For about thirty minutes this is the best ghost story Doctor Who has ever attempted: a haunted house in 1974, a candle in a dark corridor, a shape at the end of it that isn’t quite a person, and a script disciplined enough to let a room be silent. Then it explains itself, twice, and the second explanation is so much better than the first that the episode retroactively becomes about something else entirely. “Hide” is Neil Cross’s second script of the season and it’s a considerable step up from The Rings of Akhaten, with the same interest in grief and time and far more holding it up.
The haunting
Caliburn House has a ghost. It’s been photographed across centuries, always in the same posture, always screaming, always in the same spot, which is the detail that tips a viewer off early that this is a physics problem rather than a haunting. The setup is two people: Professor Alec Palmer, a former SOE operative who spent the war doing things he won’t discuss and now hunts ghosts, and Emma Grayling, an empath he uses as an instrument and is quite obviously in love with. Dougray Scott and Jessica Raine are both excellent, and the show is smart about what’s between them, a man who thinks he doesn’t deserve her, a woman waiting for him to say so, and a working relationship dressed up as a substitute for the conversation. The direction is the star. Jamie Payne shoots this like a proper horror film, with long holds, deep shadow, and a torch beam that shows you slightly less than you want. The sequence where Clara is left alone in the house while the Doctor photographs the woods is the most sustained dread this show has managed since the orphanage in Day of the Moon, and it does it almost entirely with sound and an empty corridor.
Palmer’s history is what gives the house its weight. He was in the Special Operations Executive during the war, the man who sent agents into occupied Europe knowing most of them would not come back, and who signed the orders. He doesn’t discuss it, and the episode doesn’t dramatise it. It simply establishes that his ghost-hunting is a man with a great many dead on his conscience going looking for evidence that the dead persist. Dougray Scott plays the whole part underneath, all restraint and courtesy, and when Emma tells him plainly that he isn’t the monster he thinks he is, it lands because she’s the only person alive who can actually read him.
Not a ghost
The first explanation is the good-but-ordinary one. The ghost is Hila Tacorien, a time traveller from the future, trapped in a collapsing pocket universe where time runs so slowly that her three-minute fall is a several-century scream in ours. That’s a decent idea, well executed, and the rescue is a solid set piece, with the Doctor going into the pocket universe on a tether and Clara flying the TARDIS to pull them out. The pocket universe itself is genuinely eerie, a dead forest under a dying sky with something moving in it. There’s a lovely nasty beat where the TARDIS refuses to help, and generates a voice interface that appears as Clara, and is thoroughly unpleasant to her. The ship does not like this woman. Nobody says why.
The bit that matters is the Doctor’s actual motive, and the episode holds it back until the middle. He didn’t come for a ghost. He came because Emma is a functioning empath, and he wants her to look at Clara and tell him what she is. And Emma does, and the answer is: a girl. An ordinary one. Perfectly, unremarkably human, the only girl in the world, but nothing else. Which is not what he wanted to hear, and the show lets that sit. He’s been travelling with someone he half-suspects is a trap, and the confirmation that she’s just a person is somehow more unsettling than the alternative. It also makes his conduct across the last few episodes look considerably worse in hindsight, because he has been running tests.
Clara, meanwhile, gets the season’s best small speech. The sequence that sets it up is the episode’s most ambitious: to locate the ghost, the Doctor takes her to photograph the same hillside at intervals across the entire lifespan of the planet, molten rock, ice, forest, the house, the ruin, and then the dark after the sun has gone. It’s a lot of scale for a small ghost story, and it’s the right amount, because it gives her the perspective she then turns on him. She has just watched the whole of Earth’s existence compress into a few minutes, which means she has just worked out roughly what her own life looks like from where he’s standing. Not a friend. A ghost. Something that appears briefly and is gone. It’s the first time anyone has said out loud what travelling with this man actually means from the inside, and Coleman plays it quietly furious rather than sad.
The Crooked Man
And then the reversal that makes the episode. The thing in the pocket universe, the Crooked Man, a lurching wrong-jointed silhouette that has been the scariest image in the story, isn’t hunting anybody. There are two of them. They’re a pair, separated when the universe collapsed, and one is stranded on the wrong side. Everything that looked like menace was one creature trying to get back to the other, and the haunting was two rescues happening at once. The Doctor’s realisation, it’s a love story, turns the whole hour into something else, and it rhymes properly with Alec and Emma, who have spent the episode standing three feet apart failing to say anything. The show doesn’t belabour the parallel. That’s a genuinely generous ending, and a rare one: nothing in this episode turns out to be evil. Everyone in it, human and otherwise, is simply trying to reach somebody.
The title is doing double duty, incidentally, and it takes a second viewing to catch. Everyone in this house is hiding something. Palmer his war, Emma her feelings, the Doctor his real reason for coming, the creature in the woods its intentions. The one thing nobody is doing is the thing the word usually means in a ghost story.
Rating: 4/5. Atmospheric, well acted and unusually kind, with a twist that improves everything preceding it rather than merely surprising you. It’s slightly overstuffed, since the Clara-mystery thread and the ghost story are competing for the same forty-five minutes, and the tether rescue is a touch convenient. But the craft on display is the best the season has offered. Everyone in this house was calling out for someone. It just took the Doctor forty minutes to notice that the monster was doing it too.