It's not a Before The Flood level of hecking up a good setup, but it still left me wanting.
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| The Monks are your friends. This is a good episode. Toby Whithouse is amazing at Doctor Who. |
It still works with the "fear is inefficient" model and "we need to be loved" and all that but good GOD. I was expecting something a little more meaty and interesting, a world that's imperfect because it's not our Doctor Who world but one that's at least somewhat improved by the Monks. What we get is a drab bland dystopia where everyone wears black and there's an actual literal fucking thought police dedicated to catching people who don't believe the lie of the Monks! At one point in a Bill monologue she mentions that someone was sentenced to 10 years for owning comics! What the actual fuck? It's going extra to show that this is a bad world that should be torn down, but it didn't really need to do that; the fact that it's not "our" Doctor Who world is enough for the audience to want that. Then again, this is the same guy who thought he needed to telegraph a fucking predestination paradox in the opening of his last episode so I get the vibe that he doesn't trust the audience to pick up on subtlety.
Oh, let's dig into that more with the scene. The fucking scene. Maybe I'm too goddamn clever for my own good (FAT CHANCE OF THAT HA HA HA) but the trailers and whatnot gave us the whiff of an interesting premise. Namely, you have that shot from the one Series 10 trailer of the Doctor regenerating and the implication that Missy and Bill will join forces in the Next Time trailer for Lie Of The Land. There are a lot of interesting premises and ways this can go that a clever viewer can work out in their heads regarding this! Now, Doctor Who has always been sort of a shell game of subverting expectations. I'm totally fine with shit not going how I assume it's going to go; I like being surprised by this show! The caveat, the major caveat that both this episode and Whithouse's previous effort failed to address for me, is that the surprise has to at least be as interesting as what I was expecting. Preferably more interesting! If you, say, imply that Missy and Bill are going to team up to stop a brainwashed Doctor working with the Monks in Monk's World, then you'd better either do that premise or subvert it with an equal or better premise. In case you were wondering, The Lie Of The Land does not do this. In fact, The Lie Of The Land somehow does it even worse. We get the Doctor/Bill confrontation about 15 minutes in and it's the direst sort of thing. The Doctor, having "joined the Monks" is systematically tearing down Bill for her "bad choice" at the end of the previous episode. This leads Bill to pull a gun on him in desperation, and when he doesn't back down she shoots him and he starts to regenerate. Holy shit. They could actually pull a surprise here! Who's he going to change into? What ramifications could it have? NONE! It was all a fucking test to make sure Bill wasn't compromised and now everything's okay and everyone's laughing. LAUGHING! It's hard not to read this in a terribly cynical way. It feels like the show is laughing at me for expecting all of that cool shit to happen. It doesn't even bother to replace it with equally cool shit; it's all just laughing about at poor traumatized Bill's expense. I'd want to beat the shit out of Nardole for it, too.
How about Missy, then? I won't go so far as to say that Michelle Gomez was "wasted" in this one, as the scene at the end with her tearing up over all the death she's caused in her life is a good one and might have some meat to it later in the season. Really though, aside from that what was her contribution to the episode? The Doctor goes to see her and asks how to stop the Monks. Missy says "oh just make the person who gave consent brain dead". That's Bill and the Doctor doesn't want to do that so he says "no" and tries to do something better instead. Standard Doctor Who "breaking the rules" stuff there, yes, but Missy's only contribution is to give that answer. Michelle Gomez is as good as ever, but I again let my expectations get the better of me and have been let down because of it. The concept of Bill being a psychic link due to her consent is an interesting one, though. I'll grant that's kind of neat and we'll get into it in deeper detail in just a second. The scene after this is pretty great as well, with Bill's own little anti-propaganda playing from goddamned tape Walkmans during a firefight with the Monks inside their own pyramid. I also do like the look of the central transmitter room, with its inverted pyramid and the triangle screens broadcasting all their shit. It's neat.
Okay. Climax time. The Doctor tries to do a mind battle with the main transmitter which is a head Monk on a throne. It doesn't work because it won't allow him in and it fights back his attempts. Bill is the one who steps on up to the plate to do it instead. On transmission, I liked the idea of this. It's the closest the episode gets to following up like, at all on the whole "consent" issue from last time. Of course Bill has to be the one to do it. She gave her consent, and now she has to revoke it by being the one to do the mind battle hack and dispel the stream of lies. I would have liked an explicit mention, but I'd take this symbolic one as well. It would have worked... but that's not enough. The Monks are winning the mind battle, and refusing to stop their invasion. Then Bill thinks of her mom, and that does it. It's not a memory the Monks can subvert because it's not based at all in reality. It's Bill's ideal of who her Mom was, not the reality. That's enough to break the spell. I have issues with this. Earlier in the scene, Bill gave a "goodbye" to the Doctor in the assumption that doing the thing would burn out her brain. Then she invokes the memory of her dead mom to save the day. What we have here is invocation of the Clara Oswald era; both in Face The Raven and The Rings Of Akhaten, but especially Rings. Hell, now that I think about it, Rings also had a gross mummy sitting on a throne! If I didn't make it clear before, I really liked Rings Of Akhaten. I also really liked Face The Raven! As much as I like those ideas... they don't work as well here. It's all seeded well enough with Bill's repeated imagining and narrating to her mom in this one, so it's not as if the whole thing comes out of nowhere. Frankly, I'm just not as impressed with Whithouse invoking a four year-old story here. It's Doctor Who soup, but it's a bland sort of soup that somehow turns out to be less than the sum of its parts.
I'm disappointed. Whithouse has let me down again. This was a great premise, but between the blatant dystopia, the cynical mocking way the episode tears down expectations and hype based on the trailers they put out, and the invocation of better stories that don't actually improve this story all that much I find myself disappointed. It has good bits though. It's not a shitty episode of this show, but a disappointing one. Peter Capaldi's faces are great (especially when he gleefully rams the boat into the dock). Bill and Nardole are also good in it, but they're good all the time basically so that's faint praise. The rest is just a mess, and god help us all if it has retroactively brought down Pyramid At The End Of The World or Extremis because of it. The best thing I can say about it is that it's not a waste like Before The Flood was. The best thing I can say about Whithouse is...
But then, the idea that Whithouse could have followed up on all that cool shit with a satisfying conclusion was the real lie of the land.
Next time: Rock Boshers DX but with Ice Warriors.
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