Doctor Who has a favourite kind of story about a famous person, and it goes like this: the great man or woman is misunderstood and unappreciated, the Doctor turns up and tells them how important they will one day be, and an alien threat obligingly proves the point. It worked for Van Gogh because that episode had the nerve to admit the reassurance changed nothing. It works considerably less well here, because “Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror” wants the warmth without doing the harder work, and it hangs the whole thing on a monster with nothing inside it. What saves it is Goran Visnjic, who is genuinely lovely, and a sharper handle on Thomas Edison than the internet’s version of this argument usually manages.
Two inventors, one of them not a cartoon
The best thing about this episode is that it refuses the easy version of Tesla against Edison.
The lazy telling has Tesla as a persecuted genius and Edison as a thieving fraud, and you can find that story anywhere. Nina Metivier’s script starts there and then complicates it. Robert Glenister’s Edison is loud, commercial, entirely comfortable with taking credit, and also correct about something Tesla is not: that an invention nobody can sell is an invention nobody will ever use. He runs a laboratory that works. Tesla’s beautiful ideas keep dying for want of money, and the episode is honest enough to let Edison say so out loud without the script slapping him down for it.
Visnjic plays Tesla as gentle, slightly haunted, and permanently exhausted by having to explain himself. His scenes with Yaz are the warmest material in the season, partly because Mandip Gill finally gets a proper conversational partner and partly because the two characters recognise something in each other. He tells her that he sees the finished machine in his head before he builds it and that nobody believes him, and she takes it seriously. It’s a small, generous performance in an episode that doesn’t always deserve it.
The Niagara Falls setting is used well too, and the production gets a lot out of very little. Wardenclyffe Tower, the workshop full of arcs and coils, the slightly grubby New York streets: it all looks considerably more expensive than it can possibly have been. Segun Akinola’s score is doing quiet, effective work here.
The Skithra are a wasted hour
And then there’s the monster, and the monster is where this falls apart.
The Skithra are a scavenger species who steal technology rather than invent it, ruled by a queen who wants Tesla because she needs somebody who can actually build things. That’s a serviceable idea with an obvious rhyme built in: a race of thieves, in an episode about who gets credit for what. The script even says it aloud, having the Doctor call the queen a scavenger who has never had an original thought, which is the same charge Tesla levels at Edison.
Saying the idea is not the same as using it. The Skithra do nothing with the parallel. They arrive, they demand, they chase people down corridors, and they are seen off when the Doctor rigs Wardenclyffe to throw them back into orbit. Anjli Mohindra is unrecognisable and completely wasted under the prosthetics, given a queen who has no personality beyond volume. There’s a version of this episode where the Skithra queen is genuinely tempting, offering Tesla the resources and the audience that Edison and the investors won’t, and where refusing her costs him something. Instead she shouts.
It’s the same failure the previous season kept making, and I’d hoped Spyfall had signalled a change. A monster arrives because the format needs one, delivers the theme in dialogue rather than through anything it does, and is dispatched by a technical solution nobody could have predicted. Whatever heat the historical half generates, the science fiction half keeps venting.
There is also a missed opportunity in the fam, who spend the hour being useful rather than being people. Graham gets a couple of good lines about being out of his depth and Ryan does some running, but neither of them has anything at stake here, and the show has stopped even trying to give them an inner life week to week. Series 11 at least kept Grace in the room. By this point the three of them function as a research team, splitting up to gather information and reconvening to tell the Doctor what they found. Yaz is the exception only because the script hands her Tesla to talk to, which rather proves the point: give one of them a proper scene partner and they immediately come alive.
The pacing does not help either. The middle third is a siege at Wardenclyffe that consists almost entirely of people moving between rooms while something bangs on a door, and the Skithra never feel like they are closing in. A good siege needs the space to shrink. This one has the same three sets throughout and no sense that anywhere has been lost, so the threat stays at a constant low hum from the first attack to the last.
The ending is honest, at least
Where the episode recovers a little is in refusing to lie about what happens next.
The Doctor gives Tesla the usual speech about how the future will remember him, and the episode then quietly notes that it will not do so in his lifetime. He dies broke and largely forgotten, his tower dismantled for scrap, and the closing narration says as much. Nobody pretends the encounter fixed anything. Tesla goes back to a workshop he cannot afford to run.
That’s the right instinct, and it’s the one thing separating this from a straightforward hagiography. The trouble is that it arrives in voiceover in the last ninety seconds rather than being dramatised anywhere in the preceding hour. You are told the sad ending instead of watching it happen, which is a habit this era cannot seem to break. Fan sites like Blogtor Who were kinder to this one than I can be, and I understand why, because the affection in it is real. It just keeps handing you its ideas in speech form.
I want to be clear that I like this episode more than the rating suggests. It is good company, it has genuine affection for its subject, and Visnjic gives the kind of performance that makes you want the show around him to be better than it is. The problem is that everything working here is the historical drama, and everything failing is the reason it is an episode of Doctor Who at all.
What it leaves behind is Goran Visnjic, playing a tired, decent man who sees finished machines in his head, the most likeable guest performance of the era. It leaves an Edison who is loud and grasping and also right about money, which is a braver choice than the story usually allows. It leaves Yaz with someone to talk to at last, and Mandip Gill showing again what she can do when the script remembers her. It leaves the Skithra, a race of thieves in an episode about credit, who never once use the idea they were built on. And it leaves a closing narration doing the work the drama should have done.
Rating: 2.5/5. Warm, well cast and genuinely fond of its subject, with a version of the Tesla and Edison feud that’s smarter than most. The monster at the centre is hollow, the resolution is a technical trick, and the saddest part of the story is summarised rather than shown. Pleasant company, and about half a good episode.