“World Enough and Time” is episode eleven of season ten of the new Doctor Who.
In the previous episode, “The Eaters of Light”, it turned out that the Doctor wasn’t in a rush to get back to guarding Missy in the Vault – because he had taken her with them in the TARDIS. He also suggested that Missy might be finally changing (after however long she was locked in the Vault; she was supposed to be there for a thousand years, but that time hasn’t passed yet), allowing them to be friends again. Is this true? Or is Missy dissembling?
This episode opens with the TARDIS materialising in a frozen wasteland. The Doctor stumbles out of it, glowing with regeneration energy. He doesn’t seem happy about this.
Next we see a large spacecraft of some description. It appears to be maintaining a stable distance from some sort of vortex; perhaps a black hole. Then the TARDIS materialises inside the control room. Missy steps out of it and announces that she’s Doctor Who, and has two plucky assistants, Thing 1 and The Other One (Bill and Nardole). She states that they picked up a distress call and then a warning siren goes off. All three of them have things in their ears – as it turns out, communicators, and the Doctor is on the other end of them. Missy is trying to guess what the Doctor calls the other two – friends, is what Bill says. Missy says that Time Lords can be friends with each other; everything else is cradle snatching.
According to Nardole, the ship – a colony ship – is 400 miles long and 100 wide. Pretty big in other words. And yes, the ship is close to a black hole. It’s not heading towards it any longer, but is reversing away from it very, very slowly. Someone else activates a communications device and says that they are coming to see them. Missy is pretending to be the Doctor – really, really badly – and she doesn’t really see the point. According to the Doctor, this is ma test. According to Missy, the Doctor’s real name is Doctor Who. According to the Doctor, Missy is teasing Bill. The ship apparently had a single pilot – but it’s not designed for one pilot.
The man they spoke to on the communicator – who is blue (Nardole likes blue) runs in, and says something is coming for them in the lifts. They’re coming for Bill, because Bill is the only human, and what’s coming takes humans away. The blue man wants to kill Bill (!). The Doctor tries to talk him out of it, but he shoots a huge hole in Bill’s chest.
It then apparently goes back to Earth, where the Doctor is proposing to test Missy, to see how she does. Bill is not impressed. The Doctor wants to help Missy because she’s his oldest friend in the universe. And similar to him. The Doctor gets emotional; Nardole takes a selfie with him. The Doctor reveals some of his past with Missy to Bill. The whole thing about Missy being a man back then crops up; the Doctor says that his people are beyond gender. Bill points out that they are called Time Lords. The Doctor really wants Missy to have changed. Bill is scared of Missy though.
Back on the ship, things are coming out of the lifts. Human-shaped but not walking right and using electronics to communicate, sounding rather mechanical as they do. Their figures and faces are hidden. They say they are going to repair Bill, but they won’t bring her back. The blue man doesn’t know what the things are; the ship is brand new, still waiting for the colonists, with only 50 crew, yet there are now thousands of life forms that just appeared. Some of the crew went to the rear of the ship to check the engines, and were never seen again. The Doctor figures it out – and the viewer can figure it out as well, if they know anything about how a massive gravity well affects the space-time continuum.
Bill is in a rather weird hospital, with more of the strange figures, and some more human-appearing ones. Something has been done to her chest. Perhaps something to fix the hole, but what? As Bill is being told what is happening in the hospital, the Doctor is explaining it at the top of the ship.
What the strange, humanlike things are isn’t revealed until near the end – or in the trailer and whilst the episode was introduced. Finally, something that hasn’t been heard of in the new series – or from a long time in the classic series – crops up again, and there’s a face from the past of the new series as well.
A cliff-hanger ending which continues in the season finale, “The Doctor Falls”.