Fear Her: Ranking - 248

  Fear Her

(Series 2, Dr 10 with Rose, 24/6/2006, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Matthew Graham, director: Euros Lyn) 

Rank: 248

''Appearing tonight on The Gallery we have an entry from the Isolus, aged 44 billion, that's been sent in all the way from outer space. Let's hang it on the wall...Wait, why are the eyes flashing red?...Aaaaagh!!!'

It’s normal practice in a long-running series like Dr Who, a show delivered to such tight deadlines, to commission something you never actually plan to show and keep it in your ;’just in case’ cupboard for a rainy day. It happened in the olden days when it became something of a lottery: sometimes these scripts accidentally made stars of writers like Terry Nation (who wrote ‘The Daleks’ in quick order) and Robert Holmes (ditto ‘The Krotons’), though John Flanagan and Andrew McCulloch got less lucky with ‘Meglos’ and Glen McCoy was lucky to ever work again following the backlash to ‘Timelash’. The new series seems to need these scripts more than most though: Russell T Davies had already pulled ‘Boom Town’ out of the bag at the last minute when Stephen Fry’s planned script fell through at the last minute and here Matthew Graham’s ‘Fear Her’ comes out to play because, umm, Stephen Fry’s planned rewrites on his script fell through at the last minute. Though Russell doesn’t have any more issues in ‘his’ era of the show his replacements have the same problems, Steven Moffat getting round it by always commissioning more scripts than he actually needs (and keeping some back for the following year if he didn’t need them) and Chris Chibnall by searching out for new untapped talent by giving some newbie writers their big break. ‘Fear Her’ has gone down in history as ‘the’ Dr Who back-of-the-cupboard story though, not least because it features a monster in a cupboard. It’s never been the best received of Dr Who episodes, mostly because it’s the one Russell never got the chance to re-write for a ‘tone style’ the way he did all the others bar Moffat’s, with the feel that it’s totally writing for a totally different younger audience than the rest, who’ve discovered the show through ‘Totally Dr Who’, the junior version of ‘Confidential’ that ran across series two and three with snatched interviews with actors, behind-the-scenes insights into explosions, stunts, monsters, makeup and costumes, competitions that are most infamous for the time Noel Clarke made a girl cry by beating her in a quiz before he remembered where he was and handed her home-built toy back to her with his prize, and was mostly there to inspire viewers’ own imaginative creations which often featured crayon drawings just like the ones Chloe Webber uses in this story. Uncharitably ‘Fear Her’ feels like one of the nation’s six or seven year old’s contributions too: the plot’s threadbare thin, this doesn’t feel like ‘our’ Doctor or Rose, the near-contemporary Britain everyone walks round doesn’t feel ‘real’ at all and there’s a cringeworthy finale in which the baddy of the day is healed with love. Viewers at the time were confused (this story really doesn’t feel like Dr Who), most were quite rude and ‘Fear Her’ has gone on to become a byword for everything that’s wrong about this era of the show (the insincerity, the sudden resolutions, the constantly chirpy tone, the sops to children’s TV), an easy robot dog to kick. I mean, the main ‘monster’ (not that anyone is allowed to call it that, being a non-sentient entity without emotions) is a ball of scribbled pencil doodles. It’s exactly the sort of thing Whovians like to scoff at and which just embarrasses us hugely when the general public see it too and think this show is always like this. 

I mean, fans aren’t wrong and fans aren't stupid, they know when something’s off and a lot of this story is. Tonally ‘Fear Her’ is all over the shop. This is the episode of the Davies years that most feels like other programmes of era undiluted by Dr Whoyness: there’s acting that can most generously be described as ‘broad’, a dotty old woman seeing weird things (Edna Nore was in everything back then, mostly playing the same bartty old woman), children singing random songs, an obsession with the Olympics as the balm to cure all Britain’s ills (even though the debt just after the credit crunch had kicked in nearly crippled London), kids playing football, a family being eaten from the inside out….tune in to practically any other drama show of 2006 and it looks like this. Even though it technically didn’t start for another seven years yet it looks exactly like the opening to ‘Broadchurch’ with its missing kids and neighbours curtain-twitching. Which is, in its own way, a sort of return to roots: a lot of viewers commented how the 1960s stories all looked like channel-hopping, as if the Tardis had accidentally set down in a historical drama or scifi movie or a particular genre (‘The Gunfighters’ and the Christmas episodes of ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ were deliberately written to feel like ‘Gunsmoke’ and ‘Z Cars’ respectively)but modern Who had never really done this and it’s an idea worth trying. It’s just a shame that, given what a shocking state of affairs TV was in during 2006 that certainly isn’t a good thing. In every modern series poll taken since Dr Who came back ‘Fear Her’ was at the bottom, all the way until ‘Orphan 55’ beat it hollow in 2020. And yet despite all that and all the many things it gets wrong I’m almost fond of this story (certainly far more than I am of ‘Orphan 55’). I mean, it’s not an under-rated gem or anything but it’s almost too easy to kick this story when it’s trying so hard to be loved (which is the theme of the episode after all): this isn’t some arrogant pupil that thinks its really smart even after it messed up deserves to be taken down a peg or two (like ‘Orphan 55’); ‘Fear Her’ is the slow kid at school that just needs extra time and attention – and Russell was too busy to really give it. If this is the weakest Russell-era Who comes (and it is, give or take larks with the Devil in ‘The Impossible Planet’) then, well, for those of us who lived through the John Nathan-Turner years it’s not that bad. 

 As for the plot, this is just your average tale of lonely girl meets lonely asexual alien and they get together to create a scribble beings that lives in the cupboard. The isolus is an interesting alien species that doesn’t really get enough backstory or screentime: a tiny pollen-size being, the Doctor comments that it comes from a super large family who cross the solar winds (just like the boats in ‘Enlightenment’) and spends the long journey making up things with its imagination, just like human children on long car journeys. Only this one’s got lost and ends up befriending a London girl who also feels lost for much darker reasons – the repressed trauma of what her abusive and now dead father did to her, which for various reasons she feels she can’t talk to her mum about. Socially isolated the pair ‘draw’ all the people they see around them, including an entire stadium filled with spectators watching the Olympics opening ceremony, so they can have more friends/brothers and sisters (the worry being that the isolus has four million brothers and sisters – uncharacteristically Billie Piper gets this wrong and says ‘five billion’ at one point and even more uncharacteristically nobody seems to have noticed so it got left in, another sign that by the end of this year everyone was pushed for time and running on fumes). That’s actually quite a neat idea for a Dr Who story: this is one of those stories that makes you think the alien is the real threat, when really it’s another child and the threat actually comes from a human and the suppressed rage Chloe feels at what was done to her. It’s a kiddie version of ‘Galaxy 4’ or ‘The Savages’ or ‘Frontier In Space’. 

 The problem is, though, the main pitch for this episode is children (so much so that Russell sat writer Matthew Graham down and told him to think what might appeal to his son, then aged seven and thus the perfect age to start watching Dr Who – which seems in retrospect a dangerous thing to say the week after The Abzorbaloff). Except it’s most definitely not what children would write or watch by choice, partly because the story makes them out to be passive victims and partly because it looks stupid (see the 11th Doctor ‘Good As Gold’ minisode, which really was written by children and also features the 2012 Olympics for more: that one’s got a Weeping Angel statue and is well scary). And you can’t write a story primarily for children and tackle abuse head-on: brutal Cybermen conversion yes, Dalek extermination yes, anything imaginary is fair game, but real human problems? Not before the watershed when children are safely tucked up in bed. It’s the great irony of this story that it uses a main plot that they couldn’t have got away with even in one of the more obviously grown-up Who stories (say ‘Angels Take Manhattan’ to name just one) – it needed to be done in spinoff series Torchwood, where they tended to have plots far more childish instead. Given how often Dr Who taps into nightmares it’s only right and proper that a story should be asking questions about why so many children are scared – and the reason, more often than not, is helplessness: children have no power, no authority, no control over their life. They’re reliant on their parents or guardians for support far more than adults that have learned to be independent and have their own income streams and careers and life goals and friends and can come and go as they please. While obviously most children didn’t go through what Chloe apparently did there is a case to be made that Dr Who should be doing more stories like this as, along with other children-related TV programmes, a ‘surrogate parent’ that teaches about morals and the real world outside the home. We needed a story about a spooked kid afraid of the very real problems they face and how they’re unable to talk about it. Giving Chloe an imaginary friend to soften the pain in her life and to exert some control again, just like the children in ET, Pete’s Dragon or The Snowman (classics all), is exactly what this series should be doing and which strangely it had never really done before (at least on TV) though it has a handful of times since (‘Night Terrors’ and ‘The Eleventh Hour’, where Amy adopts the Doctor) the children’s part is too childish and the explanation for Chloe’s behaviour is too dark and so we have an uneasy hybrid of both (rather sweetly Clara becomes a sort of imaginary friend for the Doctor himself in ‘Name Of the Doctor’). Had they spent more time on that and made Chloe the heroine, against the rest of the world with the Isolus as her friend the way the above stories did it could have been a winner; instead she’s a passive victim, which isn’t how children’s audiences think of themselves at all (the only child-friendly bit is when the Doctor shuts up a load of adults with the yell ‘fingers on lips!’ like adults like to do to boisterous noisy children – more gags like this, of the Doctor being on Chloe’s side, would really have made all the difference, at least for the children’s end of the audience spectrum). 

So what we get is an unhappy alliance that descends minute by minute into a cheesy story about drawings coming to life that's solved by the Doctor waking up in the 2012 Olympics and carrying the Olympic torch and solved by hope. This is absolutely the worst way of handling trauma, of pretending that it can all go away with a ‘beacon of hope’ and ‘love’. It turns from being the sort of story about a child so scared of the father she can never mention that she draws him even when she’s scared of him, desperate to gain some control over him at last, to the sort of story where children who’ve been turned into drawings, trapped and scared and apparently still conscious, are returned home and go back to playing in the street instead of running home, terrified. Which is just wrong, both for where this story started as a morality tale about the importance of talking through your emotions with those who love you and for the series as a whole which never ever gives happy endings that aren’t earned, either through the Doctor’s actions or what he inspires those around him to do. Nobody really learns anything in this story: the Doctor is kidnapped partway through, Rose stumbles onto the answer without him, the isolus never gets that stern talking-to about bringing scary scribble pictures to life and Chloe gets one hug from her mum and suddenly everything’s alright again. Russell T has never been afraid to pull punches before, for all the occasions where he seemed to suddenly remember he was writing for children and yet this one had the perfect opportunity to tell a darker story and largely ignored it in favour of a happy ending that comes out of nowhere. What could have been a story that bared more teeth than a flying shark ends up with more gums than an Androgum. 

 This is a really bad story for the Doctor and Rose all round and you can tell that both are struggling to say their hackneyed lines without laughing. They’re also way off character: he’s bossy, she’s bossy back, they bicker and flirt instead of caring for the people in this story and in contrast to every other episode of the run the only time Rose shows any emotion is her threatening Chloe when the Doctor’s taken; in stories past she’d be all over Chloe trying to comfort her, as she has with aliens from all eras, and yet she’s oddly cold to someone whose near enough from her own time and her own age. I mean, Rose was presented to us from the first as a lonely girl brought up by a single mum who dreamed of more; she should be so in the corners of both the isolus and Chloe both. Instead she mutters about not getting on with her cousins and how the Doctor doesn’t understand how nasty children can be, while the Doctor gets to preach to her about the need to be gentle and kind and humane (this is such a change to, say, Clara writing idiot-boards for the 12th Doctor so he doesn’t offend anybody and, yes, the 10th Doctor is a lot more touchy-feely but he’s still disassociating from the time war. In just three stories the plot will be all about how he needs ‘someone to stop him’ because he doesn’t feel emotions like humans do, in ‘The Runaway Bride’). The Doctor-Rose show goes from two soulmates who found each other to two smug gits who always think they're right and interfering as if solving a puzzle, not getting involved in the lives of real people. They also don’t really ‘get’ the solution: that only by facing her fears by drawing them can Chloe truly be free. I mean, yes, they provide the isolus with the heart source it needs to run away, but that doesn’t resolve what happened to Chloe and her suppressed trauma, while the ending is only a happy one for the alien – the human she’s left behind is even sadder now her only friend’s gone, thanks doc! 

 The other acting is, well, it’s not great but then if even David and Billie are struggling you can see why everyone else might be having trouble too. Nina Sosanya is great in other things (Including ‘Last Tango In Halifax’ alongside Derek ‘The Master’ Jacobi and Ann ‘Curse Of Fenric’ Reid while she got to kiss Tennant in Russell’s own ‘Casanova’, but then so did most people in that series and it had a really big cast!) but here is so far out of her depth as Chloe’s mum that her eyes scream ‘help! Get me out of this!’ After all her most taxing role is a bit of a singsong about kookaburras. There’s non sense that she’s scared of her daughter though, or that she’s at her wit’s end wondering how to help her, a single scene of her pouring her heart out to Rose would have sold this story no end and it’s strange that Russell, always so good at writing characters inside a few seconds, didn’t add one however pushed for time he was. Abisola Agbaje was discovered by casting director Andy Pryor at an after-school drama club and thought she’d be right as Chloe, but she’s one of those children’s actors who, understandably, seem to freeze up in front of the cameras and recite the lines rather than mean them. She’s not the worst child actor in Who, that’s for sure, but she’s not the best and she plays Chloe much the same way she is in real life, judging by her appearance on ‘Totally Dr Who’ that week. This is a series that relies a lot on its actors and struggles partly because they’ve been so miscast. 

 Setting this story in a near-contemporary setting is a good idea; like ‘Dalek’ and a handful of 20th century Who stories there’s the frisson of excitement that this story really could be happening any day now while unless something goes badly wrong the children watching this the first time round can second-guess what their life might be like in six years time when this story is set. Russell was keen on the idea and wanted this estate to be as ordinary looking as possible, so kids up and down the country would be staring own the end of their drives thinking ‘well, if the Tardis could land there…’ (this ordinary drive is just a stone’s throw from Who’s Cardiff base, in Tremorfa). As such the London 2012 Olympics is on the surface an obvious hook to hang the Doctor’s coat on: it was a date everyone had been talking about, a time that was meant to ‘bring people together’ the way Olympics are always meant to and the news had been full of reports about finding talented children in schools to train up for the big day. I can totally see why they did it. But it’s also totally wrong, especially when the Doctor starts waxing lyrical about what, to him, seems like a minor sort of game played on just one planet and which sees countries wave flags and start becoming unbearably nationalistic (as much as people say sport brings people together, for a lot of people it divides them ever further apart and the 2012 Olympics, with its un-watchably jingoistic Danny Boyle opening ceremony, was one of the worst in that regard, less about unity and more about ‘wasn’t the British empire great?!’) ‘How can any child possibly feel alone when we’re so united?’ the script asks. But the fact is the real Dr Who children, the ones who ‘got’ this series and connected with its spirit of rebellion and individualism and thinking for yourself and standing up to authority rather than watched it because it was in fashion, had never felt more alone. The real year 2012 was the last time anyone felt proud to be British. I’m not quite sure why: I mean all we did was put up some buildings for people to run around in. Even before that, though, starting in 2006 when the announcement was made (beating Paris in the shortlist of possible entries, the first time we’d beaten France at anything in a very long time) people went cockahoop for how great we were. Had this been any other British TV programme the religious fervour with which the nomination was received would be perfect background setting, but Dr Who is a show all about not having boundaries and accepting everyone from everywhere. It felt wrong in 2006. It felt even more wrong in 2012 when we saw the Olympics for what it really was, an expense we couldn’t afford that nearly crippled London two years into The Coalition’s uninformed and unintelligent austerity measures post credit-crunch when they were really funding all their pals and we weren’t in a spirit of togetherness at all (the highlight of the whole event was when chancellor George Osbourne got booed – much as he tried to laugh it off you can momentarily see the horror flit across his face that people are ‘on to him’ and that any success at the Olympics has been in spite of his government not because of it). 

That sense of unity too was just false lip service, given that the divisive Brexit vote is just a few years away and politics was already becoming divided between the far left (who were crucified in the right-wing owning press of the day) and the far right (who stuck a lot of lies up on a bus and called them facts). Certain mistakes, such as the swimming pool turning a funny colour, also meant that internationally London wasn’t seen as one of the best hosts the games has ever had even though the media at home kept telling us what a big success it was. The Doctor doesn’t belong in this world of nationalism and sport and the scene of him picking up the Olympic torch and carrying it off with a big cheesy grin, while since-disgraced newsreader Huw Edwards talks about love and hope and courage is one of the stupidest scenes of this era (another is Billie Piper whispering ‘feel the love’ into a pebble). It’s just a game, guys. There’ll be another one along in four years – and for a show about time travel four years is nothing. It might be going a bit far to say that it felt like a betrayal but, well, people running up and down and a series about space and time are not natural bedfellows. Why is the Doctor even in the Olympic stadium? He's the only person Chloe 'draws' and captures who ends up back on earth in a different place to where he was taken, unless the Doctor's a secret marathon runner who legged it there in time for the TV broadcast to pick up again, which might at least explain why they let him carry the torch).As for people who come to this story for the first time after 2012 of course, when the fuss has long since died away, the obvious question is ‘what was all that about then eh?’ There was, incidentally, a petition to have David Tennant become one of the celebrity torch-bearers and thus make this story sort-of ‘canon’, but instead that job went to some other geezer calked Matt Smith, amongst others. They also missed a trick: if they really had to go with an Olympics setting and wanted to praise Britain, why not set this in the 1948 London Olympics and the first since the Second World War? Now that was a world display of unity people thought they would never see again. 

 All that said, the near future setting is done with more care than some others in Who that have to make such guesses and a lot of what they got ‘right’ is so unremarkable now fans miss how clever it really is. The council did indeed re-lay the tarmac on many of the surrounding streets of the main stadiums, so visitors would get the idea all of Britain was just as fresh and clean and sparkly (note: it wasn’t), which was an odd thing to do when the government were busy shutting libraries and swimming pools and sport stadiums but okay. There were indeed streets named after British athletes in the run-up to the Games (there isn’t a Dame Kelly Holmes Drive yet but it’s the sort of thing we did get). Chloe watches the Olympic TV coverage from a live-stream on her laptop: something that was actually impossible back in 2006, but a smart guess based on the way technology was moving. Huw Edwards, in 2006 not an obvious candidate for Olympic coverage being a newsreader, did indeed commentate on the opening ceremony (a fact that, since his downfall, makes this era seem even stranger when you watch the real Olympics back). Shayne Ward, then a one-hit wonder who’d only just won that year’s ‘X Factor’ series, never did quite get a ‘greatest hits’ disc but did get seven top ten hits, which is more than a lot of bands who did compilation albums (it’s also possibly an in-joke on another layer above that, given that the props buyer on Who was also called Shayne Ward!) The only thing this story calls wrong is that Papa New Guinea didn’t qualify for the shot-put despite the Doctor’s comments about a shock result (was he remembering another games/ or is he just teasing Rose?) 

 There are other things this story gets right too. It’s great to see the Doctor back in detective mode again for the first time in a long time (and unlike Steven Moffat’s Sherlock obsession the Doctor quips about being Inspector Morse and that Rose is hiw ‘Lewis’ – funnily enough Billie Piper will marry Lewis’ ‘Lewis’, Laurence Fox as James Hathaway, in the series ‘Lewis’ whose pilot episode was on more or less concurrently with this episode: his uninformed unintelligible right wing nonsense is alas much closer to the truth of what Britain was really like in 2012 and my timeline is full of tweets sending sympathy to Billie every time he does something else outrageous and stupid, such as painting himself in blackface or saying how white men are prejudiced against. Seriously. Helen A from ‘The Happiness Patrol’ would have kicked him out of Terra Alpha for being too extreme). The way the isolus ends up in the tarmac outside Chloe’s house (when searching for a heart source) and how Rose works this out is cute and vaguely plausible. There are some cute gags (such as the Doctor moving the Tardis because he’s trapped between two crates and can’t get out, a joke by Matthew Graham about his struggles parallel parking when turning up for meetings in Cardiff). The gentle teasing of council worker Cal, who can’t see the bigger picture of what’s going on outside his proudly laid tarmac, makes for some really funny moments and is like a child’s eye view of the authority figures the 3rd Doctor was always rubbing up against when exiled to Earth (plus tarmac, the most mundane thing in the world, turned amazing when Dr Who comes to town, is one of the best examples of how this series makes the ordinary extraordinary around). There’s a funny joke that’s a dig at the 10th Doctor’s ego, when Rose calls a cat a ‘beautiful boy’ and the Doctor automatically assumes he’s talking about her and complimenting his hair (which is very much how children think adults talk i.e. only half-paying attention). When this script has time to breathe it’s really quite clever and the idea of a lost and lonely child finding another one is a really strong idea. Unlike some other Dr Whos I could name this really was an idea worth doing. It’s just suffocated by carrying the idea of trauma and the happy Olympics ending and the need to both throw something in to scare children that doesn’t really scare them and is really a distraction from the scary main theme. What this story really needed is what the isolus needs ironically, extra time and love after all that time spent in a cupboard. 

 The big one though, that sums up this story so well: on paper drawings that come to life is one of the single creepiest things Dr Who ever did. The idea of things you create taking on a life of their own and potentially harming their creator is a super creepy one that absolutely can be done properly. The Sapphire and Steel story which didn’t have an official title but which fans all know as ‘The Man Who Never Was’ does a similar thing in photographs, trapping people inside them that are then burnt so that the real people inside them burn too is the stuff of which nightmares are made – in theory drawings of humans in the same predicament should be the same. There’s a really good forgotten series to ‘Escape Into The Night’ from 1972 (which, sadly, only exists in black and white form nowadays) that has a sick girl draw a picture of a house and then dream that she’s inside it and meets a boy – she assumed she’s dreamt him, but he assumes he’s dreamt her. It’s a real psychological horror about existentialism and identity and control, the hint being that the boy at least is suffering trauma equal to what Chloe goes through (even if the girl’s a tad spoilt). They end up overcoming their natural differences and working ‘together’ when they’re attacked by scary sounds from outside and a monster that, half-glimpsed seems remarkably like the ball of graphite from this story. They made a film based on it too, the inferior ‘Paperhouse’ from 1988, which is a version for adults that, weirdly, is a lot more childish (both versions were taken from a 1964 book ‘Marianne Dreams’). Hasd this been a novel too this could have been a great one. Only this is TV and for a children’s audience that everyone seems to assume need monsters, so instead we actually have to watch the scribbled beings come to life. Doodles imbued with sentient life that can kill you are a great concept then, until you see them come to life. Someone in the production team should really have taken an eraser to the idea of the scribble monster in particular which just looks silly and is obviously fake – even whole the idea of the Doctor saving the world armed with nothing more than an eraser is pure Dr Who (to be fair to Graham this was Steven Moffat’s suggestion when the draft script was thought be both a bit short and dull). Even the drawing of the dad, potentially the scariest moment of them all, just looks daft in practice, too childlike to be truly scary. 

 As a result ‘Fear Her’ has become shorthand for everything that was wrong with this period of the series: it’s smug, it’s fake, it’s incessantly cheerful and the monster is very silly. Other Who stories down the years have been worse than that though on all fronts, if not always so many at once in this the most golden of eras: even so ‘The Impossible Pit’ had a far more annoying Doctor-Rose team, unconvincing CGI monsters and a sillier premise and most people seemed to lap that one up. ‘Fear Her’ is more ‘disappointing given what it could have been’ rather than totally wretched I think. In 50 minutes we go from an episode that really earns the title 'Fear Her' with its things lurking in the shadows and psychological horror and genuine mystery to an episode that looks ridiculous and comes with a patronising ending and which fans love to hate, 'Jeer Her'. Matthew Graham, asked since about ‘Fear Her’s bad reputation amongst fans has always said defensively ‘well, I didn’t write it for them – I wrote it for children’. But children were more disappointed by this story than anyone: Chloe isn’t a natural portrayal of a twelve year old, even one scarred by trauma, there’s no real attempt to get inside a child’s mind and confront their real phobias beyond the general theme of ‘fitting in’ and there’s less emphasis on the promising new friend (the sort of thing children would have been interested in) and more about how adults react to it, plus larks with an Olympic torch that they won’t get to see for six whole years yet (and six years is a literal lifetime if you happen to be around six). Adults, meanwhile just pointed at the drawings, laughed and said Dr Who really isn’t for them because it’s getting childish these days. Even though the main theme isn’t childish at all. At least ‘The Impossible Planet’ appealed to a particular type of action-loving fan who didn’t mind how silly the plot was and had Ood that looked cute for the kiddywinkles. Though a far superior piece of writing with a far more interesting premise it’s hard to know who ‘Fear Her’ is for: those who love the darker edges get put off by all the silliness and those who like their Dr Whos bright and cheerful find the sub-plot about abuse uncomfortable. As the sort of fans whose always felt closet to their inner seven year old who thinks this series is at its best when its dealing with darker things that can’t be said out loud in other series this episode ought to be for me and I do seem to like it more than most of the fanbase. And yet I’m not all that convinced by it either. Some things really do deserve to stay locked in cupboards without seeing the light of day. Although I still suspect it turned out a lot better than Stephen Fry’s script would have done. 

 POSITIVES + The actual drawings before they're animated and come to life are brilliant. Most are drawn by actual children so that they would look more ‘authentic’ and a talented bunch they are too (the bulk is by Indigo Rumbelow, the sister of Who’s production buyer Joelle, who was then aged eleven). Matthew Graham’s idea was to have the drawings come to life with the same ‘distortions’ as a child’s drawing, so that the arms would be too long and so on and thus seem more threatening – which is perhaps the single best idea he had. It’s not his fault the budget couldn’t really stretch to this so the most the drawings do is point or snarl. Interestingly the worst and most childish one, of Chloe's dad, is the only one drawn by an adult – Dr Who's usual 'storyboard artist' Shaun Williams - and you can so tell it's by an adult trying to draw like a child, without the 'feel' of the others. 

 NEGATIVES - How does Chloe's mum, assisted by Rose, calm her child down enough to bring back the people she scrobbled...sorry, scribbled? Apologising for what her dad did to her? Apologising for looking the other way? Telling her she's loved? That what she's feeling is normal given what she's been through, making her feel less of an 'alien'? None of the above. Instead, in one of the weirdest denouements on this list, she sings a song about Kookaburras. It's scripted to be a poignant moment, a reminder of an old promise the mum made to keep her safe, but it comes so far out of left field the viewers at home just go 'Eh? I thought it was an alien, when did it turn into a Kookaburra?!' This is a genuine Australian nursery rhyme Matthew Graham sang to his own children, which is cute for them – but for the rest of us just comes out of nowhere. 

 BEST QUOTE: Kal: ‘You just took a council axe from a council van, and now you're digging up a council road. I'm reporting you to the council!’ 

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: In common with the rest of series 2 there was a Tardisode, a sort of mini prequel that were available in the week lead up to the main episode and available first as mobile video texts, before an outcry over the price meant they were mostly seen as webcasts on the official Dr Who website instead. Officially titled ‘Tardisode #11’ this one features a fake programme named ‘Crime Crackers’ (an oddly American-style programme that clearly isn’t on the BBC and srikes the modern viewer more like the modern guff they have on GB News) trying to track down the two children who have already gone missing when ‘Fear Her’ starts, ending with a close up of Chloe’s cupboard and the sound of the scribble-Father inside it. At only 54 seconds it doesn’t exactly have time to do much, which does rather make you wonder why they bothered. 

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