Wayne Yip

The hook

The opening is the best thing in the episode: NASA, present day, receiving imagery from a probe beneath the Martian ice cap, and finding the words GOD SAVE THE QUEEN carved into the rock and clearly visible from orbit. That’s a superb cold open, funny and arresting and immediately generating the only question that matters. The Doctor and Bill go back to find out how it got there, and the answer is a detachment of Victorian soldiers, in full redcoat kit, mining Mars in 1881. The explanation is nicely economical: they rescued a stranded Ice Warrior in South Africa, he offered to take them somewhere with gold in exchange, and a colonel with a secret and a company with nothing to lose said yes. The image of scarlet tunics and pith helmets against red rock is a genuinely great one and the production makes the most of it.

The empire bit

Underneath the runaround is a sharper idea than the episode’s reputation suggests. These men are conducting a colonial expedition, using an indigenous population’s labour and technology, on the assumption that finding something means owning it. Their Ice Warrior, whom they’ve named Friday, which the Doctor points out is not his name and which nobody has ever thought to ask about, has been playing along the entire time, letting them dig, because he wants them to reach the tomb and wake his queen. It’s a good reversal. The soldiers think they’re the expedition; they’re the labour. And the reason they were never in charge is that they never once asked the person helping them what he actually wanted. Gatiss doesn’t lean on this heavily, which is probably correct for a Saturday teatime, though it is fair to complain that the script defines the moral problem and then declines to do much with it. It’s still there, and it’s the reason the episode has some weight. When Iraxxa wakes and looks at a room full of armed Englishmen standing in her tomb, the audience knows precisely how this looks from her side.

Empress of Mars: God Save the Queen, Buried on Mars - Doctor Who episode still

Adele Lynch is good as the Empress: imperious, ancient, and genuinely dangerous, with none of the Ice Warriors’ usual shuffling. The design work is strong, since the female Ice Warrior armour is a real departure and looks superb, and the show is careful to make her a sovereign rather than a monster. She has woken to find her world dead and her tomb full of trespassers, and her first instinct is entirely reasonable. The human side belongs to Godsacre and Catchlove. Colonel Godsacre was hanged for desertion and survived it, and has been carrying the shame ever since, while Catchlove is the bright, ambitious, entirely amoral subordinate who knows about it and uses it. Anthony Calf plays Godsacre with real quiet decency, and the arc of a coward getting one more chance to stand is predictable and lands anyway. His resolution is the right one: he offers Iraxxa his life in exchange for his men’s, and she takes the offer as a soldier rather than an executioner. Two officers recognising each other’s rank across an entirely alien gap is a much better ending than a battle would have been.

Gatiss clearly knows the Ice Warriors well and the episode is full of small corrections to how they’ve been used. They’re given their proper hierarchy, their own honour code, and, most importantly, a reason to be sympathetic that doesn’t require them to stop being dangerous. The tomb itself is a good piece of design, a hive of sleeping warriors around a sarcophagus with the Empress woken first because that’s the correct order of precedence. The sonic weaponry, which crumples a man inward into a small package, is the most unpleasant thing the species has ever been given and is used sparingly enough to keep working.

Where it’s thin

The plot is a corridor. Soldiers advance, Ice Warriors advance, someone gets sonic-cannoned into a compressed cube, repeat. It’s competently staged and never surprising. Bill is badly underserved, spending much of the episode being shepherded from room to room, and her few good moments are the film-literate ones, narrating the situation through the war movies and westerns she’s watched and being genuinely delighted to be in one. It’s a nice character note the season has used before, and it’s about all she gets here, which is a shame in a run that has otherwise used her superbly. The Nardole subplot is pure mechanism: the TARDIS malfunctions, takes him back to Earth, and he has to fetch Missy out of the vault to fly it. It exists solely to advance the vault story, and it shows.

This is Mark Gatiss’s last script for the programme, and it’s a fitting one to go out on. His contributions across the revived era have been consistently the most traditional things in it, from The Crimson Horror to Cold War, a run of stories built out of Victorian melodrama, Cold War thrillers and Hammer horror rather than out of clever ideas about shape. None of them are the best episodes of their seasons. Several of them are the ones that most obviously understand what this show used to be, and there’s real value in having someone in the writers’ room whose instinct is a monster in a cave and soldiers with rifles. Going out with redcoats on Mars fighting Ice Warriors over a tomb is about as complete a summary of that instinct as anyone could ask for.

Rating: 3/5. Handsome, good-natured and pleasingly old-fashioned, with a terrific hook, a strong Ice Warrior design and a guest cast playing it entirely straight. The plot is a series of corridors, Bill has almost nothing to do, and the Nardole business is naked plumbing for the finale, but as a piece of traditional Saturday adventure it’s perfectly judged. They went to Mars for gold, dug where they were told, and never once asked the man helping them what he was digging towards.

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 Lie of the Land: They Have Always Been Here - Doctor Who episode still

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.

Empress of Mars: God Save the Queen, Buried on Mars