Hide: Ranking - 268

   Hide

(Series 7, Dr 11 with Clara, 20/4/2013, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Neil Cross, director: Jamie Payne)  

Rank: 268

'Bakkafalatas are red, Malmooths are blue,  I've crossed dimensions of time and space just looking for you, plus to humans I look like a ghost. Wooooooooo!'

‘

Two fuzzy time-travelling aliens running through the trees, k-i-s-s-i-n-g...’ 

 Happy Valentine’s Day dear readers, whatever species you are. And what better way to celebrate than with the best romance in all Dr Who? We’ve had localised love affairs before of course. Incidental characters who look at one another funny, or aliens who suddenly take an interest in humans (half of the time it’s in Jo Grant) – for a time the Doctor travelled with husband and wife Amy and Rory and the Doctor himself hasn’t been immune to the lure of a pretty face (especially when that face belongs to Rose Tyler, although even as early as Dr Who’s first season William Hartnell was falling for an Aztec who took him on a date for some hot chocolate, well sort of). For my money, though, ‘Hide’ is the essence of love as a universal story, of the tug and pull that transcends barriers of time and space and even species, the one time Dr Who uses it as the ‘A’ plot around which the rest of the story hangs. It’s that age old story of boy alien meets girl alien, only for her to fall into a pocket universe where time accelerates at a different rate (or, possibly, even backwards: Hila’s unintelligible cries are actually ‘Em pleh!’, or ‘Help me!’ in reverse) so the pair of them end up as blurry ghosts in the present day (and it’s very Dr Who that one of the few times they do an honest-to-goodness ghost story they turn out to be people haunting not from the past but from the future). It’s the sort of thing I thought we’d have seen more of across the fifty years of Who, a tale that the audience at home can understand, even though Juliet’s a time traveller and Romeo’s a hideous creature from outer space. I mean, it’s an easy way for the Earthbound audience to connect with alien space creatures and identify with their motivation and as the Doctor points out birds do it, bees do it (even six foot Menoptera on the run from Zarbi and Ogris presumably do it, though how two corporeal menhirs get it on is something that’s never answered in ‘The Stones Of Blood’).The Doctor’s actually rather sweet advice on love (something he’s not exactly a regular at, despite various marriages and River Song down the years): ‘Start by holding hands…and then don’t let go’. Which is a lot better advice than anything you get in rom-coms for a kick-off. 

 Unfortunately that rushed revelation comes forty minutes into a story that, for the most part, is about a very different more earthbound romance and an episode that isn’t quite sure what it wants to be, without the time or space to do more than the basics for all the genres it juggles. We start off in a spooky manor house with the 11th Doctor investigating anomalies alongside the owner Dr Alec Palmer and his assistant. It looks as if it’s going to be a straightforward ghost story. Yippee! Then it becomes a story more about the extra-sensory phenomena sensing assistant Emma. Not quite as interesting but okay: there’s still sure to be some interesting phenomena going on. There’s a thought that the story might be a fake investigation into a real supernatural phenomenon: groovy! It’s like ‘Ghostwatch’, a drama about a fictional haunting presented as if it’s real, at one with an era when ‘Most Haunted’ was on the telly most weeks still. Then the story takes a left turn into being about the repressed feelings the two humans have for each other, which isn’t very Dr Who and not helped by the fact that the pair are more wooden that they make the trees in the all-action finale look animated. Only at the end does this story come alive, with the most abrupt finale to any Dr Who that doesn’t end in a cliffhanger, the Doctor having finally worked out who the ghosts were and reuniting the two creatures…Or at least that’s what he says he’s doing. All we see is the Doctor bungee-jumping back into the story and a fade to credits. The end result is a story that has all the ingredients for a first-class tale that emphasises all the wrong things, an oh so Dr Who tale that ends up on a hiding to nothing, a frustrating exercise in having to plough through several minutes of not much happening at all for the all-too brief conclusion. 

You would think that this story was by someone who had never written for television before, but actually Neil Cross had a large pedigree by 2013. He was the showrunner for ‘Luther’, the hard-nosed cop series starring Idris Elba (an actor whose name always comes up every time a new Doctor is cast these days, every single time – even when it was announced we had a woman a rumour went round that it was Idris in a dress). You would think that this story was by someone without any knowledge of Dr Who but no – other than obvious candidates like Davies, Moffat and Chibnall Cross is one of the most dedicated Whovians of them all – particularly the mid-1970s period in which this story is set (just note how the Doctor uses a blue crystal from ‘Metebelis 3’, a detail Cross asked for after remembering ‘Planet Of the Spiders’, though Matt Smith doesn’t seem to have reached that story in his giant watchathon on getting the role as he struggles with the pronunciation). Neil had tried to submit a script to the series in 2009, not knowing that Russell T was on his ‘gap year’ and it was his friend and Who executive producer Caroline Skinner who urged him to pitch again because she knew how much the gig would mean to him (though Cross had another Who episode ‘Rings Of Akhtaen’ that was broadcast first, due to a quirk in the timey wimey space continuum this one was written and shot first). And he’s really not far out: there’s absolutely a place in Dr Who for a story full of ghosts set in a haunted house. For what it’s worth the scientific resolution, with its pocket universes where time works at different speeds, is not only the most Moffat episode the showrunner never wrote (it’s ‘The Girl In The Fireplace’ again, only it’s ‘The Ghoul in the Forest’) but the single best explanation the show ever had to what ghosts actually are (rather than shimmering Cyber-armies, time travellers from a paradoxical future or malicious entities created by The Malus). It’s the emphasis that’s all wrong: Cross, a fan of the Pertwee days and used to running a show, decided to be kind and wrote a small-scale story with a tiny cast and only one big set. Only it isn’t a small-scale story at all. Moffat saw the potential in it and urged his fellow writer to keep making the series bigger and bolder, that it was his job to think about the budget, but in the end the story is too timid. Rather than being re-written in from the start the big bold ideas are shoved away to the last quarter by which time it’s too little too late after half an hour of humans being boring in a version of Earth in 1974 that feels less believable across half an hour than two aliens did inside five minutes. 

 You see, this really doesn’t seem like 1974 and I don’t really know why this story is set there. In Who terms we’re right on the cusp of the last Pertwee years and the first Tom Baker ones, a time when the series was being bold and bright and colourful, a side effect of the fact that after five years colour TV was now the norm for practically every viewer. In the outer world it was a colourful time to be alive: the fashions might look ridiculous now but they’ll be saying that about the denim-on-denim and the weird things people do with their eyebrows today in 2024 in a few years’ time: every era has its own fashion problems; one thing this period never was in real life though is drab. Yet there we are on screen, all beiges and tweed jackets. Alec Palmer clearly isn’t meant to be young and trendy but he’s have been considered a prude in the 1950s, all timid glances and bookish spectacles. Emma is worse: even speaking as someone whose always been a full century behind the times she’s at least three. She walks around demurely, never looking anyone in the eye and deferring to every male in the room including the Doctor; only with Clara does she get a twinkle in her eye. The main plot of the story is the two of them trying to pluck up the courage to talk to the other and fearing that the love they feel is one-sided, while it’s patently obvious to Clara. How it comes across in the script: quite sweet, in a Victoriana sort of way, all corsets and frilly bonnets. How it comes across on screen: two actors who look as if they’re having a stroke, while we can’t be sure if their long lingering looks at each other are out of adoration or if they’ve forgotten their lines. Let me be clear: I like both actors in other things. Dougray Scott, so nearly cast as James Bond if Piers Brosnan hadn’t been persuaded back for one last go in 2002, he was easily the best thing about the wretched ‘Day Of The Triffids’ remake (2009) and the only one in the ‘Mission Impossible’ franchise for whom acting isn’t, well, impossible. I only know Jessica Raine from playing Verity Lambert in just the same low-key way in the ‘Adventures In Time and Space’ drama about the early days of Dr Who and she’s superb in that: you really get the layers behind the words, the sense that Verity would be running the BBC perfectly with one hand tied behind her back if only she didn’t live in a world where her bosses were male, old, influential and stupid. There’s none of those layers here though: the script just lies there, with nothing behind the eyes, no layers between the dialogue, no sense of anything beyond the basics. Both of them treat the 1970s as if it was an archaic time from yesteryear (even though Dougray, for one, was fifteen when the decade ended). Honestly their romance isn’t that obvious on screen, though Clara (not usually a people person able to read a room, at least in the same way Rose or Martha were; there’s a good joke at her expense that the Tardis interface picks out a figure from its databanks out of thousands that Clara would trust…and it’s herself. Because she’s the only person she does trust, even over the Doctor this early on) uncharacteristically picks up on it straight away (a cut line has her actually say to Emma about the affection her beaux feels ‘oh it’s there – as unmistakeable as a bear in underwear’). I like the idea that two people who are fully alive are ghosts themselves, barely living by suppressing their emotions and pretending the attraction they feel isn’t there, but the story doesn’t make enough use of that or set up why this pair, who have worked closely together for seven years, haven’t so much as shared a lunch break date together. Had they made this a matter of class, of prejudice, of both of them knowing the other well enough to know a tragic back story why they were both so burned by love they would never try again, it might have worked nicely. Alas this plot, so central to the story, never feels believable. They missed an even more obvious trick here I think: given that the entire Earth scenes are filmed in a timeless stately home why didn’t they make it a Victorian ghost story and make the esp telepath a séance visited by aliens instead of ghosts; at a stroke this would have solved the problems of a ‘forbidden’ romance the pair dare not speak. 

 There are problems, too, with the Doctor and Clara. This was, due to Moffat’s deadliest attack of writer’s block over ‘The Snowman’ and a quirk of scheduling, the first episode that Jenna Coleman had filmed actually as Clara (as opposed to Oswin in ‘Asylum Of The Daleks’). This was a big moment for her and she was understandably nervous, especially about acting as if she knew the Doctor really well by now; you can tell I think: it’s not as if she plays Clara badly but she does play her differently – there’s no subtlety here: she’s either the Doctor’s best friend or his worst enemy getting on his nerves. Matt Smith, meanwhile, is working on his first story without Karen Gillan there and is visibly missing her: he tries his best but he’s lost a lot of his natural bounce and is struggling to play off Jenna the same way he’s used to (and a shocking cold he picked up just before filming didn’t help; you can hear it most in his voice in the Tardis scenes). These two will, in the short time they’re together, feel like one of the great partnerships of old but they’re not there yet. For his part Neil found Clara hard to write for: all he had to go on was an audition tape that wasn’t that helpful and a first draft of ‘The Snowman’ that changed a lot (although Oswin really isn’t all that different: Moffat should have just given him a copy of that episode and said ‘think of her as a contemporary human version whose gone off soufflés). That just leaves a few minutes of Kemi Bo-Jacobs as space girl Hila, whose good but doesn’t get much of a chance at all to make an impression, and ‘The Crooked Man’ monster who doesn’t get to do anything but leer and look, well, crooked I suppose. With slightly flat script and slightly flat acting this poor story didn’t really have a ghost of a chance. 

 Which is a real shame because the ghost story idea is nicely handled for the most part. Too often Dr Who scripts have the Doctor dismissing ghosts out of hand for being ‘unscientific’ (never mind the fact that half the things that happen to him aren’t scientific: you’d think ‘The Mind Robber’ and ‘Warrior’s Gate’ would shut him up there). To be fair, given the amount of times they turn out to be time-travelling Daleks or cybermen half-appearing through dimension portals, he might have a point there. Or the gassy Gelth, they're still the closest thing Dr Who has to a ghost. Here, though, rather than get all dismissive there’s a real sense of investigation and a nice use of the Doctor running up his own gadgets out of odds and ends, the way he always used to (although there’s no cup of tea balanced on top this time a la the 3rd Doctor). Anyway, this is my favourite answer to the perennial series question 'what are ghosts'? They're alien beings who live in a dimension where time travels at different speeds to our worlds of course, so that the spirit we see out the corner of our eyes is really a time traveller moving very very quickly. There’s a lot of mileage in the old ‘help! My house is haunted’ routine that Dr Who is about the only long running series not to have attempted – and for once this isn’t an ‘I’ve just inherited my grandparents’ mansion in their will as long as I stay the night in there even though some people say…it’s haunted’ because Professor Palmer has bought it for his investigation. There are some nice lines early on about the main characters believing in the paranormal but struggling to wrap their heads round time travel, much to the Doctor’s consternation that one is real and the other isn’t. Emma’s esp too is handled better than most series, where it would be a joke or a ruse: we haven’t had anyone in the show this telepathic since Susan and it’s well handled, the assistant a little afraid of her powers and embarrassed by them. The irony, too, that someone who can see things that other people see, while being unable to talk out loud about things other people find easy, is a nice bit of characterisation. It’s just a shame the script then falls into this era’s other great trap: the series arc about the mystery of Clara that takes up too many precious minutes when you don’t know the answers and which are entirely superfluous once you do. There’s an uncomfortable scene, too, where Clara (on her fifth story as seen on screen; more if you count the books, annuals and comic strips) only just realises the implications of time travel and talks about how everyone the Doctor knows is dead and ‘we’re all ghosts to you’. Which is an odd thing to say during an adventure set before Clara was born (where these people are all ghosts to her). The Doctor ends up working out what’s going on out of nowhere, from a portrait of a missing time-traveller: I mean I know he’s smart, but seriously that’s a bit of a leap to make – it comes out of nowhere after a load of talking about nothing in particular in a scene that could really have built up to something. Honestly a lot of these rather awkward scenes, with a lot of talking and not much action, feels as if they’re there to fill up space rather than tell a story. Which makes the speeded-up and rushed ending even more confusing, given that the finale is dying to be explored further: honestly the Doctor could have come up with the solution five minutes in and not changed the basic course of the story one iota. ‘I’m completely lost now, feel weird’ Clara said in the original draft script when struggling to keep up with The Doctor. You and me both, but it’s not because – as the script makes clear at this point – that there’s too much happening but because everything is happening at once in a story where nothing has been happening over and over again. 

 One reason for that might be that, for the longest time, the B-lot of this script if you like was that there was a third investigator involved. No, not UNIT (who are conspicuous by their absence given that this story is set somewhere between ‘The Web Of Fear’ and ‘Spearhead From Space’ with ‘The Invasion’ slotted somewhere in between). Not Torchwood either, who are also around by now and you would have thought would be totally into kissy-kissy aliens from space. No, it’s Professor Bernard Quatermass – yes that Quatermass – who turns up to investigate on behalf of the British Experimental Rocket Group. We haven’t mentioned Quatermass for a while, but safe to say that Dr Who’s greatest influence after H G Wells is a real Doctory character (closest in style to Hartnell at his most crotechety, but with a dash of Pertwee heroism). A sceptical scientists whose open minded enough to go with ideas of aliens he’s often the smartest person in the room and while having him believe in ghosts would have been a stretch having him butt heads with The Doctor (who didn’t believe in ghosts) could have been fun. It’s a sort of in-joke too: ghosts aren’t a natural thing for a Quatermass story (though the fourth and final series sort of got there, being far less scientific and far more bonkers than the others, with a cult of abducted hippies who think they’ve found nirvana) but ‘Hide’ is very close all round to creator Nigel Kneale’s other lasting contribution to scifi: ‘The Stone Tape’ a series from 1972 that saw an investigation into just such a manor house that turned out to be housing a cruel and malicious spirit that’s treated the house like a ‘recording’ that can be played back even when it’s no longer there. As confusing as it would have been to have a fictional character turn up it was not without precedent and indeed ‘Professor Bernard’ is name-checked in ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’, an in-joke that would have tied in nicely. Moffat was enthusiastic and looked into licensing the rights from Kneale’s estate, but what neither realised was that Kneale hated Dr Who with a passion thinking that it’s childish audience had sent his ‘intelligent’ scifi back about half a century. His family, honouring his wishes, turned round and gave a big fat ‘no’. Cross, busy with work on his own series, didn’t have time for too many rewrites and Moffat (unlike Davies) was never comfortable editing other people’s work to fit his vision for the series (editing is, after all, an art form quite separate to writing: not every writer has the knack). Once again we’re a rewrite, perhaps two or three, away from greatness because there are good ideas here, just none of them front and centre where they ought to be. They’re ‘hiding’ if you like, the curious choice of title for a story where you’re meant to think there’s a lurking monster (though in the end it’s more about Alec and Emma ‘hiding’ their feelings from each other and the Doctor and Clara’ figuring the other is ‘hiding’ something from them). The working title ‘The Hider In The House’ might have made that clearer, though (‘Hide’ is Who’s second shortest story title, after ‘42’). 

 Instead this story leans heavily on a different source, Shirley Jackson’s 1959 gothic horror novel ‘The Haunting Of Hill House’. That story starts off exactly like this one (although the characters are actually meant to date from the 1950s!) with a telepath named Eleanor whose going bonkers and can’t work out if what she’s sensing is really there or her imagination, or from some bad memory she suppressed in childhood, or because she has the hots for the dishy investigator. Not to spoil the ending, but she feels better when everyone else finally sees what she sees – even though they’re all screaming and running away for their lives. The ghost isn’t a time traveller but a malevolent entity closer to the Malus in ‘The Awakening’, another story heavily influenced by the short story. 

 There’s another sub-plot that’s really more to do with what comes next in the run, in sister Story Journey To The Centre To The Tardis’ (impressive given that story hadn’t been written when this one was filmed!) The Tardis has, till now, been welcoming to all of the Doctor’s waifs and strays bar one. It didn’t run off when the Tardis landed on Alzarius in fear of Adric, didn’t complain when Victoria started screaming and didn’t bat an eyelid at Mel’s exercise equipment, even though she was technically joining the Doctor out of order from his future (the sort of paradox you’d expect would cause a time machine to have a little breakdown). The one exception has been Captain Jack in ‘Utopia’ – and that’s more because his ‘Bad Wolf’ revival meant he wasn’t able to die and shouldn’t exist, a temporal anomaly that also once took a trip hanging on to the side of the casing through the time vortex (although it might have been all those show-tunes he kept singing). It really seems to have it in for Clara, allpart of the ‘big mystery’ they try to throw at us this year (even though Emma says there isn’t one; weirdly they’re both right, at least at this point in time).The Doctor says out loud that the Tardis is ‘like a cat’ and takes time to get to like someone, but that’s blatantly not true – in private he’s a lot more panicked by this than he is about ghosts and time travellers. Clara blots her copybook by getting it wet (if you’re wondering where the Doctor’s umbrella stand is he left it behind on ‘Frontios’) but ends up pleading with it to save the Doctor at the end when he seems to be trapped in another pocket dimension. Which it does, reluctantly. All this will only make sense (spoilers) in ‘Name Of The Doctor’ at the end of the year, when its revealed Clara once fell through the Doctor’s timelines to save her friend – and being a time machine that can see all timezones the Tardis ‘knows’. The fact the Tardis goes anyway, when it’s clearly scared of Clara, makes it all quite a noble rescue and it’s a clever idea to have the Tardis as a fully-thinking corporeal entity again (see ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ from the previous year). Even though in plot resolution terms it’s still a hit of a cheat, no different to using K9 or the sonic screwdriver to solve a problem. 

 Ultimately ‘Hide’ feels like it’s missing something, as if we’re watching ectoplasm rather than a fully forms script. Like a lot in this end of my rankings it’s not so much that anything is truly terrible so much as that there’s not much here to get your teeth into. Worst of all it’s not spooky, not even once, not even in an ‘oh dear the lights have gone out and there’s been a clap of thunder’ way. I mean we do have a shadowy creature which is a blur and like most Moffat monsters is in the process of being about to pounce rather than running directly at its prey. It doesn’t look much at all when seen as a costume, like something someone as unskilled as me would have made in a pottery class and then sat on, but shot in a forest in the dark it is quite impressive (once again it really is amazing just what a difference good lighting makes to this series). Even so, it’s never scary exactly, not ever –even with director Jamie Payne rather sweetly officially Neil’s children on the scripts as ‘monster consultants’ after asking them what they thought (judging purely by what ended up on this story they must be even wimpier kids than I was!) All that’s a problem in a creepy story you’ve built up as the ‘horror’ episode set in a haunted house. Clara talks a lot about being scared – and Emma rightly picks up on her being ‘very clever and very frightened, while trying not to show it’, which you don’t need esp powers of your own to have noticed) but compared to what she’s been through lately this episode is like a day off, a trip round a stately home. When we do see the blurry shapes they already seem more friendly than scary from their body language and there’s nothing to make you jump. Indeed the strangest thing about ‘Hide’, in the context of Dr Who, is that there ends up being no threat at all: not a misperceived threat (as with The Master pushing Draconia and Earth into a phoney war), not a misunderstood threat (as with the nanogenes repairing bodies with gas masks in ‘The Empty Child’): even before we find out the two aliens are lovers we never feel threatened by them. Horror only works if you’re scared. Scifi only works if its believable. ‘Hide’ fails miserably on both those terms even though I can point you to at least half the book/website of Dr Who stories that excel at one or other or both. Weirdly ‘Hide’ scores best as a love story, a genre the series has barely touched before, although even that part only works in a rather rushed ending. By the time we discover the real story ‘hiding’ in this adventure we’ve just spent half an hour watching two people not quite get it together while running around a stately house. Which admittedly is a very nice stately house (three of them to be exact) but nothing like the gripping horror story we were led to believe from the trail. Kind of okay-ish on first viewings, less satisfying on repeats when you see all the plotholes, ‘Hide’ 

 POSITIVES + At least if not a lot’s happening we have time to concentrate on the scenery and very gorgeous scenery it is too! There are no less than three stately homes chosen for different rooms or for their gardens in this story, all of them lovely. Margam County Park, one of the few National Trust properties to agree to Dr Who location filming, is used the most and is the perfect setting: creepy yet homely, summing up memories of other Who stately homes seen in ‘Day Of The Daleks’ and ‘Ghost Light’ but with a vibe all of its own. It was once owned by the Talbot family who were influential in Glamorganshire (one of them was its MP for a long time, as well as being gentry): though ‘Black Orchid’ wasn’t filmed here I have sometimes wondered if Terence Dudley happened to go round it when it was a National Trust property and picked up on the name. It's totally believable as the sort of place psychics and paranormal investigators would be interested in and works far better here than it did in its other Who appearance as ‘Rattigan Academy’ in ‘The Sontaron Stratagem’. Tyntesfield, meanwhile, is a Victorian Gothic county house in Wraxall, near Bristol best known for being the house in the best (and most Dr Whoy) of Moffat and Gatiss’ ‘Sherlock’ episodes ‘The Abominable Bride’. Then there’s Plas Llanmihangel, a 12th century manor house that must be one of the oldest buildings ever seen in Dr Who, located in Cowbridge near Glamorgan and turned into a bed and breakfast by the time of its appearance in the series. All three are excellent choices. 

 NEGATIVES – Alright I’ll be honest: most of this story is bland rather than bad, the sort of story that would normally be fifty or so places higher, except for one bit of dialogue that really gets on my nerves. Poxy Londoner Clara, who lives near Coal Hill (not exactly the most salubrious end of the Capitol) is sparring with the Doctor about ‘the opposite of bliss’ and nominates ‘Carlisle’. The Doctor, whose visited some real cess pits in his life, laughs and agrees with her. And then the usually reliable Internet Movie database makes up a false story about how it’s a known fact that Carlisle is famous for being ‘dull’. This is patently nonsense. Carlisle is a beautiful city, packed to the rafters with things that make it interesting. What’s more it’s about the most Dr Who-ish city there ever was: the nexus point of Britain it’s the only place on the borders of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, with a cosmopolitan mix not seen on some Dr Who planets. It’s a place where the past, present and future live side by side: there’s a Castle that isn’t parked off to the side but a mere road away from the city centre, there’s a Citadel from the Middle Ages in the middle of the high street that architects have had to build round and a Cathedral where most cities would have a mall. Forget the opposite of bliss, compared to where else I’ve lived down the years (Ormskirk, ‘the opposite of sense’ and Stafford ‘the opposite of colour’) it’s practically Eden, the name of the main river that runs through it (and I don’t mean ‘The Nightmare Of Eden’ either!) What’s more it’s the leading candidate for the real location of Camelot, a place that’s as Dr Who as they come. What’s that I hear you say? I thought that was in Cornwall? Probably not: the myths and legends date back long before writing. The earliest account we have was written not in England but France, despite being about a very English King, and locates it in Carlisle. At the time Carlisle was officially Scottish, which horrified the English so much it’s thought they changed the location and made it as far away from Scotland as they could (‘Caliburn House’ the fake name for the stately home in this story, is named after King Arthur’s sword). Oh and Carlisle had the equal highest number of police boxes (err, two) outside London by 1963, the year the series started. So there, Clara! 

 BEST QUOTE: ‘Every lonely monster needs a companion’ 

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