An Hour of Who a Day: June 6: "Night Terrors"

June 6: "Night Terrors"

We start out in an unpleasant block of flats (where all the color on-screen has been corrected to a dull urine yellow for some reason) as we get a little boy, George, who's terrified of everything -- so terrified, in fact, that his message reaches across the stars to the Doctor's psychic paper somehow.

It seems slightly churlish to criticize "Night Terrors" for not having any sort of follow-up of the events of "A Good Man Goes to War" and "Let's Kill Hitler", as it wasn't initially intended to occupy this slot (although it's not like "The Curse of the Black Spot", the episode that swapped places with this one, is any more cognizant of this), but when you're dealing with a frightened child who turns out to be an adopted one of sorts, it's a difficult problem to just ignore. (And as we'll see, while subsequent episodes deal with some heavy stuff, Amy and Rory losing their infant daughter isn't one of those things.) The problem with the more connected storylines that Moffat wants to introduce is that when the storyline is as deeply personal as the one here, the absence of it in later episodes is noticeable. It might be the intention that, since they know what happened to Melody/River, it's too late to change things -- but this is never stated explicitly, and we never see Amy and Rory ever grieve, so the end result is rather callous.

Sorry, we were discussing "Night Terrors".

This is Mark Gatiss's first script for Doctor Who that doesn't seem to have any overt sources to pastiche. There is a fear of peg dolls that makes its presence felt, but the primary story seems to be about how children can feel afraid and abandoned. It just happens to be the case that George is a much more powerful boy than most, such that he can make his fears a reality. It's certainly not a bad idea, and it's not like anyone's miscast, but there's something lacking in the final result. The fact that so much of the images are tinted a dirty yellow doesn't help, but it's really that the sense of energy that this story needs is missing. It's tempting to blame director Richard Clark, but his previous work on the series (things like "Gridlock" and "The Doctor's Wife") suggest that energy isn't a failing of his.

No, it seems to be a scripting issue. The idea of putting people in a dollhouse is a nice one, but it makes things strange rather than scary, and Amy and Rory spend too much time wandering around without anything really chasing them to really build the suspense (the shadows just aren't quite enough). And while the peg dolls are suitably creepy -- and the transformation of people into them is really nicely done -- the second person we see transformed into a doll is Amy, which inadvertently neuters them of any threat; we know Amy will be OK, so therefore it's likely everyone else will be fine too.

The other problem regards the resolution. Jamie Oram as George is really only called upon to be a frightened boy, which is perfectly fine (and shows they've learned their lesson after "Fear Her"), but it does mean that the ending of the story isn't about George finally standing up and facing his fears like you might expect, but rather about his dad Alex fully accepting him and vowing not to ever send him away. Which isn't a terrible ending, but it's also not the one they seemed to building towards (note in particular the way George finally gets off his bed and slowly approaches the cupboard full of his fears).

I dunno; it's not a bad episode, but there's a bit too much time spent in the dollhouse without a genuine threat, and that threat doesn't end up as potent as it should have been. Meanwhile, the scenes with the Doctor are wonderful (Matt Smith really is astonishingly good with children), but the lack of a clear threat does mean that these moments overwhelm the other parts of the story. The whole thing feels a bit lackluster as a result. Maybe "Night Terrors" works better for other people, but it just doesn't do much for me.