What They Say:
Episode 9: Night Terrors
The Doctor receives a distress call from the scariest place in the Universe. A child’s bedroom. Terrified of the monsters in his cupboard, George’s pleas for help break through the barriers of all time and space. But allaying his fears won’t be easy, even for the Doctor. Because George’s monsters are real.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The world can be a scary place for a child. There are plenty of things in their world that they don’t understand and adding in monsters doesn’t help. When a young boy named George fears finally reach a boiling point his desperate feelings reach across time and space and connect with his last, best hope for help-the Doctor. But even the Doctor can’t always solve everything.
While the Doctor manages to trace the message to the correct apartment building it will take a bit of investigation and some luck to find George and by the time he is found events have already swallowed Amy and Rory. The Doctor now has even more reason to try to help the boy as solving his dilemma may save the Doctor’s companions who are trapped in a bizarre location and being stalked by something-but what happens when events move forward and swallow the Doctor as well?
An oft repeated rule of storytelling is that one should only ask the audience to accept one impossible thing per episode. Granted, Doctor Who starts with an impossible premise but given that they have been building on it for almost half a century the idea that a Time Lord can exist at the same time as trying to sell oversized dust bins as unstoppable killing machines (no matter how often the Doctor does stop them) still leaves room to put in one new impossible thing an episode and make it work.
Well, most of the time anyway. But when you throw in an impossible thing but bury how they are connected so it looks like a series of unrelated impossible things you risk the problem of running headlong into the more than one impossible thing rule and getting people to connect while the mystery is being unraveled.
Night Terrors runs into trouble not only from the impossible angle but it runs into trouble as the story just doesn’t build well to events in the time afforded. Maybe with a double episode run time it might have worked but the writers try so hard to fit so many things in that it comes out leaving things a mile wide but an inch deep in development. Side characters are introduced mostly to exist just as victims which doesn’t leave time to care for them (though the incredibly one dimensional nature of them doesn’t help any either) and the terror just isn’t built up to. It kind of feels like someone threw in a bunch of things that scared them but missing the same context of experience the events fail to build to the true terror they perhaps could have with either more time or another round of script rewrites.
In Summary:
Night Terrors is an episode that isn’t done any favors by being stuck in a season that has had a number of strong episodes as its causes failings to look magnified. What should be a story that creates chills instead feels like a hollow funhouse attraction of multiple things that scare a vast number of people thrown into one location hoping that one of those images will provide a chill that the overall whole fails to be able to produce.
Grade: C-
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbhGsj9ftVM]
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