The first 'act' of The Lie of the Land presented a very interesting scenario of the Doctor turning evil and the companions having to stop him. It takes place six months since Bill consented to the Monks. The Monks now rule the world and the Doctor has apparently become their Minister of Propaganda. Bill Potts is back in the UK, living the life of just another citizen in this dystopian world. She alone can see the changes and has invented an imagined version of her real mum to speak to and remind herself of the truth. When Nardole finds her they both team up to find the Doctor on board a boat. This is a very new situation for these companions.
All this potential is ruined the moment that the Bill and Nardole are reunited with the Doctor. It turns out the Doctor was just pretending to be evil to test Bill and has been gathering a resistance. He even throws in a fake regeneration which would have no meaning to Bill and felt like it was included just to boost the trailers. These fake regenerations have become standard now. The Doctor and his friends laughing at Bill also seemed unnecessary cruel. When a similar test of faith happened in The Curse of Fenric, the Doctor appeared regretful. Here is he is every too gleeful. You'd almost think he actually was being controlled by the monks.
After the promising first act, the episode devolves into a standard adventure where Doctor and his companions work with a resistance to overthrow evil authorities. With the Doctor now good, everything feels much easier for our heroes than it should. The Doctor opening the vault to try and get Missy’s help and Missy suggests killing Bill which is something that the Doctor could probably have worked out for himself. It was nice to see the inside of the vault but a bit disappointing that it was only Missy inside of it. I was hoping there was going to be an extra twist with something else in there.
As the Doctor and his allies attempt to find the Monks control centre, the plot slowly becomes ever more ridiculous. In the previous episodes we saw that the Monks were able to meticulously planning the invasion of Earth but now we find out that they have given no thought to protecting their own base, allowing the Doctor and his team of rebels to get to the control system with very mild resistance. This is where having the Doctor on the good guys side causes problems. It all felt too easy for our heroes. Bill uses her emotional link to her mum to overpower the Monks which is very similar to the way that Craig’s love conquered the
space ship in The Lodger.
The Monks were very easily dispatched. They simply run away when the going gets tough. It could have been more interesting if we had seen the humans pursuing and fighting them. They've been shown to have the power to teleport into peoples' places and use gravity beams to control military craft but they now flee and we don't get to see how. Like many of the big events of this episode, the Monks' defeat is explained in a voice over by Bill, which feels like it was just done just to save the money and time to be spent on scenes.
At the conclusion everyone has forgotten about the alien invasion and put it down to a film which doesn’t explain how they were all wearing black clothes or what they think happened to all the people that were killed in a six months since the Monks took over. The Doctor gets a funny and true line about humanity never learns to resist dictatorships. That is true but it is still hard to think people wouldn't notice the physical changes in the world. The time paradox resolution of The Last of the Time Lords worked way better than this. The conclusion also sees Missy confessing her guilt to her past crimes but it is almost impossible to believe that she won't turn evil again by the time of the finale. Michelle Gomez puts on another good performance nad does her best to sell the concept, but it is hard to believe, especially when Missy seemed to relish the idea of killing Bill earlier on.
If Bill is so important to the Monks then why did they let her wander around with the rest of the public? Would it not be better for her to have been their prisoner? The one point where a Monk came face to face with her it apparently did not recognize her. It feels as if the writer, Toby Whithouse, had no knowledge of what had gone on in Peter Harness' script. If that was the case then it was a sloppily planned arc.
The Doctor is on and off for the episode. It seemed strange enough when he and his new soldier pals laugh at Bill for thinking he turned evil. He also laughs when he crashes the boat into the shore. Peter Capaldi turns in a decent performance but there is something a bit off about the Doctor this week.
At the end of tree episodes we still didn't really know enough about the Monks. Why did the Monks want to take over the Earth? Did they specifically want control of this planet? What was their end game? They felt a little bit too nebulous.
This episode had the opposite problem to the previous two parts of the Monk trilogy. Extremis and Pyramid had thin plots which were stretched across 45-50 minutes. Lie of the Land had a lot of plot but a lot of the narrative had to be covered in voice overs.
The Lie of the Land was a bit of a dud. It actually made me reevaluate Extremis because that episode had interesting things to say about coping in a crisis. At least we have the Ice Warriors in next week although you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the Cybermen coming back since the production team accidentally put the Cybermen theme over the Next time trailer. Let's hope that the romp will be mor entertaining
5/10
No comments:
Post a Comment