Doctor Who: Night Terrors

“Today, we’re answering a cry for help from the scariest place in the universe: a child’s bedroom.”

You might have noticed that my weekly Torchwood and Doctor Who reviews are somewhat late this weekend. This is because I spent yesterday at the rather splendid Whooverville convention in Derby. And after the excellent day’s entertainment had finished and some beer had been drunk, it was time to sit down at 7pm and watch Doctor Who, on a big screen, with my mates and loads of other fans- the best way to watch it! But fear not, my readers- I’ve just rewatched it with subtitles and written up my notes…

Richard Clark is a bloody brilliant director. The opening shots are amazing, and really looked magnificent on a big screen. The whole aesthetic is fascinating, too; taking a rather run-down 1960s housing block, complete with bin bags across a wall, and make it look both scary and beautiful. It succeeds at both brilliantly, and the direction really brings out the scariness right through the episode.

Living on the estate is a little boy called George, who seems to be afraid of everything, including, we’re told, pants. So scared, in fact, that his pleas for help against the “monsters” reach the TARDIS and the Doctor’s psychic paper.

The Doctor, Amy and Rory split up and, in some very funny intercut scenes in which Arthur Darvill shines in particular, get to meet the neighbours. We’re introduced to Mrs Rossiter, whom George thinks is a witch, and to the extremely nasty landlord, Jim Purcell, with his threatening pit-bull, Bernard. More about him later.

George, unfortunately, overhears Rory joking that “Maybe we should just let the monsters gobble him up?”. Seconds later, Rory and Amy find themselves taking a much faster and scarier trip in a lift than they had intended. Mrs Rossiter, meanwhile, is swallowed by some bin bags. I can think of no other TV series in which that could happen!

Amy and Rory discover themselves to be somewhere else, somewhere very dark and more than a little odd. They’re uncertain about where they are (I love Rory’s “We’re dead. Again.”). It seems to be a big but featureless house, with a massive glass eye in a drawer (urgh!), wooden pots and pans and electric candles. It’s all very mysterious, but the clues are there…

The Doctor tries to bond with George (I loved the fan-pleasing reference to “Snow White and the Seven Keys to Doomsday”), and establishes that everything that scares George is put into the cupboard? The suspense is ramped up to unbearable levels, but just as the Doctor is about to open the door, he’s interrupted by some loud knocking.

Alex opens the door to the bullying Purcell, and we get a glimpse of a parallel and perhaps worse terror. Alex, we learn, is unemployed, and Claire’s wages are not enough to pay the rent. None of this is resolved by the end; Purcell is still their landlord. It seems to be implied that the family may be in the early stages of a Cathy Come Home-style spiral of descent into poverty and eventual homelessness. If this is even partly correct, then the apparent happy ending we eventually see may well be illusory, and George may end up being taken away after all.

Back to fears of a more fantastic kind, though, the Doctor scans the cupboard, and discovers that George’s monsters are real. Things are getting creepy for Amy and Rory, too; children’s laughter has never seemed so scary. There’s something very Sapphire and Steel about this thread of the story.

Alex eventually asks the Doctor to leave, but is unable to. For all that these scenes are played for laughs, it’s clear that Alex is rather a weak personality- and so, from what we see of her, is Claire. None of this bodes well for the family’s future.

Amy and Rory are perhaps too eager to open their cupboard downstairs, but all they find is a horrible old doll. At first, it seems to be eerie but harmless. The cupboard, upstairs, though, after some further scenes of tension, turns out to be empty. But then the Doctor discovers something odd about the family photos; Claire photographed a fortnight before giving birth to George, is clearly not pregnant. This confuses Alex, and he blurts out that “Claire can’t have kids.” we realise two things: firstly, George is not what we thought, and secondly, he has been there all the time, listening. The room starts to shake, and the Doctor and Alex are pulled into the cupboard.

Purcell gets a hard time, too; George has heard him being nasty to his Dad, and he is pulled under the ground to the doll’s house. Amy and Rory see him there, being chased by dolls and, in a horribly memorable scene, see him being turned into one of them. These dolls are one of the best Doctor Who monsters ever, in both concept and execution. They’re simply terrifying. It’s not just the faceless, decayed appearance of the faces, but the slow advance, the childish voices and the nursery rhymes.

Amy and Rory are trapped in a room by advancing dolls, but Amy works out that the only solution is to open the door and push past. This sort of works, but Amy is caught, and turned into one of them: a terrifying moment.

The Doctor works out that the cupboard is a repository for all of George’s fears; everything that terrifies George is in there with them. It’s odd that there should be a doll’s house in the house, mind- George is a boy- but there we are. It seems that George is a Tenza (why not re-use the concept of an Isolus from Fear Her? Perhaps that’s an episode the production team would like to forget…), an alien “cuckoo” who has instinctively created a perception filter around the circumstances of his birth. The Doctor shouts to George to try and stop it, and the advancing dolls stop. And then start again, because George fears rejection. Alex soon sorts this out by running to his son, and the episode seems to end happily. But does it? What happens if the family get evicted and bad things keep following on…?

At last, a truly first class script from Mark Gatiss and probably the scariest story since The Time of Angels.