Doctor Who - The Lie of the Land Review

Doctor Who:
The Lie of the Land
By 
Toby Whitehouse

“Hidden amongst 7 billion, there is someone like you. That’s why I put up with the rest of them.”

The final part of what has been known as The Monk trilogy has finally aired and I have to say that the final part of this story was pretty boring.  I did I found it pretty dull and I could not wait for the episode to end.  It came across pretty tedious also.  They spent way too much time with Bill trying to find and then get to The Doctor.  I mean they spent way too much time that I lost interest.  To me it seemed that each part of this trilogy just got worse form episode to episode and “The Lie of the Land” was by far the worst one.

What I didn’t like was that this story was too gimmick laden for my taste. First you had a fake regeneration to get all the fans up in a tizzie and getting all the internet sites biting on whether Peter Capaldi was going to leave mid series.  I just found it funny that they actually did believe that.  Do you really think they would actually do that when we already knew Peter Capaldi’s last episode is going to be at Christmas.  It was a cheap plot device that was not needed at all.  It made no sense and it was just a cheap gimmick that shouldn’t have been used at all.

Plus how many times will the writers use the reset button?  We’ve seen it so many times before and yet again they use it again to defeat the Monks. Too many if you asked me and what made matters worse is that the Monks once they were defeated just ran away.  So what was the point of this story anyway if they were just going to run away once The Doctor and Bill pressed the reset button or in this case Bill resetting everything with memories of her mother.  I didn’t mind the mother part but it was just another type of reset button.

In my opinion the Monk trilogy was the weakest story so far of series 10 which up to this point has been a pretty good series. But unfortunately this trilogy just did not live up to the quality of the stories that came before it.  Even though it wasn’t a bad story it was just stuff we have seen before and done better than in this trilogy.  What was also troubling was the way Bill was written.  I really do not think that she would of grabbed a gun and shoot the Doctor.  That was so out of character for her that it did not seem believable to me.

So in all this trilogy was a bit too long and not all that good but not all that bad but just didn’t live up to the quality of stories that have already been aired this series.