Doctor Who Series 10: 10 Biggest WTF Moments
7. Nardole Realises He Isn't Real
Extremis was all just swimming along nicely: an Indiana Jones meets The DaVinci Code type of adventure story, until Steven Moffat pulled the rug from under our feet with one of the biggest twists of series 10. We were already reeling from the shock revelation that Nardy plays Grand Theft Auto in his spare time when we discovered that he was part of a very different game.
That moment when Nardole realised that he wasn’t real and was pixelated away, completely changed the goalposts and forced us to re-evaluate everything that had gone before. Was Bill real? Was the Doctor real? Was the Pope real? We quickly learnt that virtually the entire episode (minus the Missy flashbacks) was part of a computer simulation.
The Monks trilogy in the end told us very little about the monks themselves. Instead it was all about how human beings cope when our version of reality is challenged. We were forced in turn to question the reality of the present, our assumptions about the future – specifically how it will all end, and finally the past as mediated by the media and the history writers. Each episode took inspiration from popular films and books – here it was the Matrix and Inception, the next week it would be Armageddon and finally in Toby Whithouse’s concluding chapter, Nineteen-Eighty-Four.