Extremis

A mysterious book, the Veritas, holds an essential, terrifying truth. The only trouble is, everyone who reads it takes the secret to their grave…

PREVIEW BY BENJAMIN COOK

WARNING: Spoilers

‘The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms – he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.’

Richard Hofstadter (Harper’s Magazine), November 1964

“A long time ago, a thing happened,” explained the Doctor, in Smile. “As a result of the thing, I made a promise. As a result of the promise, I have to stay on Earth.”

“Guarding a vault?” asked Bill.

“Guarding a vault.”

Hm. You remember the Vault, don’t you? Hidden beneath St Luke’s? The university named after Luke the Evangelist, patron saint of doctors and artists, brewers and butchers? (Go on, search that for clues!) In Extremis, we get to find out what’s in the Vault – and you might not believe your eyes…

“It’s the absolute classic mystery, isn’t it? It’s the locked door,” says the writer of Extremis, Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat, who’s known for plotting intricate, twisty-turny puzzle-box thrillers – riddles wrapped in mysteries inside enigmas crammed into Gallifreyan confession dials – and yet this most tantalising of conundrums goes back to basics. “It’s the simplest thing I could do – the Doctor’s got a locked door – but it’s instantly fascinating. I mean, you’d only have to be staying in someone’s house for a while and realise that one of the doors is locked to become impossibly curious about what’s in there.

That’s human nature. There is something perfectly fascinating about a locked door. And we don’t have to wait a whole 12 episodes to find out what’s in there, which I think is important, or you’d go mad.”

Following the cataclysmic conclusion to Jamie Mathieson’s outer-space nail-biter Oxygen, Extremis brings us back down to Earth and kicks off what DWM is loosely calling ‘the Monk trilogy’: three episodes in which the planet is plundered by corpse-like creatures with desiccated, skeletal faces, withered, claw-like hands, and burgundy threads.

Missy’s back!

Imagine if a Silent had died while cosplaying as a member of the Sibylline Sisterhood, then was left to decay for a while, then was brought back to life – if you could call it that – just in time for Judgment Day. That’s a Monk.

“I was looking for something big in the middle of the series,” explains Steven.

“This was my last chance to see how far you can bend this show before it breaks.” STEVEN MOFFAT, WRITER

“That middle-ofthe- series bit can sag and you want something to hold it up, so I was trying to think of some mad, interesting plot arc. At one point, I had a ridiculous idea that we could blow up Earth – which is very exciting, but then you realise that you really don’t have a planet from that point on. And Chris [Chibnall, who’s taking over as showrunner from the 2018 series] would have been tremendously cross! So I decided not to blow up planet Earth…

“Then several things happened: Toby [Whithouse, writer of Episode 8, The Lie of the Land] wanted to do a story about a sort of Nineteen-Eighty-Four-like oppressive regime, Peter [Harness, co-writer – with Steven – of Episode 7, The Pyramid at the End of the World] wanted to do a story about Kung Fu Monks [which isn’t quite how Episode 7 ended up; see preview pages 28-29], and Jamie was scripting a story in which the Doctor was [Snip! – Spoiler Ed]. As I was working on these stories, I thought that we could actually get a kind of four-episode arc out of that. I’d not call this a four-parter, or even a three-parter, because they’re not, really. They’re all still separate stories. But I thought we’d have a nice little ‘To Be Continued’ run in the middle of the series…”