Who Review: Night Terrors

If Doctor Who never, ever, ever employs another child actor, it will still be too soon. This is what you get when you take the same damn plot from "Fear Her" and arfle bargh fargle.

Right. That's out of my system. I'll keep these paragraphs as short as I can to avoid ranting.

The Talons of Weng-Chiang is generally considered to be a classic, as is The Caves of Androzani, as is, for some unfathomable reason, Genesis of the Daleks. You know what all of these have in common? No, it's not that Bob Holmes either wrote or re-wrote them, although that's also true; it's that these have NO KIDS in them WHATSOEVER.

(Now, The Mind Robber, which I adore, had kids in it, but these kids were deliberately written to be creepy little pukes and not actually characters in their own right. They also got approximately one line and ten seconds of screen time each. None of them were asked to carry any serious weight, and, inasmuch as any kid can actually act, these ones did a decent job.)

In fact, the first time we had an obnoxious kid, the writers eventually killed him off. Then there weren't any kids for a while, and then they came back with a vengeance in the last two seasons (Remembrance of the Daleks, Survival). And then the show was CANCELLED.

Now am I saying that bad child actors got the show killed? No, a glorified accountant who would rather sell toys than produce good stories got the show killed, aided by a fat script editor who loathed him but loved Bob Holmes and violence, and later by another script editor who had a teeny bit of a bone to pick with Margaret Thatcher. But mostly it was the glorified accountant. But the kids didn't show up until the show's audience was five guys and a dog; at that point, you're desperate enough to try anything to keep the show on the air.

So there's a kid. A kid who prays to Santa* to "save me from the monsters." And despite the fact that the end of the episode manifestly proves that the Doctor is not the intended recipient, the Doctor gets the message anyway. (Moffat Cliche Number 12: the psychic paper is an e-mail inbox as well as just a fake ID.)

*No, not really, but since Doctor Who is pretty atheistic and Amelia Pond prayed to Santa at the beginning of "The Eleventh Hour," I'm going to use Santa as the go-to deity of choice for every denizen of the Whoniverse from here on out.

So the Doctor gets this message and comes a-running, because that's what he does, and it's not like they can keep paying the Nation estate all those royalties, so he can't go after the Daleks, and it's not the end of the season yet, so he can't go after the Silence.

Amy and Rory go around interviewing all the wrong people (and it's telling that the guy I sympathize the most with is the "evil" landlord). A little old lady who's definitely not as short as the camera keeps trying to make her gets eaten by a trash heap. The Doctor sees George the Fantastic Child Actor peeping through a window, so naturally he sends Amy and Rory down a floor so he can cause trouble by himself. They take the elevator.

Okay, credit where credit's due: the show does a good job of misleading you and making you think that the apartment block in general, or maybe the lift, or maybe the cupboard is what's haunted. Or maybe it's just George the Fantastic Child Actor doing such a phenomenal job that you don't want to think about him at all.

Okay, blame where blame is due: Amy and Rory take the ELEVATOR to go down ONE FLOOR. Bargle argh farl.

They get what they deserve when the elevator crashes and pukes them out in a wooden house with wooden pans and wooden food and a glass eyeball and a gigantic fake lantern. By the time Amy and Rory left that room, anybody in the audience who hadn't figured out that they were in a freaking dollhouse lost their right to vote.

Because, as I've said before and will certainly have to say again, Moffat Cliche Number One is: the audience gets ahead of the characters. Always.

So the Doctor meets George after scamming his way into George's father's confidence.

See, maybe the episode is supposed to be about parenting fears. Moffat says as much in the "behind the scenes" thingy. But what's the more realistic fear, that your son's an alien or that an absolute lunatic with a penchant for getting innocent people killed, a man who has turned a blind eye to the suffering of literally trillions of intelligent beings because the Daleks might one day do one good thing can scam his way into your life and turn it upside-down?

Is this unfair? Bringing up an episode from before the current star was born? No, not really. Not given the number of times in the previous season that we saw William Hartnell's face. Not given the fact that the initial BBC America broadcast of this episode also included a commercial for Law and Order: UK, citing the inclusion of "Fifth Doctor Peter Davison" in the cast as an incentive to watch. (What is it with that show scooping up British sci-fi veterans?)

So they quickly discover that all of George's demons are locked in his closet (subtlety was never Moffat's strong point). The Doctor argues that they can't just open the closet, because then the episode would be over. Then after about ten minutes of boggling, the Doctor decides that, yup, the closet needs to be opened. He does, and then George freaks and starts screaming "SAVE ME FROM THE MONSTERS! SAVE ME FROM THE MONSTERS!" and the Doctor and Daddy get sucked into the closet.

Now for one horrifying moment I thought the Doctor was going to be sucked in but Daddy wasn't, and that we'd then have to sit through a gender-flipped re-enactment of the end of "Fear Her," but at least Mark Gatiss is marginally smarter than that. (Was Gatiss the one with all the daddy issues back in Season 2? I don't remember and have no wish to look.)

And then the episode marks some time, in contrast to the previous half-hour of marking time. Amy gets changed into a wooden doll, because hey, why not? (And to be fair, charging the army of dolls was a frakking stupid idea and she deserved what she got.)

Now at this point it's pretty clear that the things in George's closet aren't the monsters; everything else, including the Doctor, is. This would be clever if... let's see... "The Pandorica Opens" and "A Good Man Goes to War" hadn't already done that (Moffat Cliche Number Two: The Doctor is a Monster). So the Doctor gives some technobabble about George being an alien that needs to be loved, and then yells at George from inside the cupboard, and then George comes in to stop the doll-zombies because, whoops, our intrepid writers have written themselves into a corner again, and then Daddy saves George from the doll-zombies, and then everyone who was zombified comes back to life and everyone's a happy family again and just when the sweetness of it all was getting absolutely sickening and you realized that you had no frakking idea what the hell just happened or how the problem even started in the first place...

...that creepy song the wooden dolls have been singing throughout the episode tells you that, yup, time is running out for the Doctor.

See, the TV audience is too jaded at this point. Doctor Who is a cash cow, and there's no way the BBC is just going to outright cancel it (although given the quality of this season, I don't know how much I'd complain if they did decide to put it down). It is no longer enough to just do an in-Universe "OMG Doctor's gonna die" thing; you have to actually pretend it's real in the real world too (as usual, Battlestar Galactica did this better).

So here are my thoughts overall; the theme is, probably, acceptance. Okay, fine. The kid's an alien but he'll be fine, sure, whatever, the Doctor isn't exactly known for picking up all the pieces after an adventure. The twist, to the extent that it's comprehensible, is halfway decent. But George's powers are explained in about five seconds while a bunch of other stuff is going on, and I couldn't possibly tell you what made him so afraid in the first place.

George the Fantastic Child Actor actually has very little to do except at the end, and by no means is he the worst child actor the show has ever had.

For once, the big "thing the Doctor missed" sailed over my head, probably because we saw the photo album for all of about five seconds. It wasn't like they were harping on it with every other line, like they were the two-headed Aplans back in "The Time of Angels." But Amy and Rory have suffered. It pains me to say it, because Amy hasn't done anything quite as obnoxious as Rose, but there's a clear parallel; suddenly, near the end of her voyage with the Doctor, the companion becomes really thick and unable to take care of herself.

And why is the dollhouse bigger on the inside? Once upon a time (as recently as "Doomsday"), that was a Time Lord thing. The Silence have a TARDIS-like perception filter, maybe they have a bigger-on-the-inside thingy as well.

And here's the thing: Moffat was great when he wrote self-contained, stand-alone stories. In RTD's show, he never got to do running arcs. And in that show, he delivered "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances," which rightfully stole the Hugo from BSG's "Pegasus," and "Blink," which likewise won over Razor. (He also did "Girl in the Fireplace," which robbed "Downloaded," but I'm trying to just list his accomplishments here.) Since taking over, he also gave us "A Christmas Carol," which I frankly think is the best episode, regular or otherwise, that New Who has ever had. But he's also gotten wrapped up in (hell, has staked his entire tenure as a showrunner on) this massive Kudzu plot that is highly unlikely to have a satisfying conclusion.

Anyway, "Night Terrors" isn't actually any better than "The Rebel Flesh," but I'm giving it a bonus point for not stealing its plot from Blade Runner, BSG and Avatar.

3 out of 10. The twist is clever, but it's also the only thing the episode has going for it.