Doctor Who Series 10 Episode 9: 7 Big Questions After 'Empress Of Mars'

3. Is Bill Right About The Doctor's Taste In Movies?

Bill is such a delightful character, and one of her most charming and realistic qualities is that she is a bit of a film buff. Mark Gatiss really goes to town on Bill’s love of the movies and it works brilliantly. She suggests the Doctor would love The Terminator because of the killer robots and he concurs, adding it to his watch list.

If we doubted that the Doctor might enjoy a bit of horror, then we only need to replay the ending to Knock Knock. He has a glint in his eye when he tells Missy that in his latest adventure people got eaten. But Bill’s next example nonetheless does seem a bit harsh. Would the Doctor really like The Thing because everybody dies?

In his brief but critically acclaimed spell as the Doctor, one of Christopher Eccleston most memorable scenes is the end of The Doctor Dances when he is absolutely ecstatic that ‘this time, everybody lives’. His smile of unbridled joy couldn’t be more different from the Twelfth Doctor’s disturbing grins in series 10 (and we saw another example with the countdown at the beginning of this episode).

The Doctor later confesses that his problem is that he thinks like a warrior, an admission that seems strange given that the Doctor had to take the poisoned chalice of the Sisterhood of Karn to become the War Doctor and that he’d regretted it ever since. He doesn’t say that he’ll add The Thing to his watch list, but the signs are that he would. Might this be a little clue as to what could be wrong with the Doctor? If not, then the fact that he knows about the Disney Movie Frozen, whilst a fun gag, doesn’t sound like him at all!