The Doctor Falls

I'm not a doctor. I'm the Doctor. The original you might say.

In the wake of the goodness that was World Enough and Time I'm curious to see how we go to The Doctor Falls. It is unfortunately somewhat rare for the second half of a two-parter to be as good or better than the first part. Sometimes the fall off is minimal (like the Library two-parter), but other times the story just crashes and burns (such as the end of Series 3). In all likelihood, this will actually be the second in a three-part story as I find it hard to imagine that Steven Moffat will end this story with the Doctor beginning to regenerate as shown at the beginning of last episode. So we will probably have another cliffhanger to enjoy while we wait six months for the Christmas special.

Plot Summary

Following the reveal of Bill's conversion, the Doctor is attacked and knocked against a control panel by the two Masters. Woozy, the Masters place him in a wheelchair and take him to the roof where they contemplate how to kill him. The Doctor arouses though and laughs, informing them that when he was knocked against the control panel, he expanded the scope of the Cybermen's criteria for upgrade to include two hearts. The group is subsequently attacked by a Cyberman and the Doctor is hit. Bill kills the attacking Cyberman and the whole group is rescued by Nardole who had run off and found a transport shuttle.

Nardole is able to cut through several hundred floors but they are forced to stop still five hundred floors below the bridge in a region where crops are grown. The farmers had seen invasions from the proto-Cybermen, killed them and posted them as scarecrows. They take in the refugees but keep Bill locked in the barn, though the Doctor assures everyone that she will not harm them. Nardole and the Doctor establish defenses around the farmhouse, anticipating the arrival of the Cybermen in pursuit of them.

Bill wakes, unaware that she has been converted to a Cyberman due to the mind conditioning she established during the Monk invasion. She is visited by a young girl, the only one who isn't afraid of her, who shows her a mirror. Bill sees her converted self but refuses to believe it until the Doctor arrives and helps her see. In her anger and confusion, she fires her head laser and blows a hole in the barn.

The Cybermen arrive in a scout force and are beaten back by the farmer's weapons and some upgrades from Nardole, utilizing the various lines of the spaceship around them. The Cybermen retreat and remobilize, preparing to come in force to destroy rather than simply convert.

The Master itches around for a way to escape but can't head back to his TARDIS as he burned out the dematerialization circuit evading the black hole. Missy, wavering between helping her former self and helping the Doctor, produces one, having held on to a vague memory of herself telling her former self about it. The two Masters prepare to leave, though the Doctor appeals for them to stay. They walk away, though Missy waffles for a bit.

The Doctor and Bill open a passage through the ducts of the ship that will take the residents of the level up to a subsequent farming floor. The Doctor then sends all the children and most of the other residents under the care of Nardole. Nardole protests at first but the Doctor absorbs his defense program into the sonic screwdriver and then sends him off. They retreat up the passageway just as the first line of Cybermen break through to the floor.

In the distraction of the battle, the Masters arrive at the lifts that will carry them back to the Master's TARDIS. Missy finally appeals to the Master to go back and help the Doctor. He refuses and she then stabs him in the back with a knife. He falls back to the lift and hits her with the full blast of his laser screwdriver. He then heads down the lift, holding off his regeneration until he can reach his TARDIS. Missy lies back on the grass and smiles as the sound of battle rages.

The Doctor, already showing signs of regeneration following his first attack on the roof, charges into battle destroying multiple Cybermen. He is surrounded and shot by a lead Cyberman, triggering a full burst of regeneration energy. The Doctor suppresses it and detonates a charge, destroying nearly the whole level, killing all the Cybermen and effectively killing himself.

Bill, the lone survivor of the battle due to her being shielded from the explosion, finds the Doctor and cries out in despair, beginning to cry. As she does, Heather reappears and modifies Bill's molecular structure out of the Cybersuit into a form similar to hers. This time, Bill accepts her offer to travel together and they take the Doctor back to his TARDIS and set it in motion before flying out the door.

A tear from Bill's eye splashes on the Doctor before she leaves and the tear sparks regeneration energy, reviving the Doctor. He lands in a snowy landscape and begins to fully regenerate but suppresses it, insisting he will not change. He hears a similar refrain and out of the snow he sees the First Doctor approaching him.

Analysis

I think it's safe to say that my ability to do predictions are somewhere between Jack and $h!t as the episode ended with the Doctor holding off his regeneration and then meeting the First Doctor in the snow. But as for the rest of the story, I'm a little meh on it. There were parts that were quite good and I was very jazzed by the appearance of the First Doctor at the end, but overall, the story seemed muddled and Moffat once again could not get away from his mantra of "Everybody lives."

One of the biggest things to differentiate here is the characters and their performances from the overall storyline. I had no fault with any of the characters. The Doctor was excellent and gave a great speech to define himself and what he does. It only added to the John Simm Master's character that he ignored it completely. In fact the John Simm Master was in top form as the heartless bastard that he is. Bill was good in her crisis and I really appreciated being able to see her outside of the Cyberman suit so we could get a proper bead on her emotions, which might have been lost otherwise.

But if the performances were good, the story was heavily muddled. It was never made clear just why the Doctor was already beginning to regenerate. I'm assuming it was from the Cyberman attack shown in the flashback, but that's not clear and that just started the muddling process. How did patients from the hospital escape and get up to the five hundredth floor? Were these similar expeditions to that which took Bill at the beginning of World Enough and Time? Was this the first floor with humans living on it or were anyone living below just abandoned to the Cybermen and they made their stand here because they couldn't go any further?

There were also too many parts that were never really used. We are introduced to the farmers but they don't have time to be anything other than the objects to be protected. Once the Master is revealed and they flee the floor of the Cybermen, he does nothing. He cracks bad jokes and is a dick to others but he is just a loose thread that never gets used. He sits until Missy magically provides a way for him to escape and then she sets his regeneration in motion. He in turn, ensures that she will not continue as the Master in the next Doctor's tenure.

In fact, I'm curious as to how the Master will continue. Missy is hit with the full blast and the Master even notes that she needn't bother trying to regenerate. Does this mean that she can't regenerate and is the final iteration of the Master? Or was he wrong and she does regenerate into a new Master, find his way to the bridge and steer the colony ship away to a point where he can find his TARDIS, which presumably was taken prior to Missy's attempted execution. I don't mind some loose threads, but I would have liked at least an indication that Missy could have regenerated rather than see her just lie back and seem to die.

It's also a bit disappointing that we never really got much detail on Missy's supposed turn to good. Frankly, it seemed to weaken her character. I thought she was at her height in The Witch's Familiar when she is prepared to kill Clara as easily as be friendly with her. Her subsequent change in demeanor to one that is more scared and giving it to rational emotion seems different and caused the character to lose an edge? Her bite took a serious hit and only came back in brief flashes, though it seemed close to back in World Enough and Time. But in this story, it seemed completely gone except for the moment where she is fully dark with her old self. Once the self-preservation instinct kicks in, she loses that edge again and it doesn't come back except for that flash when she slips the knife into the Master's back.

I did like the battle scenes and the reminder that since they were on a ship, they really could blow things up around them, as opposed to if they were on an actual planet. I was highly amused at the shear volume of references to previous stories, some of which were too obscure even for me. I did also like that the Doctor was eventually overrun and effectively killed by the Cybermen, showing they were not the useless villains that they have always seemed to come across as in the past. It gave them a little bite, despite the fact that the Doctor and his group was blowing them up willy-nilly prior to that.

I also was amused by the very blatent references to two of the most well known regenerations: Logopolis and The Caves of Androzani. Logopolis was pretty easy to see as you had images of prior companions saying Doctor as the Doctor faces his death, but The Caves of Androzani was a bit more subtle. In fact, I would have completely missed it but Chris Burgess of RFS pointed out that while the Fifth Doctor had five companions say his name before the Master appeared, there were twelve companions who stated his name this time prior to the appearance of Missy. This is a deep reference that you can only give props to a superfan like Steven Moffat to put out.

So let's get to the part that seems to be chafing the worst, the Deus Ex of Deus Ex Machinas: Heather's arrival and her and Bill's magical fixing of everything. Deus Ex Machinas happen in Doctor Who, you just accept it, though I tend to ding stories that rely on it. I think I could have accepted this one a bit better if A) we had had some hint of Heather's return in subsequent stories, such as a star eye glimmer or a vision of her face appearing in the background in times of turmoil (such as during the Monk's reign) and B) if this wasn't the exact same trope we had last series. Some people dislike this one more than Clara's; I happen to dislike Clara's more but that's more because I thought Clara's arc was better suited to her staying dead. Bill, unlike Clara, showed caution and appreciation of the danger she was stepping into. It took a lot of convincing by the Doctor to go onto the colony ship and I think a love redemption after dealing with ten years of crap on this trip is acceptable. I just wish it didn't feel like it came completely out of left field as though Moffat wrote himself into a corner and couldn't figure out how to get out of it.

The Rapunzel magic tear was also a bit of a bridge too far for me. The Doctor forestalls regeneration and instead blows himself up. I could buy that some of the regeneration energy was in there and needed a catalyst to get started but what about the tear is that catalyst? It's deviation into fantasy and while I don't mind that (see The Androids of Tara), there was nothing about this story that set itself up as in-line for a fantasy storyline. Indeed, the prior episode was well grounded in science and gave a strong vibe of realism, which made it feel so good. This again feels like a writer desperately searching for a way out of a corner that has wet paint all around him.

For all the flaws in the story, I cannot fault the direction of the episode. It was well shot and boosted a lot even in ordinary scenes. The scenes of Bill coming to grips with what she had become were especially well done and Rachel Talalay deserves mad props for those. The steady darkening of the atmosphere after each Cybermen attack adds to the dread that comes from each wave of Cyberman attacks and is effective in keeping the mood of the story in that vein of struggle in the face of hopelessness.

One other thing that bugs me and I hope there is expansion on this in the Christmas special is why the Doctor is so resistant to his regeneration. The Tenth Doctor couched regeneration in the frame of the death of that particular personality, which is not an unfair comparison. But we saw him resist and explain that. We even had evidence of it when he bypassed regeneration in favor of making "Handy Doctor". That was even elaborated on by the Eleventh Doctor in noting that he had vanity issues in those days. So why does the Twelfth Doctor, with a full set of regenerations in front of him (and who has been more cavalier about expending regeneration energy than any other Doctor) so resistant to change? I don't see the motivation for that. Forestalling regeneration to defeat the Cybermen? Yes, I can understand that. But I see no reason why he would deny the process after they are defeated.

But I feel I should end on the potentially most redeeming factor, the appearance of the First Doctor. This had been rumored for a couple of weeks and bandied about as a possibility ever since An Adventure in Space and Time aired. Now we have it and I'm very excited. Initial guesses are that this is going to take place in that brief moment when the Doctor heads towards the TARDIS after he and Polly are freed from the Cyberman ship by Ben at the end of Episode Four of The Tenth Planet, but that's just speculation. Still, it made for a very exciting note to end on after having gone through a real roller coaster of emotions regarding the prior sixty minutes.

So how does one judge this overall? The story was all over the place and the pacing equally iffy. But the performances, the atmosphere and tease at the end are all very good. In the end, I'm going to give a bit of leeway since it ultimately was an enjoyable run, even if I was approaching Spock levels of eyebrow arch at various points. It was the anticipated fall off from the set up, but I think it's more Utopia to The Sound of Drums fall off rather than The Sound of Drums to Last of the Time Lords fall off. Good enough to enjoy at any random turn.

Overall personal score: 4 out of 5

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

The Eaters of Light

There's a wolf out there and you're living in a house made of sticks.

We have finally arrived at the much anticipated Rona Monroe story. Ms. Monroe rather famously wrote the final classic series story Survival and was one of the most obvious candidates to come back and write for the new series (Ben Aaronovitch being the other). Unlike a lot of fandom, I didn't like Survival and the writing did play a significant factor in that as there was filler and a lot of unexplained stuff. I'll have to hope here that the more compressed time afford a better story than the last outing.

Plot Summary

The Doctor, Bill and Nardole materialize in 2nd Century Scotland to find the 9th Roman Legion which vanished without a trace. Bill heads off in one direction to find a Roman soldier while the Doctor and Nardole head off in another to find signs of settlement. Bill comes across a young woman named Kar who is offering for the dead. She sees Bill and rushes at her with a sword. Bill runs and falls into a pit where she comes across a young Roman soldier.

The Doctor and Nardole walk across to a cairn where across from it they find the remains of the Roman army. They are completely desiccated, having been robbed of all structure and covered in black slime. Fearing for Bill's safety, the Doctor and Nardole turn to leave but are captured by a band of Celts who live nearby. They take them to their meeting house to wait the Watcher.

The Roman soldier tells Bill the a group of them ran away before the battle and the rest are hiding in a nearby cave as he had come to scout the roads. They climb out of the pit after dark but are attacked by a strange glowing creature. The creature consumes the Roman and Bill runs to the cave with the other Romans. She crawls inside where is is grabbed by the soldiers just as the creature attacks her. The Romans cover the entrance with stones and pull her in. She tells them of the attack on their comrade and then passes out, a bit of black slime on her neck beginning to spread.

In the meeting house, the Doctor refutes the Celts just as Kar comes in proclaiming herself as the Watcher and the defeater of the Roman army. The Doctor scoffs at her and then creates a distraction by tossing Nardole's bag of unpopped popcorn into the fire. They run out and into the cairn where the interior door begins to open as the sun hits it. As it does, another dimension is exposed and the Doctor steps over the edge to peer in. He sees hundreds of strange creatures circling about a ball of light. One flies close to him and he leaves, shutting the door. He emerges from the cairn to find Nardole entertaining the Celts with stories, having been told that nearly two and a half days have passed despite the Doctor only being in there a few seconds.

Bill wakes from her sleep after two days with the Romans destroying the slime with sunlight. She urges their commander, Lucius, to help her go outside the cave and look for the Doctor. Her pleas become more urgent when the shaft of sunlight is blocked and they realize the creature is probing them looking for a way in. They elect to climb out and potentially die fighting rather than die underground waiting. They form up and march towards an alternate exit.

The Doctor, asking a few questions, learns that the tribe of Celts had sent a watcher in to fight every fifty or so years. Because of the difference in time, that meant the watcher would fight and die after a few minutes but would save things for several generations. Kar had instead pulled one of the creatures out to attack the Romans in a fit of rage over the slaughter and enslavement of her people. The Doctor chides her for unleashing a horror that will destroy the world for her petty revenge. He knows that the creature is weak as the sun has gone down but it will gain strength the next day. He proposes to drive it back into the rift.

The creature bursts out at the Romans, killing one of them, as they approach the exit ladder. They climb out and into the Celt meeting house before the creature can leap out after them. The Celts and Romans start shouting at each other but are caught off guard by the fact that they can understand each other via the TARDIS translation circuit. The Doctor brings Bill up to speed and then lectures both the Romans and the Celts that they have a greater danger than their own petty squabbles and must work together.

The group heads to the cairn where the group sets up with special light refactors used by the watchers. They make a lot of noise to summon the creature and it attacks just before dawn. They manage to pin the creature down using the refactors and then drive it back through the gateway as the door opens in the sunlight. The Doctor proposes to head in and fend off the creatures permanently as he has a very long lifespan and will regenerate when killed. Kar objects stating that this her task. The Romans also object, vowing revenge for their comrades and a chance to redeem their lost honor. The group holds the Doctor back and head in to the rift together.

The entrance of so many into rift causes it to destabilize and the cairn collapses with everyone rushing out to avoid the cave in. The Doctor, Bill and Nardole head back to the TARDIS with Bill being able to detect small traces of music from the pipers who entered the rift. Inside the TARDIS, they find Missy who had been watching them. She is being kept in the TARDIS now, isomorphically locked out of the controls and on maintenance duty in exchange for a bit more latitude. Missy continues to appeal to the Doctor, indicating that she has reformed but he holds her at arms length, not wanting to give in to the hope that they can be friends once again just yet.

Analysis

The reception on this story has been decidedly mixed from fans from what I can tell. I frankly enjoyed it. You can tell that Rona Monroe wrote for the classic series as this did have a very classic feel to it both in structure and it's very casual nature with regard to the overall story arc. Much like Mark Gatiss' stories, this could have been put pretty much anywhere after The Pilot and it would have worked. In fact, the fact that it took Bill until Episode Ten to cotton on to the TARDIS telepathic circuit suggests that it was probably written as an earlier in series story.

I noted above that one of my main problems with Survival was it's lack of content and how Episode Two felt like filler. There was no filler here but this story is the shortest of the series by far. It gets even shorter when you figure that the last five minutes are given over to the coda with Missy and I'd lay a decent bet that Rona Monroe did not write much if any of that part. It would seem that Ms. Monroe likes to get to the point of the story and that actually worked here.

Much of the fan problems with this story seem to be in how simple, straightforward and not tied to the overall arc this story was. I saw one commenter on-line compare it to an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures. Having never bothered with that show, I can't speak to that but this story did remind me of a more classic story. The Doctor and companions arrive, they separate, they each get into trouble, they reunite, the Doctor devises a plan, the plan is achieved with a minor hitch or two, the Doctor leaves. You could apply that formula to almost any of the classic era and it fits and fans love it. Here for some reason, they complain that it makes the story fluff. I thought it worked well and in fact would probably sit down and rewatch this one before I would something like Smile or even Thin Ice.

Another problem that I think that people blew up in their heads was the fact that this story is the last one before the series finale two-parter and it had no tie-in. After Face the Raven last year and with the grand culmination of the end of the Moffat era (including the Twelfth Doctor), I think people were expecting a grand lead in and didn't get it. So it's more of a shattering of expectations than anything else. I didn't really get that myself since the coda of the story did have a lead in, although it could easily be argued that the coda was very out of place so that could have also tied in to some of the fan irritation.

Regardless, how did everyone do? Much as Survival's main focus was on Ace, this story focused heavily on Bill. Bill is much more like the Bill prior to the Monk trilogy in that she is more forceful and brash. She openly defies the Doctor by insisting she knows more about the missing 9th Legion and is much more direct in what she wants. She also has a leadership streak with others and a near worshipful devotion to the Doctor. You can't help but get the feeling that Bill was being given a bit of an Ace injection at times. In fact, if you remove Nardole, you could plug Ace and the Seventh Doctor in this story and not have to change nearly anything in the dialogue. But I thought she worked well and was enjoyable.

The one scene of Bill's that I did find a bit overdone was the discussion with the Romans on sexuality. I get the feeling that in the character draft that was given, Bill's homosexuality was listed as a character trait and that became something of a focus point. Maybe because I've read and watched so much on Rome but I thought the discussion was a bit heavy-handed. Once Lucius found out that Bill was gay, that should have been the end of it given how accepted homosexual behavior was in Rome. I doubt it would have occurred to a real Roman to point out one of his soldiers was gay or that he enjoyed trysts with both. To paraphrase Crassus in Sparticus, "some enjoy both snails and oysters".

The Doctor was enjoyable here although not given as much focus as I would have preferred. He is rather witty with a number of good lines. He has the sharp condescension towards the locals that you would expect from the Twelfth Doctor, but not without compassion as well. I rather enjoyed him slapping the various folks around like ignorant children and it helped that they all looked very young as well. Yet at the same time, like a concerned parent, you could tell that he had their best interests at heart. Just no sugar coating about how if they screwed up, they were going to hear about it.

I thought Nardole was well captured as well. He wasn't given much other than to be comic relief but he had a nice repartee with the Doctor and the comic timing between the two worked very well. The Doctor as written here would not be the type to break the tension by creating his own joke and Nardole interjected these much the same way the Fourth Doctor would undercut his own direness with some offhanded remark. I thought it a good balance even if Nardole didn't contribute much to the overall story.

The guest cast was pretty good as well. Kar and Lucius were the only notable figures as everyone else was mostly background but I thought they did well. Lucius played the boy forced into command fairly well and aside from the expository scene regarding sexuality, I thought his overall personality was very likeable. Kar also was played well as the brash young woman who does something stupid in a fit of rage and is now dealing with the consequences. I liked her interactions where she attempts to be bold but is cut down multiple times by the Doctor and then slapped back into reality when she attempts to wallow in guilt. "Time to grow up" was a nice way to put it and I thought her invoking it at the end was a reasonable balance to her character.

The villains were a bit non-descript in this story. It's actually been quite a while since there has been a story with something as a simple as a monster who is attacking and killing people and just needs to be stopped. Even when you've had that (say Oxygen or Knock, Knock) there's been some other force or backstory behind it. This is just a monster on Earth that has to be sent away and arguably the first time it's been seen since Flatline. I would have liked a little more detail on the monsters. Yes the Doctor did go into exposition mode about being like locusts with light but I still would have liked a bit more info given that if it consumes light, how does it feed on humans? A couple of lines here or there to bring it into focus would have been appreciated.

The setting and direction was quite nice. Not quite as good as we've seen from the last few stories but I would have been very hard pressed to tell you that wasn't Scotland that we were seeing. Likewise, everyone looked period and there was a fairly good use of perspective and orientation in telling the story. It made things a bit more immersive than you might have expected.

I am very curious to see how the Missy stuff works out in the end. Clearly it's being set up that she is being given more and more access. She is out of the vault and now in the TARDIS. Yes she supposedly can't leave but that's better than where she was before trapped in the vault. I liked the Missy stuff as it plays in to the overall story and I liked seeing Missy have that flash of being her normal, slightly mad self before being emotional with the music. But the Missy stuff was its own separate piece, completely unrelated to the rest of the story. The original ending was clearly the shot of the people fighting the Eaters of Light etched on the rocks outside the cairn. I actually wonder if there was more story written and those parts were cut to make room for the coda, even though I think you could have easily had both. Or was Rona Monroe told to keep the episode a certain length in anticipation of the coda being tacked on? I don't know but the last bit was not transitioned well and had a very obvious stapled on feel.

Overall, I enjoyed this story. It was not deep but it was a straightforward bit of fun closer to the old school in style. It would be an easy story to drop someone in on to get a feel for both the Twelfth Doctor and Bill. A casual bit of fun to be enjoyed at any time.

Overall personal score: 3.5 out of 5

Empress of Mars

Rise my warriors! Sleep no more!

Empress of Mars is this season's contribution by Mark Gatiss. Gatiss has a hit or miss track record as far as most fans are concerned. He does horror well and he is very good at the fan service. But he also can be frothy and his stories will show a lack of depth often so if there isn't a strong hook, they will fall off quickly. He wrote the last Ice Warriors story, Cold War, so I'm actually looking forward to see what he can do in a more expanded setting.

Plot Summary

The Doctor, Bill and Nardole show up at NASA as a probe lands on Mars and prepares to take pictures from under the ice cap. All are shocked to find piles of stones spelling out "God Save the Queen" in English.

The trio heads to Mars in the late 19th century to try and solve the mystery. They are further surprised when the land in an underground cavern to discover oxygen and a camp fire. Bill, exploring a bit further, has the floor collapse beneath her and falls into another section of the cave. The Doctor sends Nardole back to the TARDIS for rope but upon entering, something triggers in the TARDIS and it flies back to Earth, locking Nardole out of the controls.

In her tunnel, Bill meets Captain Catchlove while the Doctor is confronted by an Ice Warrior and Colonel Godsacre. They are both taken back to camp where they learn that the Ice Warrior, nicknamed Friday, crashed on Earth and was encountered by a squad of British soldiers. They helped the Ice Warrior repair his ship and came back with him in exchange for a promise of mineral wealth. The Ice Warrior converted one of the weapons on his ship into a drill that the rest of the soldiers have been using, though no mineral wealth has been found yet.

Shortly after this, the soldiers drill into a cavern where an Ice Queen seems to be laying in state. Captain Catchlove and most of the men want to start plundering but the Doctor strongly insists on examining, fearing that this might be a hibernation chamber. Colonel Godsacre agrees and pulls back, posting a guard instead.

One of the guards, Jackdaw, drugs his superior and starts to take gems off the side of the bier. His actions trigger the reanimation process and the Queen rises and kills him. The yells attract the attention of the soldiers and another fires at her. She kills him as well before the whole group can enter, including Friday. Friday returns to her side and the Doctor pleads for mercy as the soldiers were ignorant of what they were doing. Friday also advocates for the humans, informing her of the decayed state of Mars and how they have been in hibernation longer than anticipated.

The queen listens but another soldier's weapon misfires, striking the queen's helmet. She then orders the death of all soldiers and begins to awake the soldiers. The humans retreat and collapse the entrance using the mining drill. Catchlove then reveals that Godsacre was nearly executed for desertion years ago but survived the noose. He takes command from him and has Godsacre, the Doctor and Bill locked in the brig. He sets up pickets and prepares to fight if attacked.

Three Ice Warriors tunnel under and emerge behind the soldiers where they attack them from the rear. Catchlove, seeing his men falter, runs away to get his exterior suit and head back to the ship. Friday meanwhile, also tunnels under but emerges in the brig and frees the prisoners, insisting that they help negotiate for peace. They distract the queen and her warriors while the Doctor aims the drill at the surface, threatening to cave in the whole system, killing them all. In the confusion, Godsacre also runs away.

The queen prepares to listen given the standoff but Catchlove grabs her from the rear and holds a knife to her throat. He backs towards the elevator, threatening to kill her if anyone moves. The doors open but Godsacre is there, having come back down. He kills Catchlove and then offers his life to the queen in exchange for the lives of his men. The queen, impressed by this act of honor, spares his life and inducts him into her service, ordering her men to let the others live.

The Doctor repairs the communicator and sends out a signal asking for help for the Ice Warriors as they cannot reanimate themselves and live on Mars in it's current state. Their message is received by Alpha Centauri who offers aid. To help Alpha Centauri find the landing location, the Doctor, Bill and Godsacre spell out the message in rocks that were seen by the satellite under the ice.

Shortly after, the TARDIS reappears and Nardole shows them that in order to rescue them, he had to unlock Missy and get her to fly it. The Doctor tells her that she'll have to go back in the vault and she agrees, though she does ask the Doctor if he is feeling alright.

Analysis

I rather enjoyed this story. It has a few flaws but overall it's pretty enjoyable. The one caveat to throw in though is whether my expectations are a bit lowered because it's a Mark Gatiss story. Not that I think he's bad (unlike some fans) but it is a near guarantee that he will write a pretty shallow story that has almost no bearing on the overall arc of the series. That does set the mind in a different way because you put aside higher expectations and just try to appreciate the story as is.

One other thing about Mark Gatiss is that he is a fan and puts a lot of fan service in his stories. This one had it in spades but it was not so overt as to distract from the story. But putting those in also means that he will adapt the story style to something other than his normal mode of writing. I heard one reviewer point out that you could have ripped off Gatiss' name and slapped on Malcolm Hulke's name and you would have bought it easily. I can see that and it certainly affected how the characters behaved.

The Doctor was quite enjoyable in this but he also was a bit different than the normal Twelfth Doctor. Here he was very much in line with the Third Doctor, constantly pleading with the two parties to not fight, admitting that the humans would be wiped out easily. His only real action comes in creating a brief détente by threatening to create a cave in. From there the humans resolve things without him. It's probably one of the most passive roles the Twelfth Doctor has ever taken outside of Kill the Moon.

Bill also suffers from the adoption of the Hulke style. She is still fine, but nearly all traces of her proactive nature are lost. She becomes a "sit back and wait" style of companion. It is only when asked, first by the Empress and then by the Doctor, that she even truly engages with the Ice Warriors, despite her privileged female status. Not that any of this is bad, but it's a passiveness that we've not really seen before in Bill and it does stand out a bit.

Nardole is effectively written out which makes me think that this story was written prior to it being announced that he would be in for the whole series. I don't mind him being absent, but I would have liked something resembling an explanation as to why the TARDIS bugged out and then refused to let him take control again. One would guess that it had something to do with Missy but from this story's stand alone perspective, that's one of those little plot conveniences.

I liked the Ice Warriors in this, especially Friday. He reminded me a lot of Izlyr from The Curse of Peladon, where he is thoughtful and articulate. It's the more interesting side of the Ice Warriors than the typical villain. The Empress had these moments too, although she did get swept up in the shout-y leader. I saw some people compare her to the Empress Racnoss and her tone of voice was similar, but I thought she had a bit more depth than that. Between her and General Skaldak in Cold War, I feel like the Ice Warriors have taken a more Japanese turn, similar to the Klingons in Star Trek. Not that I have a problem with that as it adds layers not previously seen in the old serials.

The humans were ok, although a bit bland. In many ways, they were typical UNIT soldiers, just there to be cannon fodder with only the faintest hint at a personality for a couple. Most of the time was given to Colonel Godsacre and Captain Catchlove. Godsacre was alright, though again, not much depth until the hasty botched execution backstory. But it was Catchlove that annoyed me.

If there is a flaw in a lot of Third Doctor stories it is that there is often a person in the military or ministry who is just a jerk for the convenience of the plot. Catchlove is this character. It turns him into the overall villain but it still feels a bit empty. He's a smarmy prick just because. Why do the men follow him? Why is he so pompous to think that they can take down the Ice Warriors despite seeing the Queen be shot at point blank range with no effect? Gatiss then goes a step further by making him both a coward and a betrayer of his own men. It's just too one dimensional for me to enjoy properly. He's a cutout villain that you could swap with just about any other.

The direction in this story was excellent. There were a number of sweeping shots that heavily added to the atmosphere while also not forcing excessive amounts of CGI that would have overblown the budget and probably looked less good. The direction added a great deal of atmosphere to this story and gave it an extra edge that added something beyond what the regular writing did.

The one thing that bugs me slightly about this story beyond little acting or storyline nits is how this plays in overall Ice Warrior continuity. Most of the other Ice Warrior stories can be fit in with this but you can tell that it was the Peladon stories that were foremost in Mark Gatiss' mind. I think the one that I have the most curiosity about is The Seeds of Death. That is the one story where you don't have a rogue group trapped on Earth and acting in a reactionary way. Instead, it's an active invasion force and set a number of years in the future. I suppose you could tie it to the rise of a more militaristic leader who chooses to go to war rather than be a more passive race as shown in The Curse of Peladon but that is a bit of a mystery.

I'd also like to know why hibernation technology is so difficult. Here the Ice Warriors oversleep for 5,000 years much like the Silurians and the Sea Devils so in those stories. Oversleeping seems to be an easy plot device to get creatures of advanced technology involved without giving too in depth of a backstory. I can understand it, but I think I would have liked something with a touch more originality.

Overall, it was a good watch. It's simple and as long as you don't expect too much from it, it will entertain you. Certainly the minor nits are just that, minor and easily ignorable.

Overall personal score: 3.5 out of 5

The Lie of the Land

Bad news for your plus one

The conclusion to the loose Monk trilogy, although I'm not sure why they keep referring to it as a loose trilogy. None of the stories are going to make full sense without watching all three and I don't see how you can get away with calling that anything but a trilogy.
Plot Summary

Six months after the Monks took over, a police state has arisen with the Monks pushing the idea that they have always been there and the Doctor transmitting PSA's to homes all over the world. Bill continues to work, waiting for the Doctor to emerge. To combat the suggestion of rewritten history, she imagines her mother via the Doctor's photos of her and has daily conversations with her in her head.

While having a conversation, Nardole enters Bill's apartment and tells her that he's found the Doctor. He is being held on a ship moored out in the ocean off the coast of Britain. They manage to get on a supply ship with a sympathetic captain and dock with the prison ship.

On the ship, they find the Doctor's room but he refuses to come with her. He says that he has joined the Monks as the only way to preserve humanity. Bill is stunned and even tries to act as though there is a code. When the Doctor appears to alert the Monks of her presence, she grabs a soldier's gun and shoots him. The Doctor releases a quick burst of regeneration energy before stopping and congratulating Bill on passing the test. He had to be sure she hadn't been taken over by the Monks. The Doctor had already deprogramed all the guards on the ship and then sent Nardole to bring her before they escaped.

After bringing the ship back to Britain, the Doctor and Bill head back to the university and enter Missy's vault. She tells them that in her previous dealings with the Monks their central weakness is that the person who made the deal is the linchpin. If that person's mind is eliminated, it will destroy the Monk's grip on the reality they are presenting, making them vulnerable to uprising. The Doctor, unwilling to sacrifice Bill, opts for a different plan.

The Doctor, Bill, Nardole and the squad of soldiers decide to attack the central pyramid from where the broadcast signal is coming from and being sent out via the statues placed all over the world. The Doctor gives the soldiers recordings of Bill's voice repeating the truth to drown out the stronger influence of the Monk's signal. They enter in the pyramid and overcome the small number of Monk's guarding inside.

The Doctor, Bill and Nardole enter the central chamber where the Doctor attempts to interface with the mind sending the signals. It overpowers his mind and he is thrown backwards, knocking him out. When he comes to, Bill has tied his hands and informs him that she is going to interface with the broadcasting Monk. He implores her to stop but she does it anyway.

The Doctor manages to get loose as Bill interfaces. The Monk's broadcast starts to overwrite her mind but the Doctor notices that it doesn't touch the image of her mother and the imaginary relationship Bill created. The Doctor implores her to focus all her mind on that relationship as it is not historical and untouchable by the Monks. This sends the image of Bill's mother all over the world and disrupts the Monk's signal of truth. With the signal disrupted, the people rise up and overpower the Monks. The remaining Monks flee to the central ship and abandon Earth.
Afterwards the Doctor points out that the Monks were able to erase their six-month interlude from the minds of collective humanity, removing any lesson humanity might have learned. He then heads to Missy's vault where she notes the guilt she is feeling over all the people she has killed over the years.

Analysis

I was a little nervous going into this story since I'd seen some references to Martha's quest from Last of the Time Lords and I didn't care for that too much. However, I was pleasantly surprised as I found this one fairly engaging and interesting. It wasn't perfect but it was fun and I found the use of "love overcoming" a much more palatable solution in this case than had been done previously.

Jumping straight to the climax, I think the reason that the memory of Bill's mother being untouchable by the Monks worked for me is that it had some basis in reality rather than just a whim of the screenwriter. In many situations, people in isolation have invented fictional friends or personalities to keep themselves sane (see Wilson in Cast Away as an example). Bill did much the same thing. She had never met her mother but the Doctor gave her enough for her to invent that relationship and it was these conversations that helped her overcome the brainwashing from the statues. But since it was a memory built on a figment, it was untouchable and I liked that.

The Doctor was enjoyable here. I really enjoyed the first third of the story where it seems as though he's working for the Monks, although I'm not sure that that had much of a point other than to give the grand fake out to the audience. The Doctor and Nardole should have been able to tell in a less dramatic fashion if Bill had been taken over by the Monks and certainly the Doctor had no need to make it look like he was regenerating. That was a trailer moment and nothing more. But it was fun and very tense at the time. But it was also very reassuring when he returned to his normal state, complete with standard arrogance and disdain for others.

Bill was the central character in this story, but she didn't grab focus as much as you might expect. I think that worked out very well for both her and the story. She did end up solving the problem but she didn't go through this great journey to become stronger to do it. She was simply surviving, waiting for others stronger than her. Her defeat of the Monks came about because she cared about the Doctor and because she had an ace that she didn't know about. It worked and she saved things, but not in the true "hero's journey" way and I think that made Bill a more enjoyable character as a result.

Nardole didn't offer much in this story other than a few jokes here and there. Given how much the story needed to focus on Bill and the Doctor, I completely understand. Nardole didn't over-insert himself either and I think that worked given the limitations of the story for him.

I liked Missy in this story. She was a touch subdued from her normal self but there was still that edge of sadism to her. The idea of killing Bill to stop them seemed the most natural solution and one that she would easily have pushed. Missy might be suggesting that she's reformed, but that dark edge is still there and it is always fun to see.

I am curious to see where they are going with her though. At the end of the story, she seemed to be feeling actual remorse over the deaths and pain she caused. There's also the fact that we're supposed to be seeing the John Simm Master at some point before the end of the series so there is definitely a plan for Missy and I can't quite see what it is yet.

The Monks didn't do themselves much better in this episode than they did the last in terms of making themselves formidable. They had some fight in them but even with the lightning and spider web shields, the interior guard was somewhat easily overrun by the Doctor's soldiers. I'm trying to reconcile that with the near limitless power they otherwise seem to have in manipulating the environment and giving the Doctor his sight back. They have great power but are limited in actual combat and they also are fairly few in number. You would think that if they have performed this trick on other worlds, their numbers would be greater given the time for replication. In a way, I can't help but think of Treehouse of Horror II where Kang and Kodos, despite having superior technology, are driven off by Moe running after them with a board with a nail in it. There is an incongruity here that just doesn't feel right.

I thought the direction quite nice and some very nice scenery choices. I thought it also interesting in treating it like the viewer was fully enmeshed in this 1984 style world. The random cuts of the Monks and their symbols in the screen reminded me a bit of Sleep No More in their immersivness of the watcher in the world. In fact, until Nardole showed up, the parallels beteween this and 1984 were quite strong, to the point that I could easily see scenes having been directly lifted from the story.

Overall, I'd say it was a good conclusion. If the trilogy as a whole has a weakness, I'd say it's that the quality of the villain does not match the time devoted to them. Each story has good parts and less than good parts, but they still more or less work as individuals. I think this story, with a lack of reference to the past two stories, almost works better in that regard, though you would probably be a bit lost if you hadn't seen the prior two episodes. But, that aside, it's still and enjoyable watch. There are little things that don't work and they might drag it down a touch on repeat viewings, but overall it's a solid conclusion and an enjoyable story.

Overall personal score: 4 out of 5

The Pyramid at the End of the World

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

Extremis

In darkness there is truth.

Steven Moffat returns in what I hope will be a more interesting story than The Pilot. Certainly the promise of Missy and intrigue from the Vatican are a tantalizing premise. I'm also under the impression that the next couple of stories are going to tie together in some fashion so this story might serve as more of an introduction and be a little thinner on the overall plot. But that doesn't mean it will be a bad story.

Plot Summary

In a flashback, the Doctor is revealed to have been summoned to a planet to conduct the execution of Missy. Whilst reminiscing about this outside the vault, the Doctor receives a message called Extremis over his sonic sunglasses, which give him a limited ability to see. He downloads the file and plays the message.

The Doctor is in a darkened lecture hall when Nardole enters with several Vatican cardinals. They also bring in the pope who appeals to the Doctor for help. They have a document in the Vatican archives called Veritas where everyone who has read the document kills themselves. They now believe this document will destroy all of society and are asking the Doctor to read it and help them.

Bill arrives back at her apartment with her date, Penny, and the two settle down for a bit of tea. They hear the TARDIS arriving and a moment later, the pope walks out of Bill's room. When Bill goes to investigate, Penny follows and runs out of the apartment at seeing several cardinals in her bedroom. Bill is a bit put out but accompanies the Doctor, Nardole and the rest back to the Vatican.

At the Vatican, the Doctor, Bill, Nardole and Cardinal Angelo enter the heretical book library. They are distracted by a great beam of light emerging from a wall that subsequently disappears. Cardinal Angelo goes to check on it while the other three follow the sound of a man's voice to a cage. While they are distracted, a withered arm reaches out from the wall and attacks Cardinal Angelo.

The other three find a Vatican researcher who admits to having sent a copy of the Veritas document to scientists at CERN and other world leaders. He runs out of the cage and moments later a gun shot is heard. The Doctor knows that he is dead but sends Bill and Nardole off to investigate to allow him a chance to examine the document alone. They go forward and find the body but also find another beam of light. They follow it and discover that it is a porthole to a central projection facility.

The Doctor uses a device that borrows from his own future and temporarily allows him to see, although it is a fuzzy field. He prepares to read the document but is attacked by a withered creature in monk's robes. The creature grabs the Vertias document but the Doctor makes off with the researcher's laptop that contained a copy of the Veritas document. He hurries down the corridor but finds his vision fading before he can open it and read the document.

The Doctor flashes back to his execution of Missy when things were interrupted by a hooded monk. They stop and the Doctor consults with the monk, who it turns out is Nardole. He gives the Doctor River's diary, salvaged after her death in the Library and a message imploring him not to go to extremes.

Bill and Nardole step into one opening and find themselves in the Pentagon. They hurry back and try and different one and find themselves at CERN. They meet a Swiss scientist who invites them down to the lab where the other scientists are sitting drinking wine at tables rigged with dynamite. A clock is counting down to when they explode. They decide to leave but the first scientist, noting that they don't know yet, asks them to name a random number. Bill and Nardole name several numbers and each time they do, they both pick the same number. Soon the other scientists join in and they always pick the same number. Freaked out, they run back to the projector room just before the dynamite goes off.

In the projector room, they notice a small blood trail and suspect the Doctor has passed through. Nardole examines the projectors and realizes that everything they've been through is a simulation. Fearful, he puts his hand in a dark space behind the projectors and then disappears, realizing that he is a simulation as well. Bill panics and follows the blood trail into the Oval Office where the President is dead, having killed himself with a vial of pills.

The Doctor sits behind the desk and tells Bill that their entire world is a simulation managed by an alien entity planning to conquer Earth. Veritas noted that simulations have trouble with randomness and that when randomness is attempted in the form of selecting numbers, those numbers are always predicted by others, informing the reader that they too are part of the simulation. Killing themselves is a way to take themselves out of the game, like Mario becoming self aware and leaving the game because he is tired of dying.

Bill freaks out once more but is subsequently digitized by the alien monk. The monk informs the Doctor that their simulations are complete and they will begin their conquest soon. The Doctor then informs the monk that since he has been struck blind, his sonic sunglasses have been recording the last several hours of the adventure. He compacts the file and sends it out of the simulation to the real Doctor's sonic sunglasses before the monk can shut down the simulation.

The real Doctor finishes watching the recording and thinks back one last time. He pulls the lever for Missy's execution and she falls over, but only stunned. The Doctor admits to agreeing to watching her body for a thousand years but not to killing her. He chases off the executioners with threats to their own persons based on his own body count and places Missy within the vault.

Coming out of his memory, the Doctor calls Bill and suggest that she ask Penny out sooner rather than later. He then knocks on the vault door and asks Missy for her help in fighting the immanent invasion.

Analysis

I have read that this is the first of three episodes that will make a loose trilogy as they all feature this alien monk as the principle antagonist. As such, there is not really a satisfying ending to this story, but I think that's okay. This story does fairly well in introducing the players and also having a pretty good "what is reality story."

This is not the first story that has feature a premise of characters in a simulation or game becoming aware of their state in Doctor Who as I think you can go back to Castrovalva for a similar situation. But unlike that story, I think it was handled quite well overall and the revelation of the nature of the simulation was done fairly well, especially as it involved the leads discovering the nature of their existence at the same time. It also gave the story the leeway to effectively kill the leads, which is something that you can only do in stories like this.

I listened to one review of this story and heard it compared to The Android Invasion and that's a pretty good set up. However, I think this is done somewhat better and without the nagging plot holes of that previous story. Of course, it does have it's own set of plot holes in that if the world is a simulation, how does a document like Veritas come into existence? Yes, people might figure out the nature of the truth of their existence through experience, but why is there a secret document that can allow the whole system to crash? The aliens running the simulation should have been aware of this glitch and taken steps to rectify it long before it reached the critical mass point of destroying the simulation. What's more, unless this glitch was a byproduct of programing, the simulation has been running for some time to allow the creation of such a document. But why do so? If the aliens are planning an imminent attack, why allow a simulation to run longer than several months or even one year? Backstory can be programmed in via observation and we are never given evidence of other flaws being in the system such as those that led to self discovery in Castrovalva.

The Doctor is good here but his lacking of eyesight has taken his edge off a bit. He does still have a bit of wit, especially when interacting from the folks from the Vatican, but there is a decided slowness in how he handles things throughout the story and it seems to tie in whenever he is hampered by the lack of eyesight. In fact, the whole story has a slow unfold very much like a suspense movie but punctuated by a bit more comedy. I think things might have worked a bit better if there had been a touch more dread surrounding these slow moments of the Doctor since the main elements of the plot were more clearly defined with Bill and Nardole.

Much like Oxygen, Nardole is finally getting some time to stretch out on screen. He is still his slightly cowardly and funny self, but he is showing more elements of backbone as well. He still has his squeaks and cries of fright but especially when away from the Doctor, he shows strength and a willingness to step into the Doctor's role with Bill. He puts together the puzzle much sooner than Bill and perhaps even the Doctor, although the Doctor is dealing with less information. But I still think this story showed that Nardole is not solely relegated to comic relief.

Bill was decent in this story but also not given much room to do anything. She was completely out of her element and served mostly as a vehicle to explain the plot to the audience towards the end. That put her more into the role of generic companion rather than emphasizing any of her inherent talents. But that is a consequence of being the companion and I don't feel that being in a diminutive position harmed Bill's character in any way. She just didn't get a chance to shine the way Nardole did.

I think it speaks of the power of Missy that even though she's only in a couple minutes of the overall story and flashback at that, she is still just so enjoyable. I'm sure the circumstances of her capture, conviction and death sentence will never actually be revealed but she is just so enjoyable to see on screen. Even in a moment of pleading for her life, she can't help the sarcasm and sharp wit we've seen in the past. I'm not overly surprised that it was her in the vault, although I'm trying to recall if Nardole actually used a gender pronoun when asking about the piano in the vault at the end of Knock Knock. He might have said "he" but I could have misheard that. Still, I'm now itching to get Missy out of the vault and into her full strutted glory. I think my biggest potential disappointment for the departure of the Twelfth Doctor at the end of this year is the likelihood that the Master will change as well.

There's not much to say about the villain since this was a light introduction. The design is a bit strange with that withered look and generic open mouth speaking, which calls back to the Mondasian Cybermen. I doubt there will be a direct connection between the two but it is one thing that popped into my mind, given how prominent the return of the Mondasian Cybermen have been. As far as the monk is concerned, I'll reserve judgment until I can see him operate in a more direct manner in the following two stories.

The look of the story was quite atmospheric for the most part and I liked the look. I also liked the look of all the other locations as there was a strong sense of believability about them. I think the only thing that struck me as odd was the method of death in the CERN lab. I find it rather unlikely that the occupants of the lab would have found coils of dynamite like a Looney Tunes cartoon. I also find it odd that they would put them under the tables like some elaborate booby trap. Far more likely (and a better use of the countdown clock) would have been the overcharging of the collider itself, which would have destroyed the facility easily and taken out much of the above ground structure as well. That did bug me a bit given how seriously everything else was played.

Overall, I'd say I enjoyed this one. I think one's overall enjoyment of it will change based on how the overall arc holds up. If the alien monks turn out to be good villains, this story might go up. If they turn out as garbage or if Missy's backstory into the vault has no real tie in except to expose that, it may go down. But for me I think it worked well. It wasn't perfect, but I look forward to going back and watching it a second time with an eye to the clues knowing how the story ends.

Overall personal score: 4 out of 5

Oxygen

Doctor: What do you want from me?
Nardole: The truth
Doctor: Don't be unreasonable.

Oxygen gives us the return of Jamie Mathieson, notable for the back-to-back Series Eight hits of Mummy on the Orient Express and Flatline. His Series Nine contribution was The Girl Who Died, which was a decent little story, although a bit overshadowed by other stories of the Series and especially with everyone's speculation about the nature of Ashildur. This time around it appears that we are getting spacesuit zombies, which would seem to be a decent premise for a story. The trailer at least gave me a strong Under the Lake vibe and I don't have any problem with that.

Plot Summary

On a far space station, two crewmen are on an EVA. The near the airlock but as they approach two dead bodies in spacesuits grab the trailing crewman from behind and rip her helmet off. As the first crewman opens the airlock, he sees three bodies approaching him.

Bored on Earth, the Doctor opts for another adventure in space with Bill. Nardole, annoyed with the Doctor's shirking of duty regarding the vault, tries to stop him by sabotaging the TARDIS. The attempt fails and the three of them are transported to a distant space station. The station is a mining colony and the workers are charged for the oxygen they breathe. As a result, the station detects the oxygen being extended by the TARDIS shell and opens the airlock to vent it into space.

The Doctor secures the door but it leaves the TARDIS trapped in a vacuum. In the room they are in is a dead body in a space suit. The Doctor notices that the station has forty crewmen and thirty-six are registered as dead. That suit comes to life and advances on them. The Doctor manages to short the suit out but it destroys his sonic screwdriver in the process.

The commotion attracts the attention of the other suits and they advance on them. The trio puts on three suits that had been put in for maintenance and contact the remaining crew. They radio down to follow the corridor where they will let them in. They rush down and the crew opens the door just before the suits grab them. The remaining crew inform them that the suits downloaded instructions to kill the organics inside and they were only spared because they were in a section where the information couldn't be downloaded.

Bill's suit develops a fault that causes her arms to raise but a crewman named Ivan resets her suit to correct the fault. Shortly afterward, the suits correct the fault that is locking the doors and they get in. They try to flee to another part of the station but the suits are there as well and they kill the crew leader, Tasker. With no other options, they decide to EVA to the unmapped section the crew were in before. As they are in the airlock, Bill's helmet develops a fault and will not work. The door opens and she is exposed to the vacuum of space. The lack of oxygen causes her to black out.

Bill wakes in the new section and finds that the Doctor used his helmet on her during the EVA. However, the vacuum of space damaged his eyes, rendering him blind. They discuss their options and one of the crew, Abby, finds a signal that seems to be from a rescue ship. While they are talking, the suits detect conversation between Nardole and Bill that allows them to map the new section into their system. They begin to advance into the section and kill the fourth crewman, Dahn-Ren.

The group runs to the reactor room but Bill's suit malfunctions again. They cannot get it working again and it magnetizes to prevent it from being lifted. With no options, the Doctor tells Bill to relax and this will feel bad but he will save her in the end. They flee, leaving Bill. The suits touch her and her suit upgrades and sends a power surge into her body.

Once inside the reactor room, the Doctor ties the life detection circuits in their suits to the reactor coolant. If they die, the coolant will be drained out and the entire station will be destroyed in five minutes. He then orders the door opened. Abby objects but the Doctor points out that there is no rescue ship. The whole thing was a set up by the company as people are too expensive and they intend to run the station using the suits alone.

They open the doors but as they advance, the Doctor notes that their deaths will be very expensive. The suits stop immediately and assess the situation. As they do, the Doctor reactivates Bill's suit and revives her. He noted that her suit lacked the battery power to kill her, only knocking her out but he couldn't say anything in case the suits overheard him. The suits then give everyone an oxygen pack to ensure their survival.

The whole group goes back to the TARDIS where Nardole uses medical equipment on the Doctor's eyes, seemingly restoring them. The Doctor transports Ivan and Abby in the TARDIS to corporate headquarters to file a major complaint, which the Doctor confides to Bill will result in a revolution. They return to Earth and Bill leaves for her apartment. Nardole exits to lecture the Doctor but the Doctor cuts him off noting that despite the medical treatment, the Doctor is still blind.

Analysis

I'm not one for the zombie genre, but this was a pretty enjoyable story. I was a little confused at the beginning by the focus as to what the balance between scary and funny they were going for, but I got my head around it fairly soon. I also liked that despite giving a couple of false flags about the potential wellness of our leads, there were some actual consequences to their actions.

The Doctor was quite good in this. He had that aloof nature where he would make jokes in the face of peril that was very natural for the Fourth Doctor. I also liked it that while he was pretty aware of the nature of the threat and how to deal with it, he was on his heels for most of the story. Unlike Nardole, he seemed to grasp fairly quickly the nature of the suits and their AI. Their ignorance was his greatest weapon and he exploited that, even though it meant dark things for Bill.

Both companions were quite good in this. Bill acted almost exactly like you would expect with the wonder of things at first and then the steady freakout as things went wrong. Of course she had the bad luck of a more faulty suit than the rest but seemed to handle it fairly well. I did think the racism bit between her and Dahh-Ren was a bit forced and the dialogue there never really felt natural. Nardole's joke line about having friends who are "blue-ish" was a real groaner as well.

I liked Nardole a lot in this one as he was finally given something to properly do. He was the conscience of the group in both trying to prevent the Doctor from going in the first place and then in trying to get them back to the TARDIS. But he also had a caring side and was genuinely concerned over Bill when it looked like she was going to be killed at several different points. Of course, he was also the one who nearly got them killed by not recognizing that the suit AI could hear him and learned to make the map based on his speech. So a slightly mixed bag but I enjoyed Nardole on the overall.

The guest cast didn't have much time to make much of an impression but they seemed alright. I was a little disappointed that Dahh-Ren was killed because even though I thought the racism bit was a bit forced, I enjoyed his dry delivery style. I found him more enjoyable than Abby, who was playing the I'm the stressed and angry woman clichéd role a bit much. I did like Ivan as he seemed more sympathetic in his practicality and you could feel for him, especially at the end where Bill was brought back but he could see that Ellie was still dead.

As for the villain, I have to say that having animated suits with corpses in them is a pretty good way to do zombies. The corpses are just there and it's the suits that are the issue (much like the robots in The Girl Who Waited) but having the decaying corpse in the suit adds that extra level of creep factor that you probably wouldn't get if you just showed an empty suit walking towards you. I also appreciated the fact that the "zombies" had an adaptable intelligence. Usually when you see a zombie move, it's some other faction of humans or a breakdown of dynamics within the survivors that allow the zombies to get in the base and swarm the protagonists. Here, you actually had something that would learn and didn't depend on a major mistake by the survivors and that was refreshing.

I also liked the fact that the suit AI was capable of learning was how the Doctor defeated it. The AI was upgraded to provide cost savings for the company but it could learn quickly enough that cost savings was a higher priority than it's base programing of deleting the organic portions. It was a clever way of defeating the enemy and using it's own weapons against it. Far better than the standard blow everything up method.

I also enjoyed the cinematography of this story. It was well shot with the different sun providing a different cast of light on the whole thing. It gave you the moody effect without resorting to the standard power failure and light's flickering that has become a staple of the horror genre. I also thought Bill's blackout just prior to the EVA was an excellent use of both heightening tension and avoiding what would have been expensive and probably less believable shots in crossing the station.

The EVA scene did point out one small point that wasn't really addressed. In Bill's brief moments of lucidity, we can see one or two of the crew members using weapons of some kind to clear the one or two suits in their way. You can see the weapons again when they breach the newly mapped section. According to the Doctor, there were 36 people who had been killed so far plus a few spare suits I would imagine. So in the entire base, there are probably less than 50 suits. If they have weapons, why don't they have a slow retreat with the weapons providing cover and steadily destroying the number of attackers? The suits would be limited by the corridors and they are naturally slow so picking off two or three each volley while maintaining a steady retreat shouldn't be too much of an issue. Picking off the suits that might be isolated would also solve the issue of getting extra oxygen as well. I can understand that weapons use might have been limited either by power available or rechargeability, but I would have liked a line that explained why the weapons use was so limited.

One other small problem I had was that through most of the episode, the threat was almost constantly to Bill. It was her suit that kept malfunctioning and her that kept being put in peril. Granted the Doctor ended up suffering but the constant focus on Bill made it that much more apparent (at least to me) that she would not be killed by the suits when they attacked her. Granted we already knew that since there was no way they would kill off a companion in the middle of a series, but the constant calling of attention to her made it just that much more obvious that she would be fine. The real twist was that she would be the only one and even someone not exposed to the vacuum of space, like Dahh-Ren, would stay dead because his suit was fully powered.

I am curious as to where they are going with the blindness of the Doctor. It's also an odd thing given that we've seen the Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors all voluntarily release regeneration energy to heal others. Can the Doctor not release regeneration energy to heal himself with carrying out the whole process? I can only guess that this must be a restriction in it's use, else we wouldn't have gotten the Handy Doctor in Journey's End. Still, I'm curious to see how this plays out over the next few stories and what it's ultimate consequence will be. I'm sure his eyes will be healed eventually since it seems like they are back to normal in the momentary clip from The Empress of Mars shown in the trailer. But we shall just have to see.

Overall, I would say that this was quite good. I think I liked both Mummy on the Orient Express and Flatline a bit better, but I suspect that's due to my overall disinterest in the zombie genre. At the very least, this is a good scary episode and also keeps things moving so that there is very little dead time. I shall look forward to revisiting this one in the near future and can only imagine how younger viewers (such as my own kids) would respond when watching it.

Overall personal score: 4.5 out of 5

Knock Knock

Yes, Dryads. I can't just call them lice now can I?

The fourth story in Series 10 appears to be going back to the haunted house fear fest. It looks fairly interesting from the trailers but that's not saying much since trailers are designed to do that. The big question will be whether this goes the Hide route (scary and then fizzle at the end) or try and stick with the scares all the way to the end (a la Horror of Fang Rock).

Plot Summary

Bill meets with five new friends and together they look for a place to live together. After several unsuccessful attempts with an agent, they are approached by an old man who is looking for tenants for his property. He takes them to an old estate house right out of a gothic horror script. They look it over and immediately agree to move in. One of the boys, Pavel, moves in that evening as his lease has run out. He settles in for the night, listening to music on a record player when he is attacked in his room, causing the record to scratch and be stuck on one small section.

The Doctor assists Bill in moving her things via the TARDIS. They deposit them in her room but the Doctor is on his guard as something is not quite right. Bill shoos him but he sneaks into the basement to explore.

That evening, a few of the people are becoming a bit unnerved by some of the shortcomings of the house, including sounds in the walls and a lack of cell phone reception. Hearing a noise, they go to investigate and find the Doctor emerging from a basement elevator. The landlord appears and he acknowledges their concerns, promising to address them in the morning. The Doctor however corners him and asks him who the Prime Minister is. The landlord begs off without answering the Doctor, his only break in mood to warn them against going in the tower. He then leaves but not before setting a tuning fork against the walls.

Bill tries to shoo the Doctor off again but he refuses. He lightens the mood by stealing Bill's phone and starting her playlist. Two of the tenants, Felicity and Harry, begin to dance around and have fun with the Doctor while Bill, Paul and Shireen take some of the last of their things upstairs. Paul teases the girls slightly but upon entering his room and closing the door, is consumed by the house.

Unnerved by the sounds from Paul's room and the less than reassuring knocks made afterwards, Bill and Shireen head to Pavel's room where his record keeps skipping in place. They find him partially consumed by the wall and seemingly frozen in place. The landlord enters and stops the record, allowing the wall to finish the job and Pavel disappears. Bill and Shireen run out of the room.

Downstairs, the shutters begin to close by themselves and the Doctor, Harry and Felicity find themselves cut off. Felicity manages to get through the kitchen shutters before they can bolt themselves and runs out to the grounds. However, she is consumed by one of the trees outside, which the Doctor had observed earlier to be swaying despite no wind.

The Doctor examines the wall and causes a large, alien woodlouse emerges. More of the creatures emerge and the Doctor and Harry retreat into the basement elevator and descend into it. In the basement they find evidence that the landlord has been inviting youths to stay in the house every twenty years only to have the lice consume them. The landlord enters and claims to do this to protect his daughter who is ill. Harry tries to run but upon touching the wooden stairs is swarmed by the lice and consumed. The Doctor offers to help his daughter and the landlord considers.

Bill and Shireen run though the house looking for an entrance to the tower. They find a trick book which opens a passage into the tower. At the top, they find Eliza, a woman who has been completely converted to wood by the lice to keep her alive from a grave illness she had. In exchange, they must feed the lice every twenty years.

The Doctor and the landlord enter and Shireen is consumed by the lice as the landlord continues with the schedule. Bill however notices a problem with the story as no father would bring his daughter bugs he found in the garden. He also has no sign of any change despite this thing going on for seventy years. The Doctor realizes that the landlord is not Eliza's father but instead her son. Eliza herself had forgotten this as her transformation to wood preserved her body but let her memories fade, allowing them to be filled by the stories of her son.

With this reveal, the landlord becomes more child-like and defiant with Eliza beginning to realize the true scope of the horror he has inflicted on people. She also realizes that he never went out and that what good is living if you stay in prison the whole time. The landlord tries to summon the bugs to eat Bill by using high pitched sound but Eliza is the one that actually controls them. She calls them off, embraces her son and then has the bugs consume them instead.

Before being totally consumed, she orders the bugs to release all of Bill's friends. The Doctor and Bill grab each of them as they emerge from the house and run outside as it collapses.

The Doctor returns to the vault where Nardole is doing some checks. Nardole has observed that the Doctor has given the occupant of the vault a piano as music is emanating. The Doctor dismisses Nardole and brings food to the occupant along with the promise of the tale of his latest adventure. He opens the vault and walks inside.

Analysis

I gathered based on fan reaction that this story was not as popular as the previous ones. For me though, this was the most enjoyable story of the series so far. It was not without it's faults, but it zipped along and kept the watcher engaged. Even the ending, which is where most people lost it, was better than I expected given the track record of Hide, Night Terrors and other pseudo-horror stories.

The horror elements of this story were quite good. I think for more underlying creepiness, I would defer to Night Terrors but this one had the haunted house and carnivorous insects vibe down cold. The landlord as well was a nice touch with his interactions being near perfect to elicit that feeling of cold dread just before the crap hit the fan.

There is however a limit to the scope of horror that can be allowed and that is where things fell apart for most people. At the end of a story, the monster needs to be defeated, things either explained or at least put into state of deferment and then have things return to normal. That last bit can either involve some or all of the guest cast returning from their actual or pseudo-deaths. Most of the time that usually involves an almost "Deus ex Machina" which typically turns people off as too quick and tidy. This story did have that but it also had a twist that helped give a plausible reason why the resolution hadn't happened yet. I at least enjoyed that and it helped me wash over the easy fix.

I enjoyed the Doctor in this story but with so many extras in this story, he got a bit lost at points. This is the first story where the Doctor and Bill have been separated in the heart of an adventure and each have taken on others who know less than them. Bill was a bit of a Doctor type in that she had guesses and intuition that paid off as well as bit more boldness than her fellow tenants. But she was still mostly just operating in the dark where the Doctor was actually looking to solve the problem. Bill could have easily worked in Harry's place but it worked better for the Doctor to actually see the lice consume someone and even though they came back, having the lice consume Bill would have given away the game that they were all going to come back.

Bill did have a nice Watsonian moment where the Doctor is being all clever and she points out flaws in the story because of age issues, something that the Doctor had forgotten about. That is probably one of the best things about Bill in my opinion. She is more observational intelligent rather than genius. In the past, it has been an easy fallback to just make the companion a very smart person who can hang with the Doctor. Bill on the other hand is more of regular smart person who has the added knack of looking at things from a different perspective and noticing things that others missed. Hence her asking a question in every story so far about the nature of the Doctor's life and little things that had never really been examined by the show so far.

The guest cast was pretty good. Bill's five friends all seemed to be enjoyable and had reasonably well fleshed out personalities even though most of them were taken from the screen after only a few minutes. Harry got the longest run being the stand-in for Bill and he did okay, although he did have a moment where his acting went a touch off the rails. But they worked well for the most part.

The highest praise should be reserved for David Suchet. I'm mostly familiar with David Suchet as Poirot and his style and appearance was so different here that I actually didn't recognize him beyond, "That guy looks familiar". But his characterization was quite enjoyable as was his treatment of the character. Since we know that a haunted house story is coming we immediately cotton on to the creepy nature of the character. His appearances and disappearances seemingly without warning got me thinking that he might be some sort of apparition or holographic projection at first.

But the interesting thing came about with the reveal about Eliza being his mother. Up until then he seemed to indulge in the various horror tropes about the butler or caretaker who is in on the attack. But there is always this sort of unsteady quality even in these moment. Once it is revealed that he was the son, he seems to drop all pretense and reverts to the eight-year old boy who wants to save his mother. It gave me a strong Norman Bates quality, except that his mother wasn't a monster. I thought there was a subtlety and dynamic to the performance that was very enjoyable.

Eliza was a bit of a failing for me in the story. The first issue wasn't a fault in the episode but with the BBC in general as Eliza's reveal was shown in the series trailer fairly prominently. As such, it was pretty obvious what was waiting behind the screen when Bill and Shireen enter. I did have a problem with the acting as well though. I'm wondering how much the actress was hampered by the makeup, but she seemed to be very unsure of herself and never really put out any sense of will. There was just something about her performance, especially relative to the strength of David Suchet's that just seemed weak.

The visuals and atmosphere were also done very well and I got the sense that the director has had some horror experience. There was a moment in the story that did bother me and I'm not sure if it was something specific to the episode or if it was the broadcast. At one point, when Bill is trying to get the Doctor to leave, the film speeds up. This is similar to the beginning where they are looking at different places, but that seemed like standard montage stuff. This speedup seemed like everyone was getting a strange Munsters quality for no appreciable reason. I wouldn't put it past BBC America to have tossed in a couple of speed moments just to keep the run time down but on the off chance they were there deliberately, they did not work at all.

One thing that did surprise me both about the story and some of the reaction to it is that with all the little clues and hints to the past that were put in, no one mentioned the Tractators. Granted, I try to avoid talking about Frontios as well, but given that Christopher H. Bidmede specifically mentioned being inspired by seeing woodlice in the garden, I would have thought that some sort of joke or reference would have made itself available. Obviously Ghost Light got the biggest play in most of the references I saw.

We also got a further tease regarding the vault at the end, which was also our only bit of Nardole in the story. There isn't much to say other than I liked the piano playing ability of the person in the vault. It is my understanding that we will probably find out who the vault person is in Episode Six (Extremis) as this is the next story written by Steven Moffat. It's rather pointless to speculate given that it's going to be revealed soon but I think the betting favorite is the John Simm Master given that he was revealed somewhat by accident by the BBC. In fact, I wouldn't be shocked to find that the vault is the Master's TARDIS except that the Doctor has disabled it in some way to both prevent it from taking off and to only allow someone in rather than anyone out. But we'll find out soon enough.

Overall, I enjoyed this story. It was a bit of a letdown at the end, but I think that is almost unavoidable given the nature of the show. But that letdown was not nearly as hard as some of the pseudo-horror stories of the past. In fact, I think if Eliza's acting ability had been a bit better, it might not have had much of a letdown at all. I also appreciated the fairly straightforward nature of the story with just that one little twist at the end to keep it from getting too generic. If you like your Doctor Who a bit scary, this story should work for you. Not perfect, but an enjoyable experience.

Overall personal score: 4 out of 5