In this week’s Doctor Who, the Doctor and his companions are menaced by dolls.
Let’s talk about this some after the cut.
Oh, and there are some mild spoilers for you to look out for.
When I hear the name Mark Gatiss, I’m usually rather excited. Between the League of Gentlemen and Sherlock, I feel like that’s a name you can trust. If there was a bank that you could take names to, I would take Mark Gatiss’ name to that bank and cash it immediately, because I would assumedly get lots of money for it. However, despite all my love of Gatiss’ work as both a writer and an actor, between The Unquiet Dead, The Idiot’s Lantern and Victory of the Daleks, I just don’t think Gatiss has it in him to do Doctor Who.
For the most part, Night Terrors is the sort of aint by numbers premise that we can expect and enjoy from a one-and-done episode of Doctor Who. That is, after all, how most of the season plays out anyway. So the Doctor is brought in to investigate some weird monsters, and we find that the ordinary and mundane is now creepy and everything is not how it seems, with a nice little moral point at the ending for good measure. It’s a fun episode to watch, but you can’t help but notice that we’ve seen it before. Nothing here is all that new, on Doctor Who or on any other program, and all things considered it is rather hard to follow up the intense continuity hopping clustercuss of an episode that was last episode’s jamboree. When you sit down to watch an episode that demands your attention and rewards your fan loyalty for sticking around as long as you have, then you come across an episode where dolls are creepy, you can’t help but wish Gatiss had perhaps tried harder.
What’s that? There are little girls singing in a way that is frightening? Well, that’s not a cliche or anything.
It’s one thing to do horror, and it’s another to do horror on Doctor Who. At this point in the series run (and when I say that, I mean post-2005), you expect the people working on the show to try a little bit harder with their ideas. Getting trapped in a dollhouse and chased by creeps with mask isn’t really all that cary anymore, and Doctor Who is a show that managed to make water scary back in the 2009 special. The show is just sort of losing it’s focus, and it shows. What once was a show about the Doctor traveling around and exploring specific moments in time on an adventure is now a show where basically any episode that Moffat didn’t write can be skipped, probably 75% of the time. At least with Gatiss’ earlier attempts on the show, he stuck by that notion of exploring a place in time rather than just going on an adventure. Not that the Doctor can’t want to save children, but it is certainly less exciting than seeing him hang out with Winston Churchill.
Of course, this isn’t to say that the episode is implicitly bad and that it has no redeeming qualities whatsoever; that’s not the case at all. The episode is good in the sense that any Doctor Who episode is good. It fills up an hour of your day with entertainment, and to be fair, those dolls were creepy. Matt Smith is a tad bit more muted in this episode than he usually is, but his Doctor still gets more entertaining with the seasons, pushing him up there as an incredibly memorable Doctor in a long line of talented performers. Arthur Darvill as Rory also continues to be the best character on the show, having spent a season as a character no one enjoyed and being fully upgraded to a character who everyone wants to be. It’s interesting to watch the evolution of Arthur Darvill between this collected season, because if there is ever any thought that there is no character progression on this show (which, really, there isn’t – much), Rory blows that all out of the water as the single-most three-dimensional character with a wonderful character arc Doctor Who has had since it’s 2005 relaunch (and it’s nice to have a character not enamored with the Doctor).
Mark Gatiss still has my heart as a fan at the end of the day, but the second-half of Doctor Who isn’t off to that great a start. Last week was great, but this is Curse of the Black Spot all over again. Every episode doesn’t need to specifically matter to the grand ol’ scheme that Moffat is cooking up here, but the less throwaway episodes the better, and this episode is very much a throwaway. We know the show can do better than this, and we (or at least, I do and you should) know Gatiss can do better than this, but if this was your first experience of either then you certainly wouldn’t know it.
