Tom Salinsky

Firstly, sorry this review is so late. I’ve been running around the country and the planet and suffering from a cold. Admittedly on September 11, this seems like very little to complain of, but there it is.

Back in 2005 a script from Mark Gatiss (long “a”) seemed like a splendid idea. I’d been following his career since “Quatermass and the Hat” at the Edinburgh Fringe circa 1991 and when buying Virgin’s New Adventures every month had thoroughly enjoyed his efforts including “Nightshade”, featuring the star of a beloved BBC TV science-fiction series plagued by fictional characters come to life. I always enjoyed The League of Gentlemen too and so when the series was revived, he seemed an obvious choice to contribute a story, but The Unquiet Dead was the one which proved to Russell T Davies that if getting the scripts up-to-scratch in time meant doing huge rewrites himself then so be it. Dickens-vs-ghosts-in-Victorian-London seemed to be much more about Russell’s vision of Who than Gatiss’s.

The Idiot’s Lantern, part of David Tennant’s first season, was a lesser effort, with no real sense of jeopardy, despite a pleasingly bonkers performance from national treasure Maureen Lipman and the Sapphire And Steel-esque vision of people with stolen faces. Last year, his script for Victory of the Daleks easily walked away with the wooden spoon in a series which was almost comically uneven and incoherent. It was with a certain amount of caution that I approached Night Terrors therefore.

But, it’s also worth noting that Mark Gatiss is one of the most prolific non-show-runners to have written for the programme so far. Only Moffat has written for every series since the show came back, although Rusty currently holds the record for the most scripts by some margin (credited with 31 episodes as writer or co-writer – Moffat can rack up only 18). When Closing Time goes out, Gareth Roberts will overtake Gatiss with five scripts. Next is Helen Raynor with four scripts over two stories. No-one else can get past three. So, he must have something going for him. Mustn’t he…?

The early part of the episode left me a little cold. The frightened little boy seemed so rote, so much a heavy-handed articulation of Moffat’s vision of Doctor Who as behind-the-sofa TV, and the “house call” a quite unnecessary gag which added nothing. As with The Soggy Pirate Rubbish earlier this year, I’m heavily invested in the series-arc plot and I need something really special to make me forget it. And this hand-me-down London estate, bringing back awful memories of Fear Her (aka The Scribbly Olympics Rubbish) didn’t look like it was going to be enough. Even the Doctor’s relationship with Alex started to bring back not-entirely happy memories of The Lodger’s over-done humour.

But as the episode unfolded, I became more and more invested in George’s plight and more and more keen to know what these creepy dolls were up to. The interior dolls house was wonderfully realised by director Richard Clark and Amy and Rory bounced off each other beautifully. The revelation that Claire, George’s mother, can’t conceive was well-handled and George himself was portrayed with laser-like sincerity by little Jamie Oram.

Finally, it all came together with modern Doctor Who doing what it does best – finding the human heart in a science-fiction idea without compromising either. George and Alex’s reunion is genuinely touching and the Doctor’s intervention manages to balance the twin forces of making this Alex’s story while reminding us that Matt Smith is the star (and what a star!).

So, ultimately this is nothing terribly special, but it is a strong, classy, well-realised slab of business-as-usual Doctor Who in 2011. And that’s a good thing, maybe a precious thing. As Tat Wood points out in volume 6 of the preposterously comprehensive review of Doctor Who stories “About Time”, making bread-and-butter episodes of the programme is what Doctor Who pretty much forgot how to do sometime in the mid-eighties and it proved to be the death of the show, killed by Michael Grade, Coronation Street, and – yes – its own fans.

What issues I do have with this episode are all to do with the unfolding arc story. Not only are we expected simply to suspend our interest in the Doctor’s impending death, the continuing complexity of River Song’s life history and the machinations of the evil Madame Eyepatch, but we are obliged to forget about them altogether. If we remember, even for a second, the events of the previous two episodes, then the Doctor’s actions in this episode seem pointlessly, disgusting, heartlessly cruel. Is it supposed to be some kind of demented therapy to take two young parents who have just a child ripped away from them, and who now have to live with the knowledge that they will never be able to nurture and protect that child, and stage a parable for them about how parental love is the most powerful and precious force in the universe? What a cunt!

That aside, four stars.