MovieChat Forums > Doctor Who (2006) Discussion > “Lie of the Land” is poorest reviewed ep...

“Lie of the Land” is poorest reviewed episode in Doctor Who history!


Just when you thought things couldn't get any worse this season, Moffat and his team have found a way to alienate Doctor Who fans even more. It is no exaggeration to say their latest material, the "Monk trilogy" set of episodes, got the absolute WORST reception throughout all 12 years of the Doctor Who revival, and possibly the disgrace of being the most hated Doctor Who story of all time.

Look at the reviews online and the critical response. The numbers do not lie:


From Wikipedia:
"The Lie of the Land" received....multiple critics finding the episode to be the poorest story in the series to date.
The episode was watched by 3.01 million overnight, the series' lowest overnight rating in its history, after the rating of 3.10 million for Battlefield in 1989.

From: www.geekgirlauthority.com/
“Lie of the Land”: worst episode of Doctor Who in the modern era? According to what I’m seeing online, I’m not the only recapper/reviewer who thinks it might be.

From the Daily Mirror:
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.

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From reading dozens of comments online from fans who had the misfortune to watch this pile of dung, it appears the damage to Doctor Who's reputation is permanent and scores of people are regretting their decision not to sit out this season. I've even read several fans state flat out that they reached the end of their rope with this episode, and won't be able to watch the show again until Moffat is gone. Perhaps the only silver lining here is that it looks the BBC is so desperate to salvage the franchise that the decision has been made to get rid of 'Bill' BEFORE the Christmas special. Hooray!

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I liked it.

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I liked Epic Movie, but that won't change the fact that it got overwhelming negative reception.

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I've not seen it.

Nice to hear you liked it though, there's always a fan for something out there in this wide world :)

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Off topic, but its very creative, a lot of fun, and Darrell Hammond's "Captain Jack SWALLOWS!" dead on parody of Johnny Depp was hilarious and more than enough made the movie worthwhile (there was a lot of other funny stuff in there too, though). My only complaint with the movie would be that the title and marketing implies they would mock overbloated, 3 hour, zillion dollar Hollywood puff pieces about sword and scandal tales and biblical stories. But I guess they felt movies like "Meet the Spartans" already covered that, so they did unrelated parodies about non-epic movies like Nacho Libre, Snakes on a Plane, and Click. They did mock "epics" a bit with The Chronicles of Narnia and Pirates of the Caribbean parodies, and it was great stuff. Another minor complaint I had was they tried to mock Borat, and you can't really parody something that is a parody to BEGIN with, though the guy doing the Borat impersonation was decent.
Anyway, back on topic, the movie has only a 2% score on Rotten Tomatoes and a terrible On score of 17 out of 100 based on 17 critics on Metacritic, indicating "overwhelming dislike". In short, the vast majority of people don't agree with me. My view is in the extreme minority.
The difference, of course, is that I can admit Epic movie got awful reception in spite of the fact *I* liked it. The people defending Moffat's current garbage can't admit that THEIR view is in the extreme minority and that longtime Who fans have been tuning OUT in droves, and that the latest episodes have the worst reviews in over a decade.
Furthermore, I can sincerely say I liked the movie because it was creative and fun, whereas most of the praise for "Bill" is because they don't want to be called racist and homophobic so they want to be seen as "progressive" for heaping praise on the franchise for giving us a black lesbian character. If those same lines were coming from a straight white female, they'd be able to admit she sucks.

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Certain things just resonate well with some and not others - I'm thankful for it as it would be boring if we all liked the same things.

As for the monks trilogy; part one was awesome (If a little dark), part two was standard fare and he third part sort of dusted it all off in the style of Last of the Time Lords/The End of Time which isn't particularly to my liking but at least we're getting an insight into Missy a little more.

As for Bill, I like her. The only sluggish lines I can think of relating to her being lesbian were in Knock Knock but a lot of the characters in that episode had hammy lines. As for her being black, Martha pretty much set the standard on dismissing that as an excuse not to like someone based on their skin tone.

I prefer Bill over Clara but that's just my personal opinion. Amy and Rory are still my favourites and I don't see that changing any time soon.

2% for Epic Movie on Rotten Tomatoes - that's incredibly harsh to my mind but, if nothing else, it shows that you have the type of outlook which doesn't conform to the norms so much and that's what makes biological evolution fall in your favour :)

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The resolution is the only part that bothered me. As soon as they said it was all being done by a psychic projection around the world, my mind went to the Archangel network, while the "remember something important" solution has been used far too many times.

I wish they'd come up with a more original, more intelligent way of resolving the story, but other than that I enjoyed it.

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But Bill didn't remember her mother. The Doctor induced Bill's perception of her mother.

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It's still a "happy thoughts win the day" thing, like Last of the Time Lords, Victory of the Daleks, Closing Time and The Big Bang.

It may as well have ended with Bill clicking here heels together and chanting "there's no place like home" :(

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The monks trilogy brought one of the best exchanges of dialogue in recent memory:

Bill: "Nardole, are you secretly a badass?"
Nardole: "There's nothing secret about it, babydoll!"

Of course written down here doesn't do justice to how well the actors played it.

Also, in the first part, the bits on the execution planet were very funny, especially when they looked up The Doctor's record and ran away (which reminded me of Colonel "Runaway" from the episode A Good Man Goes To War)

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I really enjoyed the past three episodes.

No backstory to the monks? They are clearly Mondasian.

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Really?

I disliked a lot about the episode. It was very anticlimactic. But I don't think I could call it the worst episode in the show's history, far from it. I thought most people liked this series and last series to. It seems when a bad episode comes out suddenly the series is the worst possible.

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