The Monk trilogy has been building to a story about occupation and consent, and this is where it arrives, and where, after two genuinely excellent episodes, it settles for something much more ordinary. “The Lie of the Land” has a superb opening twenty minutes, a strong central idea, one very cheap gag at its heart, and a resolution that does not deserve the setup it’s been handed. It isn’t a bad episode. It’s the disappointing one, which in a trilogy this strong is worse.
Six months later
The opening is excellent and genuinely uncomfortable. The Monks have been here six months and have rewritten human memory wholesale. Everyone on Earth now believes they have been present since the dawn of the species, guiding and protecting and benevolent, and there is documentary evidence, statuary, textbooks and newsreel to prove it. Remembering otherwise is a criminal offence: memory crime, punished by arrest. The imagery is strong and specific, with propaganda screens on every street, informers, labour camps, and a population that is not oppressed so much as grateful. The occupation works because it is loved, exactly as the Monks specified. Wayne Yip shoots a grey, drab, surveilled Britain that looks convincingly like somewhere three seasons into a bad arrangement.
The production design deserves credit for how specific it all looks. The Monks haven’t built anything, they’ve inserted themselves into what was already there. Their statues stand in existing town squares next to war memorials. Their faces are on stamps and coins and school textbooks. The archive footage of the moon landing has a Monk in the background. It’s a much smarter way to show a rewritten history than a conquered landscape would have been: nothing was destroyed, everything was simply amended, and the amendments are boring and municipal and everywhere. The labour camps get similar restraint, grey and functional and full of people who mostly think the prisoners had it coming. Bill’s isolation is well handled too. She’s immune to the rewrite because she made the deal, which means she’s the only person who remembers what actually happened, and she keeps herself sane by talking to an imagined version of the mother she never knew, a mother she only has photographs of because the Doctor quietly went back and took them for her.
The bad joke
And then the episode does the thing that a lot of people will never forgive it for. Bill finds the Doctor. He’s been making the propaganda broadcasts, the voice of the occupation, explaining to humanity why the Monks are good for them, and when she confronts him he tells her, at length and persuasively, that he means it. Humanity is a danger to itself, the Monks impose order, and he has decided to help. It’s a good scene, and Capaldi plays it with enough conviction that you genuinely wonder how they’ll walk it back. Bill shoots him. Then he starts to regenerate, and stops, and laughs, because it was a test, the gun was loaded with blanks, and the whole thing was staged to check whether she was still herself. The fake-out is the problem. Not the test, which is defensible and rather cruel in a way this Doctor can be, but staging a fake regeneration as a gag, in a season that will end with a real one, cheapens something the show should treat as expensive. It’s a stunt aimed at the trailer rather than at the story, and the episode never recovers its seriousness afterwards.
The best material is in the vault, and there isn’t enough of it. Missy has encountered the Monks before and knows how to break them, and Michelle Gomez plays the consultation as a bored professional being asked to do somebody’s homework. Her solution is straightforward and monstrous: the occupation runs on a signal broadcast through one person’s mind, so kill that person. It’s Bill. Do it and the whole thing collapses. What’s interesting is that she’s right, and that the episode has to work quite hard to find an alternative. There’s also a genuinely affecting moment where Missy, apparently in the early stages of actually reforming, is troubled by the memory of people she’s killed, and Gomez plays it without a shred of pantomime. Every scene in the vault is better than the scenes outside it.
The resolution
The fix is that Bill’s mind is broadcast on the Monks’ frequency, so they need to overwrite her with something stronger than their fabricated history. The Doctor tries and fails. Bill succeeds, by filling the signal with the image of her mother, an idea of a person built entirely out of love and photographs, which is too personal and too coherent for the Monks’ fiction to displace. The world remembers. The Monks leave. Humanity, having been freed, promptly forgets the Monks ever existed at all. The emotional logic is fine and Pearl Mackie sells it. The mechanical logic is mush, because the power of a mother’s love overwriting an alien broadcast is a sentiment rather than a solution, and it arrives about four minutes after the episode has established that this exact approach doesn’t work. It’s the same soft landing that undercut The Rings of Akhaten, and it’s more of a shame here because the trilogy’s first two parts were so rigorous.
That said, the mother thread is the episode’s best long-game payoff, and it reaches back further than it first appears. Bill has no memories of her mother at all, since she died when Bill was a baby and there were almost no photographs. In the season’s first episode the Doctor quietly went back in time and took some, and left them for her without ever mentioning it. So the image she uses to break the Monks’ signal is not a real memory, it’s a person she assembled out of a gift she doesn’t know she was given. That’s a genuinely elegant piece of construction, and it’s the one part of the resolution that feels earned rather than asserted. The final beat is the sharpest thing in the hour: everyone forgets. Six months of occupation, collaboration and informing on neighbours, gone and unexamined, no reckoning for anybody. The show tosses that away in a line, and it’s the most interesting idea in the episode.
Rating: 3/5. A tremendous first act and some of the best Missy material of the era, undone by a cheap gag at the midpoint and a resolution that substitutes sentiment for a solution. After the ingenuity of Extremis and the tension of the pyramid, this is a distinct step down, but the imagery of the occupation is strong enough that it’s still worth the time.