Never one to shy away from time bending and mind bending stories, Steven Moffat delivers just that in his second episode for the series. It opens with a voice over about a planet of executioners happy to carry out such sentences for others. A caption tells us this is a long time ago and we see that the Doctor is on the receiving end of the exposition and is told it will be an honour to kill a Time Lord, or at least be host to it as the actual sentence must be carried out by one of the convicted's own people. A door opens and out steps Missy... We cut away from this to see the present day Doctor sat outside the vault talking to Missy within, then back to the execution as she calmly pleads with him to let her live. Back to the present and the Doctor receives an e-mail on his sonic sunglasses with the title of the episode as its subject "Extremis". The titles roll with no real clue as to what on Earth is going on!
Two time-streams set in motion right from the start will continue to flip-flop back and forth throughout the episode with no apparent link. The 'long time ago' stream takes a very much second place position, but it soon becomes clear that the execution will see Missy put inside the vault. After the titles though, the Doctor is nowhere near the vault in the 'present' stream and the subject is never returned to until the very end. Instead, he gets a visit from the Pope asking for help regarding an ancient text that has sent everyone who has translated or read it to a suicidal end, perhaps the Doctor can translate it and explain why...
Meanwhile, Bill comes home with a girl, Penny, whom she thinks is actually out of her league but is taking tentative steps towards a relationship with. There is a thematic repeat from The Pilot when her mother is concerned that she has brought a man home "I have strict rules about men" she says eliciting a mumbled "Probably not as strict as me" from Bill. When mother sees Penny, she is relieved to see a woman instead, completely unaware that she is Bill's date anyway. The mild humour starts to descend into farce when the TARDIS materialises in another room and Bill tries to not explain it to Penny, pretending the noise was the pipes and that she might just go and shout at them. Then the Pope walks in talks Italian at them and walks out again. They follow him to Bill's bedroom where several other clergy are stood outside the TARDIS and Penny decides it is too much for her to handle and runs off. With all that out of the way, the story can begin properly because apart from the Pope's request for help, nothing that has happened so far is relevant!
I'm not saying Moffat has padded out a flimsy story, but it is a bit like the Matrix sequels that were originally written as a single film that was split into two when it was found to be too long and extra material was required to make those two films long enough. Extremis is the first of a three part story arc but it's a story made of three separate stories that lead into each other rather than flow as a whole cut in three. That means that the apparently irrelevant sections feed into episodes that are yet to come... not that a viewer would know this at the time. What unfolds is a confusing mystery that doesn't quite make sense but has its own logic only to be cut off as we realise the resolve is part of a bigger picture. The episode has a sense that it is leading to an ending but asks more questions before it gets there and just as it has nothing more to give or ask, the unthinkable happens and we are knocked sideways into the next episode knowing that what we have just watched may have ended completely and will not be returned to, but was also just the beginning. The proper story starts next week...
It's worth noting that Nardole is again along for the ride but out of necessity this time. We are reminded of course that the Doctor is still blind (thanks to Moffat liking the idea introduced by Jamie Mathieson in Oxygen and deciding to stretch it beyond that single episode) and he doesn't want anyone else to know, especially not Bill. Therefore, Nardole is by his side most of the way to advise him of what is happening. The Sonic Sunglasses get a new innovation thanks to this extended blindness as well: As they are psycicly linked, they enable the Doctor to see a partial impression of the world around him as a green-on-black wire-frame virtual world made of just edges (a bit like Neo seeing the Matrix!). Being a sonic device of course means it doesn't handle organic matter particularly well (as established by the Sonic Screwdriver failing to handle wooden locks and Donna Noble's exasperation "It doesn't do wood?!"), instead the Doctor sees vital statistics in floating boxes that would be useful if he could see the people they related to (imagine the graphic as an overlay over what the wearer could actually see with normal eyesight).
I'm curious to know how much rewriting or rethinking was required to accommodate the Doctor's blindness. Nardole's presence seems a little tacked on again otherwise but there are a couple of lovely sequences with him and Bill that not only wouldn't happen without him but wouldn't make narrative sense with Bill on her own, or would at the very least be a very isolated and lonely experience. Nardole is told to protect Bill as they are sent to investigate the apparent suicide of a man with a gun, she protests at the suggestion she needs protecting but Nardole gets to show his macho badass side (which soon evaporates at the sight of the gun).
I have one criticism of the episode. Bill and Nardole discover a portal hub, a white room with a ring of large grey blocks in the middle paired with portals on the wall that look like ovals of light. All well and good, they've walked through one of the portals to get there having seen a silhouetted figure disappear through one previously. However, Nardole has the line "What do these look like", referring to the blocks, and Bill replies "Projectors" quite matter-of-fact, but they don't. There is nothing to these blocks and while we don't get to see the actual projector side of them, there is nothing to suggest that they are projectors. Sure, the portals look a bit like pools of light and it's easy to imagine that they are being projected, but there is nothing to suggest that this is the case, no kind of lens or volumetric lighting to indicate the source. That aside, the effect that follows, and what it represents is quite chilling. Especially when it is repeated away from the hub a little later.
You see, and this is major spoiler time to the end of the review, the world we have been watching since the titles is nothing but a projection, a simulation. Each projected portal leads to a different part of the simulation, the Vatican, the Pentagon, CERN, etc. The ancient text remains something of a mystery though. The Doctor reads it with the aid of a text-to-speech application on a laptop and it reveals the truth of the world being a simulation (the third Matrix comparison!) That's all fine, as is the explanation that the suicides are people understanding and removing themselves from the synthesis, both escaping and rebelling. However, when Bill understands the situation she is removed from the simulation by simply pixelating away like Nardole did when he stepped behind the projectors. More importantly though, where did the ancient text come from? It is never explained. It surely wouldn't have been put in by the creators of the simulation (who, incidentally, are testing invasion tactics. Apparently) maybe we will see the Doctor inject it in one of the following episodes?
The clever twist comes, not as a solution but as a warning learnt from the simulation, when the Doctor reveals that his trusty glasses have been recording his whole experience thanks to the incredibly accurate and realistic simulation and as part of a computer system (rather than being the real glasses) are able to send an e-mail to someone in the real world. That someone is, of course, the Doctor and we saw him receive the e-mail just before the titles. So in actual fact, there have been three time streams in play: a long time ago, present, and present simulation. Back in the real present, the Doctor hastily phones Bill and asks about Penny, suggesting she call her tonight because "something's coming. Something very big and something possibly very very bad and I have the feeling that we're going to be very busy!" We see him talking to Missy in the vault as he asks her, as a friend, to help him if he really needs it, and we learn from the execution flashback that he fiddled with the equipment and simply put her to sleep, as a friend. Finally, we are reminded that despite seeing the Doctor's sight partial restored half way through the episode, he is still in fact blind because that wasn't really him and it didn't really happen. Three timestreams, one of which didn't really happen yet was able to communicate and advise one of the others... no wonder people felt confused!
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