Flatline: A Shrinking TARDIS and Monsters in the Walls

Flatline is the most chilling and realistic Doctor Who I’ve seen since 1989’s Survival, which also revolved around community service and kids the rest of the world has given up on. From the unbearably creepy cold open, where a man on the phone to the police gets pulled into his own living room wall, right through to the Boneless seeping out of the mural in the underpass, it has a raw horror to it that the grim picture of everyday Britain only adds to. And it manages all that while being one of the most fun episodes of the series too, which is a strange mix on paper. I didn’t expect a story about the TARDIS shrinking to be the one that gave me the creeps, but here we are.

Coming straight off the back of Mummy on the Orient Express, where Clara decided she wasn’t done travelling after all and told Danny something a bit short of the truth, the Doctor tries to drop her home and misses. Instead of London she ends up in present-day Bristol, and the outside of the TARDIS has started to shrink. The Doctor sends Clara out to investigate, and she meets Rigsy, a graffiti artist doing community service, who tells her about the people who’ve vanished from the estate recently, all of them commemorated on a mural inside the underpass tunnel. By the time Clara gets back the TARDIS is so small the Doctor can’t get out of it, and he’s not happy about it at all, which is half the fun of the next forty minutes.

A TARDIS in a handbag and monsters in the walls

So Clara ends up carrying the TARDIS around in her handbag, with the Doctor’s face peering out of the door, while she and Rigsy search a missing person’s flat. Which is a ridiculous image and I loved it. It’s also Clara’s double life in miniature, the juggling act that’s been getting harder to keep up ever since The Caretaker, only now one half of it is literally in her bag. Between them they work out that the disappearances are down to creatures from a two-dimensional universe experimenting with ours, and the people who’ve gone missing have been flattened, taken apart and studied. It’s such a simple idea, monsters that live in the walls and the floor and the pictures, and once you know about them every flat surface in the episode starts to look a bit threatening. The Doctor’s first instinct is to be fascinated rather than scared, he wants to talk to them and understand them, and you can see Clara and Rigsy waiting for him to catch up with the fact that people are dying.

The scenes where the creatures, the Boneless as the Doctor ends up calling them, start to work out three dimensions are horrible in the best way. PC Forrest gets dragged into the floor of the flat and turns up later spread out across the wall like a diagram of a nervous system, and the moment the mural in the underpass turns its head is one of those images that sticks. The people on that mural were real people, and the Boneless are wearing them. Then they start moving like badly drawn people, jerky and wrong, walking out of the walls after the community service crew, and it’s genuinely frightening.

Doctor Oswald

What keeps Flatline from becoming utterly downbeat is how much fun it has with the TARDIS. The whole idea of dimensional anomalies messing with the outside of the box is so playful, and it makes this one of the most artistically interesting episodes of the series. You get the Doctor’s hand crawling out of the tiny TARDIS to pull it off a railway line like something out of The Addams Family, and the TARDIS going into siege mode and turning into a little black cube, with the Doctor sealed up inside while his life support runs down. And the shrinking is used to properly cut the Doctor off, which leaves Clara to do the running around while he shouts advice from inside a box the size of a handbag.

There’s obviously something stopping the Doctor and Clara from sharing much screen time this series, because this is the third episode where the story keeps them apart. But it takes nothing away from how good the episode is. Clara gets the psychic paper, the sonic and the earpiece, and calls herself Doctor Oswald, and she’s good at it, maybe a bit too good. She gives orders, she lies to keep people moving, she makes the hard calls about who to send where, and the Doctor is stuck in the box listening to her do all the things he’d do. I’d say having Clara pretend to be the Doctor doesn’t really add anything except a couple of gags, though, and the “you were an exceptional Doctor, Clara, goodness had nothing to do with it” line at the end feels like it’s pointing at something the episode doesn’t have the room to go into.

Danny, Missy and the community service crew

There’s just too much going on to do anything but gesture at the tensions between the Doctor, Clara and Danny, who’s absent again apart from a phone call where Clara lies to him while she’s in the middle of a monster hunt. After a few episodes without her, Missy reappears at the end in the usual clunky, unrelated way, and she’s still the weakest part of the series for me. We’re back to the tedious game of who knows what about Danny’s feelings for Clara that we had before The Caretaker. Not only do the episodes act independently, so do the Doctor and Clara.

Flatline is a good episode for guest characters, like Mummy on the Orient Express before it. Rigsy is delightful, which shows how well this series is doing at giving us sympathetic and intelligent kids from the wrong side of things. He’s funny, he’s brave when it counts, he’s the one who comes up with the plan in the end, and he’s got that slightly cheeky charm that keeps the episode feeling light rather than bleak. And, like Courtney in Kill the Moon, he seems like a waste of a companion, because I’d happily have watched him go off in the TARDIS at the end.

Fenton, his community service supervisor, is the opposite, and he’s terrifically mean and crusty. He doesn’t care about the kids in his charge or the men who die around him, and he spends the whole episode moaning while other people sacrifice themselves to keep him alive. Even at the end, after everything, he’s back to grumbling about graffiti. He’s a pretty pessimistic view of the people who are meant to be looking after British society, and the show doesn’t soften him at all. In a broader sense we get a more insightful and plausible (if a lot harsher) picture of modern Britain than Doctor Who usually gives us, and it’s very welcome.

Social science fiction, and a great speech

Just as Mummy on the Orient Express reminded me what Doctor Who was capable of in the 1970s, Flatline shows what’s possible when the programme turns its hand to social science fiction. The two episodes back to back are a great reminder of how versatile the show is as both space and soap opera. Stories like Rose, Night Terrors and Survival gave us a challenging look at working-class life in Britain, and here we get science fiction that’s just as socially conscious and close to everyday life. The fantasy side is just as compelling, with a neat play on the idea of the TARDIS being bigger on the inside, turned round so for once the outside is the problem.

Visually it’s one of the more remarkable episodes of Doctor Who, with the kind of arty abstraction that almost tips over into the experimental but is kept in check by a thrilling story. Rigsy’s painted door on the train tunnel wall is a brilliant trick, the Boneless pour their stolen energy into what they think is a door and give the TARDIS back its power instead, and the Doctor steps out at full size for one of his best speeches of the series. “I am the Doctor, and I am the man that stops the monsters,” and then he sends them back where they came from. It doesn’t even matter that the characters are put on hold for a week, because the monster, the jokes and the scares more than carry it.

So were the Boneless the creepiest monster of this series for you, or does the shrinking TARDIS make Flatline too silly to be properly scary? Tell me in the comments.