Last Episode: “Let’s Kill Hitler”
In response to a comment I received in last weeks post about providing too many spoilers in my recaps, the following is my recap of “Night Terrors” for people who don’t want spoilers:
Remember when the kid put that thing in the thing? Pretty freaky, wasn’t it.
And did you believe how the Doctor used his sonic screwdriver to try and stop that stuff and nothing happened? Yeah, that was wicked!
Oh, and at the end, when it turned out that the kid was really one of those things. Who would have thunk it?
Now, for the rest of you… and remember: SPOILER ALERT!
George is a kid with a problem, he’s scared of… well, just about everything. To remedy this, though, he has a solution: put it in the cupboard.
Really it’s a wardrobe, but you get the idea. Anything he’s scared of, in this case “the lift” (British for elevator) he hears from his bedroom at night as it goes up and down in his apartment block. He and his “mum,” Claire, have a little ritual: flash the light five times (it has to be five times) and the scary thing goes into the cupboard. So they do that to the lift. But George is still remains afraid of the monsters in his cupboard.
Now, if this wasn’t Doctor Who, that might be the end of it, but George is no ordinary kid: his fears have consequences, which must be what attracts the Doctor:
So our intrepid adventurers — The Doctor, Amy, and Rory — split up to find the frightened child, although Rory is taking it less than seriously.
Claire and George’s dad, Alex, have decided to get George professional help. So, when the Doctor shows up after Claire leaves for her night shift, Alex naturally assumes that he’s the professional help. And the Doctor’s psychic paper saying this only serves to reinforce this assumption. So the Doctor begins to analyze the situation:
Yeah, I don’t like clowns either. I have this recurring nightmare where I’m at my in-laws’ house in the middle of woods all by myself, when an old-fashioned ambulance drives up and these scary clowns dressed as doctors get out, put me in a straight jacket, and drive me off… but I digress.
The Doctor inspects the cupboard in George’s bedroom, and does not like what he sees:
Meanwhile, Rory and Amy have troubles of their own. After regrouping, they get in the lift (remember the lift? The one that got put into the cupboard?) and are suddenly fall into a dark room in what looks to be an old house.
Just to save you some suspense, that’s not at all what happened, and they are not in the year seventeen-hundred-and-something. Remarkably, things are not exactly as they appear:
Instead they find life size wooden creepy dolls (apparently lifeless), clocks with painted on hands, and doors with no knobs. Just where could they be?
Back at George’s, the Doctor is having some difficulty keeping Alex convinced that he is from Social Services:
And so the Doctor’s love affair with jammie dodgers goes on. But what to do about the cupboard?
[Alex sips tea]
Rory and Amy and amy have been exploring the spooky old house, and are none too happy with what they find:
But Amy soon changes her tune as they come across another person trapped in the house who pleads for help before being overwhelmed by creepy looking dolls who make him one of their own. Yes the creepy dolls are self replicating.
In the flight that follows though, Amy is caught and becomes a red headed creepy doll. I guess she’s now dead again, again.
But Alex and the Doctor are not free from strife. After he thinks they are a danger to him, George puts them into the cupboard — remind anyone else of the Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life”? — specifically into the doll house that’s in the cupboard:
Although it comes as a revelation to the Doctor, my daughter had it figured out as soon as Amy found the first wooden frying pan.
As the Doctor and Alex flee pursuing creepy dolls, the Doctor finally pieces it all together:
It turns out that Claire was infertile, so George couldn’t be theirs. He’s an alien who blends in with a family, so completely that they aren;t even aware of it themselves. All that has to be done to fix everything is for Alex to accept his “son” and reassure him that he will never send him away. Wow, if only all father son relationships could be sewn up that neatly:
And the adventurers are off again:
Although there was some great comedic chemistry between the Doctor and Alex (played by Daniel Mays) overall this episode was pretty predictable and simplistic in its outcome. The dolls never made a lot of sense, and much of the action seemed pointless, other than to put the characters at jeopardy and then snatch them back out.
The season’s story arc was also nonexistent, except for a brief bit at the end where a spooky children’s song is heard in the background predicting that even the Doctor cannot escape death:
So it goes.
