In the Forest of the Night: London Wakes Up Under the Trees

In the Forest of the Night opens with the whole world covered in forest overnight, and on a purely conceptual level it doesn’t disappoint at all. The spectacle of trees growing up through London, through the roads and the buses and Nelson’s Column, is properly breathtaking, and it reminded me more than a little of that green and pleasant land the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony turned England into. I’d been looking forward to this one with some anticipation. So it’s a bit of a shame that by the end I was left feeling it’s the same fairytale idea Doctor Who keeps going back to, just with more leaves on it.

After the walls and the underpasses of Flatline, this one goes right back to Coal Hill. Clara and Danny are babysitting a “Gifted and Talented” sleepover at a London museum, and the nickname is a euphemism for the kids with behavioural difficulties, which tells you a lot about the school in one line. They wake up to find the building surrounded by trees. One of the students, Maebh, has already got separated from the group and found her own way through the forest to the TARDIS, parked in a very leafy Trafalgar Square, where the Doctor is as baffled by it all as anyone. He and Clara talk on the phone and she and Danny lead the class over, by which time Maebh has wandered off again, because of course she has.

A gingerbread trail through Trafalgar Square

Once they find out Maebh has been on medication since her sister went missing, the Doctor works out that the voices she keeps hearing in her head are the trees talking to her. So the whole group follows her trail of dropped belongings through the forest, which is a gingerbread trail in all but name, running into the government’s efforts to burn through the trees and a few escaped zoo animals along the way. When they finally catch up with Maebh, the Doctor uses her to talk to tiny bug-like creatures drifting in the air and realises the Earth is about to be hit by a massive solar flare. Clara tells him to go and leave them to it. He comes back, having worked out that the trees are there to protect the planet from the flare rather than end it, and sends a message to every phone on Earth asking people to leave them alone. The trees save the world, they vanish as quickly as they came, and Maebh’s sister comes home.

And that’s the thing that bugged me. The fairytale origin story has been worked over so many times in Doctor Who in the last few years that even a notable take on it like this one starts to feel like flogging a dead unicorn. Little girl in a red coat, a forest, a wolf or two, a lost sister, a happy ending, it’s all here. Many of the same ideas were done in Robot of Sherwood only seven episodes ago, and that one was about a story that’s supposed to be a legend coming true too. I don’t mind a fairytale now and then, I just wasn’t expecting to get two in one series so close together, and this one doesn’t do enough with it to feel new.

The Coal Hill kids get their turn

Of all the Coal Hill episodes, though, In the Forest of the Night is the only one that actually looks at each of the students individually. They’re not just a crowd for Clara to herd around, they each get a moment, a line, a bit of personality, and the episode might even have some educational value for kids watching at home, about trees and oxygen and not panicking about the things you don’t understand. It’s very sharply written, with a dry sarcasm running through it that stops this family-friendly modern-day fairytale from becoming too cutesy. The kids get some of the best lines and the Doctor gets told off by them more than once, which I enjoyed a lot more than I thought I would.

For a programme with such a strong international audience, it’s good to see an episode that’s so unapologetically British in its tone, its references and its imagery. Trafalgar Square, the red buses, a school trip, a government committee setting fire to things, nobody else would make it quite like this. That said, some of the science-fiction elements are handled a little sketchily. Why the trees, why now, why does nobody remember them a week later, and what exactly the little lights in the air are, it’s all waved through with a line or two of the Doctor talking fast and then the episode moves on. I can live with a fairytale not explaining itself, but this is meant to be science fiction, and it felt like they wanted it both ways.

Danny finally earns his place

What this episode has that the others this series don’t is a real use for Danny. He’s seamlessly part of the story and he plays a crucial part in the action, keeping the kids calm, thinking about them first, the soldier in him coming out without anyone having to make a speech about it. I liked him a lot here. The news that Danny won’t travel in the TARDIS, though, seems like being different for difference’s sake, and the writing clutches at straws with its call-backs to Time Heist and Robot of Sherwood, which feel tacked on. The one that works is the Doctor walking away in Kill the Moon, because that’s still sitting between him and Clara. We also see Missy watching on a tablet again, with the same imbalance of tease to information we’ve had all series.

At last, though, we start to get somewhere with the triangle of mistrust between the Doctor, Clara and Danny. Danny finds out Clara has been travelling with the Doctor behind his back through something as ordinary as the kids’ exercise books, which feels like it came straight out of a soap opera, and honestly that’s fine, because it finally puts a rather laboured story point to bed. The way it’s handled is grown up, and the reconciliation feels mature rather than another round of shouting. And Clara’s choice to stay behind with the class when the Doctor offers to take her away is a big moment that I’m still turning over.

We get more of the tension between the Doctor and Danny too, and a nice inversion of the Doctor’s usual Superman act, where Clara is the one who saves him from saving the Earth. He’s ready to fly in and fix everything and she more or less tells him the planet doesn’t need him this time. This Doctor’s fustiness with the children is a marked contrast to the infantile empathy the last one had, he’s grumpy with them, a bit useless with them, and he talks to them like small colleagues who are getting in his way. It’s funny, and it’s also a good reminder of how different this Doctor is, because the Eleventh Doctor would’ve been on the floor playing with them inside a minute.

The quaintest apocalypse you’ll ever see

I wouldn’t want In the Forest of the Night to be forgotten like the trees that saved the Earth, but it does seem a highly unnecessary addition to the long list of fairytale-themed episodes we’ve had since the show started leaning so hard that way. Perhaps somebody needs a spreadsheet to keep track of how many episodes of the same kind are going into one series. It does, however, finally prove Danny deserves his place in the series and of the decision to set so much of this year at Coal Hill School, which I’d started to wonder about a few weeks ago. Without this one the school would just be somewhere Clara goes between adventures.

I’d happily see the same team come back for another episode, as long as it wasn’t so overdone, or so indebted to the cultural patriotism of the London Olympics. Because for all my grumbling, it’s one of the quaintest visions of a post-apocalyptic world you’ll ever see, with kids wandering through a forest in the middle of London, wolves loose in the streets and the end of the world being called off by a text message. There’s something lovely about that, even if the story underneath it is one I’ve seen before.

Was Clara right to choose staying with her class over leaving with the Doctor when the solar flare was coming, or was that a step too far? Tell me in the comments.