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The episode begins with a dire warning from a young man, pleading with people not to click on the odd alien symbols in their computer's WiFi connection. Doing so will result in a person being spirited away to some unknown place from which they cannot escape. He knows this because he, and hundreds of others, suffered the same fate.
Meanwhile, unable to solve the mystery that is Clara Oswin Oswald, the Doctor holes himself up in a monastery in 13th century Cumbria. Then one day, he gets a call from her on the TARDIS phone. Like, the real phone that's not supposed to ring. She says she can't find the WiFi on her laptop, and got his number from someone who said he could help. The Doctor tries his best to help her, but she is pretty much all thumbs when it comes to computers.
When he tracks her down to modern-day England – that is, our modern day – he finds her unconscious in her foyer. She is in the process of being downloaded by a "walking base station," which looks mostly like a person, but has something like a metal bowl in the back of his or her head. The Doctor counters the download and gets her placed back into her own body, which is now suddenly much more tech-savvy than it was before. She doesn't seem to recognize the Doctor, but she helps him hunt for the aliens who are behind the attack.
The responsible party is the Great Intelligence, last seen in the Christmas Special making snowmen. The Great Intelligence has taken over the world's WiFi networks in order to control and find the human minds it needs. To that end, it has employed a Miss Kyzlet, who runs an office in The Shard filled with programmed human beings. They're eager to get Clara back, and manage to find her just as Clara finds them. This time, they complete the download by using a base station that looks like the Doctor.
The Doctor demands Kyzlet free Clara, but she insists that can't be done without freeing everyone, which her boss just wouldn't like. So the Doctor commandeers his lookalike base station, storms The Shard and downloads Kyzlet. Once she's inside the computer, she orders her employees to free everyone. The Great Intelligence flees, and Kyzlet and her employees revert to their normal, non-programmed selves.
At the end, the Doctor invites Clara to take time off from her job as a nanny and travel with him. She plays a bit hard to get, though, and doesn't accept the offer right away, telling him to come back and ask her again the day. Hopefully, he's learned to be a bit more punctual after all his missed connections with Amy. Stay tuned for the full weecap.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!"This is a warning to the whole world," says a young man. He appears to be sitting in an office or perhaps just a very well-organized living room. "You're looking for WiFi," he goes on. "Sometimes you see something a bit like this." He holds up a piece of paper with some symbols that look like a cross between Tetris shapes and cuneiform. All over the world, people casually log into WiFi networks at home, on the train, at restaurants. "Don't click it," he says. "Once you've clicked it, they're in your computer." Either people don't see his warning, or don't pay any attention to it. One computer user after another clicks on the string of symbols while searching for a wireless network. "They can see you, and if they can see you, they might choose you. And if they do, you die." The people we've been watching up to this point all drop dead, their computers near at hand. "In 24 hours, you're dead." He says people's souls are being uploaded to the internet. "Sometimes you can hear their screams on the radio, on the telly, on the net..." The dead people pop up in online videos saying "I don't know where I am" in various languages. The young man who's been warning us is one of those people who is now trapped in the internet. Other victims fill an entire wall of video screens, each calling for help. Cue opening credits.
Far from the computer age, we drop into a monastery in 13th century Cumbria. A young monk pounds on the outer door. "Wake the abbot! The bells of Saint John are ringing!" The old abbot leads him and several other monks deep into the stony cloister. A man in a hooded robe sits surrounded by candles and canvases. "The bells of Saint John are ringing," says the abbot. The hooded figure stands up, lowers his hood and reveals himself to be... the Doctor. Of course. Why do they even bother with these "suspenseful" reveals? "I'm going to need a horse," he says. While he scampers off in search of a horse, the monks muse over a canvas bearing Clara's portrait. The Doctor has been holed up here, trying to figure out how to find her.
He's about 800 years off the mark, because she's currently somewhere in 21st century England, trying to get hold of tech support on the phone while she hustles a brood of children to get ready for school. (They're not hers, as they're quick to point out.) As the kids and their father head out the door, Clara stops a boy to check on the book he's reading. It's by Amelia Williams nee Pond, just in case you were wondering how Amy was getting along in the past. Her job done for the morning, Clara flounces upstairs and turns on her laptop. Her wireless network connections offer her those Tetris symbols. She ponders it while she waits for tech support to answer the phone.
The "bells of Saint John" from the episode's title are actually the ringing of the St. John's Ambulance phone that, up to now, have merely been part of the TARDIS's exterior dressing. The Doctor, having traveled by horse through the forest to the TARDIS's hiding spot, is a bit surprised. "That's not supposed to happen," he says. When he answers the phone, it's Clara who's on the other end. "I can't find the internet," she tells him. "It's 1207," he tells her, meaning the year. She thinks he's talking about timezones. She says she got his number from "a woman in the shop" who told her it was the best help line in the universe. He starts to explain why he can't help her, then realizes it would be easier to actually help her. She locates her WiFi options with some difficulty and clicks on the family's network. She has to confer with one of the children to get the password, the letters of which she remembers with this mnemonic: "Run You Clever Boy And Remember." Indeed, the Doctor does remember! Of course, then she clicks on the Tetris symbols by mistake and ends up alerting the World Wide Weird to her existence.
A moment later, the Doctor shows up on her doorstep, still dressed as a monk. He's thrilled to see her, but she doesn't recognize him at all. "Who are you?" she asks. "The Doctor," he says. "Doctor who?" she asks. The Doctor asks her to repeat that a couple of times because he just loves hearing it so much. Moffat thinks it's cleverer than it actually is. Clara shuts the door on the shaggy monk, as well she should.
Meanwhile, in a high-tech office somewhere, a young man is monitoring Clara through his computer. Behind him is the wall of screens showing all the trapped souls. "She's borderline," he says. "Very clever, but no computer skills." He's telling this to a stern-looking woman in a sharp black suit. "Upload her anyway," the woman says, telling him to splice her a computer skills package. "I'll activate a spoonhead," he says. "Alexei - we call them servers," she tuts him. "Sorry, Miss Kizlet," he says, scurrying from her presence. Another man approaches her, worried that they're uploading too many people, too quickly. "We're going to get noticed," he says. She consults her tablet computer, pulls up the man's file and reprograms his conscience to a much lower level. "My conscience is fine," he says. "Good, because our client has his needs," says Kizlet. She fiddles with his paranoia levels while she's at it.
The Doctor is having no luck convincing Clara to open the door again. A stripey scarf in the foyer catches my eye because it reminds me a bit of Four's. He explains that he's the one she called for help, but she's still not buying it. She sends him on his way just as she hears footsteps coming down the stairs behind her. When she turns around, she sees a young girl who looks uncannily like the girl on the cover of Amy's book. "Are you a friend of Angie's?" Clara asks. "I'm a friend of Angie's," says the girl. The girl answers all of Clara's questions with a slight rewording of those questions. Clara is a bit creeped out by this, and even more creeped out when the girl's head twists around Exorcist-style. Except instead of a head, she's got a concave metal skull back there. It looks like... a spoon.
The Doctor figures the problem must be with his wardrobe, so he races back to the TARDIS to peel out of his robes. As he digs through a hamper of clothes, he eschews his old outfit for a longer, tweedy, purply-browny coat that's like a skinny Chesterfield. He sticks with a bow tie, although the new one one is black jacquard. Thus attired, he returns to Clara's door. When he buzzes her on the doorway intercom, she responds with a confused, "I don't know where I am." He sonics his way inside and finds her lying on the floor. That was a lot less than the 24 hours mentioned in the teaser. He sees the "spoonhead" and Clara's panicked reflection in its metal skull. He scans the thing. "Walking base station," he says. He grabs Clara's computer and furiously types away, reversing the upload. Alexei and Kizlet in the mystery office try to stop him, but to no avail. Clara comes back to life with a gasp.
Kizlet gets a message from the Doctor: "Under my protection." He signs it and everything, so presumably he's not trying to erase himself from the universe anymore. She calls the client. "Sir, the one you told me about? He's here. The Doctor is here." At this point, we don't get to see the client.
The Doctor sets Clara up in her bedroom with flowers and a plate of Jammy Dodgers. While she sleeps, he peruses her shelves and finds a book: 101 Places to See. He takes note of the childlike writing on the inside pages, a dried maple leaf, then retreats just before she wakes up. She hears a bit of noise outside and peers out her window to find him sitting outside the TARDIS. She says she remembers being scared. "I didn't know where I was," she says. "Do you know where you are now?" he asks. Indeed she does. He tells her to go back to sleep and resumes his perch outside the TARDIS. She's charmed to realize he's guarding her and agrees to come down to meet him.
In the mystery office, Kizlet and her team monitor Clara through security cameras around the neighborhood. She increases Alexei's IQ on her tablet so he can figure out a way to get Clara back.
The Doctor and Clara talk about how she watches the kids for a family friend. He stops himself just short of mentioning she's been a governess before. They get around to talking about how there's something living in the WiFi that tried to take her. "Imagine that! Human souls trapped like flies in the World Wide Web," he says. "Isn't that basically Twitter?" she quips. He thinks it's odd that she suddenly knows what Twitter is when just hours ago she knew nothing about computers. Is there a young person anywhere in the developed world who doesn't know what Twitter is? You don't have to be a techie to know Twitter. And yet, this is what leads him to realize that Clara got a bit of rewriting while she was hacked. She thinks for a moment and realizes she knows all about computers now. "Where did that come from?" she wonders. The Doctor thinks someone will be after her for this borrowed knowledge and tries to rush her into the TARDIS. She thinks he has romantic designs on her. A man across the street reveals himself to be a base station, which only mildly perturbs Clara. She finally follows him when all the lights in the city start flicking off and an airplane flying overhead suddenly turns towards them.
She saves her freakout for the inside of the TARDIS, which she notes is bigger than the outside. The Doctor fiddles with the controls and lands them inside the plane. They flail and scream their way towards the cockpit. So much flailing. Samuel L. Jackson pops up to shout, "I have had it with these motherfuckin' time-travelers on this motherfuckin' plane!" Everyone on the plane is asleep like they're in The Langoliers or something. The Doctor explains they've been switched off by the WiFi. With yet more flailing, they finally get to the cockpit and take the controls from the zonked pilots. Sending a plane to kill off one person seems a bit... extreme. "Oh, no, there's ant in my house! Someone get me a stick of dynamite!" Anyway, the Doctor keeps the plane from crashing while expo-babbling about how he's a thousand-year-old alien. The Doctor cuts off the WiFi and the pilots wake up, only mildly concerned to find their cockpit invaded by two strangers.
The Doctor brings the TARDIS 'round to the morning so they can have breakfast at a cafe. They get there via a motorcycle he rides out of his little blue box, much to the delight of gullible onlookers who believe it's a magic trick. As soon as someone takes a picture, Kizlet's team gets wind of it. While Clara and the Doctor sit down for a nosh, the Doctor uses Clara's laptop to find out who's been downloading people. He says he can hack the lowest level of their operating system, but can't find their physical location. Even though he's kind of in a rush to save people, he pauses long enough to chat with Clara about why she's a nanny. She avoids the topic by volunteering her new computer skills. They play tug-of-war with her laptop, because they are nine years old. Eventually, Clara wrests the computer away from him and promises she can get the info in under five minutes.
The Doctor slumps off to fetch a couple of cappuccinos from the counter. The elderly barista seems quite friendly at first, then goes a bit blank and says, "You realize you haven't the slightest chance of saving your little friend." Kizlet uses the WiFi to take over a waitress . "Go on, take a stroll around and see how impossible your situation is," she says. Kizlet takes over the cafe patrons to make them leave. A news reader on the TV pipes up: "We can hack anyone in the WiFi once they've been exposed long enough." He realizes this means there's a base station nearby. The Doctor blusters about how he won't allowed humans to be harmed. Kizlet blah-blahs about how her client loves humanity. He's not harming them; he's just... stealing their souls.
At the same time, her employees have noticed that someone is hacking their webcams. Clara uses snapshots of them to find their accounts on Facebook. Eventually, she finds one of them who posted about working at The Shard, which just happens to be the pointy glass building in the background. She looks up to tell the Doctor about her triumph, but it isn't the Doctor at all, as she discovers when he turns his concave metal head towards her. By the time the real Doctor gets back to her, she's been fully downloaded. He finds her slumped over the table with the base station still standing by.
He hops on his trusty motorcycle and races for The Shard. Kizlet's employees monitor his approach via street cams. "Should we stop him?" one of them asks. "Why bother? It might be quite funny," Kizlet says. Oh, villains. Don't ever change. Kizlet's hubris comes back to bite her in the ass almost immediately as the Doctor rides his bike straight up the building's exterior wall. It's one of the benefits of being from the future, you see.
Kizlet hears glass breaking in her office and goes to find the Doctor sitting at her desk. The bike and pieces of her former window lie on the floor. "Download her back into her body right now," says the Doctor. "She's a fully integrated part of the data cloud now," Kizlet says. "She can't be separated." He tells her to download the entire cloud. Shouldn't that be "upload" from this end of things? Anyway, she says some of them no longer have bodies they can be returned to, but the Doctor thinks it would be better than being trapped in the cloud. "So give the order," he says. "Why would I do that?" she asks. "Because I'm going to motivate you," he says. He takes off his helmet and reveals the back of his metallic head to her. The real Doctor is still back at the cafe, finishing his coffee with temporarily dead Clara.
Once Kizlet has been integrated into the Wall O' Humans, she gives the order to download the entire cloud. Her employees refuse until Doctor Spoonhead hacks into their programming and inspires them to do as they've been told.
For some reason, the real Doctor leaves Clara to wake up alone at the cafe.
By the time Kizlet comes to, UNIT have arrived on the scene. She hides away in her office and calls her client. This time we're able to see that it's the Great Intelligence, still wearing Dr. Simeon's face. He bids her goodbye and returns her and the other employees to their original selves - that is, to their state of mind before they crossed paths. For Kizlet, this means she's now a little girl in a 60-year-old woman's body, as this is how long the Great Intelligence has been with her. Other employees lose far less time, but seem equally confused as to how they came to be there.
Clara returns to her role as nanny, until she finds the TARDIS parked on the lawn one day. She goes in to chat with the Doctor, who still wants to know why she's a nanny. She explains that she was visiting friends when the mother died, and so she stayed on to help out. She doesn't run out on the people she cares about, the Doctor knows. "You know, the thing about a time machine," he says, you can run away all you like and still be home in time for tea!" Tell that to the Pond-Williamses. He invites her to go with him. She laughs a joyful, incredulous sort of laugh, but doesn't take him up on the offer just yet. "Come back tomorrow and ask me again," she says. "Why?" he asks. "Because tomorrow I might say yes," she tells him. They have an exchange about the leaf in her book that I don't get, but they toss flirty smiles at each other, and of course she's going to accept because we've already traveled into the future by way of the show's promos.
Tippi Blevins is a freelance time traveler. She dropped by 2013 to write this weecap. Email her at b_tippi@yahoo.com, or find her @TippiB.