Dear Steven Q. Moffat: WHAT IN THE FRICKLE FRACKLE FLYING FUCK?
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| The Doctor as President? This simulation is already better than reality. |
Certainly, the idea of the Veritas is conceptually very much in line with the usual Moffat horror "rules". Boiled down to its basic idea it's IF YOU ARE READING THIS SENTENCE THEN YOU ARE GOING TO COMMIT SUICIDE. The point being that humans can't un-read shit short of memory loss so once you read it you're a goner. It's a good concept and is used to some great effect once the real reason for the Veritas suicides is revealed, but the effect varies. Some people, like the priest in the Vatican's library, are obviously driven mad by the knowledge contained within. Others, like a certain few of the poor souls at CERN, are just sitting in silence with their heads in their hands in utter despair at the terrible truth revealed to them by the Veritas. Then you have the head guy at CERN who is... really quite jovial. HEY HEY WE JUST LEARNED THE FUNDAMENTAL TRUTH OF THE UNIVERSE AND WE'RE ALL GOING TO BLOW OURSELVES UP IN A SUICIDE PACT! PASS THE CHAMPAGNE, FREDRIK! I suppose the case can be made that the head CERN guy is expressing his despair and madness at the truth of it all in a different way, but... I think I would have preferred it to be like The Happening. Now, The Happening is an awful (and at times hilarious) disaster of a film... but the people who suddenly gain a death drive just sort of shuffle about in a daze, seeking to end their lives in whatever means are immediately available to them. Maybe Doctor Who didn't want to go that grim, but it certainly did hit some grim fucking notes this time... but why?
The reveal of the why of the Veritas is absolutely some of the most gonzo shit that Steven Moffat has ever pulled on this television program. The Veritas, as it turns out, is a proof of concept that reveals to anyone who reads it that the world they live in is one gigantic computer simulation, and that their life experience is nothing but advanced alien code. This is the threat of narrative collapse, as we briefly flirt with the danger of making Doctor Who fictional within the world of Doctor Who. It would mean the end of the show, as the idea of it being "real" to the characters makes it exciting and fun for us. What good would a show about an oridinary girl seeing the wonders of the universe be if we know we're watching an in-universe simulacrum? Certainly, the simulacrums can't face this truth and that is why they kill themselves en masse. Even our heroes get deleted for coming too close to the truth, Nardole first for stepping outside the bounds of his render and becoming a wireframe, and then Bill.exe is deleted by the program controllers to test the effects on TheDoctor.exe. It is a shadow world filled with shadow people, a holodeck sim in which the entirety of planet Earth on Doctor Who is given a dark mirror. The second Star Trek invocation in as many episodes is interesting, and Moffat again creates a mirror of Star Trek. Speaking from my own limited experience of 5 seasons of The Next Generation, I can say that Star Trek does indeed do a few "holodeck malfunction" episodes. Specifically I'm thinking of "The Big Goodbye" from the first season and "Elementary, Dear Data" from the second. In those stories, the normal simulation elements present inside the Enterprise's holodeck become "real" and are given a sort of life and sentience all of their own. In Extremis, the "real" world is revealed to be its own giant holodeck and the "real" people inside lose their lives and sentience, either by choice or by being deleted.
All of this, then, is a test run. I expect that someone somewhere who's super critical of the Moffat era has derided this episode for "not really happening". Yes, this simulation is all in aid of the malicious alien race of... I dunno, space zombies in red hoods who want to take over Earth and created this big facsimile of it to best determine how to go about that. Presumably next week will involve said actual invasion in the "real" Doctor Who world. I mean, fuck's sakes, at least Moffat didn't pull a Dallas here. This episode was in the simulation, not the whole season (I hope). Besides, the events of the simulation are crucial. The alien simulation is too good. The Doctor, even though he is but code and not "really" the Doctor? He's still a mirror of the Doctor... and if we learned anything from that impossible girl it's that a mirror of the Doctor can help save the day just as handily as the real thing. He's clever enough to figure everything out, and though he's just a simulation he manages to get his message out to the real Doctor in the real Doctor Who world, such that we've actually been watching the Doctor watch an episode of Doctor Who. My god, we're back in Trial Of A Time Lord territory. What's interesting is that he has all of his memories, so he still is "the Doctor" even if he is just code. Notably this involves the whole flashbacks with Missy thing that occur in the episode, and some advice from the late great River Song to help spur on TheDoctor.exe.
Let's touch on that Missy stuff, then? Okay. Thank God. Thank GOD. The mystery's out about the vault and the oath halfway in. It was Missy and the oath is about her "execution". Okay. I could be salty about the buildup to something so obvious and trivial (outside the motivations of TheDoctor.exe at the end) but I won't be. At least we got it fucking over with. Michelle Gomez is lovely as always, and the way she plays Missy as the Doctor's friend despite all the homicide and murder attempts and whatnot is really lovely, and the Doctor in this episode at least returns some of it by sparing her. They've got a friendship going on somehow, fractured and fucked up as it may be. I do also like how the gap between Husbands Of River Song and Doctor Mysterio/S10 is placed as this tangible absence of the Doctor in the narrative. There's a lot to love about this episode. The Pope and cardinals in Bill's bedroom. Nardole's mix of being a stone cold badass and a comedy relief know-it-all (I love his little EEP at the dead priest). The blurry vision as the Doctor's borrowed eyesight begins to fail while he's chased by space zombie monks. The panic of Missy's executioners. I'm conflicted about this one and its quality relative to the other episodes. Thin Ice and Oxygen spoke directly to that weird lizard-lefty part of my brain, what with the racist punching and the anti-capitalism and all that. Extremis has none of that, but it has conceptual horror quite unlike anything Moffat has done before. There is so much more I could say, but this one is spooky and absolutely grim with its depictions of people driven to despair and death at the thought of their fictionality. I can't decide if that beats out the racist punching or the anti-capitalism, but it at the least earns it a spot in the top three so far.
Dear Steven Q. Moffat: You son of a bitch. You've done it again. Love, Frezno.
Next time: THE INVASION.... OF DEATH! [TWAAAAAAAAAAAANG]
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