Series 10, Episode 6 | Part 1 of 3 | First broadcast: 20 May 2017 | Writer: Steven Moffat | Director: Daniel Nettheim
Cast
- Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor
- Pearl Mackie as Bill Potts
- Matt Lucas as Nardole
- Michelle Gomez as Missy
- Joseph Long as the Pope
- Corrado Invernizzi as Cardinal Angelo
- Tim Bentinck as the voice of the Monks
Summary
Secretly blind since “Oxygen” and hiding it behind a pair of sonic sunglasses, the Doctor is summoned by the Vatican to investigate the Veritas, a forbidden text that drives everyone who reads it to suicide, and flashbacks reveal how he came to spend a thousand years guarding the vault beneath the university — imprisoning Missy rather than executing her, at Nardole’s urging and in fulfilment of a promise to River Song. Tracing a leaked translation to CERN, the Doctor, Bill, and Nardole discover a network of doorways linking Vatican vaults to CERN and the White House, and realize that everyone they know — themselves included — are simulacra inside an elaborate computer simulation being run by an invading alien force, the Monks, to rehearse a real invasion of Earth. As Bill and Nardole are erased on discovering the truth, the doomed simulated Doctor manages to transmit everything he has learned back to the real world, so that his true self, still guarding Missy’s vault, can prepare for what is coming.
Interesting Facts
- This is the first of a loose three-part “Monks trilogy,” continuing directly into “The Pyramid at the End of the World” and “The Lie of the Land.”
- Michelle Gomez returns as Missy in a major recurring capacity from this episode onward, with flashbacks revealing the Doctor spared her execution and instead sentenced himself to guard her for a thousand years — the mystery behind the vault first raised in “The Pilot.”
- The episode’s central twist, that its cast are unwitting simulations who can detect their unreality only through the “tell” of computers failing to generate genuinely random numbers, drew widespread critical praise as one of Steven Moffat’s most philosophically ambitious scripts.
- Guest star Joseph Long, playing the Pope, had previously appeared in the Tenth Doctor Series 4 episode “Turn Left” as a different character.
- The episode continues the emotional throughline of the Doctor’s grief over River Song, referencing “The Husbands of River Song” and revealing that River is the one who originally charged Nardole with keeping the Doctor on the path of virtue.
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