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Peter Harness returns to the Whoniverse with an episode that is both weaker than those leading up to it, and weaker than his previous works in the Who canon i.e. Kill the Moon, The Zygon Invasion and The Zygon Inversion. Here he retreads similar ground to that two-parter, but this is lacklustre by comparison for all the big budget special effects and global scope.
In this episode a pyramid appears in the desert, at a place where armies from four major world powers are stationed. Aliens clad in Buddhist-like garb (as introduced in the previous episode) declare humanity will 'consent' to subjugate itself in order to survive the destruction of all life on Earth. Following this proclamation - or ultimatum - the Doomsday clock starts ticking down to midnight. Given the tone of this episode, with its overt exposition on warfare and light sprinkling of geopolitics, I'd say The Pyramid at the End of the World is both aimed at a younger audience (as earlier episodes in this series also undoubtedly are) and aimed at an audience reared on big budget block-buster films. This is as much about the spectacle as the actual impending catastrophe. But what is most powerful in this narrative is how it stresses that the smallest of choices, made by one person, can lead to calamity: Douglas going to work hungover. Erica placing her reading glasses in her handbag, and then using that bag to prop open her front door. The Doctor choosing silence, with his lie of omission to Bill. These are the moments on which the world turns. These moments, and their repercussions, make this episode worth watching.
Nodding back to The Zygon Invasion and The Zygon Inversion we see the reappearance of the Doctor as President of Earth, with the action returning to Turmezistan. The guest star of the week walks in Osgood's footsteps and so we meet Erica, played by Rachel Denning. Plucky, brilliant, and brave - for all that she's older, not employed by U.N.I.T. and obviously not fangirling the Doctor , she is instrumental in helping him. And, just like Osgood, Erica is sharp enough to attract the Doctor's attention and so have a TARDIS key dangled in front of her like a proverbial carrot. I do think someone of her age and experience would have been more overtly thrown by the appearance of the TARDIS (and the Doctor and Nardole) in the lab though. And yes, I do assume the urgency of the situation - trying to prevent lethal gas from venting into the atmosphere and ending all life on earth - was enough to warrant the writer's hand-wave.
Whilst Rachel Denning is lovely in her supporting role (particularly in scenes playing opposite Peter Capaldi) she shines playing opposite Tony Gardner. Gardner plays the hapless Douglas who jeopardises the fate of the entire planet, thanks to a hangover and a decimal point. He last played an alcoholic, self-involved, loser of a husband in the BBC's Last Tango in Halifax - casting here obviously to type, no doubt amusing for any parents watching along with their children.
In the modern world and in popular culture, war and especially World War, has always been the most likely harbinger of humanity's end. The Doomsday clock itself exists as a pre-eminent symbol of how close we may be to nuclear catastrophe. But pestilence, war, famine and death (as per the Bible) are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. In this episode whilst the so-called great military powers are as metaphorically blind as the Doctor - believing their own geopolitical aggression the only thing which can lead to mutual assured destruction - the 'horseman' almost abroad in the world is pestilence, loose in lab at Agrofuel. This is ironic, and all the more powerful for subverting the usual narrative of doom.
Doctor: "Do you understand now? Do you see? Asking them for help has conditions. Invite them in and it will be the last free action you take."
Watching this episode, I was reminded of the penultimate mytharc in Joss Whedon's Angel: The Series when a Goddess from a demonic dimension - Jasmine (played by Gina Torres) - arrives on Earth to save everyone through love. Jasmine brainwashes and subjugates in order to bring about what humanity claims it wants: World Peace. Her offered utopia is, of course, an illusion built on the enslavement of the human race through the eradication of free will. Also known as the devourer, Jasmine apparently feasts on humans to maintain her human form. And she is shown to have manipulated prior events in the lives of the shows major characters, so as to be called into being (in Los Angeles) from her dimension. Her ultimate goal? To rule over a living world, as her own was long dead.
Monk: "You are corpses to us. Your world is ending. You can do nothing. But, we can save you."
Given her true face was one of a maggot-infested corpse, and that these alien monks have taken on the form of rotting cadavers, I do see similarities. Akin to vampires, in that they need to be invited to 'save' the Earth as vampires in other literary and dramatic works need to be invited in to a person's home, they also reminded me of the Wraith in Stargate Atlantis who feed, vampirically, via the palm of their hands.
At the end of the last series the Doctor was willing to doom the universe to save his friend and companion. This series his friend and companion sells out humanity to alien devils, making a deal the outcome of which she has no way of knowing. Bill 'consents' to save the Doctor and have the alien monks return his sight to him. Her choice, ostensibly pure in intent, is a mirror of the Doctor's own in the last series when the Doctor chose to interfere in the order of the universe to save his friend; supposedly ushering in calamity if the prophecy of the hybrid was to be believed. This mirroring cannot be incidental, and so must be read as foreshadowing Bill's forthcoming fate.
Every companion becomes like the Doctor. That is their triumph and their tragedy. Like Martha Jones before her, and Sarah Jane Smith before her, undoubtedly Bill will be catapulted out of her newly acquired role of companion to tread in the Doctor's booted footsteps.
Bill may be bright, inquisitive, and liable to question the Doctor but she still accepts his word blindly, is more than a little in awe of him and unlike Nardole would neither consider kicking his arse for doing something daft, nor realise that he wouldn't want her to gamble with the planet's future in order to save him. That she does 'consent', in the name of all life on this planet, is down to the fact that Bill doesn't know her Doctor. She knows little, or nothing, about regeneration cycles and may believe this life of his is the only one he has. We know Bill lost her mother as a baby and that her foster mother is at best an agreeable landlord. The Doctor? He is tutor, friend, mentor and quasi father-figure to Bill. It's the Doctor Bill confides in about Penny and, it's his encouragement which leads her to ask the other woman out on a date.
This episode opens on Bill's choices in life. She's out on a date with Penny, in the real world, having drinks, flirting, heading home. By the end of the episode all choice is taken from her. Consent equals capitulation and subjugation. In the previous episode - Extremis - the aliens responded to the Doctor's retort that "[...this isn't a Game" by telling him it was one. Here, the game playing is taken up a level, the player no longer the Doctor, but Bill. Here circumstances converge so that the alien monks can use Bill to leverage the Doctor's compliance; facilitated by the Doctor's own lie of omission. Bill is obviously the pawn on a game board being used to capture the King, or Time Lord.
At least, that's what I presume.
The Doctor has been here before though, most recently just prior to his regeneration from his Tenth 'life' to his Eleventh, in The End of Time. In the Russell T. Davis series the villain of the piece was the Master, manipulated by Rassilon and the Time Lords of Gallifrey to bring their planet back into this dimmension. The Doctor's companion, Wilfred Mott (Donna Noble's grandfather, played by the phenomenal Bernard Cribbins) was both the personification of a prophecy AND collateral damage. At the end of that episode the Doctor swapped places with Wilf, letting the other man out of a radiation booth he had trapped himself in, before taking the lethal radiation dose himself. Wilfred had knocked four times on the radiation chamber door, as prophecied in Planet of the Dead. In this series we have heard Missy (undoubtedly the villainess-in-waiting) knocking on her vault door. Given the Quantum Fold Chamber's similarity to the Pandorica, and the knocking, I do wonder if the series won't end with the Doctor imprisoned in her stead.
For a brief moment towards the start of this episode, when plants bloomed under laboratory conditions, I was convinced that Doctor Who was going to mash-up Day of the Triffids with Stargate. Instead, we're slowly being lead from one episode to the next, in what feels like a loose trilogy. Given that this is seventh episode, we're now past the mid-point of the series, so closer to the Twelfth Doctor's final adventures. From The Pilot onwards, the Doctor has intruded in Bill's everyday life thoroughly and irrevocably, just as he has always done with each of his companions. Heather, who Bill liked so much, was possessed and killed by an alien. Both Bill's virtual and her real date with Penny were interrupted by Doctor related events. Having cheated death in Oxygen and having gambled for all life on the planet, I do wonder if Bill might not ultimately choose mundane, everyday, life on earth at the close of this series. I wonder if she might not choose to walk away from the Doctor, as both Martha Jones and Clara Oswald once did.
I'm curious to see what the next episode brings, curious to see if those strands of light seen in the pyramid ship might not stand as a tapestry of the fates; weaving futures through the multiverse. Futures now fixed by the consent, or promise, of one young, human, woman. All of that said, I found the episode a disappointment in the main. But, given my ambivalence about most action adventure big-budget films, it may simply be down to personal taste.