Doctor Who Preview: 5 questions for ‘The Lie of the Land’
In the last of the Monks saga, everything’s coming together…or maybe not. From what we know, the Doctor has joined the monks and Bill and Missy will work together to try to find a way to get everything back to normal. Last week I asked some questions about what might happen, but many of them are still unanswered.
In case you don’t know what this episode’s about, here’s the synopsis provided by Doctor Who TV.
"Written by Toby Whithouse and directed by Wayne Yip.The world is gripped by a mass delusion and only Bill Potts can see the truth. When even the Doctor is fighting on the wrong side, it’s up to Bill to convince the Time Lord that humanity is in deadly danger. And if she can’t do that, she may just have to kill her best friend…The Doctor is played by Peter Capaldi, Bill by Pearl Mackie and Nardole by Matt Lucas. Michelle Gomez guest stars as Missy."
If you were awake at three in the morning then you saw my ramblings of a question I thought of, basically wondering if the monks are evil at all.
However, we have much more questions than that, and they definitely don’t all go down the spiral that three AM musings often do.
Here are some other questions I have that I hope, I hope will be answered in The Lie of the Land. If not, we may have to wait until the two-parter to get all of our answers.
Credit: BBC
Is Nardole dead?
We last saw Nardole collapsed on the floor from what I’m guessing is either gas from the TARDIS or from the greenhouse. Here’s the issue: Isn’t he an android? He was part robot when River Song’s husband died, and we never saw how he became not-a-robot.
Either way, no matter how he got rid of the giant red suit, he’s an android. I was pretty sure that androids don’t really breathe any air, as they’re mostly robots. So how did the greenhouse gas effect him like it did?
On the other hand, it’s possible that the air that could have killed him only knocked him out because he doesn’t fully breathe oxygen. He’s slated to be in the episode, so we know that he’s not dead, but there’s still the question of why the gasses affected him at all. The episode appears to be mostly about Bill and Missy, so we might only see a bit of Nardole.
As long as our newly-badass android friend isn’t dead, I’ll be happy.
Credit: BBC
Bill and Missy…together?
Okay, here’s the issue about this. We know through chatter throughout the fandom that Bill and Missy are most likely going to be battling the Doctor and the Monks together this week. The issue with this is…Bill and Missy have never met. Bill doesn’t know who Missy is, who she is to the Doctor, and the history of just what’s happened in the past series.
If there’s anything we learned from the last episode is that Bill, good or bad, is naive and willing to do anything to the Doctor. Is that going to give Missy too much of an opening to do what she wants? Bill will want to bring the Doctor back no matter what, and it could be too easy for Missy to do what she wants — such as getting the Doctor back under specific circumstances.
The other question is, how does Bill know where to find Missy, or even who Missy is? I suppose that question goes back to Nardole. Without the Doctor there to guide her, it seems that this could be a recipe for disaster.
Especially storming the Doctor and shooting him. That doesn’t sound like Bill, and by the quote in the article I wrote last night, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that something doesn’t go wrong.
Credit: BBC
Why was Missy being executed?
This is a question that we might not find answered in this episode, but it’s a question that will at least be asked since we see her in the vault. We know that she’s the master, but even the Master has done some things in the past that hasn’t gotten him executed. And we also know that Missy was never technically on the run, from Extremis, it sounded like she was with the Daleks while the Doctor was on Derillium.
Could the Doctor have had Missy be executed for what she tried to do to Clara? But if so, why didn’t he go through with it? It seems like Missy has more secrets than we know, and I hope to find out eventually. After 1000 years of not talking, I’m sure she’s dying to talk to someone.
Part 2: Were those Time Lords?
When we saw the execution scene, those executioners looked a lot like Time Lords. But it looked like Earth, and Gallifrey is locked in an alternate universe. So how were there Time Lords, or at least people who knew how to carry out a ceremony used by the species? If it truly was 1000 years ago, this could have been back longer than any of realize, but the Doctor’s age is so confusing, we never know how long it’s been.
However, whoever they were obviously didn’t know the Doctor, while the Doctor was infamous to the Time Lords. So maybe they were just a different species?
Credit: BBC
How long have the Monks been around? (Part 2 of the Silence Question)
It’s not surprising that there are many links from the Monks to the Silence that I’ve noticed. They speak the same, they kind of look the same, and they both have titles that correlate with the church. It’s too much of a coincidence to have them not be at least from the same planet or galaxy.
The Silence, we learned, have been around for years, and we learned this week that so have the monks. Even if this is a simulation, the Monks would have learned about the Silence and used them as well. It’s also possible that they’re all part of the Papal Church of the Mainframe. If the monks have been around as long as the Silence?
Part 2: Are we still in the simulation?
Now that we’ve freely given the reigns of the human race over to the Monks, does that mean we’ve ended the simulation and we’re back as we should be? I was expecting some big reset to do it, but I suppose capturing the only person who normally saves the day is an okay story line to do as well.
On the opposite side, since The Pyramid at the End of the World didn’t address the simulation, I have to ask again if that happened because of where the library where the Veritas was, or bad TARDIS flying (sorry Nardole!), or something else, and when the Doctor sent the email back to him, we were back on what was truly the Earth?
Credit: BBC
How is the Regeneration going to work?
The first and foremost problem is we have not had a thirteenth doctor announced to us. In 2013 we had a special on the Day of the Doctor and we found out it was Capaldi and we were all happy! But nothing like that has been revealed. Nothing like that has even been mentioned across the web or on Doctor Who sites. Even the rumors about who’s going to the be the Doctor has died down.
Last I heard, the odds were on Luke Treadaway, but there’s really no way to guess. And I’ve also read that Moffat has to have Chibnall sign off on any dialogue he has the thirteenth Doctor say, so it’s not as though he can just pop the thirteenth Doctor in. With a new show runner, there is a whole new way of doing things than if Moffat was continuing.
Also, there are too many rumors about the Christmas episode and the fact that his regeneration has something to do with all the way back to the Day of the Doctor episode when all we saw were his eyes.
Simply put, there are too many rumors and not enough answers to imagine a regeneration happening tomorrow. But how can the Doctor survive a gunshot without regenerating? 10 could only do so because he had his hand to push the regeneration energy into, the last I checked, 12 doesn’t have any extra hands lying around.
Part 2: The Monk’s Symbol
Do you see the Monk’s symbol with the triangle and the man inside of it? What if that’s a sign for regeneration? The energy kind of makes a triangular shape when it’s being used, and though it’s not the exact stance that the Time Lords stand in, it does look like someone’s in pain, which we’ve seen the Doctor’s obviously in pain while regenerating.