Caution: There Are Spoilers In Our Doctor Who Extremis Review
Extremis is the sixth episode of the tenth series of Doctor Who. In this episode The Doctor is contacted by the Pope of the Catholic church to take a look at a book known as ‘The Veritas”. It’s a strange book the Pope says, anyone who has ever translated it has gone made and killed themselves after reading it. Both scientists and religious people have taken a look at it, what could it possibly say? The Doctor becomes intrigued and it is up to him and his team to investigate.
This episode was an interesting one. Continuing on from the last episode, Oxygen. The Doctor is still blind. Being blind I felt that the creators needed to slow a lot of things down. As a result this episode is a lot more slower paced than the others before. As an audience member I actually liked the slower pace for the episode. Being much slower, we were able to be drawn into the mystery of the Veritas book much more and the monsters around the Vatican had a certain mystery to them as well.
There was also a bit of jumping back and forth to The Doctor’s past with Missy. Missy was captured by The Timelords and for some reason The Doctor was chosen as the one to execute her. Of course The Doctor couldn’t do such a thing to his friend and he keeps her alive and must do so for 1,000 years. This explains what he is doing when he’s there guarding that big mysterious device we’ve been shown all season. Although since I heard the knocking a few episodes ago, I had strong suspicions it was The Master in there all along.
I found the scenes with Missy interesting. There’s a lot here in this episode for The Doctor and Missy to develop their characters and their relationships. As a long time villain The Master hasn’t had much development really, I do wonder what they will do with this character in the future. Especially since The Doctor has shown a lot of mercy to Missy here.
By the time this episode ends we discover what’s going on with the strange book and why people were killing themselves. It was all some type of video game. None of it was even real. I do wonder though who set this really advanced game up? Could it be Missy who did it? Or someone else? I guess we’ll soon find out as it looks like this episode is 1 of 2 parts. Let’s see what happens next week. But overall this was an interesting one.
