12.33: Extremis

In which Moffat traumatises a generation of kids – again!

Broadcast: May 2017 

Watched: May 2022

“They read the Veritas, and chose hell.” Alternatively: “You don’t have to be real to be the Doctor.”

Amazing. Makes Doctor Who bigger – partly in the ideas, partly just because it goes from the Vatican, to CERN, to the White House. Also, it hides the ending in plain sight: LOVE that it turns out that, for the last 40 minutes, we’ve actually been watching Doctor Who watch Doctor Who. Love even more that the first thing the real one does is call the real Bill to tell her, “No, she’s not out of your league.”

It’s also *incredibly* funny. I’d remembered the Pope walking on to Bill’s date on the line “Absolutely nothing to feel guilty about”. I’d forgotten her walking into her bedroom to find it full of cardinals, awkwardly standing about. On top of that, we get Nardole doing Big Finish narration for the (blind) Doctor’s benefit, and also being secretly a badass (“Nothing secret about it, babydoll – eeeeek!”).

All that, and it’s one of Moffat’s most thematically coherent scripts. Both plots (the monks and Missy), and the title come to that, are all about the importance of doing good, “Without hope. Without witness. Without reward”.

It is quite funny that we find out who’s in the vault at the start of an episode, rather than as a cliffhanger or twist. It’s even funnier that we keep cutting back to her “execution” after we’ve already seen the Doctor talking to Missy through a door. Maaaaaaybe we’re meant to think she’s dead and he’s talking to her corpse? But I think actually the surprise just doesn’t matter.

My only thing with this episode – which I’ve never thought before, god knows what’s changed in my head since 2017 – is that I was left wondering if it’s actually too dark for the show. The notion of a book that makes people kill themselves is terrifying; the fact no one we’re watching exists, and they gradually realise this, is worse. On top of that we get the Doctor pretending he can see, then talking to a monk while thinking it’s Cardinal Angelo; the monks themselves, who look like mummified corpses; the room of crying people at CERN, all drinking and ready to die, followed by the genuinely unnerving numbers scene... 

It’s all amazing, but in no way is this a kid’s show. I do wonder whether, like Dark Water, this is a different kind of scary to, say, Oxygen. Monsters aren’t real; death, and the meaningless of existence, arguably are. This could haunt you forever. 

But then I don’t have kids, so what do I know about what they can cope with. 

Other thoughts:

• Nice to see the return of creepy Moffat voiceover. Also, the man loves a sinister library doesn’t he?

• The opening strongly implies that it’s Missy, not the Doctor, who’s the executioner: she’s wearing gloves, he’s looking uncomfortable. Which is a mean trick. The way she begs for her life (“I’ll do anything”) is a neat contrast with Doctor and Bill going willingly to their deaths to defeat the monsters at the end of the season.

• “I said I’d look after her body for a thousand years” – sooooo does the Doctor literally found a university around her and then stay with it for centuries?

• The line “Particle physicists and priests, what could scare them both?” gives the game away: this is a world where religion (“gods built the universe”) is literally true. Later we’ll find out the monks get their power from being worshipped, plus, of course, they’re called the monks. This entire trilogy is about religion.

• Pope Benedict IX, who recommends the Doctor, is on Wikipedia’s list of “sexually active popes”. In the show, his portrait, hilariously, seems to be Angelina Jolie.

• Jim [Cooray-Smith] would be annoyed if I didn’t mention that the Pope we see is the same actor as jovial Italian man from Turn Left.

• Oh look, it’s the wood between the worlds. Actually, why does the simulation include a text explaining that it’s a simulation? Also – why did the Doctor in the previous simulations not do what this one does at the end?

• Capaldi is so good in the scene where he explains the plot to Bill: he’s so gentle, knowing that what he’s saying is going to hurt. The twelfth Doctor has come a long way from, “Top layer if you want to say a few words”. 

• The voice of the monks is provided by Timothy Charles Robert Noel Bentinck, 12th Earl of Portland, Count Bentinck und Waldeck Limpurg, better known as the voice of David Archer from The Archers.

I wonder if Moffat has read [name of recent-ish novel this spoiled redacted].