After a mid-season run of assassins, asteroid fortresses and stolen babies, Doctor Who does the thing it has always been best at and goes to a council estate to find something enormous in a small flat. “Night Terrors” is a fairy tale played straight, with a monster that would work perfectly well without any science fiction attached to it, and it is far more effective in its quiet stretches than in its loud ones. It is also, for reasons that have nothing to do with the story itself, sitting in completely the wrong place in the season.
The premise is one of the loveliest cold opens the show has managed. The psychic paper lights up with a message the Doctor cannot ignore, please save me from the monsters, and it’s from a child, and it has crossed the universe to reach him, sent by a boy who doesn’t know he sent it. The Doctor turning up at a tower block, going door to door with a screwdriver, being taken for a social worker, is exactly the mode the Eleventh Doctor is best in. Matt Smith is extraordinarily good with frightened children, and the scene where he sits on the floor of George’s bedroom and takes the fear entirely seriously, without a flicker of condescension, is the whole reason the episode works. 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 terrified of everything, lifts, old women, the drain outside, the sound of the estate at night, and his system for coping is to put the fear in the wardrobe and shut the door. His father Alex, played with enormous decency by Daniel Mays, is a man working nights and running out of ideas, who has started to wonder whether the problem is beyond him.
The dollhouse
Amy and Rory, meanwhile, get sucked into the cupboard, which contains a Victorian dollhouse the size of a world. It’s a superb set, everything slightly too large, everything made of painted wood, a grandfather clock that has no business ticking, and the peg dolls that live in it are the best monster design of the season: vast, blank-faced, giggling, moving in that stiff wooden shuffle, and lethal by touch, because they don’t kill you, they convert you, and the newly made doll turns round with the same painted smile and joins the hunt. Turning Amy into one for a stretch is a nice bit of nerve, as is the fact that there is no clever way to beat them. You cannot out-think a peg doll. You can only run, and eventually you stop running.
Where the episode sags is the middle of this sequence. The dollhouse is scary the first time and merely large 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 line of the run, cheerfully observing that they must be dead again because it’s peaceful and he’s had a lot of practice, which is funny and also the show acknowledging at last that it has been killing this man far too often. The estate above is better used than the dollhouse below. Purcell the landlord, thumping on doors and threatening tenants over unpaid rent, is dispatched by being swallowed whole by his own carpet, which is both a properly nasty image and an efficient bit of characterisation, because George has been listening to that voice through the floor for months and the cupboard has been taking notes. The show is careful to make every monster in the wardrobe traceable to something the boy has actually heard or seen, which is what separates this from a generic haunting.
George
The reveal is the reason to watch. George isn’t a frightened human boy with strange powers, George is a Tenza, a cuckoo species that finds a household aching for a child, settles in, and rewrites the parents’ memories so completely that they have baby photos, a birth, a whole history. Alex and Claire wanted a son. Something came, and became one, and gave them the past to go with him. And the reason the cupboard is full of monsters is that George overheard his father, at the end of his rope, say that they might have to send him away. That’s a beautifully constructed piece of horror logic: a child who is not what his parents think he is, who has built his entire existence on being wanted, hearing the one sentence that unpicks it, and having the ability to make the fear real. The monsters in the wardrobe aren’t a metaphor for the fear of abandonment, they are the fear of abandonment, walking about on wooden legs.
The resolution is simply Alex, in a dollhouse, telling his son that he knows what he is now and that it changes nothing, and that nobody is sending him anywhere. It works because Daniel Mays sells it completely and because the episode has the confidence to end on a hug rather than a countdown. There’s a clear family resemblance to Fear Her, another lonely child bending reality around a domestic fear, but this is much the better version, because it lets the father do the saving instead of the Doctor.
The scheduling problem
Here is the trouble, and it isn’t the script’s fault. Two episodes ago Amy and Rory had their newborn daughter stolen from them on an asteroid. One episode ago they learned she’d grown up beside them and become the woman who marries and murders the Doctor. And now they are wandering a dollhouse making pleasant jokes, with no apparent interest in any of it. “Night Terrors” was plainly built for the first half of the season, before all that, since its concerns are small and domestic and entirely disconnected from the arc, and it has landed here instead. The result is an episode about a parent’s absolute commitment to a child, playing directly after two episodes about parents losing one, which never once puts those things in the same room. The story about how much Alex loves his son is happening three feet away from two people whose daughter was taken, and the show simply doesn’t look over. Taken alone it’s a decent, warm little horror. Taken in sequence it’s faintly surreal.
The best decision in the whole episode is that a father does the saving instead of the Doctor. He works out what’s actually happening and then stands back and lets Alex be the one who fixes it, which is the right call and rarer on this show than it should be.
Rating: 3/5. Atmospheric, kind-hearted and beautifully played by Daniel Mays, with a monster the show should be proud of and a reveal that recontextualises the whole thing. It’s dragged down by a slack middle act and by a scheduling accident that leaves it stranded between two enormous emotional episodes it has no idea are happening. Everything George is frightened of goes in the cupboard, and the cupboard has been getting fuller. All it took to empty it was somebody promising not to leave.