Night Terrors: The Cupboard Had Been Getting Fuller

After a run of assassins, asteroid fortresses and stolen babies, Doctor Who goes and does the thing it’s always been best at, turning up on a council estate to find something enormous in a small flat. Night Terrors is a fairy tale played completely straight, with a monster that’d work perfectly well without any science fiction attached to it at all, and I found it far more effective in its quiet stretches than in its loud ones. It’s the kind of episode I can imagine a lot of kids watching from behind a cushion, and honestly I’d have been one of them at that age. It’s also, for reasons that have nothing to do with the story itself, sitting in completely the wrong place in the series, and I’ll get to that at the end because it bugged me more than it probably should have.

So it’s a smaller one this week, after a lot of very big ones. No River, no Silence, no eyepatch lady, just one block of flats and one scared boy and whatever’s living in his wardrobe. And I didn’t mind the change of pace one bit, at least to start with. There’s something about the show shrinking itself down to a single bedroom that I’ve always liked, and the first twenty minutes of this are about as good as anything this year, even if it doesn’t quite hold on to that all the way through. It’s a bottle episode really, one estate, one flat, one cupboard, and I think it’s better for being that small. Big monsters in small rooms has always been the show’s sweet spot.

Please save me from the monsters

The opening is one of the loveliest the show has managed in a long time. The psychic paper lights up with a message the Doctor can’t ignore, please save me from the monsters, and it’s from a child, and it’s crossed the whole universe to reach him, sent by a boy who has no idea he sent it. So the Doctor turns up at a tower block and goes door to door with his screwdriver, getting taken for a social worker, and that’s exactly the mode this Doctor is best in. Matt Smith is so good with frightened kids. There’s a scene where he sits on the floor of George’s bedroom and takes the fear completely seriously, without a flicker of talking down, and that scene’s the whole reason the episode works for me. He doesn’t tell the boy there’s nothing in the cupboard. He asks what’s in the cupboard, and then he opens it.

George is eight and scared of pretty much everything, the lift, the old woman down the hall, the noises the estate makes at night, the landlord thumping on doors, and his way of coping is to put all of it in the wardrobe and shut the door. His dad, Alex, is played with enormous decency by Daniel Mays, a man working nights and running out of ideas, who’s started to wonder whether whatever’s wrong with his son is beyond him. I really liked him. He’s not a cartoon dad and he’s not a bad one either, just a tired bloke who loves his kid and doesn’t know what to do next, and that’s a much more interesting thing to watch than another villain.

The dollhouse

Amy and Rory, meanwhile, get pulled into the cupboard, which turns out to hold a Victorian dollhouse the size of a world. It’s a superb set, everything slightly too big, everything made of painted wood, and the peg dolls that live in it are the best monster design of the series for me. They’re huge and blank-faced and giggling, they move in that stiff wooden shuffle, and they’re supremely creepy on top of that, because they don’t kill you, they turn you into one of them, and the new doll turns round with the same painted smile and joins the hunt. Turning Amy into one for a while is a nice bit of nerve. And there’s no clever trick for beating them. You can’t out-think a peg doll, you can only run, and sooner or later you stop running.

Where it sags is the middle of all this. The dollhouse is scary the first time and just big by the fourth, and there’s a good ten minutes of corridors with nicer wallpaper before the story remembers what it’s about. Rory gets the best bit of the run, deciding they must be dead again and complaining about it like a man who’s had a lot of practice, which is funny and also the show finally admitting it’s been killing him far too often. The estate upstairs is better used than the dollhouse down below. Purcell the landlord, banging on doors about unpaid rent, gets swallowed whole by his own carpet, which is a properly nasty image and a quick bit of character work too, because George has been listening to that voice through the floor for months and the cupboard’s been taking notes. Every monster in that wardrobe can be traced back to something the boy’s actually heard or seen, and that’s what makes this more than a generic haunting.

George

The twist is the reason to watch. George isn’t a frightened human boy with strange powers at all. He’s a Tenza, a sort of cuckoo species that finds a home aching for a child, settles in, and changes the family’s memories so completely that they believe he’s always been theirs. Alex and Claire wanted a son and couldn’t have one. Something came, and became one, and gave them the past to go with him. And the reason the cupboard’s so full is that George overheard his dad, at the end of his rope, say they might have to send him away. I thought that was a really clever bit of horror logic, a child who isn’t what his parents think he is, who’s built his whole life on being wanted, hearing the one sentence that pulls it apart, and having the power to make the fear real. The monsters in the wardrobe aren’t standing in for the fear of being abandoned. They are that fear, walking about on wooden legs.

The ending is just Alex, inside a dollhouse, telling his son he knows what he is now and it doesn’t change anything, and nobody’s sending him anywhere. It works because Daniel Mays sells it completely and because the episode’s brave enough to end on a hug rather than a countdown. The Doctor works out what’s actually going on and then stands back and lets the dad be the one who fixes it, which is the right call and rarer on this show than it should be. There’s a clear family likeness to Fear Her, another lonely child bending the world around a fear at home, but I think this is much the better version of that idea, and that father-does-the-saving bit is the main reason why. I’d happily watch it again just for that last scene.

The wrong week

Here’s the trouble, and it isn’t really the script’s fault. Two episodes ago Amy and Rory had their newborn daughter taken from them on an asteroid. Then in Let’s Kill Hitler they found out she’d grown up right beside them as their best friend and been raised to kill the Doctor. And now here they are wandering round a dollhouse making pleasant jokes, with no apparent interest in any of that. Night Terrors feels like it was meant to go out much earlier in the year, before all of it, because what it cares about is small and domestic and has nothing to do with the big story, and it’s ended up here instead. So I’ve got an episode about a parent’s total commitment to a child, going out straight after two episodes about parents losing one, and it never once puts those things in the same room.

The story of how much Alex loves his son is happening about three feet away from two people whose daughter was stolen, and the show just doesn’t look over. Amy doesn’t flinch at a dad pleading for his boy, and Rory doesn’t say a word about it, which after the last couple of weeks felt really odd to me. I kept waiting for one of them to catch the Doctor’s eye, or for Amy to go quiet at the end, and it just never came. Take it out of the run and watch it cold and none of this matters. On its own, it’s a decent, warm little horror story. In sequence, it’s a bit surreal.

Rating: 3/5. It was ok, a good monster and a great dad stuck in a slow middle and the wrong week.

Do you think Night Terrors would have landed better earlier in the series, before the baby story took over? Tell me in the comments what you made of it.