someone else, huh charming!’
delivered in such a way we don’t know if he’s joking or not). But it never
quite comes together: slot A never quite inserts into slot B and while it’s all
a bit skew-whiff from ‘Pyramid’ it’s totally out of line with ‘Extremis’.
Still, there’s much to love about both this story in particular and the trilogy
as a whole. After far too many stories of taking things easy there’s an
ambition about Who again, a sense that this show can go absolutely anywhere and
goes further than any fan would ever think would be possible. For a series in
its 54th year that uncertainty and unpredictability is really quite a feat to
have pulled off and if you were a fan through those tumultuous days when we didn’t
know what was going to happen next it’s uncanny just how close that sense of
unease and despair was to watching this story back to back with the news. If
anything it’s still a bit too close to home for us to get a real handle on this
story yet: it brings back too much PTSD and suppressed trauma of world leaders
lying to us and wondering why we fight back. Good on Dr Who for being what at
times felt like a lone voice fighting out against the fake news and doublespeak
and trying to remind everyone that sometimes it is better to be free and at
risk than enslaved and miserable. For
the idea that we just have to accept what is handed to us and that we never
ever had it better than this is the true ‘lie of the land’, one that even
seemed to fool the Doctor for a while there (just how much was this all a ruse,
for six whole months and how much did he really believe?) is far scarier than any monster or alien
threat could ever be and for lefties watching in 2016 (which, now that the
viewing figures were falling off, was practically the whole of the fanbase) seemed
an unstoppable force as the world lurched towards the right and pretended it
was now the ‘middle ground’. Deeply flawed, yet still under-rated.
POSITIVES + (spoilers)
When we say that the ‘bad Doctor’ sub-plot is pushed to an extreme, well...We
saw something we thought we would never see, a Doctor regenerating because they
get shot by a companion. Not one whose brainwashed either, but one whose
utterly convinced that the most Doctor-ish thing to do, the bravest solution to
save the most people in one go, is to kill this Doctor whose turned bad. Even
Turlough was a wannabe compared to Bill. And yet the story never makes you
think less of her: she’s doing this precisely because she is kind and knows
that the ‘old’ Doctor, ‘her’ Doctor, would hate what he’s become more than
dying. Pearl Mackie is superb anyway and one of the more consistent actresses
in the often thankless companion role but she’s never better than here, when
she has to steel herself to shoot the only person whose ever shown her kindness
(who wasn’t, y’know, a horny giant space puddle): this story relies on her
performance a lot and she excels. Capaldi too is excellent as the shouty
betrayer down the other end egging her on to do it. Of course, it’s all a ruse,
an attempt to make the monks think that the Doctor is really bad and he cuts
the regeneration off short, but for a moment there its only too plausible
they’ve really gone and killed off this generation of the Doctor in the worst
possible way. I mean, they’ve thrown everything else at this story so far...
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‘The Pyramid At The End Of The World’ next ‘Empress Of Mars’
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