The Pyramid At The End Of The World: Ranking - 139

                     Pyramid At The End Of The World

(Series 10, Dr 12 with Bill and Nardole, 27/5/2017, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, Daniel Nettheim)

Rank: 139

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

 🎵 I thought parallel worlds were only true in fairytales

Lived by someone else but not by me

Monks were out to get me, that's the way it seemed

Disappointment made me think real life was a dream

Then Bill Potts came. And I'm a believer! 🎵

 

 Now where were we? Oh yeah, The Pope’s called the Doctor in about a weird text called ‘Extremis’ that leads people to commit suicide, but he’s discovered the truth is that the world people are living in is a fake construction created by an alien intelligence dressed as a monk and the time portals in the Vatican have led to the Doctor, Bill and Nardole (but not in that order) discovering that they’re just a bunch of pixels and desperately trying to hang on to that revelation before they disappear forever in a puff of logic. How I hate it when that happens. How can they possibly follow that up this week? With a pyramid suddenly opening up in the middle of the Earth in a n unlikely sounding fictional country Turmezistan, that’s how! (A bit like Turkmenistan but not enough to annoy them in case they blow up any missing episodes of DW left over in the middle east). Now when I first saw this series I knew what the episodes were going to be and expected ‘Extremis’ to be a single parter because the plot seemed to have nothing to do with this next title and as it turns out there’s no more than a cursory mention of events last week – we’re just plunged into a parallel world where the Monks are our new rulers. They’re kind of a good cop bad cop bunch this lot, promising to save us from all the hardships of life in a very Axon/Savages way as long as we do what they say or they’ll kill us all in a very Dalek/Cybermen way. If the theme of ‘Extremis’ was about truth and illusion then this episode is all about power and freedom, about being careful believing everything our world leaders tell us at face value in case they’re really up to something else when we’re not looking, with paymasters pulling their strings we don’t know at all. It’s all scarily plausible. I mean, I suspect half of our politicians in this day and age are just monks with make up. The other half, of course, are Slitheens. The pyramids look amazing if a bit underused (no reason why they should be pyramids – its not like they monks are relatives of Sutekh or anything – and I’m still waiting for a full DW story set in Ancient Egypt after oh so many near misses), the threat of the metaphorical ‘Doomsday Cock’ counting down our symbolic destruction becoming an actual clock counting down a true moment of doom is very DW and the dilemma at the heart of it, as Bill is torn between following what the Doctor wants her to do and disobeying him by getting his sight back, is a great hook on which to hang the story, the human conundrum in a rare modern Who plot where the whole of Earth really is in danger. We all think we know how its going to end and what Bill’s going to do too...until the episode ends on a cliffhanger and swings into yet another part (three episodes, something we didn’t know when the story started and few would have guessed – its still the only three-parter in modern Who!) The most talked about part of this episode, though, is the sub-plot about why the Monks ‘stepped in’ to save humanity and how: it seems there was a leak of a killer disease from a scientific laboratory researching potential diseases (in flowers mind, not bats or pangolins) and it got leaked not because of some giant conspiracy or because of some lethal containment but because one of the scientists had a massive hangover and punched in the wrong number without owning up to it. All ridiculously plausible too. I don’t think I was alone in thinking of this story when the news about covid first broke in China, I mean this story had only gone out two years earlier! DW has made comparatively few premonitions about the future considering its a programme that’s forever trying to imagine what the future looks like (certainly not as many as The Simpsons) but this is one of the best ones, along with CD-Roms, BBC3, reality TV and a demented prime minister who turns out to be a mad killer assassin. It’s all so similar, the setting and the misguided attempts to cover everything up, that I’m sure I wasn’t the only fan nervously turning on the news in those early days of the pandemic wondering where the monks were. Frustratingly for us the only way its ever stopped in the story is by Bill choosing to sell her species’ soul to the monks in order for the Doctor to get his sight back (as, in a cruel bit of storytelling, he would have died without his sight being restored because he couldn’t read the sign to get out – though its worth pointing out if he’d mentioned his blindness to someone earlier they would have helped him, so its on him really as much as he blames Bill for it). It’s a sort of mirror of ‘The Daemons’ - when everything seems to be absolutely toast a companion steps in and sacrifices themselves to get the Doctor back, only Jo was only sacrificing herself – here Bill’s doomed us all. Thanks a lot for that Bill! Mind you, while there’s a Doctor there’s hope...Overall this middle section is the best part of the trilogy. It moves at a more sensible pace than the other two and asks deeper questions, although on the downside the monks still don’t seem to be as much of a threat as the script tries to make them out to be (the only person they kill is the UN secretary general and he was a pest, so most of the audience are on their side– actually I’m amazed they did this given the trouble the resuscitated DW got into for using the United Nations name as part of UNIT) and there’s absolutely no reason why they’re hanging round in a pyramid. Plus the whole ‘parallel world’ plot is now so common in DW, after stories like ‘Inferno’ and ‘The Big Bang’, that rather than be surprised by the revelation most fans just went ‘yeah, of course it is’. Still, this is a highly under-rated story that keeps you guessing to the end and Bill’s dilemma, as she goes from being ignored youngster on the margins of society to humanity’s only representative, is highly dramatic.

+ The Doctor actually loses this one for once – as much as humanity puts itself in harm’s way through tampering with viruses, as much as Bill consigns us all to be slaves, its the Doctor who mucks this one up by not telling anyone about his sight and refusing to let anyone else more expendable go to save the day. It’s all part of the ‘God complex’ that killed the 10^th Doctor too. The end of the episode, when the Doctor’s facing certain death (because even his future regenerations are all trapped and will die like him) is on an emotional par with other moments when the Doctor gets it wrong like ‘Planet Of The Spiders’ ‘Earthshock’ and ‘Waters Of Mars’. No other series does this with their heroic frontman with super powers, none. I mean, can you imagine one of the Marvel superhoeres going ‘sorry guys, my spider web’s at the cleaners so I just condemned us all to a fiery grave’? Or The Borg defeating Captain Picard not through their power and might but through, say, tennis aces? Or Darth Vader winning on ‘Star Wars’ (‘Luke I am your father – go to your room, you’re grounded!) This here, this is what DW is all about – a super hero who isn’t always super and isn’t always a hero but who is the most human and frail of all alien crusaders whose just trying to do his best over and over in a universe that doesn’t always let him. Like all the best shock-horror DW moments it makes you wonder ‘if they can do that, then what can they possibly do next?!’

- It would have been nice to have had just a little throwback to last week’s episode. I mean, what happened to the ‘Extremis’ book? Is that all back in a parallel universe that didn’t exist? And if so how far back does it go – to the start of the story? The start of the series? The time war? ‘An Unearthly Child’? Are people still dying in that universe assuming they’re alive? Is it any of it real at all? What’s the Pope got to say about the mucking around of timelines? There’s no doubting Steven Moffat’s intelligence or the clever way he can spin his scripts in different directions to keep fans on their toes, but sometimes it feels as if his scripts are building to a huge emotional climax only to reach a fork in the road where he goes ‘ooh shiny!’ and then completely ignores everything that came before it in favour of something else, only to end up abandoning that too. It’s frustrating enough in single episodes but in three parters it really does mean that this story struggles to hold your interest as you’re going ‘the what now?’ instead of just enjoying the story. Last part ‘Lie Of The Land’ tomorrow!