There’s a particular kind of Doctor Who episode that starts as a haunted-house runaround and ends up quietly dismantling the show’s central premise. “The God Complex” is one of those. It has a hotel, a maze, a monster and a body count, and by the end it has made a serious and rather uncomfortable case that travelling with the Doctor is a form of worship, and that worship is what gets people killed. Den of Geek reckoned it one of the creepiest hours the show had produced to that point, which is fair, though the creepiness isn’t really what it’s for. It is also the episode where he takes Amy and Rory home, and that is not a coincidence.
The hotel with a room for everybody
The setting is a shabby, endless 1980s hotel of swirling carpet, brass fittings, muzak and framed prints of the dead hanging in the lobby, and every room in it contains one person’s worst fear. It’s a superb concept, cheaply and brilliantly executed. Nick Hurran shoots the corridors with the same restless, off-kilter grammar he brought to The Girl Who Waited, all canted angles and hard cuts, and the rooms are a parade of small, specific, deeply personal horrors: a sad clown, a gorilla, a jilted bride, a row of ventriloquist dummies laughing in an empty function suite. Nothing cosmic. Nothing that requires explanation. Just the things individual people cannot look at. The rule is what makes it frightening, because once you find your room and see your fear, something in you turns over, and then you start saying praise him in a flat contented voice and walk off down the corridor to meet the Minotaur, and you are grateful.
The guests are a good crowd, and Rita is the best of them. Amara Karan plays a medical student with an unflappable manner, a genuinely quick mind, and no interest whatsoever in being impressed by the man with the screwdriver. She works out the hotel’s logic roughly in parallel with him, she organises the survivors, and she’s funny, dry and entirely unbothered by the Doctor’s charm. When he tells her, only half joking, that she’s fired, the joke lands because everyone in the scene understands he’s been auditioning her. He does actually offer, in the end. She declines to be saved on his terms, because by then she’s been converted, and she asks him as a kindness to let her go somewhere he can’t watch. She wants to keep her dignity, and the one thing she is certain of is that his need to save her isn’t about her.
Killing Rita is the episode’s most deliberate cruelty. She’s the most obviously companion-shaped guest star the show has produced in years, and the story removes her specifically to demonstrate that being brilliant and brave in the Doctor’s vicinity is not a survival trait. It stings, and it’s meant to. Gibbis, by contrast, survives everything. A mole-faced bureaucrat from Tivoli, the most invaded planet in the galaxy, whose national anthem is reportedly Glory to [insert name here], he has made cowardice into a civic religion, will betray anyone within about four seconds, and comes through without a scratch. It plays as comedy for two acts and then curdles. The universe is not, it turns out, arranged so the brave ones come home.
Not fear, faith
The turn is excellent, because the creature isn’t eating fear at all. It feeds on faith. Fear is just the crowbar: put someone in front of the thing they cannot bear, and they reach for whatever they actually believe in, and that is the meal. Rita has her religion. Howie has his conspiracies. Joe has his luck. The room doesn’t create the belief, it exposes it, which is a much nastier idea than a monster that simply wants you frightened.
The Doctor finds his own door, too. Room eleven. He opens it, the cloister bell begins to toll somewhere inside, and he looks at whatever is in there and says, with a tired little laugh, of course. Who else? The camera never goes past his shoulder. We are not shown it, and the episode is quite right not to show it, because every answer the audience supplies is worse than anything a set dresser could have built. It’s a superb piece of withholding in an hour otherwise built on making fears explicit, and the AV Club was right that the restraint is what makes the scene stick.
Which raises the question the episode has been walking towards from the start, and it doesn’t flinch: what does Amy Pond believe in? Her room is number seven, and it contains a little girl in a coat sitting on a suitcase in a hallway, waiting for a raggedy man to come back, the same child who waited in The Eleventh Hour and who has apparently never entirely stopped. Amy’s faith isn’t in a god or a system. It’s in him. It always has been, since she was seven, and the hotel has known it since she walked in. So he breaks it. He sits her down and tells her, deliberately and coldly, that he took her with him because he was vain and lonely and wanted to be adored, that he isn’t a hero and never was, that he is a madman with a box who has got a great many better people than her killed. Amy Williams, it’s time to stop waiting. Matt Smith plays it as an act of demolition that costs him everything, Karen Gillan plays the moment the belief actually goes out, and the creature, cut off from its food, dies on the floor of a fake hotel room.
The keys and the car
Its last words are the sting. The Minotaur is an ancient thing, related to the Nimon, kept alive for centuries by an automated prison that never stopped feeding it, and translated, what it says is that it is glad to die: an old creature drenched in the blood of the innocent, drifting through an endless shifting maze, for whom death would be a mercy. The Doctor points out that it isn’t talking about itself. He’s right, and nobody in the room argues with him.
So he takes them home. A house, a set of keys, and the red E-Type Jaguar Rory has always wanted, parked at the kerb. He doesn’t make a speech about it. He explains, more or less honestly, that he knows how this ends, that he has seen what happens to the people who keep saying yes to him, and that he would rather they were bored and alive than remarkable and dead. Amy lets him go without a fight, which is the saddest part of the whole thing. The girl on the suitcase would have chased the box down the street. This woman stands in a doorway and says goodbye properly, because he’s just taken the thing that would have made her run.
What it leaves behind is a hotel of specific fears, sad clowns and dummies and a gorilla, no cosmic horror required, just the exact wrong door for each person. It leaves the best conceptual turn of the season, a monster that doesn’t want you frightened so much as certain. It leaves Rita, the most companion-shaped guest star in years, killed to prove that being excellent near the Doctor doesn’t save you. It leaves room seven, and the fact that Amy’s faith was never in a religion but in a raggedy man who said he’d be back in five minutes and took twelve years. And it leaves the keys and the car, because he breaks her belief in him and then goes before it can grow back, which doesn’t feel like a rescue so much as a man cutting his losses.
Rating: 4/5. Sharp, ruthless about its own show, and beautifully directed, with an idea at the centre good enough to justify the entire hotel. The guest cast is uneven, since Howie and Joe are functional rather than felt, and the automated-prison explanation is a touch tidy for something this suggestive. But the closing twenty minutes are as brave as this show gets, and the goodbye is devastating precisely because nobody shouts. Every room has somebody’s name on it, and behind the door is the thing you’d fall back on. He knew which one was hers. He’d known for years.