Doctor Who: Series 10, Episode 11 – “World Enough and Time” (2017)

As tends to happen with new Who penultimate episodes, I can’t fully decide how I feel about this one until I see how it shakes out next week.  I also can’t say too much without major spoilers – I’ve generally been a little more willing to include some spoilers in my write-ups this season, especially with the “Monk” arc, but since this is the lead-up to the finale we’re talking about here, I’ll try and keep it clean.  Then, once the season ends, I’ll circle back to this episode and the next one with my more spoilery thoughts (my only big spoiler here is several episodes old, dealing with the contents of the vault.)

In one of his more ill-advised ideas (and that’s saying something!), the Doctor decides to take Missy out for a test drive, letting her “be him” in a crisis to see if she’s really “turning good” (added quotation marks to highlight the ill-advisedness of this idea.)  So, he sends her with Bill and Nardole onto a massive, 400-mile-long spaceship with one end of it stuck in a black hole.  Creepy circumstances separate Bill from the others, and while the Doctor and co. try to work out what’s going on with the ship aside from having one end of it stuck in a black hole, Bill gets a much more up-close-and-personal look into what’s happening.

I know I normally hate it when the show pulls a “Psych!  The Doctor knew what was going on the whole time, and this has all actually been part of his secret plan!  No worries!” on us, but I honestly wouldn’t mind if that’s what’s happening with this Missy stuff.  It’s just so stupid.  Yes, the Doctor is all about hope, even if Twelve doesn’t always act like it, but come on!  This can’t be genuine (or if it is, it really shouldn’t be, storytelling-wise,) and he should know that.  Letting her out and trusting her to help others, trusting her with Bill and Nardole’s lives – even with minor supervision via the Doctor monitoring her from inside the TARDIS – is a terrible, terrible idea.

Other than that, what can I say without getting into the meat of the episode?  I like the ship-partially-stuck-in-a-black-hole thing almost as much as I dislike the Doctor-trusts-Missy thing, and while it results in something of a retread of an Eleventh Doctor story, the way the show uses the concept is still neat.  There’s some unfortunate, overly-cranked-up drama of the Moffat variety, but there’s also, for my money, a well-done character reveal and some squee-worthy classic Who references.

Because this episode is largely set-up for the finale, it feels like our heroes themselves are mostly just spinning their wheels.  As such, no one gets anything super-cool to do, although Bill has some interesting material and the Doctor goes wild with the technobabble explanations – Nardole is kind of the odd man out here, not getting much of anything to work with.

At the very least, I’m definitely interested in what’s going to happen next week.  I know that season finales aren’t always the show’s strong suit, and that’s been especially true in recent years, but I’m prepared to see where they’re going with it.