Neil Cross

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.

Hide: It Was a Love Story All Along - Doctor Who episode still

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.

This is the most divisive episode of the season, and I understand exactly why. The plot is thin to the point of transparency, the antagonist is a shouting sphere, and the climax is two people making speeches at a planet. If you need Doctor Who to have a working mechanism underneath it, “The Rings of Akhaten” will drive you up the wall. I liked it anyway, and I think the reason is that it is entirely sincere about something the show usually only gestures at.

A leaf

It opens not on an alien world but in a suburban street, across about twenty years, in the best sequence Series 7 has produced. A leaf blows into a young man’s face and pushes him into the path of a car. The woman who pulls him clear is the one he marries. They have a daughter. The mother keeps the leaf pressed in a book, page one of 101 Places to See, a travel guide for journeys she never takes. She dies in 2005, and the girl grows up, and the leaf stays in the book. It’s told almost wordlessly in about four minutes, and it establishes Clara Oswald more effectively than The Bells of Saint John and the two Claras before her managed between them. This is a woman assembled out of a near-accident and a book of unvisited places, raised by a mother who ran out of time, and it makes sense of everything about her: the nannying, the restlessness, the not-quite-leaving.

The market

Then the Doctor takes her somewhere, and the somewhere is genuinely wonderful to look at. The Rings of Akhaten are seven worlds orbiting a pyramid-temple around a star, and the show spends real money on the market: dozens of prosthetic species, hawkers, food, noise, a proper alien crowd rather than four extras in a corridor. Doctor Who very rarely does scale on the ground like this, and for once the frame is full. The economy is the neatest invention in it. Currency here is sentimental value, objects that matter to their owner, priced by what they cost emotionally, which means the Doctor has to haggle with something he minds losing, and it means the whole society runs on a version of the thing the episode is about. Merry Gejelh, the Queen of Years, is a small girl who has memorised every song, law and story of her people, and whose job is to sing an old thing back to sleep. Emilia Jones is very good, properly frightened, and specifically frightened of getting the words wrong rather than of dying, which is a much better note to play.

It should be said that this is the most musical episode Doctor Who has ever made, and that’s central rather than decorative. The whole society runs on song, a lullaby sung continuously for millennia by a rotating priesthood, passed from Queen of Years to Queen of Years, holding a god asleep. Murray Gold’s score does an enormous amount of the storytelling here, and the long sequence where the singing spreads from Merry to the priests to the whole crowd, building as the thing in the star begins to stir, is the closest this programme has come to opera. If the episode works for you at all, it will be during that sequence. The Vigil are a decent secondary threat too, masked enforcers who exist purely to deliver the Queen of Years to her obligation, with no malice and no negotiation. A civilisation that has bureaucratised its own human sacrifice is a properly bleak idea, and it’s given about two scenes.

The Rings of Akhaten: The Most Important Leaf in Human History - Doctor Who episode still

The sleeper, and the leaf again

The plot proper is where it wobbles. The Old God wakes up. It is a large angry face in a star, and it wants to be fed, and the show can’t quite decide whether it is a parasite, a god, or a very hungry sun. There’s a decent idea underneath, a thing that eats stories and memories and lived experience, and a civilisation that has been paying it in songs for millennia, but the episode never makes the mechanics concrete enough for the threat to bite. People are threatened by proximity to a shouting face. That’s about it. Then the Doctor makes his speech, and it’s a good one: he offers the parasite everything he has, every memory, every loss, the whole weight of a very long life, and challenges it to finish the meal. Matt Smith plays it hard, and the detail that he’s crying by the end, that the offer is real and costs him, is what saves it from being a mere power move. It isn’t enough. And this is the part I actually admire: the Doctor fails. The thing eats a millennium of grief and is still hungry, and the man who solves everything is out of ideas.

There’s a small character beat in the middle that I liked more than the plot around it. Clara trades her mother’s ring, the one keepsake she has, to buy a moped ride, and then has to watch it disappear into somebody else’s hands as payment. The Doctor gets it back for her at the end, quietly, without mentioning it. In an episode about the price of things that matter, having the companion actually pay one is a better argument than any of the speeches, and it’s handled in about twenty seconds without comment. So Clara gives the thing in the star the leaf. Her argument is that the Doctor offered a life that was lived, enormous but finite and therefore countable. What she has is a life that wasn’t: every day her mother didn’t get, every place in the book she never went, all the unhad futures compressed into a dried leaf. Infinite potential, none of it spent, impossible to consume. And the parasite chokes on it.

As physics this is nonsense. As an image it’s rather beautiful, and it’s the correct climax for an episode that opened on a leaf and a book of unvisited places. The show has decided that the most powerful thing in the universe is what didn’t happen, and it commits to that completely rather than hedging. Whether it works depends entirely on whether you’ll accept an emotional resolution to a physical problem. I will, here, because the episode has been honest about being that kind of story since its first four minutes. But it is asking for a lot of goodwill, and it doesn’t build much of a plot to earn it with. Neil Cross gets the balance right later in the season with Hide, which has the same interest in grief and a great deal more holding it together.

Rating: 3/5. Beautiful to look at, generous with its ideas, and the strongest characterisation Clara has had, anchored by an opening sequence that’s among the year’s best. The plot is a shrug, the antagonist never becomes a real threat, and the resolution asks you to accept sentiment as a weapon. Worth it for the ambition and the sincerity, but it’s carried by its edges rather than its middle. A leaf blew into a man’s face and made a family, and years later it was worth more than a Time Lord’s entire life. That’s either profound or ridiculous, and I’ve decided I don’t mind which.

Hide: It Was a Love Story All Along