The Bells of Saint John (TV story)

The Bells of Saint John was the sixth regular episode of the seventh series of Doctor Who produced by BBC Wales. It introduced a new companion to the show, although she had, in different forms, previously appeared in both TV: Asylum of the Daleks and The Snowmen. It also reintroduced the Great Intelligence, who had last appeared in TV: The Snowmen.

Synopsis
London, 2013. "Danger. This is a warning. A warning to the whole world. You're looking for Wi-Fi. Sometimes you see something, a bit like this. Don't click it. Do not click it. Once you've clicked it, they're in your computer. They can see you. If they can see you, they might choose you. And if they do... you die."

When Clara Oswald has problems with her Internet, she's given a telephone number: the number of "the best." When the Eleventh Doctor answers at the other end, Clara is pulled into a life of adventure and mystery. But danger is lurking in the signals, picking off minds and imprisoning them. "It's like immortality, only fatal." But can the Doctor save Clara before... "I don't know where I am."

Plot
Nabile warns anyone listening about the dangers of the Wi-Fi: don't connect to any networks with writing like this. If you do, you'll get chosen. And people who get chosen die within 24 hours. At least temporarily — their souls live on, trapped. Sometimes you can hear their screams, "I don't know where I am," on the radio, on the telly, on the net. And he'd know because... "I don't know where I am."

It's then revealed that he's trapped in a screen, surrounded by at least a hundred other victims, all chanting, "I don't know where I am."

Cumbria, 1207. The bells of Saint John are ringing! The Eleventh Doctor gets a visit, and the monks notice a painting in his room: one of Clara Oswin Oswald, of the Woman Twice Dead. It reads, "RUN, YOU CLEVER BOY, AND REMEMBER."

London 2013, 3:30pm. Clara Oswald is having trouble with connecting to the internet. When Angie's family comes along, Clara calls a help line for help with her computer.

1207. The TARDIS police box telephone is ringing in a cave. The Monks, with the Doctor, enter, and the Doctor, confused, answers the phone. "Hello?"

The Doctor slowly realises that the caller is Clara, in modern-day London, who is having trouble connecting to a Wi-Fi network. Clara was given his number, and told that "it's the best helpline in the universe." The Doctor reluctantly begins to help her, talking her through the first steps. She connects instead to the network mentioned in the opening monologue.

Travelling to her house, the Doctor greets her in excitement: "Clara Oswin Oswald?" Revealing that Oswin's not part of her name, Clara states that she doesn't remember him. "Doctor who?"

After telling her how much he enjoyed hearing that said out loud, Clara closes the door on him, locking it.

At a secret base, a group is following her. Alexei calls her "very clever, but no computer skills." Miss Kizlet tells him to 'upload' her anyway. He respond that he'll activate the Spoonheads, which Kizlet complained were called 'servants'.

Kizlet decides that they should probably kill him, but only after he gets back from holiday — "let's not be unreasonable."

Mahler is worried that they're uploading too many people, too quickly, that they'll get noticed. She tries to comfort him, calling this "immortality, only fatal." She then 'hacks' him using a tablet, revealed to be able to control peoples' conscience, paranoia, obedience and IQ by metre.

Back with Clara, the Doctor begs to be let in. Clara continues ignoring it. But, then, suddenly, footsteps can be heard upstairs. Angie? No response. A little girl walks down the stairs. Clara asks if she's a friend of Angie's, and the girl repeats just that. When asked what she was doing upstairs, the girl replies that she was upstairs. Clara thinks she recognises her — and the girl repeats, "You know me, don't you?"

Clara realises that the girl's from the cover of Summer Falls, a book that she made the children she was looking after read. At this realisation, the girl's head turns — all the way around, 180 degrees — revealing a spoon-like indentation in the back of her head. Clara backs away, scared.

In the TARDIS, the Doctor decides that a change of clothes is in order, since "Monks are not cool." He tries on a fez, then drops a tweed jacket, in favour of a new one. With new clothes on, the Doctor opens up a compartment below the control room, and takes out a box with a bow tie in it.

He walks out of the TARDIS, excited to make a better impression. He asks her to let him in through the intercom, and she responds with, "I don't know where I am." Using his sonic screwdriver, the Doctor enters the house, and finds Clara lying on the floor, unconscious. She's not moving...

...but yet he can still hear her screams. Looking up, he realises that her voice is coming from the Spoonhead, the little girl. She can be seen, trapped in the indentation. He attempts to bring her back with his screwdriver.

At the secret base, an alarm goes off. Alert! Error! The download metre for Clara is going down rapidly.

In the house, the sonic reveals the true form of the Spoonhead, a walking robotic 'base station', hoovering up data. Hoovering up people. It used a camouflage based on its victim's thoughts.

In Clara's room, he finds the source of the problem: Clara's laptop. Typing rapidly, he reverses her upload.

In the base, Mahler reveals that such a reverse is possible, in theory. With some more typing from the Doctor, the bar goes all the way down to zero.

The Spoonhead gives Clara back her soul, in a pillar of light.

At Kizlet's office, they receive a message from the Doctor: "UNDER MY PROTECTION." She contacts her client: "Sir. The one you told me about. He's here. The Doctor is here."

In Clara's room, the Doctor is tidying up. He takes out Jammie Dodgers, half-eating one and leaving it on the plate. He then leaves the room. Waking up from her sleep, she pokes out the window, and the Doctor, outside guarding her, recounts everything that she'd missed. Clara reveals that she is a friend of the family who live in the house, and she looks after the children - a "governess", as the previous version of Clara that the Doctor met had been.

They realise that Clara has gained greater knowledge of computers as a result of being partially uploaded. The duo spot another Spoonhead, sent to re-upload Clara, before all the lights in the neighbourhood switch on, the residents being compelled to do so via the Wi-Fi. The lights in the rest of London go off, and the Doctor and Clara sight an aeroplane that is plummeting towards them. They travel aboard the plane in the TARDIS, and the Doctor manages to pull the plane out of its dive and revive the crew and passengers, who had been rendered unconscious via the Wi-Fi.

The Doctor and Clara travel forward to the next morning, and travel on a motorbike to a local café, where Clara uses her laptop to hack into the unknown organisation's webcams, then searching for the staff on social network sites, where they have detailed their work location — The Shard. In the café, the Doctor talks to several people who are being controlled remotely by Kizlet while Clara is re-uploaded by a Spoonhead replica of the Doctor. Upon realising what occured, the Doctor sets off for The Shard on his motorbike and uses its anti-gravity setting to scale the building and crashes into Kizlet's office. He encourages her to download Clara from the cloud - Kizlet states this is only possible if everyone else in the cloud is downloaded too.

It is then revealed that the real Doctor is still at the café and has reprogrammed the Spoonhead Doctor to be control via Clara's laptop, having it upload Kizlet to let her experience the fear experienced after being uploaded and then use it to hack into one of her subordinates to download everybody from the cloud. After doing so, the Doctor leaves, and Kizlet reports a failure to the organisation's leader, revealed to be the Great Intelligence. He orders her to restore the other members of the organisation to their "factory settings" as UNIT arrives and take control. As a result, all the organisation members' memories after being inducted are wiped with Miss Kizlet revealed to have been aiding the Great Intelligence for most of her life and now has the mentality of a scared child. Clara and the Doctor then talk inside the TARDIS, where the Doctor invites her to travel with him. She declines, but tells him to come back the next day to ask her again.

Cast

 * The Doctor - Matt Smith
 * Clara Oswald - Jenna-Louise Coleman
 * Miss Kizlet – Celia Imrie
 * Mahler – Robert Whitlock
 * Alexei - Dan Li
 * Nabile – Manpreet Bachu
 * Paul – Sean Knopp
 * The Abbot – James Greene
 * George – Geff Francis
 * Angie – Eve De Leon Allen
 * Artie – Kassius Carey Johnson
 * Little Girl – Danielle Eames
 * Barista – Fred Pearson
 * Waitress – Jade Anouka
 * Newsreader – Olivia Hill
 * Child Reading with Comic – Isabella Blake-Thomas
 * Man with Chips – Matthew Earley
 * Pilot – Antony Edridge
 * Great Intelligence - Richard E. Grant

Buildings

 * The London Shard is Miss Kizlet's base.

Communication technology

 * Clara jokes about Twitter.
 * Everyone at the base was on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google Plus or Tumblr, and they all posted their locations.
 * Peoples' voices could be heard on the radio, on televisions, and on the internet.

TARDIS

 * Clara calls the TARDIS a "snog box."
 * There's a garage in the TARDIS.

Time Lords

 * The Doctor claims that Time Lords have two hearts and 27 brains. He then admits that he was exaggerating.

Vehicles

 * The Doctor owns an anti-gravity motorbike, which he states he rode in a motor race during the Anti-Grav Olympics in 2074, where he came last in the competition.
 * The Doctor claims to have just invented the quadracycle.

Other

 * George, Artie, and Angie's household Wi-Fi network is named "Maitland_Family."

Story notes

 * This story takes a lot of the directing tropes of the BBC television series , a show written and created by Doctor Who show runner Steven Moffat and writer Mark Gatiss, with two episodes at the time of broadcast written by Steve Thompson. A prime example of this is formulas and words appearing on-screen.
 * The title of this episode is a reference to the phone incorporated into the TARDIS police box disguise, and to the "St. John Ambulance" logo on the door of this version of the TARDIS. The "Bells" part is referring to the police box phone ringing.
 * As with all of the Series 7 episodes, this episode has individually stylized opening credits: the Doctor Who logo sports a weathered metallic texture, much like that of an old spoon, alluding to the Spoonheads of this story.
 * To keep the reappearance of the Great Intelligence a surprise, Richard E. Grant was not credited in Radio Times.

Ratings
to be added

Filming locations

 * The Shard
 * Westminister Bridge

Production errors

 * During the motorcycle scene, a crew member and camera can be seen reflected in the Doctor's helmet.
 * In the same motocycle scene, the TARDIS's doors are open when the Doctor comes forward but then, when he starts riding, they are shown closed and apparently he did not remotely control them.
 * When Clara is entering the the Doctor's TARDIS, her mug shakes several times, which would cause it to spill, yet it doesn't. Later, on the Aeroplane, she starts to take a sip but is pulled away by the Doctor, and it still doesn't spill. However, when she returns to the TARDIS, she takes a sip, proving once and for all that it wasn't empty and that it should have spilled several times.
 * When the Doctor and Clara are talking after she wakes up, he sets the laptop on the ground and the monitor is upright, however, after the camera switches back to him from Clara, the screen is bent back.
 * While in the aeroplane, you can't see the city below through the open windows.
 * When the TARDIS has travelled to the aeroplane, just before the Doctor gets out, a scene change is visible and the wall position changes.

Continuity

 * The Doctor states that he is 1,000 years old, although in The Wedding of River Song he was 1,103. In A Town Called Mercy he claims to be 1,200.
 * This isn't the first time that the Doctor has encountered an alien whose plan was to upload humans to a popular technology. Previously, the Tenth Doctor encountered the Wire, who extracted the faces of humans. Both times, the victims were trapped in screens. (TV: The Idiot's Lantern)
 * Another striking similarity to TV: The Idiot's Lantern is the use of the motorbike: in both stories the Doctor rides it with his current companion through the streets of London and subsequently he rides it on his own after he loses the companion girl. In TV: The Idiot's Lantern the companion was Rose Tyler, who begins to enquire on her own before being captured by the Wire, while Clara is captured after a few moments and then the Doctor rides alone.
 * The Doctor rides a motorbike out of the TARDIS. Previously, a motorbike drove into the TARDIS, turned around, and drove back out. (TV: Doctor Who)
 * The Doctor tells Clara that they are riding a motorbike because he does not bring the TARDIS into battle, fearing that it may fall into the wrong hands. The same concern had been expressed by the Ninth Doctor to Rose Tyler. However it is interesting to note that the Doctor has used the TARDIS in battle, or at least had it on a battlefield, many times; indeed it even received damage when it was dropped into the Crucible's core. (TV: The Parting of the Ways, Journey's End, Day of the Moon, A Good Man Goes to War)
 * Clara is referred to as "The Woman Twice Dead." She had, in fact, died twice. (TV: Asylum of the Daleks, The Snowmen)
 * A painting of Clara by the Doctor reads, "RUN, YOU CLEVER BOY, AND REMEMBER." Clara also says this later while trying to remember a password. (TV: Asylum of the Daleks, The Snowmen)
 * The Doctor mentions that the TARDIS's telephone should not work. (TV: The Empty Child)
 * The Doctor can't fly an Aeroplane. He'd previously claimed that he was due for a lesson in flying a bi-plane in 1911. (TV: The Impossible Astronaut)
 * The Doctor mentions that Angie, one of the children Clara babysits, went to stay over at Nina's. (TV: Asylum of the Daleks)
 * After saving Clara from being downloaded, the Doctor sends a message to her attempted captors stating that she's "under my protection." (TV: ''The Christmas Invasion, The Eleventh Hour)
 * Summer Falls, a book that Clara owns, was written by Amelia Williams. (TV: ''The Angels Take Manhattan)
 * The Doctor once again wears Amy's reading glasses. (TV: ''The Angels Take Manhattan, The Snowmen)
 * Miss Kizlet's client is revealed to be the Great Intelligence, which still has Walter Simeon's image, despite it being over a century since it first took his form. (TV: ''The Snowmen)
 * The Doctor mentions having two hearts. (TV: Spearhead from Space, et al.)
 * The Doctor briefly dons a fez, but gives it to a young boy standing outside the TARDIS. (TV: The Big Bang, A Christmas Carol)
 * The Doctor notes that travelling short hops in the TARDIS can be difficult. (TV: State of Decay, Army of Ghosts, Dinosaurs on a Spaceship)
 * The Doctor already disguised himself as a monk in Saxon England, along with another Time Lord. (TV: The Time Meddler)
 * Monks, unlike bow ties, fezzes, and 1960s NASA technology, are evidently not cool. (TV: The Eleventh Hour, The Big Bang, The Impossible Astronaut)
 * The Doctor's fondness for Jammie Dodgers is seen again. (TV: Victory of the Daleks, The Impossible Astronaut)

Home video releases
to be added