The Doctor Who Review | S10 E11 | World Enough And Time

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WARNING! SPOILER ALERT! Welcome back to the Doctor Who Review, where I recap the week’s episode and give some thoughts and opinions on it. Please do not read if you have not seen this week’s episode. There are major spoilers ahead. You have been warned. Check out the rest of the Doctor Who Reviews here.

Title: World Enough And Time

Written by: Steven Moffat

The opening scene of this week’s episode, World Enough and Time, is of the Doctor stumbling about near the TARDIS, with shining goldy-orange hands. The first stages of regeneration is happening and all he is saying is ‘no no no’.

We’ll circle back to that.

Cut to ‘present day’. Missy, Nardole and Bill step out of the TARDIS onto a ginormous ship in space, slowly moving away from a black hole. They’ve been put into this situation and the Doctor is simply a spectator in the TARDIS. He wants to give Missy a chance at being him, or rather acting like he would in a given situation. She does so sarcastically and wonderfully, as only Missy can do.

But then things start to get a little alarming. The only crew member left on the ship, Jorj, barges in, guns blazing, and informs them that ‘they’re coming’. The Doctor runs out of the TARDIS (now he’s needed for a real emergency) and it becomes apparent that ‘they’ are shooting up elevators from level 1056. Out of the elevators come hospital-robe clad figures with masks, and they’re after Bill (who gets shot by Jorj because they’re ‘only after humans’). They take her with them, ginormous hole in her chest, to ‘fix her’ up.

When she wakes, Bill is on a gurney with a metal cybernetic heart, and after some exploration, discovers the creepy hospital people are in a hall, their monitors silencing their cries of ‘pain pain pain’. When the caretaker, Razor, sort of takes her in, Bill discovers that the people on the level are dying. They’re being upgraded so they can be strong enough to climb through to the top levels of the ship. It’s called Operation Exodus, and while the people are in pain, they’re believed to be growing stronger.

A screen Razor’s rooms that show the Doctor, Missy and Nardole in ‘real time’ but they don’t appear to be moving. Time, as it happens, moves differently at their end of the ship. Months span into possibly years as Bill waits for the Doctor to find her. But it’s only a matter of minutes for Twelve and the team.

Eventually they get down there, and Missy is put in charge of figuring out what’s happening on the computer’s history. Two scenes then happen simultaneously:

The Doctor and Nardole find the surgery room … Razor, from behind Missy, teases her that she’s been here on the ship before … Twelve is looking for Bill … Missy is like ‘what? you crazy man’ and with a few clicks discovers that the ship is from a planet called Mondas (while it sounded familiar to me, it would have got die-hard fans instantly) … just as something steps out of the closet in the surgery room with the Doc and Nardole … Razor takes off a mask to reveal it’s the Master *gasp!* … and out steps, in front of the Doctor, a Mondasian Cyberman *double gasp!*.

And to add to your lack of breath right now, the Mondasian Cyberman is none other than our good friend Bill Potts.

My thoughts on World Enough And Time

I really enjoyed this episode of Doctor Who. While I’m not really a fan of double episodes, especially seeing as the Part 2 usually flops in comparison to the first, this is probably one of my favourite episodes from this season.

In World Enough and Time we see the beginning of the Cybermen. It’s the first time in a long while since we’ve encountered these guys, and Bill hasn’t met them (or the Daleks!) yet. The Cybermen have never even remotely scared me, but boy those pre-Cyberman hospital-gown-attired humans in masks were creepy. Nope. Don’t like it. Perhaps it’s because they’re more human, and that’s the scary part.

The different elements in this episode were very Who and it almost felt like we were heading back to the earlier days of the reboot. Moffat definitely rocked the whole time travel aspect even more than usual, with the different time speeds at the top and bottom of the ship, which was an awesome take on it.

It was a joy having John Simm back on the scene as the Master. Now I really want to re-watch the series where he was in it so much before. I loved the interaction between him and Missy, and will be interesting to see how that all pans out in the finale.

The script was brilliant. Brilliant. I don’t think I’ve laughed as much as I did in a Who in a long while. As well as the usual hilarity that Nardole brings to the team, we had the addition of Razor who, yes, turned out to be the Master, but as the hospital caretaker figure, he was genius.

I loved all the little details in this episode (you can read more about the Easter Eggs of World Enough and Time on Den of Geek – I learnt so much more reading this afterwards!), especially Bill right at the end crying in her suit … and that being the tear on the Cybermen’s helmets. Great detail.

In regards to the regeneration, I highly doubt it will happen next week. There would have been something online before hand and the internet is not known for keeping secrets. I’ll eat my hat (not literally, don’t own any) if it does happen next week, because we still don’t know who 13 will be. In my mind we won’t know until about October, and the regeneration will happen fully in the Christmas episode.

Tiny gripe

One thing I will say though is that I feel like they could have kept the whole Cybermen and the Master aspects a bit more secret. I get that they want people to come back to a show week after week and adding one of the main Who monsters is a card played to draw people back in… but we already knew that the Master was going to show up, and it was obvious that it was the Cybermen who were the eventual outcome of the episode. If they hadn’t shown the two aspects of the episode in the trailer then it would have been much harder to guess what was happening. The Master would have been a surprise – at least I think he would have been, as I didn’t guess for a while that Razor was the Master – until he ripped off that mask.

But that’s my only gripe. Other than that, excellent episode.

Final comments on World Enough And Time

I’m sort of expecting a flop for next week, because it seems to me that double episodes usually hype us all up in the first one and then let us down in the second. It’s like the sort of run out of steam in Part 2 and have to “quick end things! Wrap it up! 2 minutes to go!” But…we’ll wait and see. Maybe Moffat will surprise us.

Did you watch World Enough And Time? What did you think?