The Monks Trilogy

I haven’t written about Doctor Who as such for a few weeks. Partly this was due to other distractions but mainly because I wanted to see how the “Monks” trilogy panned out. I’ve been intrigued as to where it was going and in the end it didn’t quite resolve as I expected. Initially, I thought the whole thing was going to explore a “brain in the box” type scenario in which the protagonists are stuck in a virtual reality but aren’t aware of it. In a way, the first episode was this but the others were actually a more interesting and relevant concept: what is truth?

What is the real threat of tyranny? It is possible to force people to act against their will through threats and violence but is it possible to force people to think against their will? We are constantly bombarded with messages to try and influence our thought but what if those messages are a complete distortion of facts. We see this every day with obviously verifiable scientific facts denied by those with their own agenda: whether this is climate change, evolution, carcinogens or whatever else that threatens the position of those in power. What happens when those lies and denials are aimed at things that are not so easily verifiable: we know, ourselves, that we are being lied to and the truth is as we remember it but how does one actually prove it?

So how did the Monks trilogy play this? First things first, I’ll say that this was too long. This has always been a fault with Doctor Who – even back in the day there were many 6-parters (a similar length to a modern 3-parter) that would have been better paced as a 4-parter. The only time that these do work is when the three episodes actually tell completely different stories and the Monks didn’t. In particular, I thought the middle episode didn’t really add anything to the overall story or, at least, it could easily have been merged into the first. Also, the whole concept of the Doctor’s blindness was thrown away for no really good reason. Again, I thought this was to be a major point in the stories resolution in that only the blind can see the truth. Unfortunately, that was discarded for no particularly good reason when the plot ran out of steam.

Having said all that, I did actually enjoy the whole thing and in no small part this was down to the performances of the leads. Really for the first time it felt that the Doctor, Bill and Nardole were an actual team and the revelation of the vault containing Missy, whilst not entirely unexpected, did introduce a particularly intriguing side of the character that has needed exploring: is she actually evil or is (s)he capable of redemption. The humour in the episodes was also spot on – the scene with the Pope crashing Bill’s date had me in fits. The false regeneration scene was also a good red herring. I had wondered whether this would form part of the series arc but it still had me fooled for a moment.

The monks themselves felt rather like a generic Who monster: rather zombiesque (we have seen this with the Silence) and lacking a motive other than ruling the universe. I did wonder, mainly due to the way that they spoke, whether they could be the forerunners to the Mondasian Cybermen which would make sense in terms of their rotten appearance but their modus operandi didn’t seem to match. However, we do know that the men from Mondas are returning later in the series so this is still a possibility.

This weekend sees the return of the Ice Warriors under the pen of Mark Gatiss. He did a really good job with them last time and as far as Doctor Who monsters go they are just that bit more interesting as we never know whether they are going to be good, bad or somewhere in between.