This is what Pearl Mackie was hired for. If ever there was, save for some of the Doctor-lite episodes from years past, an episode upon which the companion was the fulcrum for everything going on it is The Lie of the Land. And man-o-man did she deliver.
From morose to angry to terrified all the way to the bravery shown when taking on the burden of freeing the world at the end Mackie was ‘there’ for all of it. Of course there are echoes of Last of the Time Lords in some of the situations, and as a rule we here at the Tour hate big fake-out moments like the faux-regeneration (it didn’t work in Journey’s End, doesn’t work here, nor did the ‘companion leaving but not leaving’ scene from The Sontaran Stratagem)–they’re all needlessly manipulative and we hope that it does not lessen the impact when Capaldi really does go at Christmas.
Putting that aside, The Lie of the Land serviceably wraps the loosely-chained Monk trilogy. Remember it more for Mackie’s towering performance than anything else.
Images and caps for The Lie of the Land are now online.
