Doctor Who: Series 10 – The Episode Guide
What’s it about? The season opener marks the introduction of Pearl Mackie as new companion Bill to the show, as well as the re-introduction of Matt Lucas as Nardole, who will be a regular presence throughout the series. for the story, it looks as if the Doctor might meet Bill in a university setting, with signs up for St Luke’s University in Bristol, where an alien menace that possesses certain people begins to infect the campus through water. The Doctor will be a professor at the university who Bill, a canteen worker who sneaks into lectures, will collide with.
The episode will also incorporate a retooled version of the clip used to introduce Bill as the new companion, Friend from the Future, which means that, as with the short, the Daleks will appear here in a wartime setting. From the looks of it, however, this will not be the main plot of the episode and instead looks like a cutaway scene.
Guest stars: Stephanie Hyam plays a university friend of Bill’s.
What’s it about? Episode two, rumoured to be titled Smile, will be set either in the far future or on an alien planet, which is represented by the Valencia Science Museum where the show filmed on location. The bad guys here are the ‘Emojibots’ (it’s unclear whether this is just a nickname that they’ve been given or their real name), robots with smiley faces who turn people to skeletons. Some of the vistas from the first trailer indicate a setting reminiscent of the movie Tomorrowland, with a futuristic city enclosed inside a cornfield.
Guest stars: Ralf Little (The Royle Family) guest stars as a character named Steadfast, with Mina Anwar and Kaizer Ahktar playing Goodthing and Praiseworthy.
What’s it about? Working with the formula set in stone back in Series 1, episode three, Thin Ice, will be a historical episode, set in Regency-era England during a wintery ‘Frost Fair’ (celebrations that occurred regularly during Britain’s unusually cold Little Ice Age period) where the Thames has frozen over. Underneath the frozen river lurks a giant serpent monster of some kind, whom the Doctor and Bill will don old-school metallic diving suits to confront.
What’s it about? Knock Knock, previously rumoured to be titled The Haunted Hub, looks to be a classic haunted house story partially set in a manor where we’ll find out what lurks under the floorboards. This episode features creepy wooden monsters, and rumours indicate that some giant woodlice will also be making a lovely cameo. As ever, episode four seems to be the spooky one.
Guest stars: David Suchet, famous for his role as Agatha Christie’s detective Poirot in numerous adaptations, stars as the Landlord.
We now know that this is part one of a three-part story arc that spans all the way to episode eight, featuring the new Truth Monks as villains! In all likelihood, it seems it’ll be three interconnected adventures with the same antagonist as opposed to a fully serialised story, but time will tell.