This show has now done five episodes built around something ordinary being made frightening: gas masks, the statues in Blink, clockwork, and now shadows. “Silence in the Library” takes the simplest possible thing, the dark patch on the floor behind you, and turns it into the most efficient monster of the season. It also introduces a character who upends everything about how the Doctor’s story works, and it does that quietly, in the middle of a horror episode, while nobody’s looking.
A planet of books
The setting is magnificent. The Library is not a library on a planet, it is a planet that is a library, the whole surface of a world given over to shelving, containing a copy of every book ever written. Continents of fiction. An entire biography section the size of a country. And it’s empty. A hundred years ago the Library sealed itself, broadcast a single message, count the shadows, and four thousand and twenty-two people vanished from it without trace, while the systems simultaneously logged a million million lifeforms still present. Nobody has been back since. That’s a superb opening mystery, and the direction sells it: enormous vaulted halls, dust, silence, and the Doctor cheerfully wandering into it because he can’t help himself. Donna hates the place on sight, which is the correct response.
They aren’t alone for long. An archaeological expedition arrives, funded by Strackman Lux, a corporate heir with a proprietorial interest in the planet and a non-disclosure agreement he’d like everyone to sign before they’re permitted to die in it. His team are a decently sketched crew: two men both confusingly called Dave, a dry, capable archaeologist called Anita, and the sweet, slightly dim Miss Evangelista, who is treated with casual contempt by nearly everyone around her and whose fate the episode later uses to make a very sharp point about exactly that. Running alongside all of it is something stranger still, a little girl in what looks like a present-day suburban living room, who sees the Library whenever she closes her eyes. Every time the story cuts to her the Library flickers, people vanish mid-sentence, corridors rearrange themselves, doors reset. Her psychiatrist calmly tells her that the Library is the real world and her own life is the dream. The episode never explains it, and it keeps quietly pulling the floor out from under everything else.
Count the shadows
The Vashta Nerada are the best monster this show’s done since the Angels, and they work on exactly the same principle: a rule you can check yourself. They are microscopic, they swarm in their trillions, and they live in shadow. They strip a person to bare bone in about a second. You cannot fight them, you cannot outrun them, and you cannot see them, but you can count your shadows, because a person with two shadows has already been marked and the second one is not a shadow. The horror lands because the show plays it with total discipline. There’s no monster reveal, no creature effect to be disappointed by. There’s just a dark patch on the floor that is fractionally in the wrong place, and a man in a spacesuit who has stopped talking, and a helmet full of skull. The moment a character glances down and sees two shadows where there should be one is as good a scare as this programme has managed. The monster here is essentially a lighting note, and it works better than half the CGI creatures this show has ever spent real money on.
Even better is what happens to Miss Evangelista. Killed early, her neural relay keeps transmitting an echo of her last thoughts, a data ghost, looping and confused, asking where everyone’s gone and then repeating two words about ice cream until the signal degrades. It is genuinely horrible, and the other characters’ helpless embarrassment as they listen to a dead woman fade out mid-sentence is the most upsetting thing in the episode. It’s also, characteristically, an idea nobody else would have thought to put in a Saturday teatime drama. Donna’s part is smaller than usual, and the show makes that unease part of the texture rather than hiding it. She spends the hour wanting to leave, saying so out loud more than once, and being gently talked round each time, and on every occasion she raises the possibility of simply going home the Doctor breezes straight past it without really hearing her. Given where she ends up by the closing minutes, that little pattern looks rather different on reflection than it does in the moment.
The woman with the diary
And then, in the middle of all this, there’s River Song. She arrives with the expedition and she knows him. Not knows of him. Knows him. She has a diary full of their adventures together, in an order that hasn’t happened yet. She’s exasperated by him, fond of him, calls him “sweetie”, and is visibly hurt when it becomes clear he hasn’t the faintest idea who she is. Alex Kingston plays it beautifully, and the effect is genuinely disorientating. Every scene between them runs on an imbalance the audience can see and he can’t: she has a whole history with this man, and she’s standing in front of a version of him who is looking straight through her. When she has to prove who she is, she does it by leaning in and whispering something in his ear, and whatever it is, it stops him dead. She knows his name. His actual name. It’s a hell of a swing. The show has spent four series treating the Doctor’s past as the mystery, and this quietly introduces someone for whom his future is the settled thing and the present is the awkward part. This isn’t the first time the show has done lovers meeting out of sequence, since Reinette lived a whole life in the gaps between his visits in The Girl in the Fireplace, but this inverts it. This time the Doctor is the one arriving too early.
The cliffhanger is vicious, and it’s aimed squarely at Donna. She’s teleported out of danger, or so we’re told. Then the Doctor finds one of the Library’s information Nodes, the stone statues with real donated human faces mounted on them, and this one is wearing Donna’s face, and it says, in Donna’s voice, that Donna Noble has been saved. Nobody explains it. Nobody has time to. The shadows are closing, one of the crew is already a skeleton walking around in a suit, and the episode simply stops there. “Saved” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and none of it sounds good.
Rating: 4.5/5. Beautifully constructed, properly scary, and carrying a genuinely destabilising new character. It loses half a mark only for being the front half of a story, since everything it sets up, it sets up superbly. Four thousand and twenty-two missing people, a woman carrying a diary full of a future he hasn’t lived yet, and Donna Noble’s face bolted onto a statue in a dead library. I’ve no idea what “saved” is supposed to mean in that sentence, and I’m fairly certain I don’t want to find out. Count the shadows. Seriously, go and count them.
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