The middle part of a trilogy is usually the one that has to do the chores, and this does plenty of them, but it also contains the season’s single best idea, which is a conquest that cannot proceed without genuine, informed, uncoerced consent. Not a trick. Not a technicality. The Monks will not take the Earth unless somebody hands it over out of love, and they are entirely prepared to wait. That’s a properly unusual thing for an alien invasion to want, and a long way from the simulation trick that opened the trilogy, and “The Pyramid at the End of the World” builds its whole hour around it.
A pyramid, overnight
The opening is confident and enormous in scale. A five-thousand-year-old pyramid appears in a single night at the exact point where American, Russian and Chinese forces face one another in Turmezistan, and the three armies do what armies do, which is surround it and prepare. The Monks emerge and make an announcement rather than a threat: the world is about to end, they know how, and they are here to help. There’s a clock on the pyramid wall counting down to midnight, and it moves faster or slower depending on decisions being taken elsewhere on the planet. It’s a strong image and a stronger shape: the audience spends most of the episode watching a countdown without knowing what it’s counting down to, and the episode keeps deliberately misdirecting toward the obvious answer. Three superpowers, one disputed border, weapons at readiness. Everybody in the story assumes it’s a war.
It isn’t a war. It’s a laboratory in Yorkshire. A biochemist named Douglas came into work with a hangover and mis-set a decimal point on a growth medium. His colleague Erica, dressing in a hurry that morning, broke her glasses and can’t read the display properly. Between them they have accidentally produced a bacterium that will sterilise every living thing on Earth within a year, and neither of them has noticed. This is a genuinely great piece of writing. The trilogy’s whole argument is about consent and control, and the mechanism of the apocalypse turns out to be two competent people having an ordinary bad morning. No malice, no plan, no villain, just the end of the world as a workplace accident. The episode cuts between generals preparing for combat and a woman squinting at a dial, and the joke is that only one of those rooms matters. Rachel Denning is excellent as Erica, and the show gives her the dignity of being good at her job. She works out what’s happened, she keeps her head, and she is the one who proposes the fix.
The terms
Meanwhile the Monks make their offer to each faction in turn, and each attempt fails instructively. They want to be asked. Specifically, they want power handed over by someone who both understands what they’re giving away and does it out of love rather than fear or strategy. A general who surrenders to save his troops is refused and killed on the spot, because his motive is calculation. A second, offering out of fear, goes the same way. The Monks are fastidious about this in a way that is far more unnerving than brute force would be. And the reason is chilling once you see it: they are not conquerors, they are colonists who understand that an occupation founded on consent is stable in a way that one founded on force is not. They want the planet to want them. Everything that follows in the trilogy depends on the population believing the Monks have always been here and have always been welcome. The setup works for exactly that reason: the terms are the threat.
The Doctor’s position in all this is one of the season’s better running jokes finally paying off. He is, by a UN emergency provision, President of Earth, a role invented for a previous crisis and never rescinded, which means the armies actually have to do what he says. It’s played straight, and it gives the episode a workable answer to the perennial problem of why the military would listen to him. The Monks’ method is worth dwelling on too, because it explains the simulation from Extremis. They don’t predict the future so much as rehearse it: run the model, watch how it fails, adjust, run it again, until they know exactly which pressure point produces a genuine invitation. Everything happening in this episode has already happened thousands of times inside a machine. The reason they’re so patient about consent is that they’ve had unlimited practice at engineering the moment somebody offers it.
The lab
The last act is the strongest, and it turns on the Doctor’s blindness, the injury he took in Oxygen and has been concealing from Bill ever since. He solves the bacterial problem: seal the lab, ignite the air, done. He gets everyone out, sets the charge, and then finds himself on the wrong side of an airlock with a combination lock and no way to read the numbers, because he never told anybody he couldn’t see. It’s a superb use of a consequence. The injury isn’t a plot device dropped in for this episode, it’s four episodes of concealment arriving with a bill, and the reason he’s trapped is his own vanity. So Bill makes the deal. She gives the Monks the planet, freely and knowingly and explicitly out of love for him, in exchange for his sight. And they accept, because at last somebody has offered on the correct terms. Pearl Mackie plays it beautifully: not desperate, but furious and clear-eyed, telling them exactly what she’s doing and why. And the Doctor, sight restored, watches the Monks take the world and understands immediately what it cost.
What keeps the lab sequence from being merely tense is that it’s genuinely funny in places. Erica and the Doctor make a good double act, since she’s unflappable and he’s improvising, and their working relationship forms in about ninety seconds because they’re both competent people with a job to do. Douglas, the hungover colleague, is given exactly enough dignity: he isn’t a fool, he’s someone who came to work impaired and made one small mistake, and he volunteers to fix it and dies doing so. In an episode about a species demanding informed consent, having the actual catastrophe caused by two people who couldn’t quite read the small print is a joke with real teeth.
Rating: 4/5. Tense, well built and founded on a genuinely original idea about how conquest works, with a superb reveal about the real threat and a companion decision that costs something enormous. The military scenes are broad and the geopolitics are cardboard, but the lab material is excellent and the final ten minutes land hard. Three armies stood around a pyramid waiting for a war. The world was actually ending in a Yorkshire laboratory, because somebody couldn’t find their glasses.