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with Missy in the vault, who tells him the only way to stop the Monks' telepathic control is to kill the person who originally made the agreement with them to invade, i.e. Bill.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.

Extremis

Chapter The 244th, features the Pope and some Monks inside a life-size Grand Theft Auto.

Plot:

After his final (ish) parting with River Song on the planet Darillium, the Doctor is called to a planet of executioners. The people of the planet take their responsibility seriously and have protocols for every race of the condemned. A Time Lord must be executed by a fellow Time Lord, so they want the Doctor to execute the captive Missy. Nardole arrives, sent by River to remind the Doctor to be kind or something. Taking an oath to watch over Missy for a thousand years, insisted upon by the executioners in case of later regeneration, the Doctor pulls the big kill lever... but he's sabotaged things so Missy survives. (This is told in flashbacks intercut with the main Extremis story.) Many years later, the Doctor now works as a lecturer at a Bristol university, with Nardole as his assistant and Missy locked in an underground vault. The Doctor is still blinded after an unprotected space walk in a previous adventure, but hiding this with his special techno-sunglasses. He receives an email from an unlikely source...

The pope and entourage visit to ask for help with the 'Veritas', an ancient text fabled as one that whenever it is read in translation, the reader commits suicide. They want the Doctor to read it. He agrees, and with Bill and Nardole is taken to a secret Vatican library of forbidden works. Bill and Nardole are separated from the Doctor and find a portal that can lead them to many different locations including the Pentagon and CERN, where the scientists have all read the Veritas emailed to them by one of the Vatican translators. They are about to commit a mass suicide by blowing up the building, and Bill and Nardole only just escape in time. Investigating, Nardole sees that the different locations are being projected, and when he steps out of the projection field, he disappears. The Doctor is attacked by Monk-like creatures and flees. Bill catches up with him in a projection of the Oval office. The Doctor has worked out that they only think they are real, but are in fact characters in a computer simulation that the Monks are using to trial different scenarios in advance of an invasion. The Veritas revealed the nature of the fake world, and the suicides were just people exiting the game. A monk kills Bill, but before he is killed too, the Doctor subroutine manages to email out the details to the real world Doctor.

Context:

Watched from the Blu-ray on my own one evening with a glass of wine. Perhaps I am the only member of the household (which comprises as well as me the Better Half and three children, boys of 16 and 13, girl of 10) who hasn't grown out of Doctor Who yet. None of them have watched any stories with me for some time. I think the children will come back for Jodie Whittaker's swan song The Power of the Doctor (a few days away at time of writing), but not sure about the BH, who hasn't watched any new Who since before Flux. Time will tell, it usually does, &c. 

First Time Round:

Watched this story live with the whole fam when it first went out in the UK on BBC1, Saturday 20th May 2017. It's only just over five years ago, but I can't remember any detail. It was in the middle of a general election campaign, but the UK in those times and since always seems to be having an election campaign, or referendum, or the threat of one or the other, happening, so that doesn't narrow things down. I remember being generally happy with this latest series - the dynamic between the three regular characters was good, and I'd enjoyed the first five stories of the year before Extremis. Looking back at posts on this blog from the period, I see that I was struggling to get through The Time Monster around the time of the broadcast of Extremis, and I would publish my thoughts on it in another week's time. The Time Monster and the empty, repetitive sloganeering of Theresa May; no wonder I don't want to remember! 

Reaction:

In the UK at the time of writing, Extremis writer and exec producer Steven Moffat's latest drama Inside Man just completed its first series. I started watching with much enthusiasm as the pre-publicity had indicated an intriguing premise and it had a strong cast. I did not get much past the halfway point before I bailed on it. The plot could only develop because of a series of coincidences and increasingly silly decisions by characters, to the point where it became a bit wearing to watch. The character being put under most pressure, played by David Tennant, was a vicar, and so I wonder whether this was somehow intended to be an updated version of the story of Job. A common theme with people I saw online discussing the show was that, though most were quick to say that it was far fetched and silly, they felt that it was nonetheless compulsive: they had to keep watching to see what lurid and ridiculous scenario would occur next, and what indignities Tennant's character would bring upon himself or others. Moffat is clearly someone who can plot a piece of drama tightly if he so desires, without relying on coincidence or insane character decisions. I'm convinced therefore that he deliberately structured his drama this way, for better or worse. Those online comments reminded me of something else, but it wasn't until I watched Extremis with it's big borrowings from the novel Angels & Demons (secret clues in old writings and buildings, the Pope, Cardinals, the Vatican, CERN) that I realised what it was. Operatically - even, stratospherically - silly plotting, but compulsive for the viewer / reader's curiosity at a base level. With Inside Man, Moffat was just possibly trying to write like Dan Brown.

I wouldn't even say Moffat's latest effort was trying to write like Brown again, as beside the superficial trappings Extremis isn't much like a Dan Brown potboiler. It's definitely very watchable, with the central mystery of the Veritas text keeping up interest, but the underlying explanation is sensible (at least compared to secret societies collecting anti-matter to blow up the world, or whatever the plot of A&D was exactly - it's a long time since I read it and I ideally want to put it behind me!). The central conceit that the Doctor and friends we're seeing are self-aware cyberspace versions of themselves allows for some impactful scenes such as the whole of the CERN staff with Bill and Nardole thinking of and chanting the same number over and over again. It is pretty easy to program multiple calls to a random number function that produce different results, but the monks had a lot of coding to do simulating the entire world, so I'll forgive them for cutting corners. More distracting was my wondering throughout why reading the text produces an instant 'suicide' in everyone. Towards the end, Moffat throws in something of an explanation for why the Monks put the Veritas in their simulation - it's to see who's clever enough to work out they're not real. As such, the Monks would presumably want such people to stay alive for study, and therefore it can't be the programming forcing these deaths on people. So, why is it so comprehensive? Perhaps it's just me, but if I found out that I was living in a computer game, I'd want to stay alive as long as possible and have some fun. Though it is effective, the simulation plot is quite slight. Only one real thing happens, the simulated Doctor sends himself an email. It's a nice moment: even a copy of the Doctor can outsmart the bad guys and get a warning out to his real life counterpart. But it does mean that the main story is essentially just treading water, and the fight against the Monks doesn't start properly until the following week's episode.

In order to bulk up Extremis, flashbacks to the origin story of the Missy vault are intercut. It's the right time in the series as a whole for there to be some answers about this, with hints having been dropped in the previous five stories. The trouble is that it has no link at all to the simulation / Veritas plot. It's just for exposition because, in the course of the Monk saga (not even in the next episode, though, but the one after that), Missy will be brought into play, and this gets out of the way the necessary explanation of how she came to be in the vault. Moffat makes an effort to thematically link the memories of Missy's failed execution in to the main plot at the end, but it's a sticking plaster. This is a criticism that would only come up on second watch, though, first time out it gets away with it. Helping things along is good direction and production design throughout. The Monks are an effective new creation, with the sequence of them chasing the partially-sighted Doctor (after he's tried to fix his eyes with a gizmo) being particularly good. The scene where Bill's date with Penny is interrupted by the Pope is one of the funniest of this period, so good they did a callback to it in the next episode. The only other minor issues I have are in the Missy execution sequences, and they're both bad habits of the writer. The first scene is worded ambiguously so the audience might think momentarily that it's the Doctor that's going to be executed; Moffat does this sort of thing a lot (another example would be when Matt Smith's Doctor says "It's mine" in A Good Man Goes to War, and could be talking about the crib or Amy's baby) and I don't know why. It adds nothing except confusion. The other flaw is another recurring one, the Doctor grandstanding in a face off with someone based on his universal reputation. He gets the executioners to back down and leaves with Missy by intimidating them with all the places in their records he's listed as "cause of death". Given that the script has just been making a big deal of his mercy and compassion, it's a bit of a bum note.

Connectivity: 

Both Extremis and Meglos are stories with one word titles that feature a religious order, and both have a character appear throughout the action who looks like the Doctor, but isn't really him.

Deeper Thoughts:

The great uncast. Long-term readers of the blog (Hi Mum!) will know that I always use an obliquely linked photograph for the banner image at the top of each post. For Extremis, it was obvious to me that this should be Dan Brown related, maybe using a movie poster for the Angels & Demons celluloid adaptation. Then, I heard the news about Robbie Coltrane's death at age 72, and went with the image of him you can see above from film The Pope Must Die(t), as a small tribute. Sometimes celebrity deaths impact me more than I would have anticipated, and Coltrane's was such a surprising reaction. I was a huge fan of his comedy work in the 1980s and his dramatic work in the 1990s. The most surprising thing is that he had nothing at all to do with Doctor Who. I'm usually able to separate the work from the person and not get any unwarranted emotions mixed in, but finding out about the passing of - just to take two examples - Jon Pertwee and Terrance Dicks hit me hard despite this. My affection for Doctor Who lowers my barriers somewhat, but Coltrane had somehow got past them despite never appearing in my favourite show. My next thought was probably obvious: why hadn't Robbie Coltrane ever appeared in Doctor Who? Two guest cast members of Extremis, Jennifer Hennessey and Joseph Long, had appeared in different prominent roles only a few years previously - they were already doubling up, but there wasn't a chance to find a role for Robbie? He might have made a good comic cameo as the Pope in Extremis, though was likely too big a star in the new series era, or maybe just not interested. The nearest he came to appearing was being considered for a role in Revelation of the Daleks in the mid-1980s, probably either as Takis or the DJ (the latter was eventually played by fellow Comic Strip and Young Ones alumni Alexei Sayle).

Who else is surprisingly missing from the cast lists of Doctor Who, new and old? Catching a bit of Strictly Come Dancing in the UK recently, I saw Will Mellor on screen and wondered which was the Doctor Who story he was in. I checked online and was surprised to find that he's never appeared in the show, nor any spin off or tie-in. I think at the back of my mind I had him appearing in maybe 42 (but that was William Ash). That seems odd to me, as he is exactly the sort of person that could have been cast anytime in the last ten years. Just because he was mentioned in a recent Doctor Who Magazine interview, I also thought about Rob Brydon. He too seemed like an obvious guest star for recent years. Just like new Who, he was made in Wales, and seemed happy to act in other BBC productions. Perhaps both Mellor and Brydon have been too busy, or not interested, or both. Of the alternative comedy generation Robbie Coltrane was part of in the early 1980s, a few people have been notable by their absence. Only two of the five main actors in The Young Ones have featured in Doctor Who proper (aside from the previously mentioned Sayle, Christopher Ryan has appeared a few times over the years), plus Nigel Planer was the lead in a touring Doctor Who live production in theatres in 2010. It was a terrible shame Rik Mayall never managed to appear before his tragic early death - he was being considered (also by director Graeme Harper, who had cast Sayle in Revelation of the Daleks) as the villain in The Dark Dimension, a special planned for the 30th anniversary of Doctor Who in 1993 that then fell through. Adrian Edmondson could easily have a guest role still; he's worked as a straight actor on lots of BBC productions, including in recurring roles in long-running series Holby City and Eastenders.

The showrunners of Doctor Who since its return in 2005 do each have something of a repertory of actors that reappear in many of their works. Both Russell T Davies and Chris Chibnall started their period on the show by casting an actor they had worked with in their last production (The Second Coming and Broadchurch respectively) as the Doctor. Davies repeated it the following year by giving David Tennant the main role in Doctor Who after they had worked together on Casanova. A lot of Chibnall's Broadchurch regulars have appeared in Doctor Who, although many - Tennant, Olivia Colman, Arthur Darvill - appeared in Doctor Who first. Still, regulars of the third series of his investigative drama Lenny Henry and Julie Hesmondhalgh were cast in Doctor Who when Chibnall was in charge. Andrew Buchan and Carolyn Pickles, who had large parts throughout Broadchurch, stick out as possible guest stars in Doctor Who in future. Steven Moffat wasn't so much of a drama writer before Who, and worked with mostly different casts through his sitcom writing years, but still managed to cast the lead of his first ever show Julia Sawalha in a Doctor Who skit for comic relief in 1999. I'm surprised he never found a role for Gina Bellman,with whom he'd worked on a couple of show, when he ran the show proper. Russell T Davies seems to have been the most comprehensive at recasting from his previous shows. There are many examples between 2005 and 2009 - Jo Joyner, Mark Benton, Debbie Chazen, Jo-Stone Fewings, Peter O'Brien, Lesley Sharp, Jessica Hynes, and others. For his second showrunner period, there are a lot of people he's worked with since that could easily slot into Who roles, such as Olly Alexander and Lydia West (with whom Moffat has also worked recently). I could probably go on like this for hours. The only way that Doctor Who can cast everyone who'd be a good fit is for it to keep going for ever! Here's hoping... 

In Summary:

It's watchable; not quite extremely good, but extreme-ish.

The Pyramid at the End of the World

Chapter The 90th, features some meddling monks, and the U.N. and some I.T.

Plot: 
Along with Bill and Nardole, the Doctor - who's hiding that he was blinded a few stories back - is summoned by the UN secretary General to help investigate a pyramid that's appeared from nowhere in a global hotspot border area where US, Russian and Chinese troops are massed. The pyramid is really a disguised spaceship that contains alien invaders who appear as corpse monks. The Monks have been running a computer simulation of everything that can possibly happen on Earth and have arrived when a disaster is just about to befall the planet. The Doctor was part of this simulation, and managed to get a message out to his real self, but his real self hasn't done much to prepare seemingly (he's been too busy practising his mournful guitar work, perhaps).

Anyway, the Monks will help avert the disaster, at the cost of enslaving everyone, but only if Earth opts in with full consent (the monks were GDPR compliant a year early!) The Doctor works out that a mistake in an experimental lab is where the end of the world will start, and all the massed armies stuff is just a diversion. He goes to the lab with Nardole, leaving Bill with the Monks. The end of the world is averted; but, because of an unfortunate sequence of events, the Doctor ends up stuck in a room unable to open its combination lock as he can't see, with an explosion imminent. To save him, Bill gives consent to the Monks who restore his sight. He escapes from the room just in time, but now the world's going to be enslaved. To be continued....

Context:

Late on a weekday from the series 10 blu-ray, with beer, on my own (I'd add "natch", but I didn't even ask any of the family whether they wanted to see this one; maybe there'll be an upswing in their interest after a bit of a gap, who knows?!). Watching it, the story already felt like one from a bygone era (albeit a good one), and it's only a year old. It reminded me a little of watching The Smugglers a few weeks back - the ongoing tapestry of Doctor Who has barely gained more than a couple of stitches representing this team (be it One, Ben and Polly or Twelve, Bill and Nardole) and any moment now it's going to be "all change". Still, it was good while it lasted, and it was nice to be reminded of it again (even though you'd think it would be fresh in my memory).

First-time round:

You'd think it would be fresh in my memory, but no - a year later, and it's a blank. Only with a little digging into my online history of last year am I able to ascertain that around the time of broadcast I was blogging The Time Monster (oh, the pain!) and was also bored of the ongoing - and seemingly endless - campaigning leading up to the general election to take place a few weeks later. Likely, I watched the episode time-shifted on the evening of its BBC1 broadcast and showed the kids the following day, and likely I saw a news programme sometime in that period too, and no doubt Theresa May was on it, and she likely said "strong and stable" at least once. Strange days indeed.

Reaction

There's a thread that runs throughout the first two-thirds of this story where the audience are being shown the ominous build up of chance occurrences which will lead to an as yet unknown disaster. This structure seemed oddly familiar, but I couldn't put my finger on from where at first. Towards the mid-point, though, it hit me. All the little coincidences of broken glasses and broken bottles and where they're leading is no deep art film symbolism about a cosmic joke, they're instead a run-through of another Saturday night series' staple plot: it's not causality, it's Casualty. The long-running BBC series focuses, like this Who story, on ordinary characters away from the main action of the regulars, who step-by-step are leading themselves to the point where they'll need a Doctor. This structure was once satirically skewered (a No-Prize for anyone who can tell me where) as "Look at these mint imperials scattered on the floor. Oh that's dangerous. I wonder if someone will slip on them in the next 49 minutes!" Once I was aware of this, it did detract and distract a little, which is a shame, as the performances by Tony Gardner and Rachel Denning were particularly good.

What also took the edge off the enjoyment, was the knowledge of how royally this story is going to screw up the following one. The Monks are presented as just too powerful for their defeat after 45 minutes of The Lie of the Land to ever feel satisfactory, and that latter story would be massively improved by being a one-off rather than part of a trilogy, and having its (different) alien menace already in situ at its start, exerting control. But Pyramid was screwed up in its turn by Extremis, its preceding story: for example, if the Monks can simulate every aspect of our planet in such detail, including the Doctor's impact on events and the fact that he's blind (they knew that enough to simulate it last week), then why isn't the last twist part of their plan all along (and it's definitely not - the doomsday clocks start running backward and the Monks act surprised when the Doctor saves the day, then act suddenly suitably smug again when Bill clues them in that they have some leverage after all).

Other than that, though, it's a rather good little tale. As familiar as it is from its Saturday night schedule stablemate, Doctor Who's not really done the Casualty plot structure before, so it feels fresh, and those scenes have a brooding, intensifying atmosphere of doom. The intercut UN scenes effortlessly give the illusion of scale beyond the budget they actually will have had. The Doctor looks amazing - a craggy stick of determination in sharp threads and dusty boots. He comes over even more here as the aged gunslinger, persuaded to take up arms once more to face off the bandits, than he did in Hell Bent, where his playing that role felt somewhat forced. He gets to show off a little too - the scenes of the team working out what the threat might be, honing in by process of elimination, and finally the Doctor's master stroke: to turn off all the camera feeds to all the suspect labs, to see which one the monks turn back on. Well, I thought it was clever!

Right at the start there's a nice little sequence squeezing some great moments out of the "Previously:" section by interspersing parallel material set in the now. In these scenes, Pearl Mackie is at her best: you believe wholeheartedly that this is a student out on a date, even though the scene was co-written by two middle-aged men: she is effortlessly charming, but somewhat gawky and ordinary too. I miss her.

Connectivity: 

Not that Steven Moffat recycles tropes or anything, but this is the second story in a row from his showrunner period to include a pyramid that's the scene of a battle with some scary grey-faced aliens. And that group of aliens in both stories is styled as a religious order.

Deeper Thoughts:
London 1965, and a Twitch of Mortality.  I was a fairly early-adopter with social media, but I'm still rubbish at it. I've been on twitter for nearly 10 years and haven't reached a thousand tweets as yet. I think there was one year when I didn't get round to tweeting at all. I figure nobody wants to see a picture of what I had for lunch, or hear what I did during a dull day, or what I overheard on a train, or whatever. I consume a lot of my news, comment, humour and articles through the filter of social media, though, and sometimes this means I don't understand a meme or some millennial chatter, and - yes - it makes me feel old. But that's okay. For example, "London 1965" has become a thing over the last couple of weeks, a Doctor Who running gag (but somewhat respectful and celebratory) based on an amusing line reading of that location and year by William Russell (playing Ian, one of Doctor Who's first ever companions) at the end of The Chase.

This meme has come about because something called Twitch - which I don't fully understand as I'm not young nor savvy enough - is live-streaming loads of classic Doctor Who's online over a number of weeks  - and I mean loads of them, almost the lot. As this platform, as I understand it, is normally for watching gaming videos and other youthful content, it's bringing these episodes to a whole new audience; and, by and large, this new audience is loving it. Part of the fun is a constant text stream running alongside the pictures where viewers comment pithily on the action, try to catch everyone's imagination with a new meme, or repeat the memes that have already caught on. "London 1965" came from a trailer for the First Doctor's adventures, so had taken root long before The Chase was shown. I have found all this out from some digging (which essentially involved me finding middle-aged fans on twitter explaining it for their fellow codgers), but - inevitably - by the time I've got round to writing about it, nobody's saying "London 1965" anymore. (At the time of writing, Twitch is well into the Jon Pertwee episodes.)

So, poor old Grandpa Web 2.0. with his fusty blog is having trouble keeping up with new-fangled shenanigans. This, coming so soon after the new Time Team made everyone feel old has given me just a little cult-TV inflected pause to reflect on my own mortality.  My Dad died in the same year - 2005 - as the Better Half and I found out we were going to have our first child; of the two events, it was the latter that brought home my own mortality much more than the former. As sad as a parent's death is, your child is someone who you expect, and want, to have adventures you won't get to know about. I remember thinking it was the same as knowing, and somewhat sadly accepting, that there would be episodes of Doctor Who I would never get to see, not because they were made and lost before I was born, but because they'd be made after I die. In 2005, that had suddenly become a possibility again, and now I'm certain it will come to pass.

This idea, when it hit me, struck me as one that was fairly original and that I'd never seen expressed before. I filed it away, and four years later Gary Gillatt beat me to print: it formed a central theme of an article he wrote in Doctor Who Magazine's 400th issue. At least he's not younger than me. Though, as a university contemporary who went on to edit Doctor Who Magazine when hideously and obscenely young (and did it so well, too - it was the best ever period for the mag) he is yet another measure of my ageing. Still, ageing is at least preferable to the alternative. 

In Summary:
Better than an episode of Casualty.