Last night's episode of Doctor Who, Night Terrors, was one I had been eagerly awaiting. It was written by Mark Gatiss, whose work I have often enjoyed within Doctor Who and outside it, and the previews, going back some months now, with the creepy dolls looked amazing. Perhaps I was setting myself up for a fall then - expecting too much - because I found it all rather disappointing.
The plot starts well enough with the Doctor receiving a message via his psychic paper that reads "Please save me from the monsters" - which he obviously can't ignore despite Amy and Rory's complaints that they'd rather have "planets and history and stuff". Difficult to disagree with that sentiment and fatal to suggest that it won't be exciting if you can't then make it fantastic.
The message originates from a young boy called George, living in a non-descript flat modern day England. George is frightened of everything, his Dad says, and the coping mechanism is to put the scary things in the cupboard. George is not a normal boy though, and he unknowingly has the power to literally put anything in the cupboard, including Amy and Rory (who are scary because George overhears them joking about letting the monsters gobble him up).
And that's one of my complaints about the scare-factor, or lack thereof, in this episode. It's about things that George thinks are scary, but which actually aren't. So along with Amy and Rory, there's an old woman who the kid believes is a witch (and isn't), the noise of the lift which he thinks is like breathing (but is just the lift mechanism) and the landlord (who is pretty intimidating but not evil and arguably just doing his job). He's also afraid of old toys, which presumably explains the antique doll's house and peg dolls he's sent to the cupboard. But none of this scares me, and George is described as having irrational fears, by definition fears the viewer is unlikely to share.
My second complaint is the doll's house itself. Not only does it not look real - because it looks too real, no doll's house has so much detail and the out-of-scale toy props were few and far between - but aside from being dark it's not that creepy. It could have been a real house of horrors, albeit teatime horrors, but the only halfway frighening thing were the dolls. Clearly effort had been put into them, both in design and the way the actors moved and they way that one touch could turn an unfortunate into a doll too was a nice visual, but they didn't make sense. Why did they change you? Are we expected to believe that George was afraid of being turned into a doll?
It seemed that most of the doll's house scenes were just a way to give Amy and Rory something to do while Matt Smith got on with the real work. And he was brilliant. He has a fantastic way of sort-of-kind-of being on a child's wavelength when he speaks to them (and there have been more child actors in his tenure than ever before) and his time with little George was nicely pitched. He also worked extremely well with Daniel Mays, playing Alex, George's dad, a man rather at he end of his rope and clearly ready to believe anything if it's going to help him out. Yet, the discovery of exactly why George had such power, which should have been rather chilling, somehow ended up flat. Alright, so aliens in Doctor Who is not a twist that anyone will hold the front page for, but discovering that your son is not your son should have had more impact. Likewise, the denoument of Alex acceptig his 'son' and George feeling safe enough to let them back into the real world was rather unsatisfying and definitely too easily glossed over by all involved.
Two things I would like to compliment though were the moody lighing and claustrophobic direction, very nicely done. And the music, a creepy lullaby which was written specifically for the episode and which gives us the only really goosebumpy moment, right at the end, when we hear the final lines:
"Tick Tock goes the clock
Even for the Doctor..."
(Though ending yet another episode with the TARDIS scanner screen reminding us of The Important Arc is getting silly.)
Favourite line: "So, we're either inside a doll's house, or this is a refuge for dirty posh people who eat wooden food. Or termites, giant termites trying to get on the property ladder." - The Doctor and his awesome deductive powers.
Second favourite line: "I've got to invent a setting for wood, it's embarrassing" - The Doctor on his sonic screwdriver's short comings.
Having made my complaints about the details, I have to admit there's a couple of nice messages to this. In the end it's a combination of George facing his fears and Alex showing his love for his son that saves the day rather than the Doctor and a macguffin. And that's quite lovely, really, it's just a shame the rest of plotting is such a mess.
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