Doctor Who 10: 7 Big Questions About The Pyramid At The End Of The World

1. Why Has The Doctor Forgotten About Missy?

Michelle Gomez as Missy in Doctor Who
BBC Studios

Perhaps the biggest mystery of all given how Extremis ended is the Doctor’s total blanking of Missy. Last week, stood outside the vault, he confessed his blindness to Missy, suggesting that he needed her help in saving the Earth from the Monks. The Doctor was up for the fight, but this week, he’s locked himself away in his TARDIS, reverting to his guitar playing contemplative state as he foreshadows his own death and pontificates about the end of the world.

The Doctor is hardly given a choice about leaving Missy behind in the vault. She’s still a secret as far as everybody else except Nardole are concerned, and his TARDIS is forcibly extracted from his office (this time the windows are removed). Given Nardole’s insistence that the Doctor keep his promise, he can hardly give a presidential order to his cyborg friend to go and fetch her. But it’s odd that the Doctor doesn’t even mention Missy, especially when he’s trapped inside the lab.

It's possible that like Bill, the Doctor is caught between protecting the Earth and his Time Lord friend, but it would have been helpful to have had this confirmed by a line or two. As it stands, whilst locked in the vault, Missy remains the one person on the planet unknown to the monks and without doubt this will have a major bearing on how the situation is resolved in The Lie of the Land.

Missy returns in style next week in what promises to be another mind-bender with the trailer suggesting that the Doctor is now working for the monks. The edited highlights imply that with Nardole’s help, Bill lets Missy out of the vault and is then instructed to shoot the Doctor to restore the messed up timeline. Will Missy really keep her own promise to be good? Or is this all a set up to get her out of the vault in the first place? Next week, all will be revealed.

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Paul Driscoll is a freelance writer and author across a range of subjects from Cult TV to religion and social policy. He is a passionate Doctor Who fan and January 2017 will see the publication of his first extended study of the series (based on Toby Whithouse's series six episode, The God Complex) in the critically acclaimed Black Archive range by Obverse Books. He is a regular writer for the fan site Doctor Who Worldwide and has contributed several essays to Watching Books' You and Who range. Recently he has branched out into fiction writing, with two short stories in the charity Doctor Who anthology Seasons of War (Chinbeard Books). Paul's work will also feature in the forthcoming Iris Wildthyme collection (A Clockwork Iris, Obverse Books) and Chinbeard Books' collection of drabbles, A Time Lord for Change.