The Lie of the Land

Chapter the 262nd, where the people in charge are monsters who are lying to us (just an ordinary day in the UK).

Plot:

The Monk creatures have been humanity's benefactors since the first fish crawled out of the sea, helping us to evolve and develop, protecting us right up to the present day. At least, that's what the regular propaganda broadcasts by the Doctor say. Bill knows that it's all a lie, despite the Monks' transmission of some kind of mind control. She keeps alive her memories of Earth before their invasion by imagining a confidant in her mother, who died when she was young, and regularly having conversations with her. Nardole finds Bill and brings her with him on a mission to free to the Doctor, who is held on a prison hulk at sea. The Doctor, though, appears to have gone over to the Monks' side for the sake of peace and stability; an upset Bill shoots him and he starts to regenerate. This is all faked, though - a way to ensure that Bill was not a spy under the Monks' control. The Doctor has gradually broken the conditioning of his guards, and now has a team ready. He consults with Missy in the vault, who tells him the only way to stop the Monks' telepathic control is to kill the person who originally made the agreement with them to invade, i.e. Bill. The three TARDIS travellers and the guard team break into the Monks' pyramidical base in London where the controlling signals are being broadcast, amplified by the many statues of Monks around the world (really disguised transmitters). The Doctor cannot break the signal, and is knocked out. Bill ties him up to stop him interfering and plugs herself into the circuit, expecting to be killed. Instead, her strong memories of her Mum stop the Monks' control; without this, they rapidly leave the planet, and are quickly forgotten.

Context:

Watched from the box-set Blu-ray disc one Sunday evening with all the children (boys of 16 and 13, girl of 10). The youngest thought the Doctor's wide-eyed look into camera as he finishes his pre-credits pro-Monk propaganda speech was the most frightening thing about the story: "Why did the Doctor do that? I thought he was a nice guy." This was all about the sinister face-pulling rather than the propaganda, though; nobody believed for even an instant that the Doctor had really gone bad. The collective opinion from all three afterwards was that the story had been "pretty good".

First Time Round:

I watched this, with the whole family though none of the kids remembered having seen it before this latest watch, on the evening of its BBC1 broadcast on 3rd June 2017. I was very much enjoying the series at the time; the dynamic between the three regular characters was good, and the actors worked together with good chemistry. I was less enamoured of the linking of three stories including The Lie of the Land into a loose trilogy. I preferred the stories that were left standalone (more on that in the Reaction section below).

Reaction:

Often fans will embark on a viewing of all the older Doctor Who stories in order from the beginning; seeing the stories in this context can lead to insights that aren't obvious when watching single stories in a random order (as they appeared as repeats or came out on VHS and DVD). Could there be different insights doing things the other way round, though, as I'm doing for this blog? I thought when I first watched them that the individual Monk stories (Extemis, The Pyramid at the End of the World, and - particularly - The Lie of the Land) were hurt by being part of a trilogy, more than they were being helped by it. I was eager to see the final story of the three as a standalone adventure, and after this watch I do believe it works better that way. Imagine a cold open with a mysterious monstrous force never seen before (if The Lie of the Land had followed Knock Knock, say) suddenly in charge of Earth and claiming to always have been there. The audience would have been disorientated in exactly the same way as their identification figure Bill, wondering what they could rely on as real, particularly as the Doctor seems to be siding with the bad guys. I got a flavour of how that would have hit home this time watching a long time after I saw the preceding story (and just over six months since I last watched Extremis).

The ending is improved too. Once their mind control is switched off, the Monks nick off without a battle or even much fuss; as the end of a trilogy, this was an anticlimax. In the previous stories, the Monks have invested a lot, running simulations of every possible scenario of Earth's defiance, and working out a way that they could take control by fooling the Doctor and his friends. Would they really give up so easily? Without any of that stuff, the ending's still a bit abrupt but it works okay as the finish of just one 45-minute story. Standing alone, The Lie of the Land still has structural issues. The showdown between Bill and the Doctor doesn't convince, because it happens too early at around the 15-minute mark. A big climactic scene with heroes turning on another, and one of them appearing to be killed by the other, happens with 30 minutes to go. The action in that last 30 minutes is therefore a bit flaccid: how could anything else be as exciting as a fake regeneration? I wonder what the scene is doing there at all, really. There must have been a less explosive way to prove that the Doctor and Bill are still on the same side. Maybe it's to introduce the concept of regeneration for newer viewers, as the Capaldi Doctor is headed for his real one within a few episodes. Maybe it's to show that the Doctor's just as good at false narratives as the Monks are, but if so it's not capitalised on. More could have been made of that to build up the denouement and to make it clearer: the Doctor and the Monks' narratives fight against each other, before Bill's 'pure' narrative of her mother proves to be powerful enough to win out.

The imaginary Mum providing the method for the Monks' defeat is a nice note, and ties in to the memories the Doctor gave back to Bill in the first episode of the season by time-travelling back to get Bill the photos of her Mum that she never had. It doesn't quite come off, though - it's just a bit of technobabble and a separate emotional moment, rather than the two being well integrated. Between the climactic sequences at 15 and 45 minutes, there isn't much of note. For a supposedly global story, it is quite small and intimate. Apart from the three regulars and a cameo from Missy, there are no other real characters, just bit parts and background artists. Director Wayne Yip captures a couple of good action sequences. There's a nice darkly comic moment at the resolution when the people of Earth have already forgotten the Monks, believing that events were connected to someone filming some movie or something, constructing their own false narrative as a coping mechanism. The potential of such a strong idea feels a bit wasted, though. I think it would be better as a two-parter, starting with the Monks in control as it currently does, then telling the story of how this came to be in flashbacks as Bill searches for the Doctor and finds Nardole (I'd do it that way round, so Bill drives the plot more). The Doctor confrontation would be the part one cliffhanger, and the second part would be a much harder quest to infiltrate the Monks' base and defeat them. This would also mean throwing out Extremis and creating something completely new. This would have been too much rework for anyone to have considered it when on a tight schedule to complete the series, no doubt. But I can keep this imaginary better version of the story alive in my head nonetheless.

Connectivity:

The Lie of the Land, like The Mutants, is a tale of a colonising force oppressing the local populace of a planet. This time, though, human beings are the oppressed rather than the oppressors.

Deeper Thoughts:

A Theory on Conspiracies. Political leaders in our 'post-truth' era don't have the brainwashing tech of the Monks in The Lie of the Land, but that doesn't mean they aren't projecting false narratives. There was a time about 25 - 30 years ago of much optimism that the age of the World Wide Web would usher in honesty in all dealings, as it would allow access to information such that any fact could be looked up and checked with rapidity. It didn't work out like that, though. It's not explicitly mentioned in the story whether the Monks blocked or changed web pages to fit their big lie, there's just a couple of mentions of physical publications (a character who stashed their old comic books, another arrested for the manufacture of propaganda). It's not exactly clear, but I think the idea is that the Monks haven't made wholesale changes to the available information, they are just suppressing it to avoid it conflicting with what they're broadcasting into people's heads. Did they need to bother though? In our real world, there's no hypno-ray involved, but groups of people will still believe questionable narratives, disregarding any information that doesn't fit. It's the nature of an online echo chamber not that it has to be restricted only to believers, but rather that any non-believers are ignored, their counter-opinions already assumed to be false. Certain political leaders just lie and refuse to engage with the truth; they dare the sceptics to try and convince their followers with facts, knowing that facts don't usually win over beliefs.

I haven't got to it for the blog yet, but I recall that the Harold Saxon as Prime Minister plotline in The Sound of Drums is similar to the Monks' one in The Lie of the Land. The Master uses a hypnotic network of satellites instead of a hypnotic network of statues, but the result is similarly his being put into a position of power over humans. It would have been more interesting, and possibly more true to life, if John Simm's Master had been elected without such interference. People in the UK have had ample proof recently that it requires no techno-mesmerism to get unsuitable people elected to high office, and John Simm looks good in a suit. He'd probably have still been elected if he'd openly run on a platform of allowing an invasion from outer space and reducing the world's population by 10 percent. This is a logical flaw of conspiracy theories: terrible stuff happens out in the open, often without sanction, so why would anyone go to the bother of organising something more covert? In the words of Oscar Wilde, the true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. This hasn't stopped Doctor Who from sampling the conspiracy thriller genre often, of course. A couple of notable examples from Jon Pertwee's era are The Ambassadors of Death and Invasion of the Dinosaurs. There was clearly something in the air in the early 1970s, as there were real conspiracies (Watergate) and fictional ones in movies like The Parallax View around then. That film, and one from a decade earlier The Manchurian Candidate, influenced The Deadly Assassin in Tom Baker's era, where the Doctor investigates a conspiracy related to a political assassination on his home planet.

The real world of Doctor Who has its conspiracy theories too, often about the missing 1960s episodes. At one point around 2013, the so-called 'omnirumour' suggested that almost every episode had been rediscovered but they were being held in secret. It was many years before people stopped believing that; maybe some still do and are hoping any day now all those episodes will be returned to the BBC. A flaw of the conspiracy story is that it ends, unlike in the real world. In Invasion of the Dinosaurs, a cult of people have been brainwashed into thinking they are travelling to a new planet to colonise, a space Eden. When it's revealed to them that it's a trick, they seem far too grateful and accepting. Real world interactions with people who, for example, believe without any evidence that 5G masts or Covid vaccinations are being used to control people demonstrate that the people on that fake spaceship would have been much more stubborn and hard to persuade. There may be one or two still aboard today thinking that any day now they will arrive at paradise. It does feel that social media particularly enables people who are so inclined to believe any old nonsense, and facilitates their finding others that believe the same, or can be persuaded to do so, the exact opposite impact from what those Web optimists envisaged all those years ago. The truth can speed round the world as fast as a lie now, but the tools exist to help anyone who so desires to filter it out.

I'm constantly vigilant about this, as I know I'm not immune. I still think it's probable that the president assassinated the day before Doctor Who first started in November 1963 wasn't killed by a lone gunman. I don't think that the conspiracy necessarily went all the way to Lyndon Johnson or many other of the wild claims made over the years. It does though seem plausible that the damage done might not have been from just two shots; it also seems if not impossible then highly challenging for Lee Harvey Oswald to fire three shots in such a short space of time and have two hit target from his vantage point; it also seems quite compelling that many witness statements stated that they saw or heard shots coming from another position (the grassy knoll). I've put this out there on the internet now, so I'm no better than any other conspiracy freak. There's something about the Kennedy conspiracy that compels people; it keeps turning up in films and TV, often as a time travel narrative where people go back to check up on what really happened and end up part of the unfolding events. Perhaps it's more acceptable as it's a somewhat nostalgic conspiracy theory from long before the mess of the social media age. On TV, Doctor Who has only made brief mentions, but there is the 1990s Virgin novel Who Killed Kennedy by David Bishop, which I think is one of the best Doctor Who books from that period. Maybe in a few years time, when there's an even worse form of online social interaction, we'll look back more fondly on paranoid tweets about chemtrails, say, and someone will write a fun Doctor Who story about it. There's that optimism again, but I'd rather that than the alternative.

 

In Summary:

Some good ideas and moments, but the structure (of this story and of the trilogy of which it is part) means it doesn't quite ring true.