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 before we were rudely interrupted by 150 reviews and a lot of blogging pauses? 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 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 necessarily 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 an unlikely sounding fictional country Turmezistan, that’s how! (The first time the Dr Who ‘Earth’ has ever had a different country – one that’s quite a bit like Turkmenistan, but not enough to annoy them in case they blow up any missing episodes of Dr Who left over in the middle East. Only it looks like Tenerife, because that’s where it was filmed, along with just a dash of South Wales for certain shots). Now, when I first saw this series I knew – thanks to the Radio Times and forum gossip - 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 episode 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. The difference is that they ask for our consent to do it, like a vampire who can only cross over to your threshold and take your soul if you ask them nicely (as Bill points out). Or, indeed, a politician who punishes you for being stupid enough to vote them in.

What turns out to be Dr Who’s only true modern three-parter is an unusual beast because the three parts end up being written by three different people who all had very different ideas where the story was headed. Steven Moffat wrote ‘Extremis’ and planned it as one of his typical ‘parallel world’ stories, where it’s hard to tell between the real and the vividly imaginative, with The Monks very much based on ‘The Silence’ from ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ quintet and a touch of Dan Brown about it too. For Moffat The Doctor is the hero, the only person who can see the ‘truth’ while the monks are pure conmen. But the other two episodes are very different beasts. ‘Pyramid’ was the third and sadly final Who story by Peter Harness, who’s other Who stories were a rollercoaster ride of quality (the stupid ‘Kill The Moon’ and superb ‘Zygon Invasion/Inversion’). Harness is a lot more interested in the ‘choice’, of the ‘twin dilemma’ between two lesser evils and how that leads to bad things happening (all his trio of stories are about mankind faced with a difficult choice; Toby Whithouse, who concludes next week with ‘Lie Of The Land’, has a different take again, making the story more about trust, The Doctor pushing Bill to her limits and making this a personal feud between the two for what is ‘right’). For this episode The Doctor is a passenger: he does all the talking but he can’t choose for humanity because he’s not Human and this is very much Bill’s story, leading her to make the decision that pushes the story into a third act. For Harness the real villain isn’t the Monks, creepy as they are (they were based on mummified remains discovered in a cave in Sumeria, which reminded him of Egyptian pyramids). The choice Bill has to make is one that Harness felt faced a lot of humans in 2015 too, in the run up to the 2016 US election. Though in its early days the debate between Hillary Clinton and ‘orange’ Donald Trump was already heated, full of ‘fake news’ and disinformation, with both sides claiming that siding with them was the only way to ‘solve’ America’s problems. Usually elections come safe in the knowledge that both sides will put their differences aside enough to congratulate each other and find a basic level of co-operation but this election campaign was different: it was nasty, savage, with both sides trying to get the other locked up (though only one of them had any actual evidence). Harness based his monks on Trump: they promised to ‘save’ people from a problem that was all in their imagination and planned to invade, not by stealth, but by being given a mandate to take what they wanted. For Harness Trump was more of an existential threat, a goblin who turns up from behind a bridge at a moment of crisis to check if humanity was ready enough to stand on it’s own feet and solve its own problems or accept defeat. This bit of fortune telling is almost as scary as the more famous spot in this episode as its still only 2015 and the campaign has only just started. If they’d included a fake assassination attempt with some of the worst acting I’ve ever seen and a billionaire using his own tech to rig voting stats we’d have the full set! The choice Bill faces is that of the electorate in 2016: is a saviour who asks for love in return for our enslavement worse than a crisis that might wipe us out?

In the context of the start of the #metoo’ movement, too, this is a story about consent: is choosing a ‘partner’ who’s proven to be toxic and abusive but at least there doing something better than choosing your independence but with the added risk of loneliness and suffering from standing on your own two feet? Throughout we think we know what the answer is going to be and that it’s going to be the same decision every companion makes when faced with a choice between certain destruction and selling our soul (It’s a sort of mirror of ‘The Daemons’, the first real time they tried this sort of thing, when - when everything seems to be absolutely toast after The Master teams up with the devil – no, seriously - 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!) Under normal circumstances it would be a much easier choice than in ‘Kill The Moon’ (do we risk letting the big giant insect grow and potentially kill us all?) and Bill is arguably someone more likely to make the ‘right’ sacrificial choice than Clara (who might still potentially save herself or think she knows what she’s doing better than the Doctor). But then there’s that curveball (spoilers): The Doctor, who’s had the situation totally under control, can’t see and only Bill and Nardole know it (not the original plan incidentally: Jamie Mathieson added the Doctor’s blindness as a cliffhanger to ‘Oxygen’ expecting Moffat to take it out, but he recognised how well it would tie into this episode and re-wrote his own ‘Extremis’ to accommodate it too) . If Bill lets him carry through with his plan then he will be trapped in a laboratory and die, even if humanity are saved. And while we know she’ll do what’s right for her own species throwing that spanner in the works changes everything: Bill is that deadly combination of being both lonely and loyal and she can’t bring herself to kill her best friend, even when he orders her to. We all think we know how it’s 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 really took us by surprise, something they’d never tried in modern Who and hadn’t advertised; it’s the closest I’ve come to living through the Hartnell days when episodes had individual names and no one knew if a story would run for 2,3,4 or 6 weeks or more).

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). I know for a fact that a majority of the people supposedly put there to protect us are really serving a different master altogether (and it’s not that much of a jump to go from ‘big businesses paying them to look the other way’ to ‘aliens trying to rule the world’). The thing is: it’s obvious The Monks are the bad guys. Why do they call themselves monks? We don’t know (the original plan was to have them kung-fu fighting like ‘Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon’ until someone pointed out they’d done this in ‘Tooth and Claw’ and that had just looked silly) but it works as a parable for populations handing over control of their lives to some bigger institution that claims to know more than they do (‘monks’ suggests Christianity but the robes and the Eastern Europe setting suggest Muslim; knowing Dr Who it’s probably both religions he writer had in mind, plus more, though to avoid the one last great taboo of television they never actually do anything religious). They look like a corpse, have the manners of a Taran wood beast and the fact that they’ve created these big pyramids that pop up everywhere as a display of their power (traditionally thought of as tombs for pharaohs, Gods who came to earth in Human form, although no bodies have ever been found in any of them and there are lots of more normal tombs nearby) makes it only too obvious that they’re pyramid-marketing scam artists (it’s a real shame that we never hear more about the monks’ back story. I’d love to think that they tried this sort of thing once before, in Ancient Egypt, which is where our still-unexplained wonder of the ancient world came from. Although the way they’re treated here, with a lazer show coming out of the pyramid peak, makes them look more like a Pink Floyd concert. It’s still amazing to think that the only other time we’ve had them on screen for any meaningful sense was as a backdrop to Skaro-on-Human action in ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ or as the brief house of immortal god Sutekh in ‘Pyramids Of Mars’). The pyramids look amazing even if they are a bit underused, with a clever bit of CGI that makes it look as if the ‘real’ ones now suddenly have a front door opening.  

There are some other really good elements to this story too. 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 Dr Who (and a topical one too: the clock, first designed by atomic scientists in 1947 as a way of shocking mankind into action, as set at 11.45pm – midnight being ‘doomsday hour’ – but had been gradually edging closer to destruction not further away, moved to 11.57pm in 2015 just as this story was being written (it’s currently at 11.58:30pm at the time of writing, but with Trump back in office it’s a wonder we haven’t zoomed past death and destruction and on to midday already). It’s a subtle way of demonstrating The Monks’ power without using up any extra budget and really adds to the tension of the episode. Having the United Nations rather than the United Nation Intelligence taskforce also ups the ante too (and was rather daring given the way the UN were horrified enough by a fake UNIT website promoting the ‘comeback’ series in 2005 that they forced it to be taken down and the UNIT abbreviation officially change the first word to ‘unified’), with more multiculturalism than we often see in Dr Who, with a Japanese secretary commander and the obviously American head of an army. This wasn’t Harness’ original idea interestingly (he had Kate Stewart returning as the head of UNIT following his Zygon story, but Jemma Redgrave was too busy on ‘Holby City’ to reprise her role; a shame not just because Harness wrote well for her but because it meant they had to cut some lovely dialogue about her ‘trust’ in the Doctor, remembering childhood days when Dr 3 used to act as her mad stern but very affectionate babysitter!) A second draft had the UN delegates comprised of caricatures of Jeremy Corbyn (surely a prime minister in one of the Who parallel worlds – maybe the ‘Jeremy’ the Brigadier calls up too!), Trump and Kim Jong-Un, but this was dropped for being too ‘controversial’ (another case of the modern series being censored in ways the ‘classic’ one would never even think to consider). Having the UN there, though, makes it clear that this is the whole of the world at stake this week, not just a quarry in South Wales.

Harness saw the monks slightly differently to Moffat. They weren’t conmen so much as opportunists, aliens who were good enough at making predictions to know when mankind were at their weakest (as much as everyone quotes Asimov as a reference for Who’s robot stories it’s here, with the monks as a sort of evil version of Harry Seldon, the character at the heart of the writer’s masterpiece the ‘Foundation’ septet, that’s the most Asimovvy moment of Dr Who, seeing civilisation as a series of inevitable triumphs and disasters). The most talked about part of this episode, though, is the sub-plot about why the Monks ‘stepped in’ to save humanity and how: Harness wanted a global catastrophe that was apolitical and at first wanted to have a classic bit of miscommunication, like the errors in computer code that had caused so many near-misses in the cold war, when Russia or America were convinced the other were lobbing nuclear missiles at each other. The more he looked around at world news, though, the more he realised that it should be an accident, a mistake that led to some terrible natural catastrophe that we couldn’t solve. Harness read up on an event he remembered, the ‘raoultella planticola’ even of the 1990s spoken about with a shudder by many biologists. There was a research grant given over to Orgeon State University to study a bacteria that could be created to grow in soil, with the hope that it would improve barren soil anywhere in the world and allow mass vegetation to grow. Perfect! The university was given the go-ahead to let the thing loose and hope it travelled around the globe. But a whistleblower was concerned that the bacteria had only been grown under specific test conditions and hadn’t been tested for the different weather conditions around the Earth. Pushing for an extra test, the researchers found to their horror that under certain temperatures the bacteria became aggressive and actually killed off all living matter. Had they let it loose as they so nearly did all the Earth’s vegetation might have been killed off for good and humanity might have starved. It would have been a very Dr Who plot, very much in keeping with the pesticide one of ‘Planet Of Giants’, while Harness himself was enough of a fan to nominate the company behind it as ‘Global Chemicals’ (the one behind the giant maggots in ‘The Green Death’, with new staff who apparently hadn’t learned anything from the lessons of the past). But the more drafts he wrote the harder it seemed to be to get the threat across without having the same pictures of dead plants every few minutes.

So Harness upped the threat again, turning it into a virus that was deadly to Humans, created by accident by two researchers, a pair who had been doing the same work day in day out for decades and knew their job backwards except for an unfortunate day of coincidences when both made mistakes: a woman named Erica had lost her reading glasses and her colleague named Douglas was too hungover to check her readings the way they usually would. This fits in well with the overall message of the story, with mankind born to make mistakes and the monks there to check our homework and find us wanting. So the choice changes to being between enslavement or death: a much harder one to make, even if The Doctor for one still finds it obvious what that choice should be. It was meant as a typical Dr who warning, a ‘this could happen one day’ nod of the head to someone who’d read enough scientific journals to know that scientists are humans too and make mistakes. Like ‘Praxeus’ (which was written before bur filmed after covid) nobody could have guessed that it would (maybe?) happen for real just a few short years later. Though the research in the Dr Who version is in flowers (a hangover from the earlier draft) not bats or pangolins (or mitochondria: as an m.e. patient I keep a rough eye on what research is being done on something that might affect me and I know for a fact a laboratory in Wuhan was studying the effects of germs on body cells in the blood of similar patients in 2019; given that ‘long covid’ is basically m.e. caused by a more specific rather than a general virus is this what leaked from a laboratory for real? Or is it mankind messing around with nature by eating it again? Either way it fits the story’s narrative that we’re not fit to run our planet sometimes) and the virus 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, the events here really are incredibly close to at least one version of what happened with covid. Just check out the way everyone panics and tries to save themselves and their reputations, rather than go into immediate lockdown and prevent the virus leaving the laboratory (actually one of the science blocks at Swansea University). All ridiculously plausible too: one carless mistake, an unfortunate coincidence and we wipe ourselves out in one go. It’s all so similar too, the setting and the misguided attempts to cover everything up, that I don’t think I was alone in thinking of this story immediately when the news about covid first broke in China; after all it was only two series and three years earlier, no time at all even for a series where time is relative. 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.

Dr Who has made comparatively few accurate premonitions about the future considering its a programme that’s forever trying to imagine what that might looks like (certainly not as many as The Simpsons seems to have managed), but this is one of the most accurate ones, along with CD-Roms, BBC3, reality TV and a demented prime minister who turns out to be a mad killer assassin. Frustratingly for those of us who re-watched this story for fictional ‘clues’ as to how to escape a real killer, the only way the virus is 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 it’s worth pointing out if he’d mentioned his blindness to someone earlier they would have helped him, so it’s on him really as much as he blames Bill for it. Another bit of unfortunate telling: this is the episode that, in officially finished edit version, uses the word ‘terrorist’ more than any single other episode and went out the Saturday after the Manchester Arena bombings, the second deadliest on UK soil. A lot of the dialogue got trimmed last minute, which led to a few weird-sounding sentences that end in mid-air and a lower-than-average running time (although you don’t miss out on that much).

What a conundrum eh? It all feels like proper Dr Who, asking difficult questions that don’t have any readymade answers and which other noisier scifi shows would be too busy shooting at things or giving us special effects to think about it. The Doctor, it seems, is only Human too despite being a timelord and is bad at asking for help. If only we’d learned our own worth we wouldn’t even be considering an outside influence for help. Equally if the Doctor let down some of his walls and trusted the people he’s used to saving, if he allowed his best friend in to know what he was feeling sooner or allowed himself to be vulnerable, the cliffhanger in this story would never have happened. It’s all a power play for control – and this is the Doctor’s biggest stumbling block along with his curiosity (it’s his need to control his own life and other people’s that forces his regeneration in both his 2^nd and 3^rd bodies, arguably the 8^th too). This is a neat contrast in a story that’s about humans forever looking to the skies and someone (like The Doctor) to save them when they need to stand on their own two feet and be independent. The fact is that both sides need to be more like the other: sometimes life is easier if we ask for help, but we don’t half make things harder for ourselves if we forever ask for help instead of taking responsibility for our actions. That’s a very Dr Who dilemma if ever I heard one and, as with the choice in ‘Zygon’ (and to a lesser extent ‘Kill The Moon’) Harness does a good job of showing how even in the generally more one-dimensional colour episodes of this series life is hardly ever black-and-white. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers: as the (sadly rather flimsy) finale will put it next week the only thing you can do is come from a place of love; to trust your gut and follow your heart without ignoring your brain. If you can get all three synchronised then you will know what to do – without getting carried by your heart as Bill understandably does here (though, not to give the game away, it’s her heart and emotions that save us all next week).
The general consensus from not just fans but Moffat himself is that this three-parter is okay but would have been better had the trilogy matched up better the way it was meant to; Moffat has spoken openly about how he should have co-ordinated it all better with a series of meetings but ‘dropped the ball’ by letting his fellow writers get on with it alone and the three parts not quite matching up. It’s understandable though: this was in many ways Moffat’s hardest time in the job: the workload was piling up, the deadlines were looming, he’d just solved a bunch of problems from the first half of the series and then his mum became seriously ill. This script was revised at her bedside in fact, which might account for the extra sombre tone and lack of jokes (although that’s quite a hallmark of Harness’ writing too). I kind of like that disconnect though; the differences between these three parts isn’t jarring in the normal way of Moffat two-parters (like building the foundations of a bungalow and turning it into a pyramid partway through) so much as adding an extension to something that’s already there to allow it to breathe more. For me this middle section is easily the best part of the trilogy too. It moves at a more sensible pace than the others and asks deeper questions, about choices and threat, without the need to set up the action or resolve it. You’re led astray pretty nicely the first time as a viewer as the episode keeps coming up with surprises just when you think you’ve got this story sussed: of course this is a parallel world! Oh wait it isn’t. Of course humanity is going to reject the monks’ offer as even we’re not that stupid. Oh wait it’s not that simple. Of course The Doctor’s going to save the day. Except whoops…here comes another cliffhanger!

If there’s a problem it lies with the threat itself, who don’t do enough to earn the respect that everyone automatically gives them in this story. They’re not much of a threat (the only person they kill is the general and he was a pest, so most of the audience are on their side) – the downside of having a ‘threat’ that observes and waits for humanity to hand over the keys to their soul. They look pretty weedy too – the downside of having a ‘living corpse’ look is that a) it doesn’t fit their ‘we’re on your side humanity, honest’ silver-tongued sales patter and 2) makes them look like a pushover half-dead already. You’d think that they’d show a bit more of what they can actually do – the effect is like the school bully who stands around asking for all your lunch money when you know you can knock them out and all they’ve done is look at you funny and make idle threats. It is, in places, a little too much like ‘Turn Left’ for comfort (it’s basically that story had Donna known more about what she was doing) and can’t match it for pure emotion and/or consequences. The difference really is that in that story we see the world fall apart from one enforced ‘mistake’, whereas here we’re only really told about it. Plus the whole ‘parallel world’ plot is now so common in Dr Who, after stories like ‘Inferno’ ‘Rise Of The Cybermen/Age Of Steel’ and ‘The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang’, that rather than be surprised by the revelation most fans just went ‘yeah, of course it is, big whoop’.

Imagine for a moment that those other stories don’t exist though. Imagine, too, that you watched this episode on its own without wondering what happened to the pope from last week and without the anticlimax of where the story will end in ‘Lie Of The Land’ (which is basically a do-over for this episode, after a lot of cheating). ‘Pyramid’ is exactly what Dr Who should be doing, telling an all too plausible (and a worryingly accurate bit of fortune-telling) about mankind messing up and then trying to work out whether to trust itself or hand over control to other beings who seem to know what they’re doing. But that’s how abusers gain control, by taking our power away from us when we should be keeping it for ourselves. The story talks a lot about consent and how the monks can do what they like with us if we’ve ‘allowed’ them to – the argument of many an abuser. But how can you make a rational logical choice if someone lies or hides the truth from you?  The monks aren’t just out to make us afraid as so many lesser species do either: they want to be loved, because ‘fear is temporary – love is slavery’, with love blinding you to all sorts of things the way The Doctor is here. That’s how people end up in bad marriages, whether with spouses or politicians. The whole is impressively serious too, without the jokey feel of many Who ‘big world event’ stories, although there is room for one great comedy scene where Pearl Mackie excels (Bill’s first date was ruined by the Pope; this time it’s the UN. Sadly we don’t get the triple next week – and sadly it’s the last we see of Penny, who clearly ran far away after this episode though Bill never so much as mentions her again. An uncharacteristic era meant actress Ronke Adekoluejo wasn’t credited on the original titles). A lot of other Who episodes have tried the ‘apparently nice people that turn out to be nasty’s shtick: take your pick from ‘Galaxy 4’ ‘The Savages’ ‘The Claws Of Axos’ and ‘Aliens Of London/WW3’. But in many ways this trilogy and this middle part in particular have the most intelligent response to it, looking more deeply into why even intelligent discerning people can still get fooled by a combination of sweet talking and threats. Like all of his deepest scripts (including Harness’ Zygons most of all) Capaldi finds a way to play his Doctor as more than just a grumpy goofball too, the script bringing out some of his best acting even if there areb’t actually that many memorable lines compared to other stories (he only lapses back into ‘affected acting’ for his comedy patter; ‘the pyramid game’ is a real British quiz show from 1978-1990 by the way, a bit like trivial pursuit but with a triangular board and celebrity rivals). As for Pearl Mackie she continues to find new ways to make Bill seem both the single most vulnerable companion since Susan, frequently out of her depth in a universe she didn’t ask for but can’t tear herself away from, and one of the toughest too, ready to step up when no one else will despite being a quadzillion miles out of her comfort zone. The result is a powerful, 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 right up there with some of the show’s best.

POSITIVES + 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 10th 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? (I still say his first name is Bjorn). Or Darth Vader winning on ‘Star Wars’ (‘Luke I am your father – go to your room, you’re grounded!) This here, this is what Dr Who 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 nevertheless trying to do the right thing in a universe that doesn’t always let him. Like all the best shock-horror Dr Who moments it makes you wonder ‘if they can do that, then what can they possibly do next?!’

NEGATIVES -  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 modern 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. Make that triple for a three-parter written by different writers. 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.

BEST QUOTE: ‘A funny thing, fear, isn’t it? Once it rules you you’re even afraid to admit what’s scaring you’.

Previous ‘Extremis’ next ‘The Lie Of The Land’