Hide: Ghost Hunters in a Haunted House, 1974

For about thirty minutes “Hide” is the best ghost story Doctor Who has ever tried: a haunted house in 1974, a candle in a dark corridor, a shape at the far end of it that isn’t quite a person, and a script confident enough to let a room go silent. And then it explains itself, twice, and the second explanation is so much better than the first that the whole episode turns into something else. I came out of it properly delighted, which I wasn’t expecting after how The Rings of Akhaten left me a few weeks back. It has the same interest in grief and time, only with far more holding it up. It’s a haunted house story first, a sci-fi story second and, if you stay with it, a love story by the end, and somehow those three things don’t fight each other.

It’s also small, and that’s a big part of why it works. Two ghost hunters, one house, one wood and a pocket of somewhere else, with no crowds and nobody making a speech to a whole planet. After a run of episodes that have shouted their feelings across entire worlds, a story that keeps its voice down is almost startling, and I loved that about it. The Doctor and Clara turn up in 1974 because he has a question he doesn’t want to admit to, and I’ll get to that. Everything else is people in a cold house at night, which is exactly the right amount of story for forty-five minutes. And it’s the best-shot episode of the season, not that it’s close.

The haunting

Caliburn House has a ghost. It’s been photographed across centuries, always in the same posture, always screaming, always in exactly the same spot, which is the detail that tips you off early that this is more of a physics problem than a haunting. The setup is two people: Professor Alec Palmer, a former SOE operative who spent the war doing things he won’t talk about and now hunts ghosts for a living, and Emma Grayling, an empath he uses as an instrument and is quite obviously in love with. Dougray Scott and Jessica Raine are both excellent, and the show is smart about what’s going on between them, a man who thinks he doesn’t deserve her, a woman waiting for him to say so, and a working relationship standing in for the conversation neither of them will have. And it’s shot like a proper horror film, very much in the spirit of the old TV ghost stories, with long holds, deep shadow and a torch beam that shows you slightly less than you want, so you keep leaning toward the screen to see the part it won’t show. The stretch where Clara is left alone in the house while the Doctor photographs the woods is the most sustained dread this show has managed since the orphanage in Day of the Moon. It does it almost entirely with sound and an empty corridor.

Palmer’s history is what gives the house its weight. He was in the Special Operations Executive during the war, the man who sent agents into occupied Europe knowing most of them wouldn’t come back, and who signed the orders. He doesn’t discuss it and the episode doesn’t make a show of it either, it just establishes that his ghost hunting is a man with a great many dead on his conscience going looking for proof that the dead persist. Dougray Scott plays the whole part underneath, all restraint and courtesy, never once asking for sympathy. And when Emma tells him plainly that he isn’t the monster he thinks he is, it lands because she’s the only person alive who can actually read him.

Not a ghost

The first explanation is the good-but-ordinary one. The ghost is Hila Tacorien, a time traveller from the future, trapped in a collapsing pocket universe where time runs so slowly that one moment of her fear lasts centuries for us. That’s a decent idea, well executed, and it keeps the ghost story going for a good while with the physics showing. The pocket universe itself is properly eerie, a dead forest under a dying sky with something moving in it, and it’s the one place in the episode where the Doctor looks genuinely out of his depth. The rescue works with Emma as a kind of lantern for him to follow, and with the Doctor boosting her with a crystal that’s been sitting in his pocket since his earlier lives, which is a lovely bit of continuity that doesn’t need explaining to anyone who hasn’t seen the old stories. Clara has to get the TARDIS to pull them back out, and there’s a nasty little beat there, because the ship, which we’ve seen care a great deal about people before, plainly can’t stand her and doesn’t care who knows it. Nobody says why, and I could happily watch an entire episode about the answer, although I do wish they’d given it a clearer nudge.

The rescue itself is the weakest part of the hour. The tether is a touch convenient, and the Doctor is slightly too jokey in the first half, which takes the edge off a house that’s doing such a good job of frightening you. But it’s a small price, and I never felt it cost the episode anything it couldn’t afford. What the rescue does give the story is a reason to push the whole thing out into a wider and much stranger place than a corridor, and the second half of the episode is better for it. And it sets up the question the Doctor actually came here to ask, which is the bit that matters most.

What Emma sees in Clara

The Doctor didn’t come for a ghost. He came because Emma is a functioning empath, and he wants her to look at Clara and tell him what she is. And Emma does, and the answer is a girl. An ordinary one, perfectly and unremarkably human, nothing else, which is not what he wanted to hear, and the show lets that sit. He’s been travelling with someone he half-suspects is a trap, and the confirmation that she’s just a person is somehow more unsettling than the alternative would have been. It also makes his conduct across the last few episodes look considerably worse in hindsight, because he has been running tests on her the whole time, and I like that the show lets him look a bit small. The TARDIS’s open dislike of her only adds to the feeling that there’s something he’s not saying. I was glad they didn’t wrap it up, because it’s the first real reason to wonder what he’s actually after with her, and that’s a lot more interesting than yet another mystery box.

Clara, meanwhile, gets the season’s best small speech. To locate the ghost, the Doctor takes her to see the same hillside across the entire lifespan of the planet, molten rock, ice, forest, the house, the ruin, and then the dark after the sun has gone. It’s a lot of scale for a small ghost story, and it’s the right amount, because it gives her the perspective she then turns on him. She has just watched the whole of Earth’s existence squeezed into a few minutes, so she’s worked out roughly what her own life looks like from where he’s standing. Not a friend, a ghost, something that appears briefly and is gone. It’s the first time anyone has said out loud what travelling with this man actually means from the inside, and Jenna-Louise Coleman plays it quietly furious rather than sad, which is exactly right for her.

The Crooked Man

And then comes the turn that makes the episode. The thing in the pocket universe, the Crooked Man, a lurching wrong-jointed silhouette that has been the scariest image in the story, isn’t hunting anybody. It got trapped there as well, and everything that looked like menace has been one creature trying to get back to its mate. The haunting was two rescues happening at once. The Doctor’s realisation that it’s a love story turns the whole hour into something else, and it rhymes properly with Alec and Emma, who’ve spent the episode standing three feet apart failing to say anything. It also gives the show a tidy extra layer, because it turns out Hila is tied to the pair in the house in a way that feels earned rather than convenient. The show doesn’t belabour any of it, and that’s a genuinely generous ending, a rare one: nothing in this episode turns out to be evil.

Everyone in it, human and otherwise, is simply trying to reach somebody. The title’s doing double duty too, and it takes a second viewing to catch. Everyone in this house is hiding something: Palmer his war, Emma her feelings, the Doctor his real reason for coming, the creature in the woods its intentions. The one thing nobody’s doing is the thing the word usually means in a ghost story.

Rating: 4/5. I loved this one, and the second I’d finished it I wanted to go back and watch the first half again knowing where it was heading. I’ll be doing exactly that before the next episode turns up.

Which would you have kept as the ghost story, the haunting or the pocket universe? And did the Doctor’s reason for coming to Caliburn House change how you see him with Clara? Tell me in the comments.