Credit: BBC
Last week’s episode was definitely worth the hype that it got. Despite its rating’s dip, it started a saga that will lead to a storyline even bigger than what it started. Let’s look at the synopsis for this week’s episode from Doctor Who TV, before talking about the questions we have for this week.
"Written by Peter Harness and Steven Moffat, and directed by Daniel Nettheim.A 5,000 year-old Pyramid stands at the centre of a war zone, where the Chinese, Russian and American armies are about to clash. There are many problems with that, but the one that intrigues the Doctor is this: there wasn’t a pyramid there yesterday.The Doctor, Bill and Nardole face an alien invasion unlike any other, and before conquest can begin, these aliens need the consent of the human race…The Doctor is played by Peter Capaldi, Bill by Pearl Mackie and Nardole by Matt Lucas."
Though this seems like it’s coming out of left field considering last week’s episode (I think we’re all of the opinion that we just want to know how to fix it!), I’m sure this ties in somehow. Maybe the monks are the ones that put up the pyramid. Maybe the shadow world is cracking now that people realize what’s going on.
There are obviously question upon question given last week’s episode. Let’s go over the top three biggest questions we have.
Credit: BBC
Question 1: Are the Monks related to the Silence?
If you think about it, this question makes a lot of sense for many reasons. One, the Silence was Moffat’s big villain that he used throughout Matt Smith’s era. In Smith’s regeneration episode, he found out that Silence are basically good, except for a chapter that broke off. The Silence are priests that allow you to give confession and forget what you said. So already, we’ve had a religious villain. And if you look closely, the Monks resemble the Silence in many ways, except they look older.
If I were going to do something incredible, like, for instance, do a three-part episode and begin my last hurrah as showrunner, I would bring back something that had been a big part of my first half of the show. Maybe the Monks were at one point the Silence, but evolved throughout time and were able to do more, hence the fact that they’re called something higher up than a priest in the church hierarchy.
Also, remember the headless monks? Do they have anything to do with the monks we saw in Extremis? If you think about it, religion has often been at the center of the villains during Moffat’s tenure. Whether that’s a coincidence, because of the Doctor’s issues with believing in something more powerful, or something that’s gonna come all together, it all seems too coincidental to not be connected.
Credit: BBC
Question 2: Big Bang 3 (Shadow Version)?
Spoiler alert: I have no idea.
So we all remember The Big Bang, when the Doctor, Amy, Rory, and River all worked together to reset the universe. I’m not suggesting that Moffat’s going to do the exact same thing, but what do you do to a computer game when you want to change it?
You reset it. You give it a big bang, essentially. If we continue the metaphor of a computer game, it seems likely that in order to get out of this shadow world, they have to reach the real Earth. Maybe we reset it by getting help from the Doctor. And is that world the same as this one, exactly? Is that how we’re going to do this? Are we going to essentially reset the universe again? Will that also give the Doctor his eyesight back?
Most likely these questions won’t all be answered in episode seven alone. However, if you look at the above picture with everyone holding the lit up cords that are most likely inside the pyramid that popped up out of nowhere, maybe this begins a reset.
Credit: BBC
Question 3: Nardole, Bill?
I know this seems like an odd question, but it’s something that I realized never really got explained. We know he showed up at Missy’s execution to explicitly tell the Doctor that River wouldn’t approve. We know that he was in charge of making sure the Doctor looked after Missy. But everything surrounding how Nardole came to be in the Doctor’s life is a little fuzzy.
Also, where did Nardole and Bill go? This episode, at least, takes place in the past, so they’re still there. I’m guessing that they likely got “deleted” from the simulation, probably because they realized they were part of it. How do you get someone back when they’ve been deleted? Maybe this is a question for episode eight, but it’s definitely on our minds as we try to figure out how to keep track of everything that’s going on.
The issue here is pretty much that there are so many rumors and so many things we don’t know. We can pick apart every episode since the first episode of series 10 and still wouldn’t have a good answer to many of these questions.
I will tell you one thing: I’m guessing that pyramid has something to do with resetting the simulation.