Review: Doctor Who 6.9: Night Terrors

A good excuse for wooden acting....

Having just reviewed an episode by Gatiss, I was looking forward to this episode. I've been getting tired by the arc episodes and I was hoping for a change to preceedings. While the episode is certainly the best Gatiss has done since The Unquiet Dead, its initially creepy exterior collapsed into a bit of a disappointment. The episode promised so much in its initial premise that I can't help but feel a little put-out by the results.
     For a reason that's not explained, The Doctor's psychic paper alerts him the cries of a small child in contempory Bristol. Amy and Rory acted rather blasé about going to find their child, surprising after the ordeal with Melody. This is because this episode was written for before the break but got moved back for one reason or another. Interesting. The boy, George, is frightened of everything and his father Alex (Daniel Mays, last seen in Outcasts and Ashes To Ashes} and he doesn't know what to do. Amy and Rory are somehow transported into a doll's house as The Doctor arrives at the house and identifies something very powerful inside his wardrobe.
     Inside the Doll's House, empty-eyed dolls stalk the halls and transform anyone sucked in into another doll. It's quite a creepy transformation scene, especially when Amy's plan to surprise the dolls ends up with her being made into wood. The Doctor persuades Alex that the monsters in his cupboard are real, but when he looks there's nothing but the toys that George is afraid of. When The Doctor realises (and reveals} that George can't be Alex's son because his wife is infertile. He surmises that George is in fact an alien called a Tenza that was attracted to his "parents" need for a child, but is so powerful that he makes real his fears. They get sucked in, but the day is saved when Alex finally accepts George as his son and everyone is returned to normal.
      The dolls, so heavily featured in this episodes' publicity, are incredibly creepy - their wooden hands and charicaturish heads, as well as their echoing childish giggling meant that they were the first genuinely scary monsters in quite a while - for me, anyway. My only problem with them was the fact that they didn't actually make sense - they were the personifications of George's fears but were stunningly specific. It was as if Gatiss was trying to write a Moffat-esque horror story and went wrong along the way.

"Claire CAN'T HAVE kids!"

     Episode placement really buggered this episode up in far too many ways. As it was written, Amy is still a Ganger here, and she also doesn't give a damn about her child. I gave it some leeway when I was watching the episode because stylistically the tone was so very different to Let's Kill Hitler, but if I view it in context (which, with Moffat's arcing, I have to}then they seem incredibly cold and out-of-character. When I watch this, Amy is still a Ganger and The Doctor's oblivious to his fate. And to top it all off, this episode is paradoxically family oriented. Jamie Oram, who plays George, portrays a vision of a really messed-up kid, but it's not unreal. The story's ultimate solution is The Power of Love and acceptance of Family, and because of the fact that this episode wasn't written with the events of AGMGTW/LKH in mind, it lost all of its potential gravitas.
      Gatiss' Night Terrors was tense and its villains creepy, but it failed in the one key area where this current series has a specialisation. The main characters were sidelined in an episode that was well out of its time and a pale impression of what it was aiming for. I still enjoyed the first half, with the tension and the mystery surrounding it still intact, but once we learnt what the secrets behind the episode's yarn it soon became tiresome. If anything, Night Terrors was a sorely missed oppourtunity to do something really interesting and potent, but was let down by its scheduling on a massive scale.

Thanks.