#no lie I bought this episode on iTunes specifically because of this scene

[script101]

Worst Case Scenario (or "One by one I've watched illusions shattered")

THERE ARE NO SPOILERS. I HAVEN’T EVEN SEEN THE TRAILER. I shouldn’t have put the next episode’s title in the header. That was idiotic. I’m sorry.

I really was going to write off “Lie of the Land” as an aberration.

I got a refund from iTunes (a surprise!) no questions asked.

Twelve has been my favorite Doctor.

I had thoroughly enjoyed every episode until “Lie”. Even though I hadn’t bought “Knock Knock” I didn’t dislike it.

I thought “Extremis” was brilliant.

I liked Pyramid and expected that the problems others had noted in it would be plot points that would have been addressed and resolved in part three. For example, “they needed to be loved” but they clearly weren’t. No problem. They just took that emotion and laundered it towards themselves. The combination lock that didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen, had no indentations for numbers and no Braille markings? No problem. It was a trap. They were intentionally trying to catch a Time Lord. The monks had set a “vanity trap” and Twelve walked right into it. The lock? “Perception filter” The implausibly of the sonic NOT simply opening the door? No problem. See above: it was a trap specifically designed for Twelve. The reason the earth was at its weakest at that particular moment? Duh! It’s protector was afraid to tell anyone he was blind and was still in completely denial of his injury. That would have been moving. Having Bill or Nardole call him out on his inability to trust others and ask why? Cut to the final scene of him and Missy in the prison vault.

Easy peasy.

BUT Toby Whithouse instead wrote intellectually and viscerally offensive garbage.

No problem, as I said, just pretend it never happened.

EXCEPT NOW I CAN’T.

TWELVE’S ABUSE AND MANIPULATION OF BILL IN “LIE” IS CLEARLY A DIRECT PARALLEL TO THE MASTER’S ABUSE AND MANIPULATION OF BILL IN “WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME”

And the events of the last episode are central to the events in the one airing this weekend.

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I just read Whovian Feminism’s review of “Lie of the Land”.

I disagree with most of it.

I DO blame the writer, Toby Whithouse. Why? Because if you need non-stop narration from multiple characters, your script sucks. There’s no way around it. If you are writing human characters and those humans do not act or react like humans, your script sucks.

I maintain that the director, Wayne Yip, made every wrong choice possible. Did ya’ not palpably feel the tension caused by the janitor waving the gun around “World Enough and Time” as opposed to the gun being aimed in “Lie” when we KNEW that we were in the room where the “regeneration from the preseason promos” was going to happen?

I am glad that Whovian Feminism noted the cruelty of Twelve intentionally making Bill shoot him, but I’m disappointed that they let the character (and the writer) off so easily.

I had been using the word “Evil” since the Doctor is an imaginary alien from an imaginary planet. I wasn’t keen to “diagnose” him as a psychopath since I have no idea if this fictional species has an orbital prefrontal cortex.

But, since budget means the inhabitants of Earth and the inhabitants of Gallifrey look exactly the same, and since “kin selection” is a real phenomena that (among other things) causes people to feel naturally inclined to protect those who look similar to them, and since Robert Hare has described psychopaths “interspecies predators” who are lacking the moral compass that all but DEFINES humanity, I’m not saying “Evil” anymore.

Maybe Twelve suffered brain damage in “Oxygen”, maybe not, but as of “Lie of the Land” and every episode that followed, Twelve has been a psychopath.

Twelve is no better than the master.

(You might want an “air sickness bag” handy. I’m not kidding.)

I really was going to drop this and just pretend “Lie of the Land” never happened, I WANTED to, but “World Enough and Time” has made it impossible, because the way the Doctor cruelly manipulated Bill for his own comfort and lolz after insinuating himself into her life as a parental figure is directly paralleled with how the Master cruelly manipulated Bill for his own usage and lolz after insinuating himself into her life as a parental figure.

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It truly is remarkable how “Lie” managed to push every button it could have pushed.

I’m against the death penalty (I’m sure that was obvious) in all but one instance: treason.

I refuse to give them credit for the reference they were trying to make, but since The Doctor had been given the (laughably absurd) status of “President” of the earth, he was guilty of High Treason (pffft I’d have to make up a term to accurately describe the extent of what he did while under absolutely no duress!).

Twelve specifically had accepted the title of President, and he had accepted the responsibility of protecting the earth. Twelve did not just fail to protect the humans he had agreed to protect for SIX FULL MONTHS (and there was no hint at any mitigating motive despite non-stop narration; awful writing), Twelve actively aided and abetted a malevolent occupation of the planet.

Gaslighting is not funny.

No person should be toyed with to force them into the horrible corner of being judge, jury, and executioner. But this is what Twelve did to Bill. This was his INTENT. “Designed and directed”. Intentionally.

(And yes, Bill was indeed Twelve’s toy in a game for the lolz. We saw the laughing and were explicitly told it was a test. Compare and contrast with the Master’s treatment of Bill in “World Enough and Time”. The only difference is that Twelve is given a free pass for his sin.

Consider the circumstances. Bill had endured six months of extreme emotional duress, we saw she was so far over the edge that she was able to turn on waking daytime hallucinations of her mother with less effort than required to turn on a light, she was the victim of active gas lighting by Twelve because of his propaganda commercials, and this ALL culminated in her being terrorized with the promise of betrayal by Twelve in the white office (he called for armed guards the moment she entered, he pretended to phone the nightmarish monks, and he announced to the room that she was trying to speak to him in code). Each act was terrorizing. Each act was a betrayal. Each act was a knife in the heart that we saw vaporized in “World Enough and Time.”

Because of this, because of the extreme emotional duress Twelve inflicted upon her for absolutely no reason at all, Bill is, in my eyes, NOT guilty of the 1st Degree Murder she believed she was committing. He had committed unthinkable treason, intended to continue his treason, and she knew he could erase people’s memories and that the monks were brainwashing people. She was forced to shoot to kill. Twelve WANTED HER TO. For the lolz.

That crap was inexcusable! Ya know what else was inexcusable? The fact that everything individually and combined was horrifically traumatic but Whithouse’s lazy script couldn’t be bothered to address this.

By giving Twelve a free pass, by having him not recognize and apologize profusely for the psychological torture he inflicted on Bill by manipulating her to serve his own ends in “Lie”, Whithouse made Twelve no better than the Master when he in turn manipulated Bill to serve his own ends in “World Enough”. They would have remained directly related, but Toby Whithouse’s shitty script and Wayne Yip’s shitty directing had the gall to simply try to PRETEND that aiming a gun at someone you love and shooting that person FOUR ::coughFOURcough:: times with the intent to kill that person wouldn’t be deeply traumatizing.

Bill should have had a meltdown. A male character would have had a meltdown too. Because that is what a normal human reaction would be after willfully murdering someone they had loved.

Instead they showed Bill get angry at Nardole (nope, sorry: the audience was explicitly told in “Smile” that “dry brains” thought differently than “wet brains”).

Whithouse lazily tried to distract viewers from the fallout of The Doctor’s disgusting abuse and manipulation Bill with a cheap joke (oh my! Swearing! On my tv machine! How fucking shocking! Oh my, I feel the vapors coming on! Where oh where is my fainting couch?)

Immediately after Bill shot him, she should have had a breakdown.

Before anyone says that I hit the nail on the head and maybe that is the reason for the title of the next episode: yes, maybe we WERE supposed to see a parallel between the despicable actions of the Doctor and the despicable actions of the Master, but I want to point out that THAT DOES NOT MEAN THERE IS POTENTIALLY A DRAMATIC EXCUSE FOR TWELVE TO HAVE NOT CORRECTLY REALIZED THAT THE SPECIFIC DETAILS OF WHAT HE HAD ORCHESTRATED IN THAT ROOM WERE HORRIFICALLY CRUEL AND WRONG….

•while ALSO failing to realize that it was part of a larger pattern of behavior. •while STILL having Twelve not grasp that everything that happened was his fault (how about: The earth was at its weakest at that moment because its alien hero who promised to protect it was too scared to tell anyone he was blind?). •Twelve could have realized IN THE WHITE OFFICE how badly he had hurt Bill while STILL arrogantly claiming personal credit for what Bill did at the end of “Lie” that drowned out the Monks brainwashing. •Twelve could have been completely genuinely sorry for terrorizing Bill in the White Room, could have painfully regretted it, and then STILL made the mistake of hounding Bill and Nardole into the idiotic “Test” of Missy that (appears to have) destroyed Bill.

Indeed, if Twelve HAD been horrified by how terribly he had hurt Bill in “Lie”, if had truly regretted what he had done and apologized and reassured he that she had done nothing wrong (even without recognizing the larger picture of his own arrogance and recklessness), “World Enough and Time” would have worked BETTER. Why? Because without an apology and sincere regret from Twelve after he goading her into firing that gun with the intent to kill him, there is currently no plausible reason why any human would ever trust, let alone be anywhere near, The Doctor again. Male or female, THERE IS NO HUMAN WHO WOULD EVER TRUST HIM AGAIN.

Why does Bill still trust or even still care about the Doctor? Why isn’t she flat out terrified of him? There is no human who wouldn’t have gone home to their foster mom, said, “you were right about that professor”, packed their bags, and attempted to get as far away from him as possible. If her foster mom did as any one would and attempted to go to the University to scream at him and demand to know what he did to frighten her foster daughter so terribly, Bill would only need to say WHAT SHE HAS KNOWN since “Thin Ice”: THE DOCTOR HAS KILLED PEOPLE.

Without Twelve sincerely apologizing for what he did in “Lie” PLEASE explain, in terms of plausible human behavior, why Bill is still spending time with The Doctor?

The ONLY REASON SHE WENT ALONG FOR MISSY’S “TEST” WAS BECAUSE SHE CARED ABOUT TWELVE.

THE ONLY REASON BILL CARED ABOUT TWELVE IS BECAUSE SHE TRUSTED HIM MORE THAN SHE TRUSTED HER OWN INTUITION THAT THIS TEST WAS A BAD IDEA.

For “World Enough and Time” to be plausible without pretending “Lie of the Land” never happened, we needed an apology that was never given.

“Lie of the Land” was shit. The script was shit. The directing was shit. The premise was shit. The episode was shit.

And having seen “World Enough and Time”, I now believe “Lie of the Land” wasn’t simply a bad episode that I can forget and ignore, it was poorly executed deliberate foreshadowing.

Deliberate foreshadowing that unfortunately has no plausible human motivation allowing it to ring true.

Twelve is a psychopath. He crossed The Moral Event Horizon and I can’t just pretend it never happened.

Twelve was my favorite by a mile. Now? I’m disgusted.

It IS possible for them to write themselves out of the 6 foot hole they dug for this character and the entire show. But if I can’t simply write off “Lie of the Land” as no more than a lousy episode with a crappy script that was directed with less artistry than a cell phone video??? All I can say is that Steven Moffat and Rachel Talalay will have needed to have written and directed something capable of fixing this in 50 minutes minus opening and closing music. They will need to have written something far better than I can imagine.

It’s possible.

I hope that they can salvage this. Honestly and with tremendous sadness. I really really do.