Night Terrors – Doctor Who Review

The Doctor confronts young boy's fears. Can he defeat the monsters this time even though one of them may be his own companion?

Mild Spoilers

One of my favorite elements of Doctor Who is the horror aspect of the show. It is one of the series most successful and appealing concepts. From the Yeti in the 60's to the unseen creature in “Midnight”, Doctor Who has always given us some scares.

Now author Mark Gatiss tackles this head on as the Doctor combats a child's bottled up fears.  Receiving a message from Earth, the Doctor and crew travel to a run down apartment complex and search for the boy.  The search kicks up the usual sterotypical apartment renters including the old complaining woman and the not so nice landlord.  The Doctor locates the boy and learns from his father that something is not right.  Meanwhile Amy and Rory are transported to a fake house of sorts, being followed by what appear to be dolls. How does all this come together? Well Gatiss has sort of remade the story “Fear Her” and twisted it up a bit. The mysterious boy has created a pocket world in a doll house that is somehow sucking everything the boy is afraid of into it and turning them into dolls. Okay. Rather than go into the why I will have to say the ending is a bit touching if not telegraphed and blasted up onto signs for quite some time in the episode. Apart from some early creepy moments in the apartment and with the dolls, nothing is really scary.

The story is sort of shallow and not very interesting. I was really looking forward to this but like many of Gatiss's work, the expectations are never quite reached. The idea mirrors the self aware idea that the Doctor protects the children but this idea has already been seen in”Fear Her” with Amy last season and the child in the space suit earlier this year.

The acting is fine and overall there is nothing to really complain about really except that there wasn't much memorable about this. I love simple stories and this was certainly one of them but not very original and will probably be forgotten in this season.