The God Complex: A Hotel With a Room for Everybody

Some Doctor Who episodes start out as a haunted-house runaround and end up quietly pulling the show’s premise to bits, and The God Complex is one of those. It’s got a hotel, a maze, a monster and a body count, and by the end it’s made a serious and pretty uncomfortable case that travelling with the Doctor is a kind of worship, and that the worship is what gets people killed. I thought it was one of the creepiest hours the show’s done in years, though the creepy stuff isn’t really what it’s for. It’s also the episode where he takes Amy and Rory home. Which isn’t a coincidence, and the more I thought about it afterwards the more the whole hour seemed to be walking towards that front door.

It opens before the Doctor’s even arrived. A police officer, Lucy Hayes, is hiding from something in the corridors, and by the end of the scene she’s calm and smiling and saying praise him, and she goes out to meet it. It’s a really nasty little opening, and I liked that it doesn’t explain anything yet, it just leaves you with a woman who’s stopped being frightened for no reason you can see. Then the TARDIS turns up in what looks like a slightly naff hotel, the Doctor’s delighted with himself, Amy and Rory are up for it, and it takes about two minutes for the fun to drain out. There’s no real way to talk about the ending without spoiling it, so I won’t pretend otherwise, but I’ll try to keep the smaller surprises intact. And I’d go in knowing as little as possible if you can, because a lot of what makes it work is the slow realisation of what the hotel’s really for.

A room for everybody

The setting’s a shabby, endless 1980s hotel, swirly carpet, brass fittings, muzak, and photos of previous guests on the walls (a Sontaran, a Judoon, a Silurian and a Catkind among them, if you pause it). Every room in it holds one person’s worst fear. It’s a superb idea, done cheaply and brilliantly, and after the white corridors of The Girl Who Waited last week it’s the opposite look entirely, warm and tatty and wrong. The rooms are a parade of small, specific, personal horrors, a sad clown, a gorilla, a row of ventriloquist dummies grinning round a table in an empty function room. Nothing cosmic, nothing that needs explaining, just the things particular people can’t look at. And the rule is what makes it frightening, because once you find your room and see your fear something in you turns over, you start saying praise him in a flat contented voice, and you walk off down the corridor to meet the Minotaur, grateful.

The guests are a good crowd, and Rita’s the best of them. Amara Karan plays a medical student with a quick mind and no interest at all in being impressed by the man with the screwdriver, and she works out the hotel’s logic more or less alongside him, keeps the survivors organised and stays dry and funny through all of it. When she gets something right before Amy does, he tells Amy, with regret, that she’s fired, then mimes “we’ll talk” at Rita, and the joke lands because everyone in the scene can see he’s auditioning her. Howie’s a conspiracy nut and Joe’s a gambler they find tied to a chair, already converted. And then there’s Gibbis, played by David Walliams, a mole-faced little bureaucrat from Tivoli, the most invaded planet in the galaxy, whose national anthem is Glory to [insert name here].

Not fear, faith

The turn’s excellent, because the creature isn’t eating fear at all. It feeds on faith. Fear’s just the crowbar, put someone in front of the thing they can’t bear and they grab for whatever they actually believe in, and that’s the meal. Rita has her religion, Howie has his conspiracies, Joe has his luck. The room doesn’t create the belief, it shows it up, which is a much nastier idea than a monster that just wants you scared, and when the Doctor finally gets it I sat up a bit. It plays fair with it too, because the clues are all sitting there in the first half, Rita’s prayers, Howie’s theories, Joe and his lucky streak, and I just didn’t put them together.

Gibbis, meanwhile, comes through everything without a scratch. He’s made cowardice into a civic religion, he’ll betray anyone inside about four seconds, and it plays as comedy for most of the hour before it curdles. Because Rita doesn’t make it. She’s the most obviously companion-shaped guest the show’s had in years, and the story removes her specifically to show that being brilliant and brave near the Doctor isn’t a survival trait, which puts her at the end of a line of people he invites along who never get to go. Once she’s converted she asks him, as a kindness, to let her go somewhere he can’t watch, and she keeps her dignity right to the end. It stings, and it’s meant to, and his face when she walks off is the first sign of what’s coming. The universe isn’t, it turns out, arranged so that the brave ones get home.

Room eleven, room seven

The Doctor finds his own door too. Room eleven. He opens it, the cloister bell starts tolling somewhere inside, and he looks at whatever’s in there and says, with a tired little laugh, of course, who else? The camera never goes past his shoulder, and the episode’s quite right not to show it, because anything I filled that room with in my own head was worse than what a set dresser could’ve built. I kept thinking back to Amy’s Choice, where something wearing his face spent a whole episode telling him what he really thinks of himself. It’s a superb bit of holding back in an hour that’s otherwise built on making fears explicit, and that restraint is why it stuck with me.

Which raises the question the episode’s been walking towards from the start, and it doesn’t flinch from it. What does Amy Pond believe in? Her room’s number seven, and inside there’s a little girl sitting on a suitcase, waiting for a raggedy man to come back, the same child who waited in The Eleventh Hour and who apparently never quite stopped. Amy’s faith isn’t in a god or a system, it’s in him, and it has been since she was seven. 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 wanted to be adored, that he’s not a hero, that he’s just a madman with a box, and then, Amy Williams, it’s time to stop waiting. Matt Smith plays it as a demolition job 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’s an ancient thing, a cousin of the Nimon, kept going for who knows how long by a prison ship that never stopped dragging in new believers to feed it, and the Doctor translates as it goes. It’s glad to die, an ancient creature drenched in the blood of the innocent, drifting through an endless shifting maze, and for something like that death would be a gift. Then the kicker, which is that it wasn’t talking about itself. Nobody in the room argues, and the Doctor doesn’t either, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the show say that about him quite so bluntly.

So he takes them home. A house, a set of keys, and a shiny red car parked at the kerb that Rory’s clearly thrilled about. When Amy asks why now, he says because she’s still breathing, and I took that to mean he’d rather they were bored and alive than remarkable and dead. Amy lets him go without a fight, and that’s the saddest part of the whole thing for me. The girl on the suitcase would’ve chased the box down the street, but this woman stands in the road and says goodbye properly, and asks him to tell her daughter to visit her old mum sometime if he bumps into her. Because he’s just taken away the thing that would have made her run, and he goes before it can grow back, which doesn’t feel like a rescue so much as a man cutting his losses.

Rating: 4/5. I really enjoyed this one, and the goodbye’s devastating precisely because nobody shouts. The missing mark is Howie and Joe, who are functional rather than felt, and a prison explanation that’s a touch tidy for something this suggestive.

What do you think was behind the door of room eleven? Tell me in the comments.