World Enough and Time

Wait for me.

I'm very curious about this episode. I know that it will be the first of the two-part and may even be the first of a three-parter depending on how things go with the Christmas special. I'm also a touch disappointed given that it's already been revealed that this story will feature the John Simm Master as well as the Mondasian Cybermen. Teasers are what they are but I can only imagine what it would have been to be shocked by the appearance of John Simm at least in the actual episode. But that's just a sidebar and we'll see how the story stands up on it's own merit.

Plot Summary

The TARDIS materializes in a frozen wasteland. The Doctor stumbles out into the snow and kneeling in the snow, begins to regenerate.

Flashing backwards, the Doctor discusses with Bill about giving Missy a test to see if she has reformed. They pick a distress call and materialize on the bridge of a colony ship reversing itself from a black hole. Missy, Bill and Nardole emerge with the Doctor listening from within the TARDIS. Their arrival sets off an alarm and a lone figure speaks to them over the monitor.

The figure, Jorj, arrives on the bridge, alarmed that the presence of a human has alerted something from below. He pulls a gun and demands to know which of them is human. Alarmed, the Doctor emerges to calm him down. Bill identifies herself as the human as the elevators approach the bridge. As the elevators prepare to open, Jorj shoots Bill in the chest, vaporizing her heart and most of her lungs. She falls over, seemingly dead.

Seconds later, masked figures trailing IV type mounts, emerge and put Bill on a gurney. They take her back to the elevator and back to the lower reaches of the ship stating that they can repair her. As she is taken away, the Doctor runs to the edge of the elevator and impresses a message psychically for her to wait for him.

The Doctor interrogates Jorj who states that this is a new colony ship that was being delivered when they ran near the black hole. They reversed course but a portion of the crew went to the rear of the ship to affect repairs when they first began two days ago but they never returned. After that, groups of the masked figures would emerge and take any human they could find below decks. The Doctor realizes what has happened and begins to explain.

Bill wakes up in a hospital where a Doctor informs her that she has been for several weeks. Her heart and lungs have been replaced with an external chest pumping device. Despite the doctor's instructions, her curiosity get the better of her and she explores the hospital. She is attracted to the sound of a man in a mask pressing a keyboard and signaling that he is in pain repeatedly.

A nurse and the janitor, Razor, enter and Bill hides behind a curtain. Razor spots her but motions for her to keep quiet. The nurse deals with the patient but only turns the speaker down instead of dealing with the pain. She then leaves. Horrified at this callousness, Bill tries to run and is found by Razor once again. He motions for her to come to his office where he offers her a cup of tea.

In Razor's office she sees the Doctor on screen, seemingly frozen and asks where he is now. Razor explains that the Doctor is still on the bridge but Bill in confused as to how this can be if she's been in the hospital for weeks. Razor tries to explain and the scene cuts back to the Doctor explaining that because of the ship's proximity to the black hole, time is dilating. On the bridge, only two days have past. But at the back of the ship, hundreds of years have past and the thousands of life forms now detected are the descendants of the original maintenance crew that went down below.

In the span of the Doctor's explanation, Bill becomes Razor's assistant, moping floors and doing general cleaning. He eventually takes her outside the hospital briefly, explaining that the atmosphere has become contaminated and they are all dying due to the aft end of the ship being thousands of years old. The surgeries and "upgrades" are the only way they can see to survive since they are not strong enough to even leave the floor and head forward, except in rare instances.

As the Doctor finishes his explanation, he flips Jorj onto his back and he, Missy and Nardole head for the elevator. Then enter and begin to descend, hoping to rescue Bill but also knowing that although it's only been a few minutes for them, she would have experienced months and possibly years.

Seeing the Doctor enter the elevator on Razor's monitor, she asks him to help her find the elevator doors in the hospital. Razor demurs but reluctantly agrees. That night he guides her into the operating theater but she is surprised by the Doctor and several assistants. They had decided to submit her to full conversion like the others and used her trust in Razor to get her in to the theater in an unaware state as that avoids upsetting the other patients.

The Doctor, Nardole and Missy arrive below. The Doctor and Nardole head off to find Bill while Missy accesses the computer to find out what is going on. As she does so, Razor comes up from behind and begins to chat with her. She is annoyed by his antics and threatens to kill him. Razor laughs it off and then removes his disguise to reveal himself as the Harold Saxon Master.

The Doctor and Nardole enter the operating theater and discover a newly converted Mondasian Cyberman (the colony ship was heading back to Mondas). The Doctor inquires of the cyberman about Bill Potts and the cyberman responds that it is Bill Potts. The Doctor is horrified as Missy and the Master then come up from behind the cybernized Bill, who repeats that she waited for him.

Analysis

On this week's episode of Radio Free Skaro, Paul Cornell was debating on whether this might be Steven Moffat's best script ever. I'm not sure I'm willing to go that far but I can see why it would be considered as this was an absolutely excellent episode. I was going back over it in my head and I'm hard pressed to find any thing that's wrong with it and a whole lot of stuff that was both gripping and entertaining.

What's really rather amazing is how good this story is despite the fact that the Doctor is not the central focus. He actually loses even more time to Missy given that he would have gotten more of an intro there. This is Bill's story and it's the things that happen to her that drive everything. And it works. The horror movie aspects when she is moving around the hospital with the early versions of the cybermen are very creepy. Then you get the extra layer of horror in learning that no one is helping these people, they are only ignoring their pain and longing for death. Although never said, it is clearly harkening back to The Tenth Planet where the Doctor notes that emotions would cause the Cybermen to go mad to be emotionally aware of what they were.

But Bill is quite good. You enjoy her relationship as it develops with Razor and are absolutely horrified when he turns her in to be cybernized. It feels like an additional betrayal beyond what she has already experienced, especially as she might have tried to escape at an earlier point, given her questions about the upper floors, if it hadn't been for the Doctor's plea for her to wait for him. I couldn't help but get a thought similar to The Lie of the Land where again Bill waits around until Nardole shows up on her doorstep to kick things into motion.

The one thing I'm curious/worried about is how this will be resolved. On one hand, I want the Doctor to save Bill as I like her. But on the other hand, Steven Moffat does have a bad habit of rectifying things such that "everybody lives" and I can't help but think that the series might actually benefit from a story where the Doctor didn't save everyone and a companion does actually die. I thought Clara should have stayed dead after Face the Raven and there is a part of me that does want the Doctor to be forced to make the choice of either leaving Bill as a cyberman or to kill her.

Like the Doctor, Missy is sidelined after the opening scene on the bridge. She does get some good cracks in with Razor but she is fairly quiet for the bulk of the story. That being said, the scenes where she is in are very entertaining. She has that off-kilter sense of humor and her banter about cutting to the chase regarding the "Doctor; Doctor who?" joke was equally funny. The next time trailer seems to suggest she'll be getting more leg room in the finale and I'm looking forward to that.

Despite all his forays before, this story is where the John Simm Master really became the Master for me. Before he had always been a very over-the-top villain, even beyond what Anthony Ainley would do. But here you have him fully enmeshed as this amusing and almost caring character of Razor, only to finally be revealed at the end. I kept waiting for the Master to pop out of the shadows, thinking that he was guiding the surgeries with the doctor. I finally cottoned on to him being the Master when he enter the room with Missy. Even his betrayal of Bill was framed in a way to make you think he was doing something for him that he genuinely thought was a good thing. It was a stellar performance and the intricacy of the plot were truly worthy of a plan of the Master.

As much as I've enjoyed the direction from other episodes this series, it is nearly impossible to top what Rachel Talalay is able to do in this story. Her framing and focus on various things is just excellent and the style of shots she uses add a ton of atmosphere to scenes that could have been generic or worse, boring. Instead you have long shots that invoke a creep level worthy of Hitchcock. The lighting, the framing, the slow burn of the horror just makes for an excellent mix and draws the viewer into higher and higher points of tension. I think the writing could have held up on it's own but her direction added some extra layers to this story that took it up another couple of notches.

One of the things that was probably most enjoyable was the organic nature of the development of the Cybermen. Time dilation around a black hole would probably have results like that and certainly someone not versed in physics like Jorj would not think of something like that. So you have a rapid acceleration of age and a natural deterioration within the ship that forces emergency measures like cyberization just to survive. I also appreciated that it was clearly a trial and error process and that it took until Bill was cybernized to even get the trademark handles with the idea that they would drain the pain and emotion from her. It just had a very natural flow that made sense rather than having something be included because they show up in a future sense.

Of course, these same restrictions also led to my one criticism of the story and that was the proto-cybermen coming to the bridge to get Bill in the first place. From the time dilation, they would have been away for weeks in getting Bill so where does their personal time differ from the time of each level? Is there a negative effect in transitioning from one time to another? Razor makes comment about how an expedition was sent to floor 500 and they never came back but would they not have been subjected to the same time dilation as those that went to the bridge? The confinement to the back of the ship is what I can't wrap my head around and why small parties are acceptable when retrieving fellow humans but not in trying to simply get to other levels where their survival without cybernization might be possible.

But that's a small quibble from the overall standpoint of the episode. I really enjoyed this, much more than I would have expected given the cheap look of the Mondasian Cybermen in The Tenth Planet. But the atmosphere more than made up for any shortcomings in that regard and even then the way the story evolved, the look of the Cybermen made sense in the overall context of the story. I'm looking forward to going back and watching this one a second time and even more interested to see how this plays in to The Doctor Falls and likely the Christmas special.

Overall personal score: 5 out of 5