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I usually rate Steven Moffat's episodes in the Whoniverse more highly than those by many other contributing writers. Usually. But not this time. I found World Enough and Time to be truly strange, more than a little macabre, and something other than Doctor Who in tone.
In many ways Steven Moffat's entire tenure as show runner (or is that producer?) at the Doctor Who helm has been a reaction to his predecessor. Eleven and his Ponds were purposefully not Rose Tyler or Jack Harkness, or Martha Jones and Mickey Smith. Rory Williams had the Doctor's number almost immediately -
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RORY: "You know what's dangerous about you? It's not that you make people take risks, it's that you make them want to impress you. You make it so they don't want to let you down. You have no idea how dangerous you make people to themselves when you're around." (The Vampires of Venice)
- and the Doctor's young companions, with whom he travelled the multi-verse, became his parents-in-law and surrogate family - not possible romantic partners. The entire minisode Pond Life can even be taken as a reaction to RTD's declaration that the Doctor doesn't 'do domestic' (with which I agree, if meant stereotypically) but, I'd have to say that Nardole's gobsmacked surprise on seeing the Doctor all emotional in this episode smacked of slapdash writing, rather than a true reading of the Doctor's character. If Twelve doesn't get emotional, then Clara Oswald’s entire journey arc as the “Impossible Girl” becomes even more incomprehensible. And as for his conflicted feelings for Missy, the Doctor wouldn't be so desperate so as to hope his childhood friend can be redeemed - as evidenced by the tear Missy sheds at the tail-end of The Eaters of Light and more importantly by the Doctor's reaction to it - if he were unfeeling.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that there has been a colony ship at the edge of a black hole in the Whoniverse before. And the Master has also appeared in disguise on such a colony ship before, at the end of the universe, in the episode Utopia, 'masquerading' as Doctor Yana, as played by Derek Jacobi.
The show’s history resonates here just as clearly as the sound of drums which once drove the Master mad, whilst Russell T. Davies was show-runner. Small moments remind us of past travels, and past companions. Bill peels spuds and makes chips, reminding us she was working in the university cafeteria when she first audited the Doctor's lectures (The Pilot. ) But we're also reminded that the Doctor and Rose once bonded over chips, as did Clara and Twelve who sauntered off down a high-street in search of chips and coffee.
Yet, for all that we see the horrific birth of the Mondas Cybermen - or Cybermen Mark I - in this episode and for all that the Master will be revealed to be the malevolent God in the heart of the machine, this felt far less like an episode of Doctor Who than most. Yes, even Heaven Sent (also directed by Rachel Talalay) which although one of the best episodes of Who ever made is very, very different from most of the shows canon.
Here Bill is shot through the heart in cartoon-esque fashion, a gapping cauterised hole all that's left of where her heart and internal organs once were. Still living, she is rushed down to surgery via a nightmarish pair of lift-banks and, upon waking from surgery, discovers a clunky chest-unit installed where her heart once was. Less Tony Stark's mini-arc reactor, it is a bulky prosthetic the stuff of nightmares. But nothing, not visual references to refugees, or a program named Exodus (which reminds one inescapably of the founding myth of the Israelites as well as the Allied repatriation program at the end of WWII) nothing is as horrifying as the recurrent word "pain" muttered by the wounded, masked, wheelchair bound figures lining the hospital wards. Nothing is as horrific as the moment when the switch on a macabre IV unit is turned and, together with Bill, viewers realise the dial simply turns down the sound whilst offering no pain relief at all.
Nothing.
Bill has entered a netherworld - a squalid hospital, all dingy corridors and tormented patients - a netherworld from which there may be no escape. Of course the true horror at the heart of this episode is meant to be Bill's fate: shot through the heart, companion-napped, betrayed, upgraded. Razor, aka the Master, horrifically pretends to be her friend (standing in for her missing Doctor) whilst fattening her up for the kill. Worse still, Bill meets her doom due to her faith in the Doctor and the subliminal message he implants in her mind imploring her to wait for him.
Here Steven Moffat retreads old ground, and old themes, as well as welcoming back old foes. Just like one incarnation of Clara Oswald (Asylum of the Daleks) and an abandoned, aged, Amelia Pond (The Girl Who Waited) Bill waits in vain. And we remember the first time we met soufflé girl and realised a human consciousness was alive - personality intact - trapped within a Dalek. We remember Danny Pink, upgraded and turned into a Cyberman, before later forfeiting his chance to escape from a digital, degrading, virtual heaven to save a child (Death in Heaven.) We remember Missy taunting the Doctor whilst the dying monster Davros revealed himself to have been a terrified little boy trapped on the battlefield, once a long time ago. (Into the Dalek) In World Enough and Time the monsters are, mainly, all too human. The nurse is obviously inspired by Ratched from "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" and the maniacal surgeon all too possibly drawn from history - aka Joseph Mengele the angel of death. But, this time, the little boy who grew up to be a monster is revealed to be the Doctor's childhood friend.
I had long grown used to thinking of the Master as Missy - as portrayed with panache by Michelle Gomez - all jaunty, tilted hat, crinoline and parasol. The moment Razor peeled off a latex mask and wig to reveal the face of John Simm was phenomenal, shocking and quite the plot twist. That said, I found his excuse of needing a disguise because he had first been a British Prime Minister, and then a global totalitarian dictator (nearly a decade ago in viewing terms) daft. I assume several centuries have passed between when he was ousted and when he landed on the trapped space capsule. History seems doomed to be forgotten, rather than remembered.
Disguised as Razor, the supposed janitor-manager of this shambolic hospital, the Master bears more than a passing resemblance to both J. K. Rowling's Argus Filch (amusingly played by David Bradley who played William Hartnall in An Adventure in Time and Space and the First Doctor in Twice Upon a Time) and a caricaturish Fagin. The costume and makeup which transform Simm reminded me strongly of Sir Alec Guinness's portrayal of Fagin in the 1948 film of Oliver Twist directed by David Lean. I do wonder if Simm drew direct inspiration from that classic film. If so it would be fitting, given Fagin was the king of his own subterranean fiefdom and a "kidsman" - someone who like the Cybermen specifically targeted children.
I did find it particularly bizarre (and canonically annoying) that Missy and the Master can occupy the exact same moment in time and space with no bizarre 'wibbly-wobbly, timey-whimey' repercussions, even minor ones such as those seen in Time Crash, The Children in Need minisode in which Peter Davidson's ageing was comically explained away as: "two of us together has shortened out the time differential”. But, I suppose one can theorise the difference is due to the proximity to the black hole event horizon.
But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
from "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvel
I vaguely knew that the title of this episode was drawn from a poem, but it took Googling to discover it was quoted in the Powell and Pressburger 1946 British film A Matter of Life and Death and referenced in Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, a copy of which Twelve used have on his bookshelves.
Whilst the masked figures called to mind WWI soldiers, I cannot put my finger on why my mind drew such an allusion. Costume design? The mask itself? The nasal canula? I couldn't say. Yet the allusion is incredibly strong - thanks to costume and set design which were fantastic, and fantastically chilling. Yet, despite such allusion, it is the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi's which are overtly writ large throughout. The grimey, polluted level which houses the hospital resembles a ghetto. People queue, exhausted, hopeless, with no hope of escape. There is little difference between deathly showers in the concentration camp and this hell of habitat level; the sky a lid above people's heads stamped with a number, just as people were once branded with one. Being upgraded is here as much a final, horrifying, solution as the original. Stylistically World Enough and Time probably also nods directly to the horror genre in television and film. Horror is not my cup of tea, so I don't have that frame of reference to draw upon, but given Rachel Talalay's filmography, this is more than possible. Personally the set design reminded me of films set in Soviet Russia and of the sets and costumes last seen in 'The Lie of the Land.
Talalay creates a palpable sense of menace through direction, with the formidable aid of both the art and props department. But the episode is lesser, not greater, than the sum of its parts.
Despite the horrific fate which befalls Bill, despite the denouement of its reveal right at the close of the episode, i wasn't griped. I felt the episode dragged, time moving almost as slowly as it does for those on the upper levels of the colony ship. Worse, my horror was spent far earlier by the repetitive cries of those masked surgical victims so, at the close of the episode when Bill's horrific fate was revealed I was basically unmoved. Peter Capaldi is a marvellous actor, yet here I thought his look of horror, on recognising Bill and what has befallen her, was forced rather than natural. He has the ability to move a viewer to tears (see Heaven Sent and Series Two of The Hour) but not here. Not this viewer.
The pace and tone of World Enough and Time is odd. Luckily Moffat curtailes his flirtation with the fourth wall to Missy's meta-flavoured monologue - spelling out that the two companions are comic relief and exposition before riffing on the fact that the Doctor did, or did not, name himself Doctor Who - but there is odd pacing and tone at the top of the episode over and above this. On first watch I thought it might have been Capaldi's delivery, naming the Master as his 'man crush' back in the day, whilst off-handledly letting Bill know that Time Lords have been known to change their sex. On rewatch I realised the the jarring moment is nothing to do with the retcon* revelation about Gallifreyan physiology, which foreshadows Simm's unveiling, but rather it's the moment where Bill admits Missy really scares her. Bill may be partly joking, when she asks the Doctor not to get her killed, but it's the fact that he doesn't take her fears as seriously as he should which underpins the scene. Focused as he is on Missy's redemption he misses Bill's fear and deep unease, and reminds us of Rory's prophetic words. The episode closes on the horror of Bill's robotic gaze, on her last tear shed out of the corner of her eye, as it becomes the iconic frozen tear marking the corner of each and every Cyberman eye. Bill now seems to have little understanding that she was once a vibrant young woman, and even less understanding of what has befallen her.
And all is lost to the episode cliff-hanger. Yet I found the teaser more compelling.
Watching the episode for the first time, spoiler free, it's enough to make a fannish viewer skittish, wondering if the regeneration from one actor to the next might not be occurring far earlier than billed. Opening on the Doctor falling out of the TARDIS doors onto a snow-filled tundra, one hand glowing with regeneration energy - just as Ten's severed hand once did before it reanimated Donna Noble as the Doctor!Donna - before both his hands and then his entire body glows is a great hook - and a brilliant cliff-hanger. It is also a prologue to the next episode, or series finale - possibly.
World Enough and Time isn't a strong, well-paced stand-alone episode. But as a hook to the series finale it works and that episode may inform and enrich this one, with the benefit of hindsight.