Lie Of The Land: Ranking - 138

      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 12^th 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 4^th 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 21^st 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...

NEGATIVES - Most of series 10 is Dr Who at its darkest and refreshingly schmaltz-free, a series where everybody is as likely to die in a horrible inferno of destruction as much as ‘everybody lives’, but the big conclusion to this story consists of Bill saving humanity through the ‘strong loving memory’ of her dead mother, images of which gets broadcast round the world instead of the Mad Monks’ intended messages and wakes everyone out of their slumber. Why would that work though? I’ll buy that its a nugget of real intense emotion in a world that’s forgotten how to feel (which is a pretty good parallel of how Dr Who felt in 2017 when most TV was as numb and dumbed down as its ), but why would that do anything? It’s one truth against so very many lies. It’s not as if hypnotists end their magic tricks with the words ‘I’ll count to three and snap my fingers and if that doesn’t work think about your dead dog’.

BEST QUOTE: Nardole: ‘However bad a situation is, if people think that’s how it’s always been they put up with it. It’s 90% of the job done’.

 Previous ‘The Pyramid At The End Of The World’ next ‘Empress Of Mars’

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’

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’