Trivia / Doctor Who S36 E11 "World Enough and Time"

---

• Completely Different Title:
  • the French title is "L'Éternité devant soi" (The Eternity before us).
  • The German title is “Masken der Verdammnis“ (Masks of Damnation).
• Distanced from Current Events: An online, Twitter-based fan watch-a-long of this and "The Doctor Falls" was supposed to serve as the finale of several weeks of rescreenings during 2020's "Doctor Who Lockdown" campaign, but it would have run on June 6, just after Black Lives Matter/anti-Police Brutality protests erupted in the United States and elsewhere. The organizers decided going ahead with it would have been in bad taste given what Bill goes through in this story, and cancelled the event. Instead, the scheduled airdate saw the debut of the epilogue short "The Best of Days", which prominently features Bill and Nardole after they've earned their happy endings, and even mentions the protests.
• Recycled Script:
  • The premise of this episode is almost identical to that of "Dark Water", the first half of the Series 8 finale, both of which were written by Steven Moffat: After a shocking event in the early scenes, the Twelfth Doctor searches for a black main/recurring character who has ended up in a sinister facility where they unwittingly end up becoming a Cyberman, and the companion goes through major Break the Cutie as a result of this. The Master has a role in the evil events, too. The main differences are that it's the Doctor's companion rather than the companion's love interest who is trapped and transformed, Clara's Break the Cutie is due to her grief at losing her lover while Bill's is the result of spending years on the spaceship without the Doctor followed by her Cyber-conversion, and another incarnation of the Master (the one responsible for the Series 8 events) is present as well and on the side of the good guys — at least at first.
  • It also borrows one plot point from "The Girl Who Waited"; the companion is left alone for several years in a hospital as a result of the Doctor making a mistake.
• Role Reprise: John Simm returns as the Master for the first time since "The End of Time" seven-and-a-half years before.
• Similarly Named Works: Big Finish's second Diary of River Song boxset's (released only six months before this story aired) third story was also called World Enough and Time. It also features some temporal shenanigans, most prominently the meeting of River and the Sixth Doctor, but otherwise the two stories have little in common other than the universe they take place in.
• Trolling Creator: Moffat trolls the hell out of the fanbase with Missy identifying herself as "Doctor Who" and claiming that it is the Doctor's actual name, given the years-long I Am Not Shazam and the fact that identifying the Doctor with that name has become a Fandom-Enraging Misconception. And then she calls the companions "disposables", referring to how much Moffat loves to invoke Anyone Can Die. Later, even the Doctor himself says, "My name is Doctor Who," and when Nardole says, "It's not, is it?" he replies, "I like it."
• What Could Have Been: Had it not been for The Sun leaking the news that John Simm was returning to Doctor Who, none of the publicity in the runup to this episode's premiere would have even hinted at the return of the Harold Saxon Master. Once the leak was made, The BBC decided to roll with it. And that firmly cemented the tabloid as The Scrappy among the Doctor Who fandom, given its particularly vicious struggle to avoid leaks and spoilers (the introduction of the War Doctor spoiled by candid photos of the fiftieth anniversary special being filmed sneaking online and Series 7 DVD sets shipping out before his proper debut aired that resulted in an advised gag order for those who had seen it already, the absolutely shameful way the Eighth Doctor's return got spoiled by accident by the thumbnail of the fateful mini-episode the BBC posted to their own website, the leaked rough cuts of Series 8, and so on...). No one working on the show was happy with this, it seems, Moffat and Simm above all.

---