Doctor Who Review: Night Terrors
Night Terrors is an interesting episode, not least because I believe that this is the story originally scheduled to be broadcast before the completely-necessary-and-not-at-all-done-purely-for-the-publicity summer break. Then Moffat decided that the first half of the series had to contain the maximum possible amount of suck, and replaced it with The Curse of the Black Spot.
But it's more than just a lonely glimmer of quality, staggering about an otherwise dreadful season like a lost sheep. (For another example of this phenomenon, see Fear Her- an ironically very similar episode in terms of imagery and set pieces.) It's arguably the episode where the themes, motifs and common plot devices of the Moffat era finally coalesce into a workable, interesting story. the surrealism of Amy's Choice; the fairy tale-esque imagery glimpsed in parts of The Eleventh Hour and The Beast Below; and the curious, retro set design to create an ambiguous time period- this last one I mentioned in my Impossible Astronaut review, where a sixties atmosphere is created before they travel to the sixties, seemingly for the sole purpose of confusing the audience. Here the drab 1940s wallpaper and furniture, particularly in the landlord's flat, create a sense of a mean, moody place.
Finally, of course, there's the ultimate Moffat- era cliché: the small child who the Doctor has to turn up and rescue amazingly. This is the biggest reason I defy anyone to claim that Moffat sees the show as anything other than targeted at a kids audience: he inserts small children that need saving into every other story, because he believes that the young target audience can imagine themselves in the child's shoes, having this amazing man briefly appear, make an impact, then vanish just as mysteriously. This is not totally accurate, of course; what any audience member really wants is to be able to travel in the TARDIS, either as the companion or as the Doctor himself, not just as a bit part in one story who then has to get on with their boring life immediately afterwards. It's a vision that doesn't completely match up with what made Doctor Who so great almost fifty years ago, but, using Night Terrors as a template, it's a vision that still makes for an interesting direction for the show.
Incredibly, though, it's taken a whopping seven goes to get it right. Let's go through all the helpless little children the Eleventh Doctor's dropped in on in the last year and a half. We've got:
Little Amelia, from The Eleventh Hour (and various later attempts of increasing obviousness to recapture the original success)
Random mood-swinging schoolgirl from The Beast BelowKid in the mysteriously deserted Welsh village in The Hungry Earth *
Young Dumbledore from Christmas Carol
Astro-girl (later revealed to be young River) from The Impossible Astronaut
Captain Avery's son from Curse of the Black Spot
And now little George, notable for being the first one to actually work since the first time, back in the opening of Eleventh Hour.
*I add a footnote to this one to note that it was in fact Rory who established the stronger rapport in that episode, until a stop was put to that on the ground that Arthur Darvill would have more than half a dozen lines of dialogue if that happened. However, I think this is a relationship that really needs to be seen: we haven't yet seen Rory come to terms with the fact that he is now a father; he just is now, move on. We really need to see Rory in a paternal role; it would offer him a vast amount of character development... so chances are we'll never see anything like that. Rory is like the Harry Kim of the Doctor Who franchise; the guy who bad stuff happens to, with barely a flicker of the consequences.
Anyway, this time around, George is actually a strong addition to the script, establishing a rapport with both the Doctor and the audience in a way that none of the above sprogs have done since Caitlin Blackwood. It's just a shame he's the worst actor out of the bunch. But what the hell, I'll let that slide. Finally, we get a child character that's actually a character, rather than just a cynical tool to trigger basic emotions from the audience: pathos from the adults, envy (supposedly) from the children. Here, though, Mark Gatiss (I always knew he had at least one script in him that was more than just mediocre) actually gives us a story not just about some kid, but about the deep, complex bond between father and son. To be fair, Curse of the Black Spot tried something similar, which was the reason I gave what little credit I did to that episode, but there the kid just felt like an afterthought in the midst of the stuff about pretty green women and casual racism. Here, the relationship is the story.
Part of the success of the character interaction in this episode is down chiefly to Matt Smith's portrayal here. Whereas with, say, young Kazran from A Christmas Carol or Mandy from The Beast Below, Smith would be prancing around like a bumbling, ineffectual, comedy relief idiot, here he portrays the Doctor straight, something that, parts of The Rebel Flesh aside, he's barely done this year. He comes into the flat, masquerading as a social services official, and actually succeeds in convincingly keeping up the pretence, asking intelligent questions, analysing problems rationally, and conversing with Alex in a sensible fashion instead of gurning at him.
Witness, for example, the way the Doctor talks about his childhood "Ooh, about a thousand years ago." That's true, of course, but delivered in such a way that it sounds like a joke, to get George to relax. The Doctor actually seems like a specialist, carefully coming to conclusions through analysis, showing that when the Doctor knuckles down, he can really be serious about these things, and should do it more often.
In fact, I think the episode could have been improved even more by having the Doctor keep up this act until just before he and Alex are sucked into the cupboard. Smith plays the serious tones so well that it almost feels like a Seventh Doctor story, almost Ghost Light -esque, the mysterious figure turning up and solving problems without any fuss or extravagance.
But, sadly, halfway through the episode, we get the "You see these eyes? They're old eyes" speech, clearly meant to be this week's "Basically, run" moment.
"Basically, run" moments are points in the story where the Doctor will, for no conceivable reason, sudden spew out a random line that establishes how brave and wonderful he is, not because it has an place in the episode, but so that it can be put in the trailer. It's essentially deliberately creating a memorable quote that people will remember and quote at each other, and one day stick on websites and books about the series in the future. Of course, this is ridiculous; writers shouldn't write lines just because they sound cool in isolation, any more than comedy writers deliberately create catchphrases. Audiences rate and recall lines of dialogue on their own merits, not because of any genetic engineering the writer's done to the script.
So, just like every other time this has been done before, I knew these lines weeks in advance. Just like the "Hello Stonehenge!" speech, or, even worse, "there's one thing you never, ever put in a trap... me!!!1!!!1!one!!" I knew that at some point this episode, the Doctor would say "They're old eyes" and "Monsters are real." But the funny thing was, I'd never seen any more then the merest flash of this speech in any trailers or videos. Oh, I'd seen it written down plenty of times, but they'd never actually shown us any of that scene in advance.
You want to know why that is? Smith actually plays the speech completely straight and serious. No random going from quiet to shouty and then back again, no gurning, no leaping about... just completely, terrifyingly natural. Oh, everyone else tries to ruin it for him, naturally. The camera gets right into his face! Murray Gold's godawful music blares! The rest of the script then makes it impossible for him to keep it up, and he ends up then going back to the leaping and gurning, but just for a moment, just for a single moment, you realise that, apart from the "hello universe" speech from The Big Bang, this is the best Smith has ever done in the role, and ranks as one of the best performances of the Doctor since 1989.
It's not a perfect episode, of course; far from it. The issue of how exactly one child's wishes are somehow across space, along time, through, apparently, the beginning of the Sylvester McCoy title sequence (I was most miffed when it zoomed in on the police box hanging in the void instead of a massive silver winking face) to arrive on the Doctor's psychic paper is never explained. Yeah, he's an alien, but so what? I understand that most writers want to break the obvious cliché of having the Doctor just happen across some alien invasion or monster, but don't go down that route if you have to sacrifice any kind of sense to do it! Besides, it really damages the concept of the TARDIS as impregnable.
Admittedly, they may well have explained that later on, when the Doctor was explaining just what the hell the kid was, but a combination of Smith's trademark rapid speech style of exposition, shoddy direction that had him practically out of the frame at some points, and, of course, Murray Gold's abysmal score drowning out every single word he was saying, left the audience utterly in the dark. True, most of what was said seemed to be reiterated later, which suggests Gatiss knew this would be done to the scene, and so tried to increase the chances of information actually reaching the audience.
Seriously, though, the positives far outweigh the negatives here. I think that, in terms of imagery and thrills, this is what a lot of people were hoping for as the norm when Moffat first took over, almost two years ago. Within the story itself, Rory makes an interesting point: grotty council estates aren't what most people expect from a show all about travelling to every time and every place. But, although I frequently comment on how the time- and space- travel in the show, and the sheer variety of the settings is the strength and the body of the show, it always comes down to the stories. The complex stories. The human stories.
That's what makes great Who.
But it's more than just a lonely glimmer of quality, staggering about an otherwise dreadful season like a lost sheep. (For another example of this phenomenon, see Fear Her- an ironically very similar episode in terms of imagery and set pieces.) It's arguably the episode where the themes, motifs and common plot devices of the Moffat era finally coalesce into a workable, interesting story. the surrealism of Amy's Choice; the fairy tale-esque imagery glimpsed in parts of The Eleventh Hour and The Beast Below; and the curious, retro set design to create an ambiguous time period- this last one I mentioned in my Impossible Astronaut review, where a sixties atmosphere is created before they travel to the sixties, seemingly for the sole purpose of confusing the audience. Here the drab 1940s wallpaper and furniture, particularly in the landlord's flat, create a sense of a mean, moody place.
Finally, of course, there's the ultimate Moffat- era cliché: the small child who the Doctor has to turn up and rescue amazingly. This is the biggest reason I defy anyone to claim that Moffat sees the show as anything other than targeted at a kids audience: he inserts small children that need saving into every other story, because he believes that the young target audience can imagine themselves in the child's shoes, having this amazing man briefly appear, make an impact, then vanish just as mysteriously. This is not totally accurate, of course; what any audience member really wants is to be able to travel in the TARDIS, either as the companion or as the Doctor himself, not just as a bit part in one story who then has to get on with their boring life immediately afterwards. It's a vision that doesn't completely match up with what made Doctor Who so great almost fifty years ago, but, using Night Terrors as a template, it's a vision that still makes for an interesting direction for the show.
Incredibly, though, it's taken a whopping seven goes to get it right. Let's go through all the helpless little children the Eleventh Doctor's dropped in on in the last year and a half. We've got:
Little Amelia, from The Eleventh Hour (and various later attempts of increasing obviousness to recapture the original success)
Random mood-swinging schoolgirl from The Beast BelowKid in the mysteriously deserted Welsh village in The Hungry Earth *
Young Dumbledore from Christmas Carol
Astro-girl (later revealed to be young River) from The Impossible Astronaut
Captain Avery's son from Curse of the Black Spot
And now little George, notable for being the first one to actually work since the first time, back in the opening of Eleventh Hour.
*I add a footnote to this one to note that it was in fact Rory who established the stronger rapport in that episode, until a stop was put to that on the ground that Arthur Darvill would have more than half a dozen lines of dialogue if that happened. However, I think this is a relationship that really needs to be seen: we haven't yet seen Rory come to terms with the fact that he is now a father; he just is now, move on. We really need to see Rory in a paternal role; it would offer him a vast amount of character development... so chances are we'll never see anything like that. Rory is like the Harry Kim of the Doctor Who franchise; the guy who bad stuff happens to, with barely a flicker of the consequences.
Anyway, this time around, George is actually a strong addition to the script, establishing a rapport with both the Doctor and the audience in a way that none of the above sprogs have done since Caitlin Blackwood. It's just a shame he's the worst actor out of the bunch. But what the hell, I'll let that slide. Finally, we get a child character that's actually a character, rather than just a cynical tool to trigger basic emotions from the audience: pathos from the adults, envy (supposedly) from the children. Here, though, Mark Gatiss (I always knew he had at least one script in him that was more than just mediocre) actually gives us a story not just about some kid, but about the deep, complex bond between father and son. To be fair, Curse of the Black Spot tried something similar, which was the reason I gave what little credit I did to that episode, but there the kid just felt like an afterthought in the midst of the stuff about pretty green women and casual racism. Here, the relationship is the story.
Part of the success of the character interaction in this episode is down chiefly to Matt Smith's portrayal here. Whereas with, say, young Kazran from A Christmas Carol or Mandy from The Beast Below, Smith would be prancing around like a bumbling, ineffectual, comedy relief idiot, here he portrays the Doctor straight, something that, parts of The Rebel Flesh aside, he's barely done this year. He comes into the flat, masquerading as a social services official, and actually succeeds in convincingly keeping up the pretence, asking intelligent questions, analysing problems rationally, and conversing with Alex in a sensible fashion instead of gurning at him.
Witness, for example, the way the Doctor talks about his childhood "Ooh, about a thousand years ago." That's true, of course, but delivered in such a way that it sounds like a joke, to get George to relax. The Doctor actually seems like a specialist, carefully coming to conclusions through analysis, showing that when the Doctor knuckles down, he can really be serious about these things, and should do it more often.
In fact, I think the episode could have been improved even more by having the Doctor keep up this act until just before he and Alex are sucked into the cupboard. Smith plays the serious tones so well that it almost feels like a Seventh Doctor story, almost Ghost Light -esque, the mysterious figure turning up and solving problems without any fuss or extravagance.
But, sadly, halfway through the episode, we get the "You see these eyes? They're old eyes" speech, clearly meant to be this week's "Basically, run" moment.
"Basically, run" moments are points in the story where the Doctor will, for no conceivable reason, sudden spew out a random line that establishes how brave and wonderful he is, not because it has an place in the episode, but so that it can be put in the trailer. It's essentially deliberately creating a memorable quote that people will remember and quote at each other, and one day stick on websites and books about the series in the future. Of course, this is ridiculous; writers shouldn't write lines just because they sound cool in isolation, any more than comedy writers deliberately create catchphrases. Audiences rate and recall lines of dialogue on their own merits, not because of any genetic engineering the writer's done to the script.
So, just like every other time this has been done before, I knew these lines weeks in advance. Just like the "Hello Stonehenge!" speech, or, even worse, "there's one thing you never, ever put in a trap... me!!!1!!!1!one!!" I knew that at some point this episode, the Doctor would say "They're old eyes" and "Monsters are real." But the funny thing was, I'd never seen any more then the merest flash of this speech in any trailers or videos. Oh, I'd seen it written down plenty of times, but they'd never actually shown us any of that scene in advance.
You want to know why that is? Smith actually plays the speech completely straight and serious. No random going from quiet to shouty and then back again, no gurning, no leaping about... just completely, terrifyingly natural. Oh, everyone else tries to ruin it for him, naturally. The camera gets right into his face! Murray Gold's godawful music blares! The rest of the script then makes it impossible for him to keep it up, and he ends up then going back to the leaping and gurning, but just for a moment, just for a single moment, you realise that, apart from the "hello universe" speech from The Big Bang, this is the best Smith has ever done in the role, and ranks as one of the best performances of the Doctor since 1989.
It's not a perfect episode, of course; far from it. The issue of how exactly one child's wishes are somehow across space, along time, through, apparently, the beginning of the Sylvester McCoy title sequence (I was most miffed when it zoomed in on the police box hanging in the void instead of a massive silver winking face) to arrive on the Doctor's psychic paper is never explained. Yeah, he's an alien, but so what? I understand that most writers want to break the obvious cliché of having the Doctor just happen across some alien invasion or monster, but don't go down that route if you have to sacrifice any kind of sense to do it! Besides, it really damages the concept of the TARDIS as impregnable.
Admittedly, they may well have explained that later on, when the Doctor was explaining just what the hell the kid was, but a combination of Smith's trademark rapid speech style of exposition, shoddy direction that had him practically out of the frame at some points, and, of course, Murray Gold's abysmal score drowning out every single word he was saying, left the audience utterly in the dark. True, most of what was said seemed to be reiterated later, which suggests Gatiss knew this would be done to the scene, and so tried to increase the chances of information actually reaching the audience.
Seriously, though, the positives far outweigh the negatives here. I think that, in terms of imagery and thrills, this is what a lot of people were hoping for as the norm when Moffat first took over, almost two years ago. Within the story itself, Rory makes an interesting point: grotty council estates aren't what most people expect from a show all about travelling to every time and every place. But, although I frequently comment on how the time- and space- travel in the show, and the sheer variety of the settings is the strength and the body of the show, it always comes down to the stories. The complex stories. The human stories.
That's what makes great Who.