Doctor Who:
Hide
By Neil Cross
“I'm sorry! I understand
now! I can take you to her! I can take you to a safe place far away from here!
You can be together! Well, come on, then. She's waiting!”
Haunted houses have been a
pretty good plot device for scary and horror movies for a long time. You just have to go back to last year for the
“The Woman in Black” with Daniel Radcliffe as proof to how well popular and if
done properly can be pretty scary and very enjoyable to watch. Doctor Who has dabbled with using haunted
houses with 1989’s “Ghost Light.” While
not a true haunted house story it was pretty effective in conveying the horror
of the house and the evil the resided in it.
So know we have “Hide” and the return to a haunted house style of a
story that is rare in Doctor Who. Did
“Hide” do the ghost story genre proud or did it fizzle like candles often do in
a haunted house. Read on to see what I thought of “Hide”.
First off I wasn’t too
enamored with Neil Cross’s earlier story ‘The Rings of Akhaten. So I went into “Hide” with a bit of
trepidation and hoped I would enjoy his new story. Well for the most part I did enjoy the Luthor
scribes latest entry. For the most part
it was pretty entertaining and I did enjoy what “Hide” was trying to
accomplish. But I wasn’t overly a fan of
it but I did not hate it as I did for the most part enjoy what I was
watching.
What really got me on its
side was the fact that they did something different. It wasn’t your normal monster of the week or
base under siege formula that Doctor Who has been famous for. No, what they did was take the haunted house
theme and added a science fiction twist to it.
Now this was all the stuff I enjoyed.
I loved how the story opened up with the ghost appearing and scaring
Alec and Emma by literally running into Emma.
I also enjoyed watching
The Doctor and Clara exploring the house and getting extremely scared. That was something different as you don’t
usually see The Doctor getting scared.
Not very often does he get scared.
It was quite unusual for him to be acting like that and in fact he was
pretty scared throughout the story at times.
It was somewhat unnerving seeing The Doctor like that as he is supposed
to be the calming presence and the one people look up to and depended on to
save them.
Another thing I was pretty
happy to see was that the sonic screwdriver not working all that much as Neil Cross
used it way to much in his previous story “The Rings of Akhaten.” With that said I really liked how The Doctor
came up with a solution. Going through
the worm hole into the pocket universe using a wrench system to pull him back
and using a focusing crystal from Metabellis 3 was a cool nod to the Pertwee
era. In fact the whole mechanism he
hooked Emma to had a 3rd Doctor feel to it and it was good to see
The Doctor making and using a gadget to save the day again.
There were some things I
did not like about the story. One I did not like Matt Smith’s performance. Well
yes and no. I did like the way they conveyed
how The Doctor was scared in the beginning and in the pocket universe
especially when he was being chased by the Crooked Man. That was all very well done and I could see
the fright in his face. What I didn’t
care for was that I thought The Doctor was a tad over the top. This is a very rare criticism from me as I
think Matt Smith is a great actor and wonderful in the part of The Doctor so
for me to be critical of him is pretty rare indeed and did not detract from the
overall story.
I also didn’t like how you
thought it was over and then they went back to save the Crooked Man. All of a sudden there were two of them and
The Doctor had to head back into the pocket universe. Well ok.
It was kind of a weird way to end the story unless of course it was
added because the story was too short. Whatever it just didn’t feel right.
In all “Hide’ was a decent
story with some pretty cool moments in it and props for the production crew for
trying something different. It was cool
to see a haunted house themed story and it is good to see them make an effort
to bring the scares back into the show. What bothered me was that there were
quite a bit of inconsistences as why did he draw a circle on the floor wasn’t
explained to well and how did he know Hila’s name. Plus he said he couldn’t
pilot the TARDIS into the pocket universe but the TARDIS goes in there twice to
save him. Plus if there was a second
creature in the house how come the others never saw it. Not the perfect story so far this series but
it is by far not the worst and kudos for trying something different which was
very welcome indeed.
Grade B -
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