Doctor: What are the essentials?
Nardole: Air, Water, food, beer.
Vacations are pleasant things, but it's also nice to get back to the standard run of TV watching. At least the vacation allows me to watch the second and third parts of the loose "monk trilogy" in close succession. I think my biggest curiosity is how the second episode of the trilogy will fall. Are we looking at something good on it's own like The Empire Strikes Back or The Two Towers or are we looking at something less pleasant like Terminus.
Plot Summary
Encouraged by the Doctor, Bill goes out on a date with Penny, whom she amuses with the story of their date in the simulation. As they are sitting down to tea, soldiers enter Bill's apartment and are followed shortly their after by the Secretary-General of the UN. The Secretary-General is invoking the Doctor's term as President of Earth and wishes to know where to find him.
Resistant to taking up the office again, the Doctor holes up in the TARDIS, unaware until later that it was taken out of his office and placed on a plane. They travel to a desert region in Asia at the crossroads where the Chinese, Russian and American militaries are all on high alert. In this region, a 5,000 year old pyramid has appeared.
The Doctor approaches the pyramid where he is confronted by one of the Monks. The Monks inform him that they will take over Earth and they will be invited to do so. They then shut the door in the Doctor's face and all phones on Earth instantly switch to 11:57 PM, reflecting the Monk's version of the Doomsday Clock. Uneasy, the Doctor allows the three armies to coordinate an attack on the pyramid.
Meanwhile in Yorkshire, two scientists are settling down for work in a biochemical lab. One, Erica, has to have her co-worker, Douglas, input the figures for today as her husband accidentally broke her reading glasses that morning. Douglas, suffering from a bad hangover, inputs the numbers but mistakenly inputs the decimal point in the wrong location, causing too much of a certain chemical to be injected into the system.
The Monks take over the offensive capabilities of the three armies, rendering them useless. They then invite the power players into the pyramid. Inside, they tell the three commanders, the Secretary-General and the Doctor, Nardole and Bill how the planet will be dead in a year. They will save them in exchange for being invited to take over. They allow the party to see into their modeling and see the dead planet.
The Doctor scoffs at their offer but the Secretary-General decides to accept it. He offers to let the Monks take control. The Monks examine him but the offer must be made from a point of love and sincerity. The Secretary-General, motivated by fear, does not qualify and he collapses into dust.
The remaining party withdraws out of the pyramid and the leaders of the three armies agree to not follow any orders that would cause them to enter into war. Despite this agreement, the clock clicks forward to 11:59. The Doctor realizes that the potential war is not the cause of humanity's destruction. They brainstorm and settle on the likelihood of a plague and the Doctor sets them to search for possibilities after declassifying the government contracts.
At the lab in Yorkshire, the chemicals complete their mixing and inject themselves into the plant cultures. The plants then wither and die in moments. Erica and Douglas run out to seal the lab but Douglas leaves the main lab door open. He had also previously taken off his sterile helmet and collapses a moment later, withering into a slime. Erica seals the lab and initiates venting procedures.
Nardole narrows down the search field to about four hundred labs but the three commanders balk at this as it will take too much time to search. They head back to the pyramid to negotiate. The Doctor sends Bill to keep tabs on them while he and Nardole head back to the TARDIS. The Doctor has Narodle hack into the system and shut down the security cameras off all four hundred plus labs that are on the their list. The Monks then move to reactivate the cameras of the one lab they are watching and the Doctor heads there in the TARDIS.
As he arrives, the commanders attempt to surrender Earth to the Monks. The Monks determine they are surrendering out of strategy and not love and the three commanders are turned to dust as well. They turn to Bill as the Doctor's representative but she declines and backs off.
In the lab, the Doctor assesses the situation and figures that the venting will send the bacteria into the atmosphere and kill everything. He sends Nardole back into the TARDIS and moves it out of the lab. As he does so, Nardole collapses in the TARDIS as his lungs are attacked by the bacteria. The Doctor and Erica rig a small bomb that will ignite the ethanol being given off by the bacteria.
The Doctor sets the timer for two minutes and then heads towards the exit. As he does so, the doomsday timer trips backwards away from midnight and the Monks head back to their console to examine the problem. Erica is already outside the lab and tells the Doctor he'll have to manually enter the code to unlock the door. However, the Doctor cannot see the numbers on the dials to manipulate them. He tries to contact Nardole but he is unconscious.
Bill, listening in, realizes there is a problem. The Doctor finally confesses to her that he is blind and cannot escape. Bill then heads back to the Monks and offers to surrender if they give the Doctor his sight back. As her offer is made through love for the Doctor's well being, it is accepted. The Doctor's sight is restored and he exits the lab a few seconds before the bomb incinerates the bacteria.
Analysis
This story was not bad, but it wasn't overly engaging earlier. It did have a lot to overcome in the fact that it is the bridging episode between the first and last parts. Some of those stories hang well on their own but this seemed a little too wheel spinning to enjoy for it's own sake. Extremis introduces the Monks and their simulation systems while The Lie of the Land is going to cover how their takeover is overthrown. This story is them taking over and it's not particularly interesting in that.
What was interesting was the lab stuff. I found Erica and Douglas far more engaging than anyone in the high command of the various armies. I also really appreciated the fact that the role of Erica was written and no changes were made because they cast a little person. She is just a role and her height is irrelevant to the story. That was refreshing. Then you have the fact that she and Douglas have that casual workplace friendship that is just enjoyable to watch. There's no unrequited romance or weird politics. It's just two people who work together and get along. I almost wish the bacteria hadn't interrupted as I would have liked to have heard Erica's story about throwing up in her helmet.
I did like all the principles in this story. The Doctor seemed very wrong-footed and unsure of himself for a lot of the story. In fact, he seemed more unsure of himself than he did in Extremis but I thought it worked fairly well. But he also got his big brash moments in making the bomb and destroying the bacteria. I found his interaction with Erica to be very amusing. I also liked that fact that Erica didn't have a clue who the Doctor was. There's been a lot of stories where the Doctor seemed a bit too familiar so having someone have no clue who he was felt good.
This is the third story in a row where Nardole was given a good bit to do and he worked well. Someone on-line compared him to K-9 and I think that is a very apt description, even down to the sarcasm. People have also speculated that Nardole was originally conceived as arriving in the flashback sequence in Extremis and they enjoyed him so much they wrote him back into the earlier stories. That would make sense since his first real story was Oxygen, the story just prior to this and his lines could easily have been given to Bill or some other character in that story.
Bill was good too. It was rather obvious that something was going to happen and she was going to end up trading Earth for the Doctor's life. I didn't see it being his sight restored but I'm not sorry to see the blindness go. But I like that Bill is just an ordinary person who travels with the Doctor. She's smart but not so much that she will supersede the Doctor. She's much more like the companions that the Third or Fourth Doctor would travel with in that they brought their own skills but were, for the most part, ordinary people. I did find it highly amusing that Bill is relating the story of the pope in the simulation only to have nearly the same thing happen but with the Secretary-General instead. I also appreciated that scene because it was a variation on a theme within the original simulation, suggesting that the Monks had things plotted out pretty correctly.
I'm a bit mixed on the Monks as villains. They clearly are extremely powerful and could easily take over the world anytime they want. I don't buy the ruling through love angle since the love that was acted on was Bill's for the Doctor. They are just agents at that point. In many ways, they are like a rehash of the Silence but with broader power rather than the elusiveness that made the Silence interesting. There are more questions involved with them that I hope are at least partially addressed in the next episode.
I was also a little disappointed that after teasing her in the first part, Missy did not make an appearance in this story. It would have been nice to see her offering snide bits of commentary while chained up or contained back within a cell in the TARDIS, speaking over a video relay in the Doctor's sunglasses. That would have been highly amusing, like an in frame commentary. But she does seem to be making an appearance in the conclusion so hopefully she's good there.
The cinematography and direction was pretty good in this. I was having small issues with the feed on my TV so I couldn't get it as nice as it should have looked, but I thought it looked well done with some nice direction. It certainly had a much more intimate feel that I might have otherwise expected given how sterile it could have easily been done. But it looked very nice and I thought it well done.
Overall, I think is this in the slightly above average category. It'll be watched more as a context piece with the other two rather than as a story in it's own right. In fact, I probably could have tied this one and The Lie of the Land in a single review but it had been long enough that I just wanted to jump in. So, I highly doubt anyone will single this episode out as one to watch, but I don't think it's a major falloff from Extremis either in the overall arc.
Overall personal score: 3 out of 5
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