Fridge / Doctor Who S36 E7 "The Pyramid at the End of the World"

• The Doctor tries twice to tell Bill about his blindness. The first time, he's interrupted by the pyramid becoming active. The second time his own thoughts interrupt him. If the Prophets have simulated humanity in such exacting detail, and are aware of what's going on in the plane (as they seem to respond to everyone's actions in their changing the times on the clocks), it's possible that they knew they could get what they wanted if they could keep the Doctor from revealing his blindness to Bill until his life was in danger from it, so they chose that exact moment to start their response to the attack to prevent her learning the truth too soon.
• Bill's choice to save the Doctor may have been done out of love, thus avoiding disintegration for pragmatism, but it was also the pragmatic choice, given how many times the Doctor has saved humanity, past, present, and future. If he died in that explosion, who would save humanity from all similar threats yet to come?
  • Also, it's fairly self-evident by that point that the Monks will keep on pressuring human authority-figures into inviting them in, to avert whatever future catastrophes might be coming down the pipe. Heck, the Doctor himself openly admits that he's been constantly standing off disasters that imperil the Earth, boasting about his track-record in front of Bill! So if she didn't agree in order to save Twelve and restore his eyesight, it's all but inevitable that somebody else would forfeit the planet to the Monks, sooner or later.
  • Bill is also a rookie companion, barely out of her teens, and the Doctor is pretty much the only "family" she has, much like Susan and Ace in the Classic series. She's also just watched the Monks kill the Secretary of the UN and three generals from major world powers right in front of her. The Doctor at his full strength was the only hope anyone had, she knew it, and just because it was done out of love for Twelve didn't mean it wasn't the only real choice on the table.
  • This also comes after years of the Doctor being built up as a superhero ("Turn Left" being the most dramatic example, but it was also visible throughout Eleven's tenure). If Bill had had full information it would only have reinforced the choice she made anyway. This isn't even bringing up the major parallels to "The Sound of Drums"/"Last of the Time Lords" — fascist alien with brainwashing technology is given power by willing humans and takes over the Earth — and in that story the solution was also to save the Doctor instead of fighting the enemy.
  • What's strange is that the other characters' attempts to accept the Monks were rejected for being done out of strategy or fear, but surely they were also motivated by love of their own families, which would make their reasons the same as Bill's.
• The Doctor claims that his sonic screwdriver can't help him open the combination lock because it can only tell him the combination to open it, not what it is currently set to... but combination locks only have numbers on the dial, there's nothing "inside" the lock which directly tells you what numbers correspond to the "open setting". So, either the sonic screwdriver can read numbers on the dial, solving the problem directly; or the sonic should be able to read the state of the lock itself, in which case he should be able to crack it like a safe (which he's done before).
• The absence of UNIT from a story about an alien takeover of Earth seems very odd, until you consider the Monks' key advantage over Earth's defenses is detailed predictive knowledge. They simply waited to make their move until the precise date when UNIT's forces and officers would be too caught up in other matters, and/or too out of favor with the planet's major powers following the latest Zygon near-debacle, to be called in.