Doctor Who - Matrix Glitch

Of course, there are innumerable differences in the approach between Moffat and RTD as showrunners but one that I dwell on is that RTD despises the "it's all a dream" approach. Massive rewrites were carried out on The Satan Pit as the original saw Rose caught in a dreamscape as the Beast tried to possesses and Turn Left set its stall as an AU ep from the start. Yet Moff's casual Donna-in-dream-world stuffed things up to require episodes reshuffled and without Big Russell, things have spiraled out.

Meh. This isn't even as bad as the Pope clit-blocking you earlier in the episode.

While some complain of numerous episodes invoking the malfunction tech plot (which in the Classic Series was pretty much limited to The Edge of Destruction and The Face of Evil), ever since Moffat took over we've had a massive increase in episodes that never happened, that were either dreams, simulations or totally reset at the endings. Not only did his first series decanonize itself at the climax, Amy's Choice and The Big Bang were set in nightmare worlds that were never mentioned again. Then there was The Girl Who Waited But Never Actually Did or The Wedding of River Song That Wasn't. The Angels Take Manhattan, Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS, The Name of the Doctor, Dark Water, Last Christmas, Sleep No More, Heaven Sent... all episodes that basically waste up to 95% of their run-time undoing their existences.

Of course, some times it's justified. Amy and Rory's one canonical farewell scene would have no meaning without the false history they just escaped, but would the previous series really have suffered if the Doctor went straight from Trap Street to Gallifrey? Moffat's sociopathy when it comes to his work, taking a self-confessed sadism in torturing characters for the hell of it, reaches an even greater meta-textual peak than ever before. He refused to work with Big Finish in 1999 because he couldn't write a story where the Eighth Doctor is repeatedly tortured into insanity, and when he actually completed the script in Heaven Sent he ended up having to go to great lengths to put things back in the box.

The ultimate blasphemous truth... you can totally skip this episode. Seriously, you're wasting an hour of your life watching it. I mean, you think The Idiot's Lantern was totally irrelevant to the ongoing series but that was peanuts compared to this...

And now we have an episode about a bunch of aliens who are just pissing about with the Doctor for shits and giggles. Their true motivations are briefly described and will no doubt be the focus of the next two episodes which, lest we forget, are not written by Moffat. But for this episode, the world ends, companions are killed off, the Doctor suffers horribly and dies for the simple reason that the bad guys just want to see him suffer for the hell of it. You really could skip this episode entirely, it has no actual impact on anything else. Everything in it is a waste of time, existing only to freak out the characters and the audience.

And, it should be said, it does that immensely well.

Like the Sam Neill film The Mouth of Madness, there's a fine line between showing the breakdown of cause and effect against the forces of truly alien power and simply pulling off crazy shit in the random hope some of it sticks. Indeed, this story of a book that turns you mad and suicidal with the truth reality is fiction, and ends with the world sinking into anarchy and destruction as our hero is unable to do more than outlive the other characters and realize what the hell is going on.

The subliminal flashes of crime scenes as the Doctor is told of the deaths, the cheerful suicide parties, the dead bodies in the Oval Office (alas, it's clear this was written when the idea Obama's replacement would be someone we'd regret killing themselves), the slowly dawning horror of "oh shit, I'm not real" when even the TARDIS crew end up not immune. It's creepy, it's unsettling, and the bits with a blind Doctor being chased around a library by some badly-lipsynched red-robed monks who aren't even worth keeping in focus are, if anything, reassuring in comparison. Drawing the Catholic Church of today rather than some lesbo-vampire-ruled-space-army also adds some real weight to another convenient labyrinth of old macguffins.

Wow. I bet a lot of thought and effort went into that monster design.

Catholicism gets a pretty light ride here. Apart from a genuinely hilarious gag about the Pope interrupting a gay date, the cardinals are all shown to be intelligent and worthy of respect. They are shown to be totally right in their belief the Doctor can help and that the situation needs his attention, they even try to offer him absolution, and it's clear that while they keep the history of a female pope secret they don't consider her any lesser a leader of their religion. No choir boys are molested, no money resting in the account...

Maybe that was the first clue none of this is real?

Yep. It really IS the opening credits to The Last Leg. Nothing more to say.

Now, leaving aside the Red Dwarf template of "hang on, we're real but we're all just dreaming" we've got perhaps the more Stargate-initiated "we are real but we want to stop that from the greater good" types as I'm sure I remember an ep set in the future where SG1 had accidentally let aliens invade and sacrificed themselves to send a warning back into the past, altering history. Or that brilliant SGU ep where we get a glimpse of the timeline between everything went wrong and everything went right. And there's also the jaw-drapping Angel episode where it seems the vampire with a soul has saved the whole world, reunited his friends and got the girl... only to turn out that whole bit was an illusion and that they stuck with the far more dangerous Plan A instead. Rather similar to Dark Angel that...

My point is, I could forgive this "it wasn't quite all a dream" business if I felt confident it mattered. The only person who knows of what might have been is the ever-secretive Doctor, about aliens who aren't doing what they're going to be defined as doing to people who don't exist. It's not even a twist ending, the whole plot revolves around a plot idea even Nardole suspects was done first with Picard and the holodeck. It doesn't exist in isolation like, say, Amy's Choice did on it's own terms. No one learns anything or even has the slightest bit of closure. It's ostensibly part one of a trilogy, the same way The Last was supposed to foreshadow The Next Life (bringing things neatly back round to McGann BF stories).

Ultimately, Extremis can be summarized as a dream sequence interspersed with flashbacks.

And the flashbacks aren't really up to much, there's no surprise that they didn't merit an episode on their own and despite the dialogue, actors and the like still manages to feel less epic than the opening scene of the Telemovie. The Master/Missy is to be executed and the Doctor left to deal with the remains, but by turning it into a Game of Thrones cutaway outside Westeros with ye olde hang-on-I'm-not-the-Time-Lord-we're-talking-about-she-is "twist" it lacks the bewildering shock of flying eyes and exploding planets. Missy has the least funny and memorable dialogue she's been given, Nardole's shock arrival as a non-headless monk is only remarkable for his Garth Marenghi monologue, and I was actually surprised we got to see the Doctor save Missy given Moff's preferred "never mind what happened next" fetish he mastered in Sherlock.

Still waiting for jammy dodgers, a fez and proper monsters with decent story arc.

So. Missy is in the vault.

Is anyone surprised? A clue: no.

The moment anyone even considered the idea the vault might be a prison for an individual, everyone assumed it was Missy. I mean, everyone. In fact, this drove speculation wild because, of course, it surely couldn't be that simple, could it? But, no, it's Missy. And she's in the vault because, um, the Doctor pinky-promised to bury her alive for a thousand years to trick her executioners, even though he defeated them with the "fear me, bitches" approach that, together with River's diary and Nardole, are completely unexplained to the so-called new audience. In fact, it's never made clear bitchy Mary Poppins lady is actually called "Missy" or that the Fatality Index might have had reason to want her executed - I dare say any new viewers would have ended up with the confused impression Michelle Gomez is playing the Doctor's wife, and he's now a nutter who locks her in the cellar.

"For my final request, I want the Doctor, a rival Time Lord, to take my remains home to Gallifrey and you're not going to fall for this one again, are you?"

Of course, Moffat doesn't want to go arc-heavy this year but let's be honest - he's rubbish at arcs. Not just resolving them, but even sustaining them. What is the Pandorica and who is inside? No idea, we only find out it's a prison three minutes before the twist it was empty, and no one bar the Doctor and River have heard of it the previous twelve weeks. What are the cracks in the universe? Most of them aren't being even spotted by the main characters, so they aren't wondering. What's up with Amy's pregnancy, the little girl in the spacesuit, the eyepatch lady and the future Doctor's death? Well, Amy's not willing to do anything about any of those, so who gives a flying fuck?

Even when he realized that character arcs were the way to go - how can the Doctor cope without the Ponds? what the hell is happening to Clara? - he blows it all away by expecting us to wet ourselves with excitement about mentioning the word "hybrid" in random contexts, apparently due to that ancient Gallifreyan prophecy never mentioned before or since and explained by a gloating Davros in a scene you can barely hear because Capaldi's screaming at the top of his head.

This year, we've just had one arc that was clearly less important than Bill joining the universe. What is in the vault, and why is the Doctor guarding it? Now we know it's Missy and... for no obvious reason whatsoever, and Nardole's rant about the threat Missy poses seems completely bizarre since he went to the trouble of helping save Missy's life. And if she's happy to have Mexican takeaway without trying to escape and destroy the world, is it really so important the vault stay closed?

To be blunt, Moffat manages to turn in the biggest failure of the season by giving us an important episode that has no import, shocks us with stuff we already knew, and offers us a threat that has nothing to do with with anything seen before or since.

For the first time, yes, I think Moff's finally become more trouble than he's worth.

At last, there's actually real effort going into these designs.

And now, out of sheer muscular habit, a quick review of Whovians which has as we all known driven me to the clocktower with an automatic rifle far too many times than even Chris Lilly. This week wasn't so gut-churningly offensive - the "little nerd" from last week was allowed his revenge to upstage Rove several times and humiliate Adam Richards who now has little to say between random squawks of despair and pointing out how little his theories actually make sense. Bargo is still more amphetamines than a season of House, and it's painfully obvious they've had to dragoon two random ABC celebs to sit on the panel with them since no one else is willing to tolerate the assholes. Not once did these ladies convince me they were fans, and indeed I doubted they actually watched the episode shown directly in front of them.

It went from pathetic to painful as the revelation Missy was in the vault robbed them of anything to actually talk about, given the whole episode never happened and their desperate vamping to pad out thirty minutes shows just how flawed it was. It was so bad even the Shadow Test Autocue Gag (which was genuinely funny) didn't even make me care they weren't all going to kill themselves, when last week I would have sacrificed a virgin carrot to grant myself the liberty of their deaths...

So, in short, a wasted week.

"Forgive me for the indulgence," begged Moffat in DWM.

You're forgiven. Now piss off and don't come back.

"Come on, can't you let a brutha have one last pointless pre-credit sequence more interesting and exciting than the rest of the episode put together? Huh? Gimme some skin!"