Doctor Who: "Extremis" Review

I admit it: I had a bad feeling about this episode going in. The plot sounded to me like something that would be really easy to spectacularly mishandle, and last week’s cliffhanger only compounded matters.

And I didn’t like “Extremis”. In fact, if you read on, I didn’t like it at all. But I don’t think it was due to my preconceptions, because for a lot of the time, it feels like the episode is telling a totally different story to the one that was advertised. Unfortunately, that story is totally incomprehensible.

I reviewed Sherlock back in January, trying to pinpoint exactly where it had gone wrong, and had particularly harsh words for the fourth series finale, “The Final Problem”. It feels like most of the criticisms I wrote back there could apply to this episode. Here is a list of some of the things that happen in “Extremis”:

• The Pope shows up in Bill’s house during a date.
• There’s a flashback sequence telling us how Missy came to be locked in the Vault.
• There’s a monster stalking the Vatican.
• Bill and Nardole end up in the Pentagon.
• They discover a piece of alien technology that serves as a series of portals to crucial points across the Earth (the Pentagon, the White House, CERN, etc).
• CERN has been rigged with explosives to blow up.
• The President of the United States commits suicide. (I will refrain from making any obvious jokes here.)
• It turns out none of this is real, including the Doctor, Bill and Nardole, and it’s a computer simulation being run by aliens planning to attack Earth.

Any of those ideas could take up an entire episode by itself, and none of them have any breathing space whatsoever. They don’t flow naturally from A to B – they crash into one another pell-mell, with F, Q and Z-2 slamming together, rendering the entire story a confused mess. I haven’t even mentioned what was meant to be the main plot – an ancient text that cannot be read without making you take your own life. Despite this supposedly causing suicides the world over (something I only knew because it was in the episode’s official synopsis), the ramifications of this are never explored, and what exactly the Doctor plans to do is never comprehensibly covered beyond “read it himself”. I can see a big flaw with that plan, to be honest. Oh, and the flashback sequence with Missy? Although it explains the series’ story arc… it doesn’t feel connected to the other plot. It just feels like it’s there because it’s time to explain what’s in the Vault, and it also raises more questions than it answers – such as who the bloody hell those people trying to get the Doctor to execute Missy were and why it didn’t work and how they ended up in that situation.

But above all of this… despite everything that’s going on, I still managed to find it a bit boring. The whole thing just felt flat. I think this is down to the direction (I seem to recall this was a problem with director Daniel Nettheim’s debut last series, with “The Zygon Invasion” / “The Zygon Inversion”)… but it’s quite a feat to make any Doctor Who story feel flat, especially one that’s got quite that much going on. And then the episode just sort of… ends. I know the story’s going to be continued next week, but it still doesn’t feel like a natural ending, it just rather abruptly stops, which only exacerbates my feeling that this is a load of random events rather than an actual story.

“Extremis” is a mess. That’s not necessarily what makes it dreadful – something that’s tonally all over the place, or has a confusing narrative, can still be entertaining to watch. But it’s too opaque, and all of its many, many ingredients are undercooked.