Night Terrors: Ranking - 262

 Night Terrors

(Series 6, Dr 11 with Amy and Rory, 3/9/2011, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Mark Gatiss, director: Richard Clark)  

Rank: 262

Aaaagh! I'm being haunted by all my Dr Who figurines: the one of Mel in two different colours, the Davros with the human hands, the Leela doll with the bust size so big it could pole your eye out and the Tom Baker underpants!!! Let's stick them all in the Dr Who cupboard (it's bigger on the inside than the outside)...

Do you ever look at an adult and think ‘gee I bet they were a really interesting kid, I wish I’d known them back then back when they were free and unfiltered?’ There are many candidates for this: Bob Holmes, all three modern  showrunners, Sylvester McCoy, The Kandyman. Chief amongst those is Mark Gatiss, whose child’s eye view of the world is both powerfully real and scarily frightening. All his Dr Who stories seem to be about him working through his phobias to some extent (and he has a lot of them) but usually they manage to be universal, the sort of things that keep children (and more than a few adults) up at night.  ‘Night Terrors’ though is a new one: the threat isn’t clowns, or teachers, or drowning, or television rotting your brain, or aliens, or ghosts, or shadows, or losing your parents in a busy shop full of people, or war, or house fires, or being abandoned by your best friend or eating too many chocolate cakes and making yourself permanently sick, or the existential fear that every adult you meet seems to be utterly broken by life and one day it will happen to you, the usual sorts of things that keep up an imaginary empathetic child up late at night. No ‘Night Terrors’ is about Mark’s very personal fears of dolls. Not just any dolls but the peg dolls from ld antique fairs so old that their hair is coming out and their faces are rubbing off, leaving them to look unfinished. Or being sucked into your own floor by unseen forces. Oh and falling into a pile of refuse sacks and being eaten by rats. I thought my phobia count was pretty high but I can’t say I’ve ever had either of these or thought much about having them. I’m willing to bet most of the people watching ‘Night Terrors’ haven’t either. And yet here we are  in a story that manages to be utterly unlike anything else the series ever did.

For a start The Doctor pays a house visit not to a legendary figure from history or a passing timelord but to a scared little boy who can’t sleep, as if he’s personally visiting all the terrified children who can’t sleep. Even in a s series that was partly created to help the open-hearted empathetic children overcome their nightmares and navigate the mess of the modern world they’ve been born into, that’s new. The Doctor, Amy and Rory seem an odd substitute for a visit by social services but then, of course, George turns out not to be your normal child.  Poor George needs help from someone. He’s the kind of kid that is terrified of everything. He’s a combination of ‘Mr Jelly’ from ‘The Mr Men’ and Shaggy from Scooby Doo. He’s the sort of kid that would watch Dr Who from behind the sofa. If only he weren’t You might think that’s rather sweet, until The Doctor merrily tells the family that George’s phobias are real and everything he’s scared of really is terrifying. The story ends up with never a dull moment, but plenty of doll ones, as Amy and Rory are menaced by toys that come to life and do the usual Moffat-era baddy thing, loom menacingly. Scariest of all, though, is the fact that The Doctor is taking it all so seriously, after a million adults have told the child to stop making nothing up and there’s nothing there – for while there’s nothing as disappointing to a child as being dismissed by an adult there’s nothing scarier than when an adult (if The Doctor can be called that) who takes them seriously. The result is as if Dr Who has channel hopped into one of those weird horror films where the child is right and the world is every bit as terrifying as they said it was (see ‘Return To Oz’ ‘The Exorcist’ ‘Time Bandits’ and goodness knows what else), simultaneously mixed in with a soap opera (two tired parents at the end of their tether because they simply don’t know how to help their boy).

There’s a message at the back of this story though about what this series fundamentally is and what role it plays. Mary Whitehouse famously attacked Dr Who mercilessly in the 1970s, saying that it was too scary for children, that it was giving children nightmares and that it was ‘teatime terror for tots’. In one sense she’s not wrong: I still remember the nightmare I had, aged six, after watching episode one of ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’. But Dr Who isn’t there purely to frighten children or frankly no child would ever choose to watch it (life is frightening enough as it is when you’re small and have no power to make adults listen to you). Dr Who is, to give it a modern phrase, a ‘safe space’, where you get to be frightened by something you know isn’t real, hopefully in the company of adults who can look after you. It’s a chance to practice how you react to the things in everyday life that scare you, from demon headmaster to big bullies to that dog at the end of the road that barks every time you pass it to the school bus that smells a bit funny, to the growing sense of panic that you live in a world where bas things can happen without warning and people do funny things  all the time and people misbehave and break the rules and don’t think about the people they put in trouble, and where your life and everything you know can be uprooted on the whim of an adult getting a new job, or  an illness, or a lottery win, or abduction by aliens, and that you’re not invincible and that one day you will be dead. It’s a lot for a little brain to take in, especially as so many of the things you’re coming across in your everyday life are either new or last happened so long ago you’ve forgotten about them: Seasons, car journeys, new classrooms, haircuts, dentist trips, new friends joining school, joining new schools yourself. What Mary Whiitehouse missed so spectacularly was that Dr Who and programmes like it were never about making children afraid but about giving them the coping mechanisms they need to cope with what scares them in their real life. I’ve lost count of the amount of fans who’ve told stories about how Dr Who being on at the same time every Saturday was the only safe permanent unmoving unchanging thing in their lives during some big change growing up, or how they drew on their admiration for The Doctor in how to react to something that scared them, or how they realised that they were living in a universe so huge it made the monsters under their bed seemed tiny and defeatible.  Being scared, in a safe place, as a practice run for the real thing, is a lot better than ending up in the middle of something awful one day and not knowing what to do about it because you’ve never been scared before. That old joke about hiding behind the sofa when Dr Who was on is surely symbolic (I don’t know any fan that actually did it and most sofas in most homes are backed against walls anyway, un-shiftable when you’re small – and not for lack of trying I might add), to truly enjoy this programme you need to watch it in a domestic setting where you know you’re safe. That’s why Dr Who was always a family programme and why it worked as one even in the 21^st century when TV makers created things for demographics and didn’t normally make programme makers anymore. Note too how many of the ‘threats’ mentioned or seen that turn out to be innocent are very much things already in Dr Who: clowns (‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’), water (take your pick but ‘The Sea Devils’ and ‘Warriors Of The Deep’ spring to mind) and little old ladies who act a bit funny (‘Paradise Towers’). No walking talking cactuses, ten foot long ants, monsters made out of sweets or Kylie Minogue admittedly (all very rational fears) but hey, maybe George is just a weird child.

The alternative, the ‘Mary Whitehouse’ way if you like, is to take everything you don’t like and put it in a cupboard to avoid looking at it, to pretend it isn’t there and never deal with it at all. That’s the sensible ‘adult’ thing to do after all: if you don’t like something, don’t deal with it. But children can’t do that. The cupboard is just too big: you can’t do what an adult does and avoid the people or things that make you miserable by, say, changing jobs or studying for a new one or moving out of town. You don’t have many options as a child: you simply have to get through it as best you can, even if that means walking past the mean dog and the school bully and the teacher who seems to look at you in the same way Davros looks at humans and Thals. By approaching those fears one by one, testing them out, finding that they won’t hurt you, that’s how you get through life, not by throwing a blanket over something and pretending it’s not there. That leads to suppressed trauma and adults that end up a lot more scared of life than the kids who got to confront what scared them and feel they can do anything. That use of a cupboard might be significant by the way: though originally planned for the first half of series six and indeed the first story of the season to be filmed ‘Night Terrors’ ended up being moved by Steven Moffat to here officially so that the ‘darker’ and ‘fluffier’ stories would be more evenly spaced (something I don’t buy at all: I mean, this story is followed by ‘The Girl Who Waited’ and ‘The Crimson Horror’; the only story in the run even close to being fluffy is ‘Closing Time’ and that’s partly about The Doctor’s certainty he’s about to go to his death) . No, I think the running order was tweaked more carefully than that, with this story following on from ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’, a story where the scariest real person in the 20^th century was left by Rory in a cupboard. Society, you see, is still a bit twitchy about how it deals with real-life monsters. Especially round children’s programmes. You can have all the documentary programmes on Hitler you like (and boy are there a lot of them), but dramas for adults? That’s a bit scary. Dramas for children? Impossible. As late as ‘The Curse Of Fenric’ in 1989, when Dr Who first did WW2, there was a general feeling that maybe it was a bit too soon to put something on TV in a fictional context that some people watching would have lived through (and been genuinely scared by), as if making it fictional undid the real horror of the man and his policies (never mind the fact that Davros effectively is Hitler, as are most chief Daleks going back to 1963). It feels as if Moffat tried to write a story properly about Hitler and found his hands were tied so he took a leaf from his friend Gatiss’ book and parked Hitler in a cupboard, as a comment on how the world still isn’t ready to deal with the horrors it created just yet. Heaven forefend that children learn about the worst that adults can do. They just have to live in a world partly shaped by those adults instead, left to cope on their own.     

‘Night Terrors’ is a story that understands this more than any other story out there, that Dr Who’s job is not just to scare but to encourage children that they have the strength to defeat the monsters they find in everyday life. The parts of the story that work best are when Gatiss taps into his inner child and asks what he’d most want to see on screen, even throwing in the extra detail of the creepy landlord upstairs that was modelled and named after his least favourite teacher, the sadistic p.e. tutor Jim Purcell, who – so it’s hinted in interviews – was not unlike Sgt Patterson in ‘Survival’, forever telling the weedy effeminate Gatiss to man up because he’d never get away with being a scaredy cat for the rest of his life (his career making horror films begs to differ; like Patterson it does the heart good o his belief when this bully preaching survival of the fittest is the first to scream when something awful actually happens to him and turns out to be a wimp. Especially if you substitute him with your least favourite teacher). It’s more than the writing though: this really is a child’s eye view right down to the really low camera angles that make the everyday setting weird and threatening, a world built for adults and not you. Everyone looms in this story, like a true Moffat monster should. The adults we see are all giggling, as if enjoying a private joke they can’t share with you (adults quickly forget but seriously 90% of childhood is like that and feeling left out of adult life). Even a tired Amy and Rory, giggling about a monster eating the boy up when they think he’s not looking, seem threatening suddenly, filmed in such a way that the artificial hall lighting in this tower block lights up their face and makes them look all spooky. We know they’re well meaning and big hearted of course, just tired and stressed, the way that most adults are when they accidentally scare children, with an impenetrable language code about aching bones and deadlines and earning enough money to make your loved ones stay alive that children aren’t privvy to yet (and seems dead easy and not worth all the fuss when you have things like spelling tests and swimming lessons to go to). Briefly, though, you see Amy and Rory as George would see them, as strangers laughing at him. Just as you see the dolls from his point of view, terrifyingly lifesize and emotionless, unreadable, threatening. In that sense ‘Night Terrors’ scores much more highly than the similar ‘Fear Her’ (about scribble monsters that arrive in another cupboard) because it at least feels as if its taking the threat seriously.
However that creates a few really big problems with this story which means that, for all the big brave intentions, it never quite comes off. One is that this story just looks weird. Like…really weird. It's one of those stories that makes you want to ask the writer 'is everything alright at home?' (At least until you see Mark Gatiss' name on the writer's credit and then think to yourself 'ah yes, but of course’). The fact that its shot from a child’s point of view makes it look unlike anything the series has ever tried before or since without actually saying why, so until you work out that we’re meant to be from George’s point of view it’s just unsettling. And not in a good way necessarily, it’s just…weird. Another is that as this is a story about being scared the monsters need to be absolutely bed-wettingly bed-hiding goosepimply scary and…they’re just dolls. They’re something I suspect only scares Mark Gatiss. Or perhaps his therapist as they seem to be a real screaming phobia, treated in the script as if they’re more terrifying than the angriest Dalek or the most emotionless Cybermen. To those of us without the phobia they look like the flimsiest monsters going, easy to knock over if you needed to leg it. Phobias, like jokes, are hard to get right: what scares one person or makes them laugh will be totally different with someone else depending on personality and humour. Mostly Dr Who monsters work because everyone is a little afraid that aliens might actually be real (and if you aren’t then you aren’t watching the right series because the whole point of Dr Who is that the universe is so big and wide it’s impossible to know anything about anything outside our own solar system for real). It asks a lot, though, to make us scared of a phobia this personal, this locked in time to one person’s childhood (I mean, I’m sure there are other people who share the same phobia but it’s not exactly common). It feels, too, as if they got censored somewhere, as if someone read this script and totally misread it, figuring ‘we can’t make them too scary’ and so they got changed into bland generic peg doll monsters. Honestly I knew dolls scarier than this growing up when they weren’t ten foot tall and looming at me and I don’t have a phobia of them. In a series that deals with some pretty scary things on a regular basis (I mean, just look at The Daleks) it’s a tragedy that it was this, of all stories, that saw the plug pulled on the scary factor, in a story about the importance of the scare factor. The fact that someone needs to be in danger also means that Amy and Rory get cut off from the main plot really quickly and left to wander around a (spoilers) doll’s house in the dark: this is meant to be a huge twist but it’s one of the very few I saw coming on first transmission, thanks to all the lingering on George’s cupboard and, cute as the very Doctory speech about what else it might be amounts to (‘a refuge for people who eat wooden food? Or termites trying to get on the property ladder?’) really there’s only one solution to this conundrum and the second half of the story is about trying not to give the game away while still being vaguely threatening. There’s a totally doesn’t-work scene of them crashing in a lift (sorry, elevator to my American readers) that really doesn’t work too: we don’t know what’s going on, it’s shot in the dark and it looks like two actors standing in a room and going ‘ah!’, falling totally flat (sorry, elevator to my American readers. No wait…) It actually feels more realistic when the ten foot peg dolls start walking, it’s that bad.  

 
The other problem is that, like the much maligned ‘Fear Her’ we end up with an unbearably cheesy ending about the importance of love: mercifully it’s better than the kooky kookaburra song and doesn’t involve Huw Edwards pontificating about the power of love while David Tennant runs around with an Olympic torch, but it’s still way too saccharine for the tastes of any kid brave enough to get through a programme all about how their childhood fears are real. You see, the very Dr Who twist is that George isn’t a human child but a Tenza, an alien cuckoo that invades other alien’s nests not out of spite or jealousy but because it wants love. Alas this leads to more than a few plotholes though, actually more than the tightly plotted ‘Fear Her’ which at least made sense on its own terms (even if it felt like odd Dr Who). How do any Tenza survive being abandoned by their parents and left to survive the universe alone, especially if they’re all as naturally timid as this? Quite why the Tenza came to Earth, a planet without much spare to go round when there are so many more suitable candidates in the universe, is another matter (there are times I think they’d be better off hopping one planet over to Mars and adopting an Ice Warrior child and his pet snake, terrified of anything that doesn’t hiss). Quite why nobody outside the parents have seen through the perception filter it surrounds itself with is another matter (not least because, in ‘The Eleventh Hour’, it was attached to a place not a person: what happens every time the parents go outside and talk about their son and their friends and family look at them funny? How come nobody commented that the couple had a baby without any signs of pregnancy or morning sickness or anything? Did they suddenly rush out and bought a bunch of baby supplies the day their child arrived without thinking it odd once they left the house? How come people visiting don’t get zapped by the filter and walk out going ‘why am I suddenly buying presents for a nephew I don’t have’? Clearly somebody other than George’s presents has been buying him presents and some weird ones too: why would anyone buy dolls that big for a child that small? Is this is a well meaning friend or relative that’s never met George? What happens about school – does George simply not go? A terrified child whose home-schooled and never leaves the house is bound to get social services round, especially if the neighbours can hear his terrified wails and the authorities know that officially no child is meant to live there. Plus of course the big one: if George is so terrified by his dolls and dolls house – odd things to give a boy anyway but never mind – why don’t his parents just throw them away? They’ve reached the point where they’re talking about sending the kid away, don’t tell me they haven’t considered throwing stuff out first). In ‘Fear Her’, daft as it is, you at least bought into the idea of a lonely Isolus combining with a lonely Human child, neither knowing it was wrong. George and his situation, by contrast, never feel completely real or believable. While there’s a good reason we don’t learn his back story early on (that would have given the game away) it would have helped the script a lot if we knew more about his parents from the start: how badly they wanted this child, how they’re anxious about giving him the best life and afraid they’re getting it wrong, how they’d do anything for him including sending him away for his own good. We barely see George’s mum for instance and there’s a point, midway through, when it looks as if she’s going to be revealed as the monster, the same way Chloe’s dad was in ‘Fear Her’. Only the script isn’t as brave and chickens out (ironic really given the topic) and takes the easy Dr Who-ish route instead. Even The Doctor doesn’t feel quite right this story, as if Gatiss is still writing for the 9^th Doctor and hasn’t shifted to the fact that Matt Smith’s Doctor is basically still a big kid himself, sometimes coming over as patronising rather than kind (he’s much more natural with children in ‘Closing Time’ or with the young Amy Pond). 

In the end, then, ‘Night Terrors’ is an un-scary story about being frightened, with monsters and situations that seem silly rather than threatening, that uses The Doctor badly and Amy and Rory barely at all, in a story that has the one definitively real world setting in the Moffat era of Who that somehow feels more fairytale like and unreal than any of the others, while the plot turns into a weak soap opera about parenting that never quite feels real enough to care about and is really badly acted throughout with a cast who are if anything more convincingly wooden than the dolls (with no companions this story relies a lot on Daniel Mays being natural and he never seems entirely comfortable throughout). Is there anything worth watching this story for? Well yes. There are lots of great little bits, like The Doctor recounting his own childhood bedtime stories, some of which became tie-in novels (‘Snow White and The Seven Keys To Doomsday’ ‘The Three Little Sontarons’ and ‘The Emperor Dalek’s New Clothes’, further emphasising how all times and cultures have their own ‘scary’ literature in childhood to help children prepare for life, even Gallifreyans) or joking about how ‘Pantophobia is a fear of everything – including pants I suppose’. I love the postmodern way that The Doctor helps us with our childhood traumas both in the story and by what he does every week in every story as part of the TV series about him. I love the idea that there’s no baddy as such in this story (and everybody lives…again! though it makes more aesthetic sense here than usual) everyone, adults children and aliens all, are just kind of muddling along, equally anxious that they’re messing up. The more the parents worry about their parenting the more George worries and the more things get to him, a vicious cycle that the family can’t escape from. I love the way Gatiss taps back into the feeling long lost to the vast majority of adults of what the world was like when it was new and exciting and full of possibilities but also scary and unfathomable (rather than being repetitive and mundane) and Gatiss has a better handle on that than almost any other writer out there, certainly on Dr Who. There’s nothing more sinister than childhood innocence being used in a creepy knowing way as an adult, as if they know something you don’t, as any amount of psychedelia albums will show you or indeed ‘The Mind Robber’ – it’s about time modern Who had a go at this trope too. The ending, with George telling his dolls to get lost, is horrifically shot with The Doctor pleading for his life up a staircase with the weediest Who monsters of them all moving very very slowly and as schmaltzy as it gets when he faces his fears and banishes the toys (another scene that actually worked much better in ‘Fear Her’) but it’s the ‘right’ ending. All of George’s fears are, like most phobias, about abandonment deep down, of losing the people that love you. The fact that we know that George’s dad Alex is devoted and besotted and just an adult at the end of his tether trying to do the best for the son that he adores doesn’t mean that George knows it. The moment he goes from horrified ‘what do you mean my son is an alien?’ to super dad I the time it takes George to cry is one of those scenes that melts your heart even if you’ve spent the past 40 minutes laughing at the grannies falling into rubbish tips and landlords being eaten by their own floor (a sequence so much worse than when they did it the year before in ‘The Hungry Earth’ for some reason).

Unfortunately I low key hate everything else. The flat dialogue The way that even the stuff that happens for real seems oddly unreal and detached, as if you’re not supposed to care about it. The humour that goes wrong. The endless talking. The extended sequences running around the least scary setup in Dr Who history (done right being trapped in a doll’s house could have been chilling, but not like this). I’m all for the ordinary becoming extraordinary but, handled in the wrong, way it just looks stupid. And ‘Night Terrors’ has more of ‘those’ sorts of scenes than most. The way The Doctor has become Dr Smug and his two companions Angry and Angsty. The fact that I’ve basically wasted 45 minutes of my life watching some giant dolls do nothing very much and characters we’ve seen face oncoming storms of goodness knows what have kittens. Ultimately ‘Fear Her’, much hated as it is, still comes in a few rungs further up my ladder courtesy of doing all this stuff first, being brave enough to go a darker route, the 10th Dr and Rose being on top form and the special effects (although that’s hardly a classic either). ‘Night Terrors’ knows its core audience better than that story though and really taps into its fears with greater accuracy than suppressed scribbles, while its great that we got some child centric story in what is quite an adult series (like the best children’s literature it’s a story that would have been solved far quicker if adults had taken the time to actually listen to their children instead of shushing them); I just wish the adults making this had been as brave as the children they were writing it for and taken a few more risks. ‘Fear Her’ was a child’s story that made adults afraid too; ‘Night Terrors’ isn’t scary for anyone over six and even then less than almost any other Dr Who episode, unless they too happen to the same quirks and phobias as the writer. Sadly the end result is a story that’s unlikely to keep many fans up at night – in fact, hidden away in series six like this, in the middle of the ‘Astronaut’ plot arc about River’s origins (which it doesn't address at all, not even a line: surely they could have overdubbed a quick scene about Amy and Rory being terrified what was happening to their own child – that would have fitted in with the story theme really well) This story has no real jeopardy, no scares, no real reason to exist, the epitome of forgettable, never mentioned much past the week of broadcast (at least ‘Fear Her’ was notorious in the bits that it got wrong, whereas this one is just…weird). Not for the last time there’s a great script in here but the way it’s treated mean it feels like a cuckoo, like a story that shouldn’t be here even in a format with the elasticity of Dr Who (many commentators picked up on how it works far more like an unsettling ‘Sapphire and Steel’ story than a Dr Who; especially assignment one with its abandoned children in a haunted house who caused a rift in time by speaking nursery rhymes, the definition of creepy: sanitised 21^st century telly would never be allowed to create something quite that menacing; remembering this is why The Dolls suddenly start speaking nursery rhymes, when everyone saw back the rushes and saw how silly it looked – though goodness knows how they were able to speak given the context of the story that they were George’s toys and not even his subconscious fears ala ‘Fear Her’). Above all it’s…weird. Not in a way like so many of my favourite weird stories either (from ‘The Mind Robber’ to ‘Warrior’s Gate’ to ‘The Happiness Patrol’ that look at the world from another angle and really make you think) but just…weird. Oh well, it was a good try. Not everything in life works out the way you want it to in life, so muddled and messy and, well, human. No wonder we’re scared of it sometimes. Just not in the way Mary Whitehouse thought we were (now there’s a person who gave me far more nightmares than Dr Who ever did!) 

 
POSITIVES + It's great to see Dr Who back on a council estate again, even if this Croydon tower block looks a lot more run down than most of the Croydon I know (maybe because it was filmed in the decidedly less upmarket Redcliffe, a suburb of Bristol. Why didn’t they just set this in Bristol you might ask? Good point – it’s weird how London-centric this series is sometimes). As fab as most of the Moffat-era episodes are they do have a slight feel of not taking place in 'our' world but in a 'fairy tale' version, but this one feels 'real' again (at least until Amy and Rory find themselves trapped in a doll's house). The fact we have some clearly working class figures in the show again felt at the time like a bigger, more unexpected twist than any monster could have been. It works a lot better than the doll’s house itself, the country house Dryham Park which was chosen purely for its distinctive checkered flooring which is barely seen in any case in the dark (the owners were rather shocked to find all their antique furniture removed and replaced with oversized childhood props a la ‘Planet Of Giants’!)  

NEGATIVES - Child actors in family shows always get a raw deal I think. Children, as a rule, don't like seeing other children acting; they blur the lines between reality and fantasy a bit too much and aren't as obviously 'distant' as foreign actors are, while they’re either so bad you’re growling because you could do a better job or deeply jealous because you know you can’t and the fact someone your age can do it so effortlessly makes you feel bad. Also they tend to be written by adult writers who long ago forgot what it was like to be a child through decades of worrying about marriage and mortgages and impending death and are statistically quite likely to have never had children of their own. Often an adult's idea of a child is from 'their' generation too, not the one watching, so they’re utterly clueless and outdated when it comes to the modern world the child is trying to navigate its way round. In other words even an experienced adult actor would struggle with some of the things child actors have to say. All the more so when they're playing an alien whose main characteristic is 'worried 8 year old'. The lad playing George is really struggling and gives one of the all time rubbish performances, but I stress it’s not his fault - the best actors in the world wouldn't be able to shine in that role as written (give those lines to an eight year old David Tennant and he’d probably do just as badly).

BEST QUOTE: ‘I’ve been around the block a few times. More than a few. They’ve knocked down the block I’ve been round and rebuilt them as bigger blocks. Super blocks. I’ve been around them as well’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: While all the other Doctors were doing Big Finish Tom Baker instead stayed loyal to BBC audio and starred in the increasingly bonkers spinoff series ‘Hornet’s Nest’, a sort of parallel world where an older 4^th Doctor is exiled to earth for…reasons and is accompanied by Mike Yates while fighting a sort of pseudo Master, Mrs Wibbsey. Stories that make the most of Tom’s love of the absurd they’re heavy going for the most part and surreal in the extreme and few more so than ‘The Dead Shoes’. The reason its mentioned here is that there’s a scene where The Doctor has been shrunk and placed inside a doll’s house, terrorised by peg dolls in exactly the same way Amy and Rory are here, as part of a dream sequence. It won’t surprise you to lean that writer Paul Magrs is good friends with Mark Gatiss.
One of the weirder Dr Who spin off ranges out there is the ‘Timelord FairyTales’ box set (2015) by Justin Richards containing Whoniverse-linked retellings of Human fairytales (but of course we got a release like this in the middle of the Steen Moffat years: its hard to imagine it under any other producer/showrunner but it makes sense in this era). There are fifteen stories by Dr Who regulars, all a bit weirdly written with the best thing about them their titles: ‘The Garden Of Statues’ (‘The Selfish Giant’ with Weeping Angel statues), ‘Frozen Beauty’ (a cryogenically frozen Sleeping Beauty who gets nibbled by a Wirrn), ‘Cinderella And The Magic Box’ (hint: it includes Great Vampires), ‘The Twins In The Wood’ (‘Babes In the Wood’…on Gallifrey), ‘Jak And The Wormhole’ (which is a bit like a beanstalk), Little Rose Riding Hood’ (with a Zygon instead of a wolf!), ‘The Gingerbread Trap’ (made using Krillitane oil), ‘The Scruffy Piper’ (a merry tale of the 2^nd Doctor playing his recorder and stopping a Cyberman invasion), ‘Helena and The Beast’, ‘Andiba And The Four Slitheen (thieves in other words), ‘The Grief Collector’ (an even odder version of Rumpletiltskin than ‘Name Of the Doctor’!), ‘The Three Brothers Gruff’ (who are all Sontaron clones) and ‘Sirgwain And The Green Knight (go on, guess! Nope: he’s an Ice Warrior!) Naturally the book includes two of the three stories mentioned, with ‘The Dalek Emperor’s Clothes’ added to a 2016 ‘slipcase’ reissue. There’s a Big Finish audio edition with everyone from Strax to Ace reading them out too.

‘The Three Little Sontarons’ is #5 in the collection and features three very different Sontaron strategies for defeating a lone Rutan warrior. Marshall Vrike orders his men to take defensive positions, waiting for the Rutan to strike first and lays ambushes and traps around their last known position in the woods; he gets electrocuted by the Rutan. Major Kyre divides his men into units ready to outflank the enemy, using heat sensors to detect where it is. Figuring its alone and not very dangerous he rushes in to kill it face to face but the Rutan was hiding in a stone building that protected it from heat rays and The Sontaron is disintegrated. That leaves Commander Stern, who realises that the Rutan is moving from building to building and is heading for a power plant; he pretends to ambush it but really he’s hiding in the ventilation shaft where the Rutan goes to hide, destroying it with a scissor grenade. Only one of them lived happily after but at least the others died in glorious battle!

‘Snow White and The Seven Keys To Doomsday’ was first published in the 2012 Dr Who Annual and is #7 in the collection. King Drextor arrives on a planet called Winter and takes over the throne, creating a machine using seven keys that allows his reign to continue undisturbed forever. Only The Queen gets scared of his power and poisons him on the night of his coronation when he was planning to switch the throne on, killing him. The people of Winter scatter the seven keys through the kingdom so no one will ever be abel to turn the machine on. Snow White is born, the daughter of the Groundsman and a kitchen maid,  and when grown up overhears about wicked Queen Salima ordering her guards to find the keys so she can use the machine again. So Snow White decides to hunt for the keys herself and when she finds the entrance to one of the hiding places is too small she enlists the help of some local diminutive miners. Then its hi ho hi ho as they collect the keys in various adventures until Snow White has them all; Salima has heard of her plan and tries to ruin it by snatching the keys so the girl decides to break them instead, causing a big explosion which kills The Queen. And they all lived happily ever after. Sort of.

Weirdly enough it utterly contradicts an earlier example of ‘Snow White And The Seven Keys To Doomsday’ printed in the 2012 Dr Who annual (a parallel world version???), writer unknown.  In this one ‘long ago in the Old Times when Gallifrey was young’ Rassilon establishes the matrix and asks it ‘who has the power to make Gallifrey fall?’ It replies ‘only you’ for years until one day it says ‘Snowana The Fair, using the keys To Doomsday’, has the power to destroy all of Gallifrey’. However she’s just a little girl, in her first regeneration and still too young to attend academy classes. Calling an emergency meeting in the Panoptican the timelords debate what to do with a debate much like the one at the heart of ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’: should they kill an innocent girl just in case or wait till she tries to use her power against them? Rassilon takes the middle option and banishes her to Gallifrey’s wastelands where she’s sure to die naturally. Only of course she doesn’t: she’s adopted by Gallifrey’s ‘outlers’ (see ‘The Invasion Of Time’) and renamed ‘Snow White’ because of her pale skin from being born inside the citadel away from the burning suns of Gallifrey. Selendor, an outler, falls in love with her but becomes cruel, intent on revenage aginst the Gallifreyans who cast him out. He creates a terrible weapon and makes seven keys one for each ‘crime’ his kind committed: pride, injustice, power, exile, knowledge, wisdom and ‘Nevermore’. The outlers flee as he starts up the machine, all except for Snowana who promised to love Selandor and let her use the last key for revenge; instead she ran and hid, creating a box to house the keys to time so they would be kept safe, with a forcefield that none could break but she. However it meant her death as well, confined inside the glass box containment field. ‘Some say she is sleeping still’ the story ends. And everyone lived happily ever after because of one girl’s sacrifice. Sweet: much better than the books.  

The latecomer ‘The Dalek Emperor’s New Clothes’ features Daleks invading the planet Rarjohan for valuable resources only to be fought back by the native rebel army. The Emperor Dalek’s casing is damaged in the fight and he’s temporarily powerless, losing the ability to control the forcefield he keeps around the city. The rebels rake over the city and seek to ambush him, timing it for the ‘parade’ where he gets to show his Daleks his new specially built casing and how he’s still the supreme and rightful ruler of them all.  Only (spoilers) it’s all a trick: The Daleks know their Emperor is their rightful ruler and its just a trap to capture the rebel and exterminate them. Despite their bravery the rebels don’t get to lie happily ever after (because they’re dead). Like the res of the set all three are good fun if you’re in the right mood and nicely illustrated but, like many fairytales, are a tad gruesome for the age they’re intended for yet far too childish for most adult readers, rather falling between two stools. Most fans I know who got them for Christmas hacent got further than reading the first one and looking at all the pictures.  

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