Doctor Who: "The Pyramid at the End of the World" Review

“The Pyramid at the End of the World” is cut from very much the same cloth as “Extremis” was (hardly surprising, really, given it is the second part of a three-part story arc, it is co-written by Moffat and has the same director)… and hence, I’m afraid for the second week running, I really disliked it. Still, last week’s hugely negative review got twice as many hits as the blog usually does, so there’s always a silver lining, eh?

When I say “Pyramid” is cut from the same cloth… I mean it’s not coherent, although it at least fares slightly better on that front than last week’s did. It’s a succession of set-pieces rather than an actual coherent story. Things often aren’t explained. There’s a plot running in parallel to the latest adventures of Doctor Who involving two scientists that feels like it really wants to be meaningful, with its repeated imagery of smashing glass as a foreshadowing of disaster, but really, really isn’t (including a little speech by the Doctor at the beginning about death that is totally, laughably meaningless).

Apart from that… the story simply doesn’t work. There’s some stuff about armies. We learn some more about the monks, although their motives still aren’t clear at all. All of the supporting characters are flat and uninteresting, to the point that the story never even bothers to tell us most of their names. I think this is my biggest hurdle to enjoying the episode, actually; the very best Doctor Who always has fantastic, three-dimensional guest characters to help anchor the show. Jago & Litefoot and Counter-Measures are one thing, but the ones on offer here don’t even reach the heights of Angie and Artie. At least then the show bothered to tell us what they were called.

The Missy strand from last week has been totally abandoned for the time being. There’s a Doomsday countdown based on the real-life Doomsday Clock, although exactly why it’s mimicking that is never explained, or why it starts going backwards when the day is saved. (Surely it should just stop?) This makes so little sense, and is so dull, I find it hard to write much about it when I already covered the same ground last week. (And, it has to be said, on the basis of what we’ve seen, I really don’t think Daniel Nettheim is suited to directing this show. He just doesn’t seem to be able to realise action and big set-pieces very well.) The episode once again ends extremely abruptly, with at least one major plot-strand still hanging (Nardole is still seemingly dying on the floor of the TARDIS)… which only contributes to my ultimate feeling:

This isn’t a proper story, it is simply a procession of stuff that happens. Even if the third part of this story is great (and I’m not exactly thrilled by the prospect of spending another 50 minutes on this story arc), the three individual parts still won’t make a cohesive whole. There's the occasional good idea (I quite like the 'previously on...' bit at the beginning being intercut with 'now', that's quite a clever bit of messing with the fourth wall, and when it's clear what the bloody hell the space monks are actually doing it seems to work quite well), but there's also a lot of stuff that simply doesn't work, and once again it's all being thrown together without thought as to consistency or sensibility (although not quite as rapid and unworkable a pace as things were last week, which does make the episode a little more palatable).

Also: Is anyone else really surprised that Tony Gardner hasn’t been in the show before now?