In The Forest Of The Night: Rank - 275

  In The Forest Of The Night

(Series 8, Dr 12 with Clara, 25/10/2014, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Frank Cottrell-Boyce, director: Sheree Folkson)  

Rank: 275

How to tell a Dr Who gardener: look out for the Weeping Angel Birch, the Black-Eyed Susan Foreman, Herb Barbara Wright, the Madman In A Boxwood, Wild Rose Tyler, Captain-Jack-By-The-Hedge, the robot Dogwood, Oak and Quilley and a Robo-Santa playing a Tuber! They have all universes growing in their garden. Oh no, whose this doing the pruning? It’s the Monty Doninators! (as played by Brian Cant in waders). 

I love it when Dr Who goes green. Some of the best Dr Who stories have been devastating tales of giant maggots gone mad, gardeners holding humanity by the Krynoids as it puts us through a metaphorical composter and a inch-high Doctor battling against the evils of pesticide. Every generation of fans has a story that realises that mankind’s inhumanity to man is harmful to the planet and that maybe, to the vast majority of life on the planet, humans need pruning if anything else is ever to survive. Some of these tales can be harrowing, savage reflections of the consequences of our actions that have sus scuttling behind our-water butts more than any lumbering monster ever could. And then there’s ‘In The Forest Of The Night’, a story whose bark is far worse than it’s bite, quite literally, by having trees take over the planet and save us all from natural disaster. It’s the cutesiest of Who stories in many ways, an episode that decides to do away with such traditions as a monster, a villain or even much drama at all to be perfectly honest, in a story that’s as treacly as a kitchen full of Kandy Kitchen sweets. We shouldn’t be killing off the natural world because the natural world just wants to protect us, honest. Err, except for all those times in past stories where it didn’t (I mean, where were the plants in ‘The Ice Warriors’ ice age, to say nothing about all those future invasions). Which might have worked if it had been set on an alien planet or in the far future when trees were walking and talking (like the far less silly ones in ‘The End Of The World’ despite the fact that they were, umm, walking and talking) but is set in contemporary Britain. And had this not already been used as the worst moment in what most fans regarded as one of the worst stories of comeback Who ‘The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe’. The result is a story that left a lot of fans scratching their heads: if you ever wondered what a Dr Who story with no threat, no aliens, no bases under siege and practically no drama would look like then this is it: a story that sometimes seems as if it’s going to get scary and scifi-y but never actually does (that plot in full – spoilers – a child gets lost, hears voices, there’s a vague threat in the sky and some trees grow. That’s not Dr Who, that’s Gardener’s World on steroids). I mean, what were we to make of a story that was clearly fiction (rather than the delicious frisson of being vaguely plausible future fiction), which once again has a protagonist that can’t speak (except at the end, through a child known to suffer delusions) and which gave us nothing scarier than an avoided meteor impact (that our scientists didn’t see coming) or an escaped Tiger? And in a series that can go anywhere in time or space why are we spending on what looks (for the first ten minutes) like the most boring school field trip ever? 

The thing is, we all expected this one to be tree-mendous. It was written by one of the highest profile writers Dr Who has ever had, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, then at a career high after co-writing the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. It was a huge coup getting him at the time when he was being hailed as the saviour of all things British (and yes he was enough of a fan to sneak in a Tardis dematerialisation effect into the Olympics, although a planned scene involving a Tardis and various monsters got cut for ‘timing reasons’, so we could see more of what makes the average Britain great: the, err, super-rich Royals, the slave traders, the factory owners and capitalists and big businessmen exploiting us over and over while we try to make things and dance. Thank goodness for Ray Davies looking bemused and cynical at the closing ceremony; now that's the Britain I know). Boyce was a friend of Russell T’s and Moffat was more than happy to accommodate him for the extra publicity push he new he would get. And there was indeed a lot of publicity surrounding this story: not just because of the high profile name writer but as the last adventure before the tear-jerking finale, when traditionally stakes are at their highest, a last moment of normality before the Doctor and Clara face their darkest fears! Instead it felt like an over-long school trip to somewhere really boring, with the Tardis – the single greatest vehicle in fiction, capable of going anywhere in time or space – relegated to being a school bus replacement. But it doesn’t feel like Dr Who in anyway. It’s as if Boyce got a completely different memo to everyone else in 2014: that he picked up on the ‘Clara leads a double life and spends half of it in school with the Doctor as a bit of a nuisance’ part rather than the ‘Clara’s a time traveller who can do six impossible things before breakfast but always has to come back to school’ which is how every other writer saw series eight (even ‘The Caretaker’ is more about the adventure side, its just unfortunate that the adventure happens to take place in Clara’s school). It felt odd at the time and even more so in the years since when the fanbase has long forgotten the Clara-Danny-Doctor love triangle and realised that it has absolutely nothing to do with the big finale at all. There’s no other story in the canon quite like it – usually I say that in my reviews as a good thing but it makes ‘Forest’ an orphan, a lone bush in a field full of trees and grass that we don’t quite know what to do with. 

As early as the first scene you suspect that, despite Boyce’s claims of being a fan, he doesn’t really ‘get’ this series (and Moffat is too anxious to re-write such a big name so heavily or put him off). The Doctor is keeping close tabs on Clara and Danny, obsessively stalking them (something he’s never done before with anyone – even in ‘The Caretaker’ he was at least supposed to be working undercover to stop an alien invasion but there’s no excuse here except they might ‘need some help’. On a Coal Hill school trip? What does he think is going to happen? I mean, my school did get trapped down a mine once, but even that wasn’t like ‘The Green Death’ with radioactive maggots, it was more the teacher leaving the helmet-light batteries on over night so we were left in pitch darkness. Or was The Doctor just tagging on for the inevitable ‘headcount of pupils in the giftshop’?) Next a lost girl decides that, rather than contact any of the adult Humans she knows can help her, instead decides to call on a big blue phone box, of which she’s approximately forty years too young to remember what they’re really there for (perhaps she saw the word ‘police’ or the voices in her head told her to call, but it’s all very uncharacteristic). And then the Doctor answers the door and…invites her in to look around! The Doctor, who was once so terrified of humans finding out about the secrets of time-travel that he kidnapped two teachers from this very school, letting a little girl look around – and later inviting all her friends in to have a look too! (They’re incredibly underwhelmed). After that it’s all giant trees and inter-staff kissing, as we get some (far too) belated scenes of Clara and Danny actually getting on, in between arguing as per usual, in a story where the danger is as hidden as the Trafalgar Square lions covered by the overgrown bushes. 

 Dr Who stories without jeopardy can work if you care enough about the characters within them (I mean, not a lot happens in, say, ‘Boom Town’ either but I really like that one), but you don’t – not really. I like Clara more than most of the fandom seems to but even I think she’s out-staying her welcome by this point, where for yet another episode she’s torn between her Earthly life with its responsibilities and duties and her exciting life with The Doctor. There Danny is on the one side, telling her to be cautious because they’re responsible adults in charge of a school trip – and there the Doctor is on the other, thrilled at the chance to investigate something new. So what does she do? She, uhh, puts the children’s lives in danger by encouraging them to go with her until Danny stops her – only to be saved later from a tiger by her boyfriend and pupils coming to rescue her from a tiger. I mean, I know a lot of our teachers would have been quite happy to see us be eaten by carnivorous plants but I reckon intergalactic OFSTED might want a word about that (after all there’s an obvious solution: leave the kids with Danny and go out herself – while, surely, there has to be at least another member of staff out with all these pupils). Danny would be the hero of the hour if this were real life, but in the context of the series he’s an even bigger drip than usual, ignoring the single most extraordinary thing to happen on planet Earth in his lifetime and hiding away (because, forget what the Doctor says at the end about how quickly humanity forgets things, we’d be talking about this day forever. Plus there’d be proof: even I had a camera in my phone back in 2014 and I'm a luddite, so I'm willing to bet there's be a worldwide cult of people pleading with trees to save them every time there was a future invasion of Earth. Which in the DW universe is about monthly). Poor Samuel Anderson hasn’t been at ease with Danny for a while but he’s never looked more lost or cross with his agent for getting him this job than when he’s marching through a forest, chanting Scout songs and waving torches at imaginary wild animals with a buch of ragtag school kids behind him. The two finally get to kiss – in the one place they absolutely never ever would in real life, in front of all their pupils, who are guaranteed to make their lives a misery after this. The Doctor, meanwhile, is written the way he was at the start of the year, as deeply grumpy and unlikeable, and Peter Capaldi’s not as good at playing grumpiness as the production team seem to think he is. By his own admission he’s an explorer, not a child minder and as such is a hard fit for this story (though it might have worked with, say, the more childlike 11th Doctor). So that’s three leads competing for space this week, all of whom are about as welcome as poison ivy. 

 There is a class full of pupils too but, well, they’re the single worst thing about this episode. Let me make that clear: the child actors cast for these roles are actually really good and far better than they needed to be. It’s the characters they’re saddled with that are the problem (and make me think that, as well as not knowing this series, Boyce hasn’t actually interacted with anyone under thirty for a very long time). This is Dr Who. It’s a series made, at least in part, for children. The main mission of every showrunner, no matter what they say, is to juggle enough stories to please old-timers and enough appealing trailers of exciting looking things to bag the next generation of children to ensure that Dr Who lives on a bit longer. They are the lifeblood and essence of the series’ core audience and – believe me, this is something I know firsthand – once you become a Whovian as a child you’re unlikely to turn into a Whovian as an adult. It’s a series that grows with you as you age – and there really aren’t many series out there that do that, it’s a big reason Dr Who has lasted as many years as it has. So the very last thing any showrunner should do at any time is be rude to their core audience. The poor Zoomers/Gen Z children watching this who, for the sake of this review, were all roughly around the same age these kids are (eleven ish). They’re portrayed as a bunch of wimps, forever on medication to cure them of all sorts of things adults can laugh at them for needing: the medication that regulates their tempers, the medication that regulates their allergies, the medication that regulates the voices talking in their heads. Meab Areden (named, surely, for one of the earliest time-travelling novels, E Nesbit’s masterpiece ‘The House Of Arden’, despite all the guidebooks saying it’s an obscure reference to Shakespeare) shouldn’t be in a comprehensive like Coal Hill, they should be in a special needs school – she’s clearly not well, poor thing, and being stuck in a classroom full of some of the snobbiest, rudest tweenagers you’ll ever meet must be harder for her than any planet full of Daleks. Ruby, meanwhile, can’t stop talking and insulting people and the script isn’t sure whether that makes her cute or annoying (my guess is Boyce made her deliberately annoying and Moffat, used to two main characters who won’t shut up, tries to make her more endearing. Is she potentially Ruby Sunday as a child ? They don’t look anything alike but they would be about the right age and do both talk a lot). Another un-named kid is there to be laughed at for being ‘darkness phobic’ (yeah because the dark isn’t scary at all and the Doctor would never be scared of such a thing. Err, see ‘Listen’ earlier this same year for why that’s not strictly true). 

I mean, what even is the moral of this story – that we should embrace our quirks and face them head on like Maeb or toughen up like the other kids need to? It’s confused. None of the pupils are at all surprised to see the wonders of the Tardis and all shrug as one, much to the Doctor’s disappointment: a weak gag and totally unlike what would really happen (just watch children in any interactive Dr Who exhibit: the danger would be keeping pupils away from the controls and driving like they do on GTA: Grand Tardis Auto). There is no way, in a quadzillion years, a bunch of socially-conscious first years are going to admit to wanting to go home to mum rather than explore time and space, even if a few of them actually think it. Watch in shock as these two teachers snatch a few words about how hopeless, mollycoddled and irritating their pupils are – then watch this back with ‘An Unearthly Child’ and see the half-respect teachers used to have for their pupils (enough to care about them disappearing into strange blue boxes in the middle of the night even) and weep: this is where the focus of the story should be, on adults letting down children, not children being weak-kneed losers who weren’t like they were in my day etc etc. Back in the 1960s Dr Who was as close to being a ‘safe space’ as children of the day had, to put their point of view of a more universal Earth connected by peace – it’s beyond sad to see the show end up here, 51 years in, as a mean for adults to point at kids and laugh. I mean, just think what the message of this episode ought to have been: that adults have messed up the world with greed and global warming but that the children should still have hope they can put it right despite us. The viewing figures for Dr Who really begin to start tumbling from this point on; admittedly the fuss from the 50th anniversary was always going to die out, but I can’t help but think that the crazy way this era handles its child characters was what made so many youngsters go ‘this series is not for me’. 

 Worse yet is the message at the core of this story: that medication is bad. The Doctor goes into a rant about typical Humans trying to hide the voices in children’s heads when sentient alien entities talk to them. The story appears to back him up: after all, it’s only the trees getting in touch to say all is well and not to worry and Maeb isn’t mad, she’s just a little bit psychic. Phew, that’s alright then. Except what if it wasn’t: usually in Dr Who when people start to hear alien voices it’s a bad and scary things. Even the most learned of Tibetan monks who’ve lived pure and happy lives aren’t immune to evil when it turns up (‘The Abominable Snowman’) so why should defenceless inexperienced children be? I am astonished that there wasn’t a flood of complaints after this episode because little children refused to take their medication that helped their damaged brains cope with a damaged world because the Doctor said it was bad for them. But then, most children had probably stopped watching after the insulting way they were depicted early on. 

 So is there anything this story gets right? Well yes, a fair bit actually. You really do believe that we’ve walked into another world where trees have taken over London (with welcome news reports for other countries to show it’s a worldwide phenomenon). The set designers excel themselves in this story turning Britain’s capital into a forest (actually it’s mostly Wales again, a training centre for young army recruits in Caerwent with a few shots in the real thing, but unlike some other stories where Wales stands in for England it really feels like London. The Trafalgar Square lion mock-ups are gorgeous, a crashing Nelson’s Column is kind of okay too and the road-signs occasionally peeking out from the shrubbery are a nice touch. Never mind foley artists this one needs foliage artists, to get the sound of traipsing through woods in a capital right, and they do: this story sounds as well as looks great. Even Murray Gold is almost subtle with his score for this one, with just enough hint of nursery and fairytale and scares during the (rather long) moments when nothing much seems to be happening. There’s nice moment, too, when they all check for growth rings in the trees…and find they don’t have any (because, much like the children, they’re brand new!) The story clearly needs some kind of jeopardy and the idea of animals let loose from the (fictional) London Zoological Society is a nice touch, with nature reclaiming the Earth quite happily the minute humanity’s back is turned. Given that this is the low budget story, in the traditional 11th slot where the money has run out, it all looks very good actually, making the most of a story that has less demands on the effects budget than most Dr Who stories. It also feels a little like ‘Planet Of The Giants’ again, Dr Who’s first ecological story from the start of their second year, with the children especially dwarfed by objects that would normally be up in the air brought down to ground level. Had the story gone for that angle more, of how a familiar place can seem unfamiliar from a different angle, they might yet have been on to a winner. 

 There’s a neat half-theme that I wish had been further explored too, about the woods. Boyce has clearly been watching all the reviewers calling the Moffat years a ‘fairytale’ – to be fair it’s an approach that only really lasted as long as ‘The Eleventh Hour’ and a few others but Boyce decides to write a ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ style metaphor about unprepared children going off into the world that’s really promising. Note how, before the production team realise how dangerous and impractical it is, Clara thinks she’s about to be attacked by a wolf (tigers are much easier to control on set, assuming they’ve just been fed. Plus they fit into the rather odd and un-rhyming William Blake poem from which the rather odd title of this story was taken. Which would have been clever had this story been set at night-time, rather than in school hours in the day time!) The idea of the forest, as a symbolic place of adulthood where wild things happen to a different set of rules and how you can’t trust anyone at face value, is common to many fairytales and so it is here, only because childhood is so much more protected now children have less chance of negotiating adult life when it arrives (hence why all that stuff about medication is really here, wrong as it is). When the forest, something shadowy and dangerous but safely ‘over there’ for the first part of your life, takes over the capital so you can’t avoid it, how are you going to cope? After all, that’s why fairytales were invented: not as a way of scaring children so much as to let them navigate their way round them should they ever end up in one in later life. Maeb’s sister Annabel was lost (abduction? Accident? We never find out) and Maeb’s clearly struggling to cope, dealing with very adult emotions in a body too inexperienced and young to understand what to do with them (although that’s a tad rude in itself: children are far more resilient than adults). Having the forest grow to cover the capital gives her still childish friends an insight into how she feels, with a world gone topsy-turvy and the dark shadowy side temporarily seeming to win, something I wish the story had made a better job of relating to (instead of just having Maeb waving her arms a lot stand in for her inner turmoil). A lot of the original fairytales are morality tales about doing the right thing in difficult circumstances, of being pure enough that you hurt no one but aren’t so pure you get conned – and if that isn’t a Dr Who moral too I don’t know what is (see ‘Claws Of Axos’ for a story that works very like a fairytale does). I just wish they’d done more with it – had Maeb solve the story in a more direct way than just talking to people for instance and actively participating in taking down the metaphorical wolf pretending to be Grandma. Instead she just talks to the trees, something crazy people are always said to do, and even if in this case she’s ‘right’ there’s no pay-off that makes her the undisputed heroine. One other thing that bothers me about this story: Maeb and her welfare, or that of her classmates, is never referred to again even though the events of the next two season finales are every bit as terrifying and awful for her class (first they lose their maths teacher by having him turn into a Cybermen, then their English teacher has a Raven fly into her heart – these poor kids will need a lot more than medication by the end of season nine) And yet the Doctor never so much as visits. Huh! 

So where does that leave the ending though? Well, it feels as if Boyce is trying to make out that the forest is not something to be feared after all – and that the more we try to hide from our true feelings and the things that make us different the less able we are to see that it’s all going to be alright. A solar flare approaches so our trees all respond by coming to life and bursting in full bloom to protect humanity. Because the trees, which we chop down every day for our selfish ends, love us really and want to protect us. They’ve been doing this across time (the Doctor mentions the Tungunska explosion in Russia in 1908, thought to be caused by an asteroid). It’s a clever twist, the revelation that what we fear for most of the episode is actually friendly, but it’s clearly bonkers for several good reasons. The big one is that, as we said, this isn't on some alien planet in some parallel world but The Earth in 2014. Frankly if our trees could do that they'd have saved us from ourselves long ago. Nowhere is it explained just why they know about these flares (not sure about you but I've never seen a tree using a telescope. I mean, I'd love to but I'm sure its something I'd remember. And yes they sense things that happen to each other…but through their roots in the soil. If this story had been about an earthly problem, like a volcano or an earthquake, it would make so much more sense).Our scientists know when the sun is about to have solar flares – by the time the sun’s light gets to us we’d have had plenty of warning so people would at least know to expect something weird. And if our trees can do this then why didn't they save the dinosaurs? They've been kinder to woodland than we've ever been. In other words it’s an aesthetically beautiful ending (the trees are our friends, let’s be kind to them!), that works well in the context of the story (there was no threat all along we should learn to trust more!) but is absolutely bonkers when you sit down and think about it. I mean, so are all the Dalek’s masterplans and The Master’s masterplans (and The master’s Dalek masterplans) so it’s not like this is a problem unique to this story. But they can be explained as the rantings of a mad megalomaniac and the whole point of this story is that there’s no such thing as madness, it’s just a quirk of human nature that gets medicated away. Because it’s alright, the trees didn’t want to kill us, they just wanted to show us lurrrrve (and so are just like Miss and Sir getting it on when they think we’re not looking and sometimes when we are). Euuurgh. And then Annabelle comes back, weirdly hidden inside a hydrangea (there is an Annabelle Hydrangea by the way) and the world is back to being safe again – even though the whole ‘point’ of fairytales are that we can get through the scariest of things if we keep our head, not that everything will be put right for us. 

The result is a story that, much like the 2012 Olympic ceremony, relies on all the things that have come before it and general goodwill from people gathered together in harmony and the odd twist to work, even though it patently re-writes history and insults half the people gathered together without them perhaps quite realising it and then throws in some noisy guff that we should be ashamed of not celebrating (and yes, they did feature a Spice Girls reunion as it happens). With so many bigger events going on around it this story got kinda lost on first transmission, although those who remember it don’t really care for it much (we haven’t had a poll covering every story since 2013, which this story just missed, but it regularly comes bottom of 12th Doctor polls which, I would imagine, means it comes somewhere near the bottom of the overall one in an overview of fans’ affections). It’s not my least favourite story by any means: there’s a great story in there somewhere about nature reclaiming humanity’s biggest industrial places, even if it feels as if this story is never quite it. The twist is elegant though and the production top notch, while there are clever ideas there and some witty lines (‘It’s like the New Forest. Only newer’ and ‘You’ve heard of leaves on the line. Well…’) and especially with the fairytale metaphors and I’m all for a story in which there are no aliens or monsters or even threats – it’s just that this story doesn’t do enough with any of the things it has going for it for it to actually be any good either and is so clumsily wrong on so many of the basics. There’s nothing a bit of pruning or proper showrunner editing wouldn’t have put right for I don’t even mind Boyce’s writing, despite how this review might appear – his second bash ‘Smile’ corrects all this story’s faults for an actually really clever and moving take on modern society and where it’s going wrong, one that doesn’t insult anyone. It’s just the emphasis is on the wrong things and rather than make this a full-on fairytale, on some alien planet, they put in in our world, a world we’re always being told in other stories treat with science and logic. Moffat for one was annoyed enough by the criticism of ‘Forest’ to say that he thought the science was accurate (‘I checked’), which onlky goes to show what an eccentric he can be and this story would ‘grow in stature over the years’, by which he probably meant the ecological message, but this is no ‘Green Death’ and the only time this story is going to be celebrated is when the generation of children it depicts are old enough to have their own Whovian children, who can laugh at them instead. Until then ‘In The Forest Of The Night’ is a few twigs short of a branch, breaks every storytelling rule of drama, Dr Who and science into the bargain and is yet more evidence, in the rollercoaster ride that is series eight, that this is a series that’s beginning to have problems, no longer in the full bloom it enjoyed right up to the anniversary special. At least, though, it only insults live children. Imagine what would happen if this series started insulting dead people! Oh wait… 

POSITIVES + There's a great and very Dr Whoy moment when it looks as if everyone on Earth has fallen asleep and either been abducted to another planet or woken up in the prehistoric past, but no; they discover one of the lions of Trafalgar Square sticking up out of the trees and realise that they haven't moved in time or space after all. Spooky... 

 NEGATIVES – Things not to do when in charge of a class #1: never, under any circumstance, take them out with you when there are wolves and tigers and goodness knows what else at large. Do not, repeat not, walk towards the said creature with a piddly little torch and put dozens of lives at stake just because you openly fancy the English teacher, whose broken rule #2 by running off and leaving said children with a single adult to face danger alone. Quite why OFSTED haven’t shut Coal Hill School down by now I’ll never know - I mean there was that unsolved case of that missing pupil from 1963 and the disappearance of two teachers on the books already… 

BEST QUOTE: ‘What is it with you people? You hear voices you want to shut them up. The trees come to save you, you want to chop them down’. 

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