Big bad Bill shot the Doctor – but thankfully she was firing blanks. Yes, The Monks Trilogy concluded with post-apocalyptic adventure The Lie of the Land.

That early regeneration was fake after all

There have been online rumours and fan rumblings that the scary-eyebrowed Twelfth Doctor (Peter Capaldi) might pull the rug out from under us by regenerating before the Christmas special – but the ever-wily Time Lord fooled us all.

Cast adrift on a prison ship, our newly-sighted hero seemed to have joined the meddling Monks and be doing their dirty work by fronting Big Brother-esque propaganda videos, brainwashing the planet’s population into believing that the red-robed zombies had been babysitting us throughout human history – a neat chance for the BBC to raid the archives, make some Zelig-like insertions and thrill fans with glimpses of the Daleks, Cybermen and Weeping Angels (aptly, blink and you’d miss them).

When companion Bill Potts (Pearl Mackie) finally tracked down the Doctor, she was so broken-hearted by his betrayal that she shot him not once but four times. Cue the Doctor stumbling and doing the traditional staring-at-his-glowing-hands thing – except it was all a ruse to check that Bill wasn’t working for the Monks either. “Good girl!” exclaimed the delighted Doc, who smiled more during this episode than we’re used to seeing. Capaldi’s teeth got some serious screen time.

Yes, the bullets were blanks and the regeneration was fake (“Too much?” he asked Nardole, who replied that it was “A nice touch”). The Doctor was manipulating the Monks, not the other way round. Phew. Now that “the band was back together”, they could get on with the serious business of saving the planet.

Love saved the day and defeated the Monks

This was an old-fashioned alien invasion tale, with the world enslaved and humanity in deadly danger. Six months after the events of The Pyramid at the End of the World, the Monks were in complete control of Earth, resulting in a chilling dystopia reminiscent of 2008 episode Turn Left.

However, the Monks themselves were seen fairly fleetingly in this episode and didn’t put up much resistance before fleeing back to… well, wherever they came from. Their defeat felt a tad too easy, falling back on that fix-all sci-fi trope of alien villains getting vanquished by human sentimentality. For me, a not-quite-satisfying conclusion to this three-episode story. Mawkish rather than Monkish.

We knew Bill’s mum would prove significant

Bill’s memory of the mother she never met has been a bittersweet recurring motif all series and now we saw why. She began by dredging up a vision of her mother, even sharing a cup of tea with her spirit (Bill’s all about the cosy tea-for-two chats), to help hang onto her memories amid the Monk’s psychic trickery.

Indeed, Bill was the anchor of this story: narrating as the sole voice of sanity, resisting the Monks’ regime, tracking down the Doctor and ultimately beating the Monks in a battle of the brains. Plugging herself into their psychic network, the purity and power of Bill’s memories meant the Monks couldn’t compete. As her reward, Bill even got to hear her mother calling her name for the first time.

Pearl Mackie put in another marvellous performance here: authentic but controlled, never histrionic, equally convincing whether she was threatening to “beat the s–t” out of Nardole or saying a fond farewell when she thought she was sacrificing herself.

“You clever, brilliant, ridiculous girl!” declared the Doctor, later adding: “Amongst 7 billion people on this planet, there’s one like you. That’s why I put up with the rest of them.” Aww. Now she’s just got to write that overdue 3000-word essay about free will. Typical lazy student.

No fava beans or a nice Chianti for Missy

This was another modest but scene-stealing supporting turn from Missy (Michelle Gomez), still imprisoned at the university and here acting as a sort of Hannibal Lecter figure – advising the Tardis trio on how to defeat the Monks, while making her own demands: “New boots, some toys like a particle accelerator, a 3D printer and a pony.”

“The other last of the Time Lords” came face-to-face with Bill for the first time and the companion was amusingly unimpressed, giving some side-eye to the Doctor: “Why have you got a woman in a vault? Even I think that’s weird and I’ve been attacked by a puddle.”

Michelle Gomez made the most of her few minutes on-screen, charismatically holding court, mixing French and Spanish phrases with American therapy-speak, boasting about how she “once built a gun out of leaves” and reminding the Doctor: “I’ve had adventures too. My whole life doesn’t revolve around you, you know.” A hint of twists to come in Missy’s storyline this series? “Going cold turkey from being bad”, she was last seen weeping about how many people she’d killed down the centuries.

Just one minor mis-step, when she threatened Bill with being “so brain-dead, you couldn’t even get on Celebrity Love Island”. Tut tut, Missy. Everyone knows it’s just called Love Island these days. In fact, the new series starts Monday on ITV2, trash fans. I wonder if Missy’s got a TV in that vault.

Political undertow to Monks’ tyranny

In the words of sparkly suited Ben Elton, “a little bit of politics there”. Scripts this series have increasingly engaged with the real world and this one was no different, with The Monks’ rule able to be read as both a religious and political allegory.

Like George Orwell’s 1984, this was a world where humanity had been essentially enslaved and was constantly spied upon, with dissenters sent to labour camps for committing “memory crimes” (as opposed to Orwell’s “thoughtcrimes”). History had been rewritten by the oppressors and there were Nazi resonances when the Doctor insisted that the Monks “bring peace and order”.

“Fundamentalism and fascism” were mentioned, before Bill sounded a departing note of optimism: “It’s a turning point. Humans have learnt they can overthrow dictators. They just have to band together.”

A witty script from Toby Whithouse

This episode was written by fan favourite Toby Whithouse – the Being Human creator’s seventh episode of New Who – and leavened its heavier themes with some typically zingy dialogue.

The Doctor name-checked the worst aspects of humanity as “racism and people who talk in cinemas”, before describing the retro tech of Sony Walkmen and cassette tapes as “stereo headphone iThingies”. We also enjoyed him collaring a random passer-by: “You with the appalling hair!”

Another knowing nod to the Hartnell era

With its references to the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan, this series has been harking back through Who history to the First Doctor – and that continued here. Notice the name of the shop where oppressed humans watched TV through the window? Magpie Electricals, first visited by William Hartnell when he needed components to repair the Tardis.

Magpie Electricals has since popped up regularly: as the label on the Doctor’s guitar amp, selling black-and-white sets in The Idiot’s Lantern and as the brand of Martha Jones, Wilfred Mott, River Song and Sarah Jane Smith’s gadgetry. A sly in-joke for both the props department and eagle-eyed Who nerds.

Nardole got smaller role but still big laughs

“It’s me! Nardy!” The Doctor’s bumbling sidekick (Matt Lucas) has grown into his role in recent weeks and continued to relish his position as class clown aboard the Tardis. Nardole was last seen unconscious after inhaling the super-bacteria and we found out he’d been “laid up for six weeks but I would’ve died if I was human”.

There were slapstick screams and sore arms from Bill’s playful punches. There was a callback to his preferred spaceship door sound from Oxygen (“Shuck-shuck, obviously”). Nardole wistfully recalled how his imaginary friend left him for someone else and proudly explained how he found a tracer gadget in the Tardis: “in a drawer with some old takeaway menus and 50 Danish kroner.”

To mean old Missy, he might be “that bald bloke who looks like an egg” but Nardole also dropped further hints about being a “secret badass”, skilled in martial arts and who won his left hand in a bet. Don’t mess with the egg man.

Ice Warriors return next week 

Now the Monks have been sent packing, next week’s episode is Empress of Mars, written by Mark Gatiss. Landing on the Red Planet, the Tardis team find themselves in the midst of an impossible war between Victorian soldiers and the Ice Warriors – those vintage reptilian monsters who haven’t been seen in the sci-fi franchise since 2013 story “Cold War”, also penned by Gatiss.

Whose side will the Doctor be on? See you back here next Saturday to figure it all out.

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Doctor Who rounded off its ‘Monk Trilogy’ with the eighth episode of the series, The Lie Of The Land.

Even as The Doctor begged her not to, Bill consented to let the evil Monks take control of Earth in return for restoring the Timelord’s vision and saving his life.

This week explored Bill’s decision and the consequences for human kind. The Doctor’s making Monk propaganda, statues are everywhere and Bill’s holding a gun in a way that looks like she might use it.

So for those of you who haven’t watched The Lie Of The Land, go no further. Spoilers lurk below…

Oh dear.

This series started so well. It was back to basics, punchy stories, awesome new companion and the Twelfth Doctor in his prime.

So it’s incredibly disheartening to have such a weak and wasteful three parter just descend into the mix. Extremis was a disjointed story that revealed most of the episode was a computer simulation. The Pyramid At The End Of The World tried its best to setup the danger of the invading Monks and play with some elements of wheels in motion and hubris but still didn’t fire on all cylinders.

So there was a lot riding on the final episode of the ‘Monk Trilogy’, the missing piece to make the previous two episodes work as a whole. And for me, it failed to deliver.

In fact, as a starved Doctor Who fan who only gets twelve episodes per year, it left me annoyed that we’ve lost a quarter of a season to this particular arc.

The central threat of The Monks is one of the biggest failings across the trilogy, but in The Lie Of The Land even more so.

They’ve simulated all of history. They’ve gotten consent from a human being to take the planet. And then what?

Their list of accomplishments in sixth months of ruling the planet is an oversized photoshopping machine, implementation of ID papers, erecting a large number of Monk statues/transmitters and apparently stopping to design a new purple uniform for their one dimensional human army.

The Monks aren’t really making the most of their new planet and it all seems like a pain in the proverbial to keep everything ticking over, let alone do something nerfarious.

With the revelation that there’s only twelve Monks on the entire planet, it all seems a little undramatic.

At least when The Master conquered the Earth, he used the population to build weapons for a new space war and The Daleks turned the planet into a giant reality bomb.

The Monks made everyone wear grey and occasionally killed a few dissenters.

Even the original conceit that they needed love to rule is washed over, especially when every human fears them when they appear.

With no back story, no actual story and hopefully no future stories, The Monks threat fails to be anything more than scene dressing.

And I’m skipping right over the fact the Monks stopped mid-escape to apparently wipe everyone’s memories of the entire affair.

To be blunt, I wish they’d do it to me as well.

So with Monk rant over, what are we left with in The Lie Of The Land?

The first third of the episode is a nonsensical fake out, which even though the episode was written by Who stalwart Toby Whithouse – I can smell Moffat ‘s twisty signature all over it.

Nardole pretends to be looking for The Doctor, reunites with Bill to find him, the pair board a prison boat to find The Doctor is now aligned with The Monks and has become some weird vlogger. Bill shoots him (several times!) for being on the wrong side and he regenerates.

Except none of that is true. It’s all one big test for Bill because… anyone? Seriously, anyone? Because Bill literally did a test with Nardole a few minutes earlier to see if he was under outside-influence and in a way that wouldn’t traumatise someone.

It’s an incredibly watchable scene, with some fantastic acting from Pearl Mackie and Peter Capaldi . His speech about joining the Monks conveys a Doctor who is tired of saving humanity as much as he is resigned to his new allegiance.

Genuinely following that idea and letting it play out would have been fascinating – far more so than a minibus of Monks.

But the audience know The Doctor hasn’t turned evil. They know The Doctor is probably faking. They certainly know that Bill isn’t going pop a cap in her mentor’s posterior and that the Doctor isn’t due for his face changing regeneration any time soon.

The incredible acting and build up is washed away mere seconds later and serves nothing to the story other than to have a cheeky regeneration snippet to pop into trailers.

Even The Doctor laughs it off.

And if The Doctor has been making plans and deprogramming a group of soldiers for six months, why does he suddenly need Missy to solve everthing?

Then finally, Missy.

Thank Omega for Missy, because it’s the only plot strand in The Lie Of The Land that makes any sense and moves us along.

The always excellent Michelle Gomez is finally getting the chance to stretch her portrayal of Missy.

Her first meeting with Bill in the Vault brings us classic, top form Missy – dangerous, a bit unhinged and an intellectual equal for The Doctor.

Her game of hot and cold with her sparring partner, mentions of pushing a small girl into a volcano and piano interludes create a Silence Of The Lambs vibe that I could watch an entire episode of.

But there’s more to Missy of late and it’s really working. Her chastisement of The Doctor’s particular brand of ‘goodness’ has a point. Lose one life to save many is ethically correct for a change and she happily calls him out for his own skewed idea of being good.

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★★ After two weeks of build-up, this loose trilogy, the mid-series Monks marathon, hobbles to an end. The truth of The Lie of the Land is that it’s disappointingly uneven; there are interesting contours and notable features but it tends towards flat. Watching it unfold, I empathise with the brainwashed masses it depicts, living half-lives, clad in drab turquoise, sucking up the big lie, struggling to remember the recent past.

It’s not so much the storyline (often playful and inventive) or the performances (the leads are knockout as per) or even the direction (adequate). It’s more the general tone (spirit-sappingly funereal), the structure (all over the place) and the lack of threat.

The invasion has happened and almost no one is aware or bothered. The odd rebel committing a “memory crime” is given a “swift and painless” death to the cheers on onlookers. So far, so Orwell. The Monks have conquered the world and, as Bill says, “gone to the trouble of changing the past”. It’s not just fake news they’re peddling, it’s fake history. They appear in cave paintings, doctored stills of Churchill and Einstein; they’ve erected statues all over the globe, and planted a pyramid base in the City of London.

But what are the Monks actually doing? It’s as if subjugation of our planet is all they desire. I was expecting more development, more depth, a revelation. But no, the Monks are just a small band of zombies and rather dull rewriters of history.

The Lie of the Land is notable for two particularly lengthy and jarring scenes. The first is the almighty hoodwink the Doctor pulls against Bill, making her believe he’s really on side with the Monks, testing whether she’s been brainwashed. Lasting more than seven minutes, it’s a dreadful scene.

It presents the Doctor, Bill and Nardole in a very poor light. It’s blocked awkwardly. The actors look uncomfortable. There’s wash of burble-musak – one of my bêtes noires – failing to breathe life into it. Moreover, it’s horribly misjudged to show Bill turning a gun on the Doctor and firing not once but four times. We’ve seen nothing that would push her to such an extreme act. It cannot be rationalised or condoned.

The Doctor then stumbles into a fake regeneration, but for whose benefit? Bill and the soldiers in the room would not know what’s going on. The Monks? Only Nardole perhaps, to whom he says, “Regeneration too much?” Frankly, yes. It’s purely to tease the TV viewer – and maybe please the BBC bods making season trailers.

The second sequence that jars is when the Doctor and Bill go out of their way to visit Missy. It exists in its own bubble. Quite superfluous. The Doctor could easily have come to the same conclusion without consulting his arch-frenemy – “the only person I know almost as smart as me… the other Last of the Time Lords”. That isn’t to say this digression isn’t hugely enjoyable. Any Missy tickles me, and Michelle Gomez interlude the scene with relish – the woman’s in her own warped sitcom.

Unsurprisingly, her vault is relatively homely, much larger on the inside and how one might envisage her Tardis. I’m genuinely intrigued by the Missy/Vault season arc. We know it will tie up somehow with the return of John Simm’s Master. But why is the Doctor detaining her? We begin to see that this could be the longest psychotherapy session in history. Her anguish at the end appears genuine – but she is the master of deviousness.

A lovely touch is that the story broadens Bill’s conversations with her long-dead mum. They have a mug of tea together as Bill opens her heart, a nifty shortcut to bring us up to speed on the past six months. She continues to speak to her mum throughout the episode, and then of course there’s the ace pay-off when Bill’s “memories” of imaginary times with her mum cannot be overwritten by the Monks. As the Doctor cries: “Bill’s mum, you’ve just gone viral!”

The Lie of the Land leaves a sweet-and-sour taste. Peter Capaldi’s Doctor is the scariest thing in it. He wavers between downright nasty (his propaganda-spouting for the Monks; his appalling treatment of Bill) and at best disconcerting (his demented excitement when his boat is ramming the dock). He’s world-weary – specifically, Earth-weary. You can almost believe he’s working for the dark side, so great is his disenchantment with the human race.

When the crisis is over, the Monks have departed and everyone’s memories have been reset, he observes coldly, “Humanity is doomed never to learn from its mistakes.” Bill asks why he puts up with us. He smiles benignly and offers: “In amongst seven billion there’s someone like you. That’s why I put up with the rest of them.” At last a glimmer of light.

I hope we all have someone like that in our short lives. That is the truth of the land.

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There’s a new Doctor! Except he looks and sounds exactly like the old one.

The latest episode of Doctor Who dealt with fake news and benign dictatorship, as Bill tried to overthrow the Monks, who had rewritten Earth’s history, this week.

But how can you help people who don’t even know they’re being oppressed?

And what happens when the only man you trust appears to have switched sides?

Here’s a recap of everything that happened in the 8th episode of series 10.

Big Brother’s watching you

From the very beginning, the influence of George Orwell on The Lie Of The Land was fairly obvious.

Just as in his seminal classic, 1984, most people lived in a state of denial – although in Doctor Who this was thanks to a signal the Monks were broadcasting to keep them believing the lie.

They were happy to accept a rewritten version of history, and the few who dissented were rounded up and taken to labour camps – or simply murdered.

Worst of all (and in another nod to 1984), the one person Bill thought she could rely on seemed to have joined the Monks, insisting it was for the good of humanity.

Talkin’ bout my regeneration

We saw it in the trailers, and we’ve been talking about it non-stop for weeks – this was the moment the Doctor regenerated.

Except, um, it wasn’t.

As Bill – pushed to the limit by months of living in hiding – finally shot her tutor, the Twelfth Doctor ‘regenerated’ into… the Twelfth Doctor.

As we should have expected, the whole thing turned out to be a ruse – a final (and extremely convincing) test from the Doctor to check if Bill was actually under the control of the Monks.

But given the way this scene has been teased over the past couple of months, we have to ask – was this about fooling Bill, or fooling the audience?

Meet The Empress Of Mars

Legendary monsters the Ice Warriors make another appearance next week, as the Doctor finds himself on Mars.

But this time, it’s the British Empire doing the invading, as the Ice Warriors’ native habitat is beset by Victorian soldiers.

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‘However bad a situation is, if people think that’s how it’s always been, they put up with it.’

Okay, love did sort of save the day this week, what with Bill’s imagined version of her late mum breaking the psychic link that was key to the Monks’ conquest of Earth (or something). But not before the bulk of another grim instalment – a world of dystopian labour camps, sassy statues and what looks for the longest time like a suicide mission on Bill’s part.

Writer Toby Whithouse is responsible for BBC3’s excellent Being Human, along with some of the most acclaimed episodes of Nu Who, leading him to be widely tipped as a potential future showrunner. But what you normally get from him is a lot more gags. Not the case here, as the Monks trilogy comes to an end – at least, presumably, for now. It’s probably inevitable for a story taking cues from a 1984-style dystopia, but after the light touch we’ve enjoyed this series, The Lie of the Land does feel at times like a relentless downer. It’s a clever long con (or rather, short con) on the Monks’ part to convince humanity they’ve been there forever. And the vague nature of their … nature meant I didn’t mind the easy explanation of a “psychic link”. But it won’t be forgotten that the Doctor manipulated his companion into “shooting” him and she thought the whole thing was real, before surrendering herself into wasting away as a “Husk”. Even Matt Lucas’ Nardole, the regular comic relief, was played in darker hues.

‘Your version of good is not absolute. It’s vain, arrogant, sentimental. And if you’re waiting for me to become all that, I’m going to be here for a long time yet.’

It’s always fun to have Missy back, just as it was to have River back. Pop fact: this is the first time she has ever been written by somebody other than Steven Moffat – something which never happened with River. Michelle Gomez remains a delight, but her different role this year continues to allow new subtlety to the trickiest of characters to get right – the supervillain. It’s hardly a spoiler to suggest that this pause in hostilities between her and the Doctor can’t last forever. After all, she once built a gun out of leaves so she could easily get through a door if she wanted to. As moving as that final scene was, Gomez has likened Missy’s arc this year to the story of the frog and the scorpion.

“The frog comes along to the lake, can’t get across the lake because he’s missed the ferry, and there’s a scorpion there and he says ‘I’ll take you across’ and the frog’s like ‘no way man, right’ and the scorpion says ‘it’s cool’. And then of course halfway across, the scorpion attacks the frog and he’s like, ‘why’d you do that?’ And he says ‘because I’m a scorpion’” (via The Fan Show).

Those meddling Monks

The Monks deserve props for their domination of planets – convincing the populace they’ve been around forever is some skill. And assuming she’s telling the truth, there’s clearly some backstory with Missy that suggests this might not all be over. But I’m still struggling to place a motive on their part, aside from posing as sassy statues.

Mysteries and questions

Taking the above into account, I’m moving closer to the posited suggestion that there’s something wider going on with the Monks. Could they indeed be precursors to the promised return of the Mondasian Cybermen in the finale?

Is there some foreshadowing of Twelve’s regeneration going on here? The fake-out regeneration was shot very similarly to footage of a “real” regeneration in the trailer.

The stuff with Bill’s mum also feels like it has more to come. We’ve been introduced to her foster parent Moira, but given she’s had so little to do thus far, you do wonder why they even bothered …

Deeper into the vortex

• Whithouse – a former star of The House of Eliott no less, has recently also returned to acting with his one-man show Executioner Number One, in which he plays an … executioner. A recent run in London may well be followed by a wider run.

• It was a nice in-joke about special effects and supporting artists that a key Monk strategy is “convincing you there are more of them than there actually are”.

• Bill keeps on with the difficult questions: “Why do you have a woman locked in a vault? Because even I think that’s weird – and I’ve been attacked by a puddle.”

• Humanity’s greatest inventions apparently are the light bulb, the telephone and the internet.

Next week!

After this grim trilogy, we can expect a dose of lighter relief as Mark Gatiss brings back the Ice Warriors in Empress of Mars.

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In “The Lie of the Land,” the conclusion to the three-part monk story, the Doctor faces what may be his greatest foe yet: fake news. Truly, it is an enemy we can all fear.

And the episode proves to be a pretty good one, satisfyingly wrapping up the overall story while also charting some new ground, providing more than a couple of thrills and head-fakes, commenting on current events in a not at all subdued way, and further advancing the vault/Missy storyline just enough to keep us on the hook.

The idea of our heroes finding themselves in an alternate reality is a well-worn trope in sci-fi television, going back at least as far as that time Spock got a goatee. And while here the technical whatchamacallits of the scenario makes it less an alternate world than a mind-controlled population perceiving an alternate history, the effects are more or less the same: Bill has found herself six months out from her deal with the monks in the previous episode, with the hideous creatures now masters of the planet as a result. The thing is, the monks are perceived by just about everyone on Earth as benign caretakers who have been with humankind throughout their evolution.

The imagery setting up this world is well realized, especially considering the budgetary limitations of Doctor Who. The uniform, darkish color scheme of the unknowingly enslaved citizens’ clothing mixes well with authoritarian imagery of the monks intermingled with icons of human history, flashing across TV screens — and those same citizens’ minds — everywhere, even while the site of giant monk statues standing among the world’s landmarks is striking.

Even the Doctor is seemingly caught up in this whole scenario, broadcasting to the world the importance of the monks and even going so far as to rat out Bill once she finally tracks him down. Of course, it’s all a ruse on the Doctor’s part, but it’s an effective scene when his apparently traitorous behavior leads her to shoot him down. He even regenerates! (Only not really.) Unfortunately, the reason why the Doctor felt compelled to pose as a tool of the monks for six months doesn’t quite land. He’s trying to get the monks to trust him? That’s an awfully patient route for the Doctor to take… awfully patient, and un-Doctor like too.

But of course the real thrust of this story is the fake news parallel, which Peter Capaldi even announces for the cheap seats as he enters the “eye of the storm,” as it were. What’s most scary about this monk storyline, it turns out, isn’t the monks themselves or the world being taken over, but rather the manipulation of the masses that so easily allows the creatures to not just rule, but to alter history itself. David Byrne once said “Facts are simple and facts are straight” before adding “Facts all come with points of view / Facts don’t do what I want them to.” Indeed, and this is the world in which the Doctor, Bill and Nardole have found themselves in. Truly horrifying. Can you dig it?

But in the end, it’s Bill’s single, pure (and interestingly enough, semi-fabricated) memory of her mother which is able to defeat the fake news of the monks. The lies, the manipulations, the fabrications can’t win against love, and that message is indeed heartening.

As for Missy, I was as disappointed by the briefness of her role here as I was enchanted by Michelle Gomez’ performance. Her usual playfulness combined with a different sort of edge than we’ve seen in the past; is she really trying to become “good”? Is that even possible? We’ll find out, I suppose, as her story will continue for the foreseeable future.

Some notes:

• So that glimpse of regeneration that we got in the Season 10 trailer was a fake-out after all.
• We get the second Trump reference in as many weeks here, as his face pops up on the monk’s fake news screen.
• It’s funny how Bill’s mom is probably only a little bit older than Bill, but of course that’s what happens when you die: You’re frozen in time forever at that point in your life.
• Nardole has turned out to be quite multi-talented. And speaking of Spock, he even has his own version of the Vulcan nerve pinch!

The monk storyline ends on a strong note, giving us SJW food for thought, a couple of exciting set pieces, and some great, if tantalizing Missy scenes.