‘Doctor Who’ Recap (Series 6, Episode 9): The Cupboard Revisited

After the twisted time loops of last week’s premiere, it’s refreshing to follow the Doctor and his companions into a more straightforward Doctor Who story, albeit one that’s just a bit metatextual. This is something which will likely be so obvious in the UK as to be barely worth mentioning, but might go over the heads of BBC America’s 9:00 PM audience. Like most science fiction drama, Doctor Who is aimed squarely at the 18-49 demo in America, a crowd that might be unaware of how different the audience in the UK is. Across the pond, Doctor Who is produced for and consumed by a “family” audience, and it goes out at 7:00 pm or earlier on BBC One. It’s a difference that matters. Doctor Who means something different in the UK from what it means here in the US. Here, its audience of “geeky” teens and twentysomethings is largely unconcerned with the program’s five-decade pedigree of scaring children “behind the sofa,” while in the UK that’s simply what Doctor Who is.

That’s why children who fear monsters have become a recurring motif in the revived Doctor Who, and the Doctor is so often positioned as a comforting presence for children like this. Just last year we saw him reassure young Amelia in “The Eleventh Hour” as well as Elliot in “The Hungry Earth” and “Cold Blood”. See also Reinette in 2006′s “The Girl in the Fireplace”, Chloe in “Fear Her,” or pretty much any other small child in Doctor Who since 2005. The people who now write Doctor Who are the children who cowered from its monsters in the sixties, seventies and eighties, with this episode’s scribe Mark Gatiss being no exception. And these fan-writers love that kind of metatextual commentary on Doctor Who’s cultural position. Once you know what you’re looking for you see it everywhere. Don’t even get me started on the number of times they’ve written analogies for the program’s demise and return (try “Last of the Time Lords” and “The Big Bang” for starters).

In any case, this week’s story revolves around the eight-year-old George, who is so terrified of the monsters in his bedroom that his fear registers on the Doctor’s slightly psychic paper. The Doctor, Amy and Rory come to his rescue, but Amy and Rory find themselves trapped inside the child’s nightmare world, a creepy old dollhouse. They are terrorized by living dolls who turn trapped humans into their own kind, and Amy herself becomes a doll. Meanwhile, the Doctor meets George’s father Alex, and investigates George’s cupboard, which seems to terrify him. It turns out that George is actually not a human, but an alien foster child who has used a perception filter to assimilate into the lives of a couple who can’t have children. When the Doctor opens the cupboard, he and Alex find themselves in the same nightmare world as Amy and Rory. The world of horrors has been created by George’s fears, focused on the cupboard, and Alex is able to dissolve the nightmare world by reassuring George that he still loves him and accepts him despite his alienness. Everything is returned to normal again.

It’s a fairly simple story, and one with a genuinely touching human core to it. Alex makes a likable and compelling pseudo-companion as he runs through the various emotions of concern for his son, frustration with the Doctor, and uncertainty about how to react to the revelations that his son is an alien. Not to mention the fact that the episode is flat-out creepy and scary pretty much from start to finish, which given its premise is essential.

I have to admit that I’m not always excited when I hear that an upcoming episode of Doctor Who is written by Mark Gatiss. He’s already been touted as a possible showrunner after Steven Moffatt’s eventual departure, and Gatiss has the television experience and Doctor Who fan credentials to make him a likely candidate. But  despite his pedigree, and despite the fact that he clearly “gets” Doctor Who in the same way as great Doctor Who writers like Rob Shearman, Paul Cornell, Neil Gaiman, Steven Moffat, and yes, even Russell T. Davies, I’ve never come away from a Mark Gatiss Doctor Who episode feeling like the execution has lived up to his vision. But Night Terrors finally ends that track record of disappointment with a script crackling with drama, suspense, and outright terror.

Oh, and it’s funny. Often hilarious. The banter between Amy and Rory is some of the best we’ve seen between those characters. I particularly enjoyed Rory’s “We’re dead, aren’t we? The lift fell and we’re dead. We’re dead. Again.” I mean, it helps that I tend to love every line that ever comes out of Rory’s mouth, but in this case I have to say that I even enjoyed Amy, a character who usually frustrates me to no end. Moffatt has often touted Amy as being a great character because she’s “mad,” but it’s rare that we see this from her. Her plan to open the door for the dolls rather than hide is a great moment for the character, even if it doesn’t work out as she planned. And the Doctor gets some great lines as well. The reference to “Snow White and the Seven Keys to Doomsday” is sure to make you grin if you get the reference and at least chuckle if you don’t.

I’m not surprised that this episode was so standalone, since it’s widely known among Doctor Who fans that it was actually intended to air much earlier in the season, after “The Doctor’s Wife” but before “The Rebel Flesh.” It was moved so that a greater variety of stories could be told in the first half of the series (“Curse of the Black Spot” was supposed to air in this position), and I can sort of see why. Havign Amy and Rory split up from the Doctor for most of the episode is quite similar to “The Doctor’s Wife,” and the father/son issues here can be seen as a weird inversion of those in “The Rebel Flesh” and “The Almost People.”  That said, there are also some strange resonances between this episode and last weeks, what with the greatest war criminal of the twentieth century having been shoved in a cupboard and forgotten about, and now a child is told to metaphorically put all his fears in a cupboard. In any case, it does create some jarring tonal issues, as though Amy and Rory have stopped caring about the search for their daughter (But maybe we’re supposed to understand that they have, because they now know about her childhood? It was never clear last week). And the reference to the Doctor’s final fate was shoehorned into the final shot of the episode, obviously as a last-minute change to integrate the episode into its new position.

It’s a bit strange to see a standalone episode like this in the middle of Doctor Who’s most serialized season in decades. Part of me wishes Moffat would commit one way or the other, to do an entirely serialized story or to do mostly standalone episodes like his predecessor, Russell T Davies did. The existence of episodes like this (and its counterpart from this spring, “Curse of the Black Spot”) make Series Six a bit of an odd duck when viewed as a whole. But here and now it’s hard to complain about an episode as fun, scary, and touching as “Night Terrors”.