'World Enough and Time' (Story Code 10.11) by Steven Moffat

“This was a good place once. Hundreds of years ago when the settlers first came here. But this ship is old. Everything is dying. Our world is rust, our air is engine fumes. So we must evolve to survive. But evolution is not fast enough. The special patients, they are strong. Soon we will all be upgraded like them.” – Mr Razor

The TARDIS materialises on an icy landscape. The Doctor emerges and falls to his knees, his body glowing with energy as his next regeneration begins…

Earlier, the TARDIS lands inside the control room of a massive, cylindrical spaceship four-hundred miles long and one-hundred miles wide, trapped in the gravity well of a black hole. Out of the ship steps Missy, with the announcement that she is called ‘Doctor Who’, followed by her two ‘plucky assistants’, Bill and Nardole, neither of whom appear happy with their mission to answer the vessel’s distress call. Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor monitors his friends’ progress, passing comment over earpiece-comms as they deduce where they are, all part of a test of Missy’s rehabilitation and reliability. After an alarm sounds the trio meet a blue man named Jori, clearly terrified and brandishing a gun; his terror increases when he detects the arrival of the ship’s super-fast inertia lifts, an imminent threat he blames on Bill as the only human in the party. When Jori aims his gun on Bill the Doctor leaves the TARDIS to talk him down – but the man shoots Bill point-blank, leaving a huge, cauterised hole through her chest…

The past: the Doctor tells Bill his plan to test Missy by picking a good distress call for her to help out with. Despite Bill’s protestations, the Doctor won’t give up on Missy, as both a fellow Time Lord and also his first friend. Bill reluctantly agrees to the Doctor’s rash decision, telling him to try not to get her killed…

Back aboard the ship, the Doctor and Nardole watch helplessly as the mortally-wounded Bill falls to the floor. The lifts’ doors open to reveal shambling figures dressed in hospital gowns, their faces covered by blank cloth, hands dragging portable drip-feeds alongside them. While two figures bundle Bill onto a gurney, one creature uses a voice synthesiser to advise that they are taking Bill away to be repaired. As the lifts depart, the Doctor projects a message into Bill’s subconscious, telling her to wait for him; he then turns to Jori the janitor, who explains that the ship is only two days out on its journey to pick up colonists, but got caught by the black hole; although there should only be a skeleton crew of fifty, the ship is somehow now teeming with thousands of life signs. Learning that a team of twenty was sent to the bottom of the ship to reverse the rear engines, the Doctor realises that the vessel has not been boarded…

Bill wakes to find herself lying on a hospital bed, watched over by a surgeon; he talks of ‘partial conversion’ and then sends Bill back to sleep. Waking two days later, Bill glimpses a scruffy man with long hair and beard, who quickly runs away. Struggling to rise Bill feels under her gown, where a chest unit now covers her wound; she then sees a vision of the Doctor, with his message to wait for him. Hearing a voice crying out the word “pain”, Bill gets up and grabs her drip-feed stand, wheeling it out into the corridor to investigate. At one end of the corridor is the ‘Conversion Theatre’, on either side are rooms labelled ‘In’ and ‘Out’; the former is full of motionless, bed-ridden forms, while the latter contains more patients with cloth faces, all sitting pathetically in wheelchairs. One patient repeatedly presses a button to register its pain, but before Bill can help she is forced to hide from the arrival of a large Nurse; the woman is accompanied by the scruffy man, Mr Razor, who notices Bill’s hiding place, but doesn’t give her up. Once they have left to continue their rounds, Bill turns up the volume on another patient’s speaker and hears a plaintive plea to kill it. Looking out the ward’s window, Bill sees a smog-laden, decrepit city, its metal sky labelled ‘1056’; Bill fails to notice as one of the patients reaches out to grab her, but she is saved by Mr Razor, who knocks out the creature and then invites Bill to tea. Following the man to his room, Bill sees a CCTV screen showing a frozen image of the Doctor, Nardole, Missy and Jori. Over tea Mr Razor explains that Bill has been given a new heart, and that she has been in the hospital for months; Mr Razor also explains that the television image is not frozen – time at the bottom of the ship passes faster that at the top, due to the effects of the black hole’s gravity…

In the time it takes the Doctor to explain the time disparity to Nardole, Missy and Jori, Bill gets a job working for Mr Razor as the hospital cleaner. As the months pass she and the caretaker spend time sharing meals and watching the group on the bridge as they move infinitesimally slowly. During her duties Bill keeps seeing the vision of the Doctor, and wonders just how many years she will have to wait for him…

As the Doctor concludes his explanation with the revelation that the spurious life forms are the descendants of the repair team, Mr Razor finally takes Bill outside to show her the city on their lower level of the ship. The people living in the decaying buildings and squalid streets are sick and dying from industrial pollution, and the only way for them to survive is to take the conversion process offered by the hospital. As more and more people are transformed into the shambling patients, the time until ‘Operation Exodus’ gets closer, when the lower population will rise up through the ship and take command. Mr Razor tells Bill that an expedition to the largest solar farm on level 507 was made years before, but no-one ever returned. Before they can stay out too long in the city, Bill’s chest unit malfunctions, forcing her back to the safety of the hospital…

Using Venusian Aikido, the Doctor overpowers Jori; unable to accurately pilot the TARDIS this close to a black hole, the Doctor, Nardole and Missy take the lift so they can rescue Bill. Their progress is watched by Bill on Mr Razor’s television; hoping for rescue, she uses a hug to elicit the location of the lift from her friend. When night falls, Bill follows a burglar mask-wearing Mr Razor as they sneak into the Operating Theatre, where they find the motionless bodies of work-in-progress patients. To Bill’s horror they are confronted by the Surgeon and Nurse, who thank Mr Razor for bringing their patient to them. As a protesting Bill is held fast by two of the patients, the Surgeon shows her the special headpiece that will stop her caring about the pain from her full conversion…

The lift takes the Doctor, Nardole and Missy to the lower floor of the ship. While the Doctor and Nardole set off to search for Bill, Missy remains behind to extract data from a computer terminal; she is soon found by Mr Razor, who has been looking forward to meeting her, and insists that she has been on the ship before, even though she has no memory of it. Scanning the vessel’s records, Missy discovers that it is not from Earth – it is from its twin planet, Mondas. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Nardole find the Operating Theatre, now empty apart from the bodies of discarded patients; then a door opens to reveal a towering figure clad in silver cloth and metal: a Mondasian Cyberman! Missy tries warning the Doctor, but Mr Razor pulls a gun on her; he then takes great pleasure in removing his mask, to reveal the goatee-bearded features of Missy’s former incarnation: the Master! With the Cyberman advancing on him and Nardole, the Doctor asks for the creature’s help in locating Bill via its neural network – and to his horror the silver giant announces that it is Bill Potts. Then Missy arrives with the Master, and together they gleefully announce that Operation Exodus has become the genesis of the Cybermen…


Peter Capaldi (The Doctor), Pearl Mackie (Bill Potts), Matt Lucas (Nardole), Michelle Gomez (Missy), John Simm (Mr Razor / The Master), Oliver Lansley (Jorj), Paul Brightwell (Surgeon), Alison Lintott (Nurse), Nicholas Briggs (Voice of the Cybermen)

Directed by Rachel Talalay
Produced by Peter Bennett
Executive Producers Steven Moffat and Brian Minchin
A BBC Wales production

TX (BBC 1 & BBC 1 HD):
24th June 2017 @ 6.45 pm


Notes:
*Featuring the Twelfth Doctor, Bill and Nardole

*Part one of a two-part story