Doctor Who 10: 7 Big Questions About The Pyramid At The End Of The World
4. Why Doesn't Bill Realise The Doctor Is Blind?
Pearl Mackie’s outstanding performances as new companion Bill
Potts have been the highlight of series 10 so far. She’s a wonderful mix of naivety
and nerve. Every week she encounters something else to be afraid of, and yet
she is not prepared to be treated like a second class citizen and mothered by
the overly protective Nardole. But there’s something quite unsatisfying about
her failure to spot the Doctor’s blindness. She can very quickly get under his
skin, noting for example how the form of the TARDIS reflects his need to be a
saviour figure, and yet she’s missing the glaringly obvious.
This isn’t the first time Bill has come across as surprisingly dumb. Despite getting top marks in her Quantum Physics essays, her simulant had never heard of CERN. With Clara Oswald wrongly being criticised by some fans for being too clever, these little quirks are perhaps a deliberate counterbalance, but they are entirely unnecessary, and in the case of the Doctor’s blindness they lose all credibility.
This week she is even standing with Nardole while he tells the Doctor that a door has opened up in the pyramid in front of him, yet still she doesn’t put two and two together. In the original script of Oxygen the Doctor was to get his sight back by the end of the story, but Moffat was rather taken with the notion of his disability and decided to use in in the next two adventures. It worked well last week, but falls apart in this episode.
Not only does Bill have to be made to look unnecessarily dumb, but the laboratory has to have a key mechanism that resembles a children’s toy or an old fashioned bike-lock instead of the more believable touch pad (which the Doctor would be able to operate based on the position of the numbers).