Doctor Who Series 10 First Impressions: Episode 7 (The Pyramid At The End Of The World)

(Hey it's a Doctor Who thing and there's spoilers for it.)

If nothing else, now I'm really excited for next week.

Google didn't have any better pictures so this will
have to do.

Okay, we really are sort of playing about in that fun state of quantum flux between weeks. This exact reaction to The Pyramid At The End Of The World is only possible within the next six days; once the next episode drops and we have a realization of the consequences of this one's ending, my perceptions are going to change massively. Funny enough, the last time this happened was another joint by Peter Harness from 16 months ago; the Zygon Inv__ two-parter. There are one or two parallels to be drawn here between those episodes and Pyramid, but we'll have to save that. What we have in the meantime is a neat setup playing off of the previous setup of Extremis. I like this episode fine, which is a bit of an inversion (HEH) of how I felt about the first half of Peter Harness's previous job. Really, the vibe I get here is of Under The Lake; an interesting premise with an ending that can lead to some really clever bits if they follow up their own themes in the ways I'm expecting and hoping for. That should terrify me considering how much of a fucking botch job I thought Before The Flood was, but I have a little more faith this time. Whether or not it will be unwarranted... well, those of you reading this on the day it's written are just going to have to wait along with me. Anyone from the future coming in already knows if The Lie Of The Land fucked up or not, but hey. Fingers crossed, right? Good. Let's talk about this show a little bit before we get to the specifics of what crackles about it.

I really dig the combination between PREVIOUSLY ON DOCTOR WHO and RIGHT NOW ON DOCTOR WHO intercutting Extremis bits with Bill and Penny on a date while Bill tells Penny all about Extremis. There's also the joke about the President being orange, which I'm sure upset somebody out there. Shame that Bill's dates keep getting ruined. Uh, there's also a nice monologue from Capaldi about the end of your life and how some doors are going to be the last doors you ever go through and stuff. He does well at it, as always. I'm trying very hard not to make this a plot summary with jokes, so let's get to one of the main thrusts of the episode. The Pyramid At The End Of The World is a cheeky little title, and one I bet Moffat came up with. The trick is not that the pyramid is situated spatially at the end of the world, but temporally. All those simulations have led the Monks to conclude that here and now is where they will make their bid to rule the Earth... because someone is about to fuck up massively due to causality. A little person and a hung over guy, both working at a lab playing about with bacteria and plants and whatnot. The girl's glasses got broken on her way to work so the hung over guy has to input the amount of chemical to pump into the plants for their experiment. He shifts a decimal point to the right due to being hung over, releasing a massive amount of chemical that biodegrades all living things. It escapes into the atmosphere. All life on Earth is dead within a year. This is what the Monks have forseen, and it is this event which has led them to begin their conquest here and now. We'll touch back on that in just a moment, but I do like the influences here... or, if nothing else, the reminders. I got vibes to the beginning of Stephen King's The Stand, although in that it was a superflu rather than super-bacteria. Still, same sort of effect, most of humanity wiped out due to human error. An entire species destroyed because some drunk fucker messed up his math. Grim stuff, when you think about it. That goes hand in hand with the whole doomsday clock invocation which is very Eleventh Hour. One wonders why the Monks didn't just park their pyramid in 1985... but then, making us destroy ourselves was never their goal.


Yes, let's get to those Monks because their modes of operation and "rules" are the most interesting part of the episode for me. First of all, they act a lot like us. Not us as in "humanity" but us as in "watching Doctor Who". Many of their shots are of them looking at security footage, and they're seen reflected in the screens as they watch. (+1 for mirror imagery, yahoo!) In the end, they really are just watchers in a sense. They watch their simulations play out, learning how to interpret planet Earth from the simulated episodes they consume. They watch the world, not really "interfering" other than setting up a giant fuckoff pyramid in the middle of the desert. But then, that in itself is a form of interfering. By plopping the pyramid right where they did, at the contested borders of three world superpowers, they put all attention to them and distract from the nasty business with the melting bacteria. They tell humanity everything about how they're fucked, except the source of their own fuckery currenly going on right at that moment. This is interesting and we really will go into it, but I do love the Doctor's solution of blinding all the camera feeds of all the labs and then pinpointing where to go based on which one comes back on. The Monks can't help but watch the situation unfold, just as we couldn't switch off our TVs 30 minutes into the episode. In fact, the Doctor very nearly solves the whole thing! It's just that little wrinkle of him being blind that fucks him up, right at the end. He could probably have regenerated from it. Maybe? Even so, Bill's not having it. Bill makes a choice, and now we come to the fun stuff.


Consent! These Monks run on some sort of weird rule yet again, as they actually need the consent of the human race to invade and take over the world. Their grand scheme here is that we'll need to ask for help with the whole super-bacteria thing, and they'll be just peachy to help in exchange for the planet! Here's where things get tricky. The next episode is set in a world in which the Monks rule. It's typical narrative collapse and changing of the status quo that threatens Doctor Who's ability to tell the story it has been telling for 54 years, and will very likely be undone by the end of The Lie Of The Land. We won't worry about the how of it just yet, but what I am concerned about is Monk's World itself. Obviously we as an audience want it undone in order to have more Doctor Who stories, but what will Monk's World be like? They speak so much of power, consent, and love. They obviously want and need to be adored in order to rule. This sounds like some sort of totalarian nightmare, but they do claim that ruling by fear is "inefficient". This gives me doubts as to them ruling the planet as a bunch of alien fascists. More to the point, the idea of "consent" is interesting. How far will they go with that concept, I wonder? In the first place, Bill makes a somewhat impulsive and desperate decision to consent to the Monks in order to restore the Doctor's eyesight and save his life. They have the consent of one human to take over, but what of the other 7 billion? What if they didn't consent to being ruled by the Monks? What then? What we have is Bill being almost Clara-like, but it's not even quite that to me. It's Peter Harness going back to his previous well. Bill is being Bonnie-like, making a radical world-altering decision that will have ramifications for her species, even if not all of that species desires this outcome. It's all really very interesting, but let's not forget that consent goes both ways. No means no, and what if Bill decides to revoke her consent in the next episode? Will they pull out and leave Earth, or laugh in her face and continue to rule? Is this a healthy world-rule relationship or some Space Christian Grey horseshit?


As you can tell I'm very curious about how these themes will get developed in the next episode, if at all. I'm crossing my fingers that they won't heck it up. Hecking it up, in this case, would be the Monks ruling planet Earth like a bunch of dictators. Or not following up on the theme of consent and it being healthy. I can only have faith, but for now what I can say is that The Pyramid At The End Of The World is a mouthful, both in its long title and in the heady themes it offers up regarding the Monks and their takeover of the planet. It's a good enough episode, but not one I can really judge as of yet. We're still in flux, and next time could either enhance its themes or ruin it retroactively with the knowledge of the ball drop that is about to come. We'll just have to see, won't we? Tune in to that TV and see what the hell they do. I consent... to good television.


Next time: LIES LIES LIES YEAHHHHHH