Tom Salinsky

Part ones are arguably far easier than concluding part twos. Creating mysteries, locked box conundrums, impossible life-or-death situations is far, far easier than providing solutions which manage to be simultaneously surprising, satisfying, and with hindsight seem inevitable. Recent Doctor Who is (understandably) littered with examples of part twos which fail to live up to the promise of part one, and sometimes even tarnish the memory of part one.

A notable exception is last year’s The Zygon Inversion, a co-pro between showrunner Steven Moffat and Wallander scribe Peter Harness, the conclusion of which is still for me a high water mark for the series as a whole (up there with Human Nature, Dalek and, yes, I suppose, Blink).

I didn’t really review Extremis last week, but suffice to say I thought it was a fairly empty and meaningless exercise. A glorified “and it was all a dream” ending which makes very little sense on any level. So, I had rather mixed feelings sitting down to watch this week’s installment.

I needn’t have worried. This is masterly stuff, playing to both writers’ strengths. I suspect Moffat’s hand in the chain-of-chance plotting which leads lab workers Rachel Denning and Tony Gardner to accidentally create a bacterium antithetical to all life. And Harness’s contribution I imagine is likely to be the stunning pair of moral dilemmas – first those faced by the three generals, and then the even greater one faced by Bill at the very end.

It’s also very well worth pointing out that – for perhaps the first time since Matt Smith took over – this is serialised storytelling done right. Doctor Who 1963-1996 was always fundamentally a serialised anthology series. Even linked seasons like The Key to Time or (gawdelpus) The Trial of a Time Lord fell neatly into self-contained sections. Parts two, three and four might be a little hard to follow if you hadn’t seen last week’s episode, but every part one was a new story, and all you needed to know was the Doctor travels in time in a police box and you could start watching.

But in 2005, the television landscape was very different. Post Babylon 5, post Murder One, post The Wire, audiences were happy with – maybe even expected – a series arc at the very least. Russell’s approach to this was cautious. Mentions of Bad Wolf, Torchwood or Mr Saxon could be picked up by devoted watchers, safely ignored by casual viewers.

When Moffat and Smith took over in 2010, we were post Breaking Bad, post Man Men. And Moffat was keen to show that Doctor Who could compete. However, not wanting to sacrifice variety, the end result was a pretty ghastly muddle at times, with “arc” stories rubbing up against “non-arc stories” sometimes in the clumsiest of ways (see Night Terrors for arguably the worst offender in this regard).

Under Capaldi’s reign, things have been a bit smoother, with stand-alone-stories generally being the order of the day, but we’ve still had to suffer end-of-season gibberish like Death in Heaven. Now it seems like the balance between these two forces is being struck perfectly. Both this episode and the preceding one stand alone, but they work better together. In fact, Pyramid retrospectively flatters the earlier episode. I’m considering bumping it up from two stars to three.

Back to the episode itself. The structure is more sophisticated than, say, Robot, but far simpler and far less OCD than many recent stories. The Doctor madly scrambles to figure out what the monks in the pyramid are up to, but we know he’s looking in the wrong direction. Finally, the Doctor’s blindness pays off – he figures out how to find the source of the impending catastrophe.

Here the physical geography of the lab is a little confusing. It would have been better to have found some way in the scripting or the shooting to clearly demarcate which areas were compromised and which were safe, but the key elements of the problem are assembled very neatly. The Doctor on one side of a door. The TARDIS on the other. Nardole, incapacitated inside. And the Doctor’s sonic glasses totally unable to read the numbers on the combination lock. As a piece of plotting, forcing Bill to sacrifice the stewardship of the Earth out of pure love, it’s basically perfect.

Let’s have a little talk about that prop though. The actual combination lock itself looks like a child’s toy and no lab in the world ever had a combination lock like that. Surely it should be a keypad? That’s a problem if Denning knows the code, because then the Doctor can enter it without looking at it, but surely a better solution would be to have the code be 10-12 digits long – so long that Denning and Gardner keep it written down. Now Denning doesn’t know it, and any sighted person would be able to read it and we don’t have to have that ridiculous looking Duplo prop.

This is a minor niggle, and I hate giving episode five stars when there’s a conclusion still to come, but this is really, really good stuff. The regulars are on great form, the UN quartet do everything that’s asked of them, the effects are all top notch and director Daniel Nettheim generally keeps things moving. I’m going to keep half a star in my back pocket though. 4½ stars and onwards to The Lie of the Land.

Evil Monk 1: So, how did we fare in our simulated invasion of Earth?

Evil Monk 2: Oh, pretty well.

Evil Monk 1: Did we learn all we needed to about how to subdue the Earth people and take their planet?

Evil Monk 2: Yup. Pretty much.

Evil Monk 1: Good, good. And this “Doctor”, were we able to handle his interference?

Evil Monk 2: Oh yes. Well, I mean he was blind.

Evil Monk 1: What?

Evil Monk 2: Yeah, we made him blind.

Evil Monk 1: What? Why?

Evil Monk 2: Well, he’d just been made blind when we started gathering data for the simulation, so we thought…

Evil Monk 1: But we want the Doctor at the absolute peak of his powers. What’s the point in testing our invasion against a weakened version of the Doctor?

Evil Monk 2: Well, he wasn’t all that weakened. He had these glasses with a sort of heads-up display.

Evil Monk 1: Glasses with a what?

Evil Monk 2: A heads-up display. Showing him what he couldn’t see with his eyes.

Evil Monk 1: And what was he using to look at the heads-up display?

Evil Monk 2: Eh?

Evil Monk 1: If his eyes don’t work, how does a heads-up display help- oh, look it doesn’t matter. The point is, we’ve ironed out all the kinks in our invasion plan now, right?

Evil Monk 2: Yeah, I think so. I mean, it was pretty easy once everyone started to commit suicide.

Evil Monk 1: When they what?

Evil Monk 2: Well, once they found the book, the er, Extremis, which told them that they were in a simulation and how to test it, then they just started committing suicide.

Evil Monk 1: How to test it?

Evil Monk 2: Yeah. Despite the fact that each subroutine controlling each of the billions of people in our simulation is fantastically unique and complicated, so much so that the simulations believe they are alive, we couldn’t think of a single way of using that rich, complicated and unique data to find an arbitrary starting point for a random number generator, so when they-

Evil Monk 1: Wait, stop, go back. You put a book in the simulation…

Evil Monk 2: Extremis, yeah…

Evil Monk 1: Telling the people in the simulation that it was just a simulation?

Pause.

Evil Monk 2: We did make it very hard to translate.

Evil Monk 1: But what was it doing there at all??

Evil Monk 2: Sort of like an in-joke.

Evil Monk 1: Acolyte, I’m hugely disappointed. You were clearly the wrong person to put in charge of this simulation project. I should have realised something was up when I watched the Doctor execute the Master and take the body away for safekeeping – and not mention that he was doing this for the second time.

Evil Monk 2: I’m sorry, sir. I failed you.

Evil Monk 1: Never mind. We’re in no hurry. We’ll build a new simulation and do it properly this time. After all, what difference does it make if we invade this week, or next week, or next year?

Evil Monk 2: Ah… well…

Evil Monk 1: “Ah well” what?

Evil Monk 2: You know how you said we should make absolutely sure that the simulation was connected to the Earth Internet?

Evil Monk 1: What? No, I said it was to be totally isolated from any other networks. It was to be totally air-gapped. Any other plan of action would be foolhardy to the point of self-defeating.

Evil Monk 2: Oh…

Evil Monk 1: Why???

And, scene…

Jamie Mathieson’s first two scripts for the show – Mummy on the Orient Express and Flatline attracted near-universal praise, including from this blog, so expectations were high for his return in series ten. Were they met? Ah… nearly.

The set-up is largely great. Putting the Doctor and his – still very new – companion at risk of a terrible death in the icy vacuum of space is a great idea. The David Tennant episode 42, and in particular the sight of Martha Jones drifting off into nothing, is one of the very few things keeping me optimistic about Chris Chibnall’s forthcoming takeover of the programme. And who doesn’t like seeing Capaldi wandering around a deserted base making macabre quips, even if that kind of thing has been happening a lot lately.

The teaser is also very compelling, with the zombie colleague offing the newly-engaged couple and – look! – Nardole’s allowed to come. So what’s the problem? Well, there are too. One is a science niggle, but it’s such an important plot point that I can’t permit it to go unchallenged. For, I suspect practical production reasons, the cast don’t wear their helmets most of the time, but instead have a forcefield around their heads which keeps the air in. Thus even though the inside of the station is a vacuum, they can breathe normally.

But suddenly when they have to go outside the station, proper helmets are required. But either the station is deprived of air or it isn’t. As soon as there’s any opportunity, the pressure will equalise. You can’t maintain a thin atmosphere like on a small planet. And thus, either the forcefield can create an air-tight seal or it can’t. There’s just no way that the vacuum inside the station is more vacuum-y than the vacuum outside the station.

So, this rather takes the shine off the generally terrifying ordeal of the station inhabitants (as usually, poorly-differentiated, although the blue one is a nice sources of gags about racism, although played by a white actor I believe) and horrendous sacrifice – more on that later. The other, far bigger problem is that the episode is not so much rushed as absolutely stuffed. Whereas several recent episodes have had about thirty minutes of story and ten-fifteen minutes of running around and quipping (The Witch’s Familiar being the most egregious recent example) this could have certainly made a 60 minute special and is probably only one subplot away from being a two-parter.

So, when the Doctor’s blindness is easily fixed back at base, I’m intensely frustrated that such a brilliant idea wasn’t given time enough to be really developed and explored. Except of course – they aren’t done with that idea yet, are they! A lovely final twist to a thrilling and very well-executed episode.

I’ll quickly note that I don’t regard the profiteering algorithm as another automatic system gone awry for the simple reason that the algorithm was programmed by heartlessly profiteering bad-guys, so it’s not a benevolent system which becomes accidentally fatal, it’s a ruthless system doing exactly what it was intended to do.

4 ½ stars. Hurrah.

Okay, now this is more like it.

There’s a tremendous amount to like in Sarah Dollard’s script, which has much of the same atmosphere as her previous Face the Raven, but doesn’t spend so much time tying itself in quasi-legal knots to make the story work.

Bill’s role as the companion who questions all those things which we’ve taken as read for years continues to impress and delight, whether she’s pondering how her presence will change history, or how people will react to the presence of the TARDIS and the melanin in her skin, she’s an unqualified joy and Pearl Mackie’s chemistry with Peter Capaldi is amazing. This is quickly becoming my favourite TARDIS team since Tennant and Tate.

The central mystery is clearly presented, with adorable ragamuffins who narrowly stay on the right side of cloying, pointing the Doctor and Bill in the right direction, even if that means one of them gets sacrificed to The Beast Below – which, yes, this story does stand as a less-bonkers version of. But whereas the Matt Smith story was about morality on a colossal scale, this story is much more about personal morality. The Doctor and Bill have two exchanges, which bookend her questioning whether traveling with him is any sense right. In the first, exquisitely painful interaction, she makes him confront the fact that his presence costs lives. In the second, slightly less successful one, his clear-minded speech wins her back round. Capaldi beautifully underplays this, but it’s a little simplistic by the standards of The Zygon Inversion.

What a tale of this kind needs, therefore is – hurrah! – a real villain, rather than an Automated System Gone Wrong. And Nicholas Burns is suitably slimy and selfish and – yes – punchable, effects work ever done, well it’s certainly no Skarasen either. I will note in passing that once again, Matt Lucas is completely sidelined. Did he film all of his scenes for the season in a weekend?

And what did I think of Knock Knock?

It’s the turn of another Proper Writer to have a go at Doctor Who, which either means they will bring a completely new perspective, or it means they will blunder into all the cliches and traps which they don’t know are there. Sadly, Mike Bartlett needs a new sat-nav because this is pretty ropey, samey stuff, until the end which is almost gibberish.

The set-up is okay, I suppose. Bill is now a student and is doing the student thing of finding people to share a house with. One thing you must give Steven Moffat – he can do jokes. But the tour of awful shared houses is woefully unfunny, very unlike the usual high standard of comedy which modern Doctor Who is capable of.

So, the largely indistinguishable bunch of cannon fodder shows up ready to move in to their totally not suspicious at all giant gothic mansion, only to discover David Suchet apparently going out of his way to be evil and mysterious. Bill seems determined to hide the fact the Doctor is a lecturer at the University and that’s how she knows him, even though it was established in The Pilot that he is well-known on campus and his lectures are very popular. When no-one believes that he’s her grandfather, everybody just stops mentioning it. It feels like a set-up for a punchline that never comes – maybe a fossil from an earlier draft.

But nobody in this story behaves like a real person. It’s completely unclear how any of these uninteresting students knows each other or for how long, and it utterly beggars belief that they would leave one of their number locked in his room like that. There’s also no particular reason for the house/woodworm/daughter/mother to pick them off one at a time, let alone have so much time elapse between the first devouring and all the subsequent ones, during which time, the inhabitants could think better of it and get out of dodge.

Finally, the revelation, although beautifully played by both Suchet and Mariah Gale, makes no sense whatsoever. If the space bugs eat people, then why didn’t they just eat Eliza to begin with? How did Suchet find out that he could keep Eliza alive by feeding them people? Why six people every twenty years instead of a more regular diet? Why do they come back to life at the end if their energy has already been consumed. And at exactly what point did she start thinking he was her dad?

The whole thing is muddled to the point of near total nonsense, and because it doesn’t make any real sense, it’s impossible to buy into the emotion, which is a tremendous waste of the talent involved.
Director Bill Anderson shoots it and paces it nicely, and the Bill’s continuing exploration of Doctor Who lore are as delightful as ever, but this is an often dull, rather forgettable instalment, which may ultimately only be noteworthy for the clues as to what – or who – the Doctor is keeping in that vault.

Three stars, and I will also note that we have so far has an alien puddle which eats someone, swarms of nanobots which eat people, swarms of glowing bugs under the ice which eat people and now swarms of insects in the walls which eat people. From the look of it, next week we have space suits which eat people. Is this the new Automated System Gone Wrong?