Knock Knock: Ranking - 192

                                                   Knock Knock

(Series 10, Dr 12 with Bill, 6/5/2017, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Mike Bartlett, director: Bill Anderson)  

'New flat to rent. Wanted: nice, tasty Humans to live in old family house. It's a bit rustic with creaky floorboards and dry rot, but the rooms are really big and rent is cheap. Oh and do ignore the noises in the tower, I have a noisy family. Remember, in this house you're never alone, there's always someone with you on the other side of a wall, maybe closer!'  

Ranking: 192

 

Now to a story that’s stands out like a wooden thumb, one that’s impressively different not just to the rest of season 10 but Dr Who as a whole, one that would be an impressive standalone drama but which feels slightly out of place with every episode of the era. We’ve had character stories and surrogate families before on Who many times, but this feels new: Bill isn’t getting married or working as a nanny or even discovering the parent who died in childhood in a parallel universe but doing something as normal and everyday as moving in with her uni flatmates, finding her independence after several episodes where the Doctor has given her the confidence to stand on her own two feet (because, unlike Clara, she isn’t the teacher but very much the pupil). Given that students have always been a large part of the average Dr Who audience in any era it seems amazing that no one had done a story like this before: so much of this series is about fear of the unknown and taking your first big steps towards independence by moving in with a bunch of strangers in a town you’ve probably never been to is high on the list of ‘big scary life events’ that a lot of the audience at home would have gone through so it’s about as close as any of us are going to get to a Dr Who story full of fright and courage in everyday life. It’s a particularly big deal for orphan Bill who finally gets to move out of her hated adopted family home and into a flat with actual people her own age. Bill’s been portrayed to us as someone whose been a bit trapped at home, awkward enough not to have many friends and to never quite fit in, so for her personally this is a bigger scarier moment than seeing her fight off armies of Cybermen as she tries hard to get along with near-strangers and make roots of her own. There’s a cute scene where she’s hanging up the portrait of her biological mum on the wall and sighing: finally she’s made it, she’s got out from her toxic household and everything’s going to be alright now. Only it isn’t.  

For the Doctor of course meeting new people is easy and ‘Knock Knock’ works best as a comedy, juxtaposing slightly awkward Bill who never feels quite at home with people her own age with the elderly grandfather who looks three times everyone else’s age and who is in reality several hundred times their age and who effortlessly fits in, making friends far quicker than Bill ever could. The series is switched round: suddenly Bill feels like the alien while the Doctor is in his element swapping stories, dancing to the latest hit songs and happily wearing all the food while Bill stares on thinking ‘how does he do that?’ For the Doctor, though, every time is now and he doesn’t belong to any particular Earth generation so getting down wi da kids is as easy and natural for him as rubbing shoulders with Marco Polo or cavemen.    He ends up being the ultimate embarrassing parent from hell: insatiably curious, unstoppably chatty and downright weird with no understanding of human etiquette or what people do at this age in this generation at all and yet Bill’s friends all love him while they don’t quite know what to make of her, with several barbed comments about her being standoffish when really she’s just shy and has been putting off the time of meeting the friends of her friends because she’s scared (although travelling in the Tardis probably had a little bit to do with that). Poor Bill: it’s like ‘The Lodger’ all over again, only this isn’t a stranger he’s moved in with, it’s his companion and her mates he just won’t leave alone. And it’s hilarious in a way the series has never quite allowed itself to be before, Peter Capaldi and Pearl Mackie being the perfect odd couple. I’d have gladly had a whole episode or even a whole series of this rather than the first ten minutes or so setting up the rest of the story. Considering that writer Mike Bartlett only had a brief screen-test of Pearl’s to go on he doesn’t half nail her character, all eye rolls and silent fuming, while Capaldi is at his best in a script that calls for him to do a lot of comedy, by far his strongest suit as the Doctor.

Mostly, though, this is a horror story, one that tries hard to tap into the Phillip Hinchcliffe era of creepy insects and nasty things from the past being dug up in the present and in that sense is slightly less effective because the effects are mixed and it’s never quite the outright scary story it’s trying so hard to be, especially (not for the first or last time) given the poor quality of the main ‘monster’ that just makes it all seem a bit silly. Even there though ‘Knock Knock’ earns bonus points for doing all sorts of things that make this story feel utterly unlike the others. For the only time outside ‘Blink’ we have an alien entity invading not a street or an army base but an ordinary house (indeed, it’s the exact same house they used in the filming for that episode, located in Wester Drumlins, Newport: David Suchet commented on the first day of filming that it seemed familiar and after posing in the doorway for publicity photos was shocked to find the real landlord coming out to greet him and asking if he’s enjoyed his stay there for a family reunion the last Christmas). Usually Dr Who gets its jumpscares from the fact we’re somewhere new and unknown and it’s the Doctor and companions who are the alien visitors wondering what the things scuttling off in the shadows are, but here its Bill whose ‘supposed’ to be there and the story takes place, for the most part, under bright dazzling artificial light. We get all the hammer horror clichés its true, from creaking floorboards to a chattering just out of earshot, but this doesn’t feel like a haunted house exactly: it’s a reasonable contemporary student flat developed from a property a few decades old. It’s exactly the sort of ordinary place where the extraordinary things of Dr Who shouldn’t be. However, because we’re watching Dr Who and we know that something Dr Whoy is likely to happen, we spend the first half of the story looking for something scary, jumping at the sound of our own shadows, only to find out for the first few minutes that it really is just a creaky floorboard and that it is just thunder and lightning outside and, most memorably, that the scary man outside the door is just the Doctor lurking, alert to something no one else can see and refusing to go home.

Dr Who has had no end of alien insects too, from Zarbi ants to Menoptera butterflies to Mentor slugs to Vespiform wasps to Giant Maggots, but never anything quite like the woodlice (sorry, Dryards) that aren’t just living in this house but to all intents and purposes living off this house. They really are insect-sized though and not that alarming for a good two-thirds of the story. After all, seeing insects isn’t all that rare in student houses, particularly in ones that have just been refurbished and where builders have disturbed walls and floors that haven’t been touched for a while (not to mention the food left out all night because your flatmates are lazy slobs with no sense of responsibility) so they don’t seem out of place at first. But the way the woodlice behave as a swarm, picking off the students one by one and pulling them through the walls, is new (and genuinely creepy, like the maggots in ‘The Green Death’ rather than the wishy-washy spiders or the lifesize wasps attacking murder mystery writers and giant busses that have been too silly to take seriously): we’ve never had a monster that both looked so Earth-like and acted so alien, with the unsettling explanation that they can potentially live in any house on our planet but normally keep to themselves unless asked to intervene. And we’ve certainly never had them turn into a wooden-looking humanoid before, kept alive (spoilers) out of kindness because they took pity on a boy who didn’t want to let his mother die. The explanation isn’t obvious either and needs the likes of Poirot on hand to solve it, only as it happens David Suchet is playing the baddy, a landlord with a family secret, under-playing a role that could easily have tipped over into parody. He starts off being quite scary and ends up being quite sweet, making the move in such tiny steps that you never quite see it coming. The script cleverly plays up the ‘otherness’ of the Landlord, whose realistic in both the alien strangeness and the disconcerting way he always seems to be there when you don’t expect him to be, perhaps letting himself in quietly with his own key (although as it turns out he lives inside the house). It’s typical landlord tactics, ruining your ideas of independence and doing your own thing without supervision, that feeling that you’re still not quite trusted to live your own adult life by other older adults yet and yet he’s also plausible as part alien himself (although that might just have been because my student landlord had a wooden leg and so seemed even more part woodlouse). Really, though, he’s not an alien at all just a lonely little boy who never quite made his way out of childhood and the family home the way the students did. He’s just become so warped in his grief that he’s happy to see people die to keep his mum alive – and misguided love is a far more believable motive for a baddy than world domination.

For third to being a comedy or horror this is a ‘message’ story, about the need for independence and making your own way in the world. For the knocking is both the very real threat of woodlice in the skirting boards but also the existential threat of something deadly lurking for you in the adult ‘real’ world away from the safe cocoon of the family home. And that it’s a step that’s universal, one every generation goes through. I love the mirroring between the students who are desperately trying to navigate adulthood for the first time (turning to this house out of desperation having not been able to afford any of the others on their list or finding their landlords are trying to rip them off with poky rooms at full price) and the landlord who (given the 1937 dating) is a good sixty years older than they are but who seems just as lost in it. They have a lot in common this lot: the students trying hard to find their way without simply running off back to home because it’s too hard and the landlord who was so afraid to let his mum go that he allowed her to become part woodlouse. For becoming adult isn’t just about getting on with your flatmates and finding a house at a cheap price and seeing through the strings of landlords trying to make money out of you, it’s being old enough to realise that the landlords need to live too and that however alien and strange they’re human beings just like you. At the start the landlord is a scary elderly adult but little by bit you learn that he’s not even the wooden girl’s father or her husband but her son and that he couldn’t leave’ her just as the students struggle to leave home for the first time and be away from the family unit. Becoming adult also means that you’re old enough to realise that you’re not the last generation who are ever going to be young and that one day you’re going to be old: one of the cleverest twists in this story is the fact that the Dryads need fresh humans to chew on roughly twenty years apart, with a basement filled with belongings dating from 1937, 57, 77 and 97 all bundled up (and the hint that we’re in the then-near future of 2017), with this tale of leaving home a universal generational occurrence (it’s hard to see on screen but according to the story notes there’s a box from 1957 with a Bill Haley record, a 1977 box full of polaroids and a box from 1997 with an early Nokia phone – they must have been rich students as they cost a fortune back then –  a ‘Friends’ video and a ‘Superted’ doll, one that really was ‘Superted this time unlike the war pattern seen in ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’). Even having this in the basement is a neat twist: generally in horror movies it’s the last place you should go, but in Dr Who it’s the wood that’s dangerous and the stone floor is about the safest place you can be. I also love the way the landlord doesn’t quite understand modern life so the living room features a piano and a wind-up gramophone alongside more modern and likely belongings, yet student houses can so often be a jumble of things bought secondhand that no one in the house thinks it strange). Notably Bill’s path is the Landlord’s in reverse: she’s spent her life looking for love after not having any but doesn’t quite know how to go about it whereas the landlord knows how precious that love is and doesn’t want to let it get away. Bill too is close to her mum and would do anything to get her back (she nearly does in ‘The Lie Of The Land’): she knows how rare precious and beautiful motherly love is; so do the other students all glancing at their phones every few seconds for a text from home if they’re honest about it.  But leaving the family home and making your own way in the world is ‘normal’, however hard. The solution, for everyone in this story, is the same: to open the curtains to step out into life and live it, even though you’re scared. I like to think that, despite what the Landlord’s put them through, they all come to some sort of solution where they help each other on the outside world with Bill, naturally kind and empathetic the first to offer help.

‘Knock Knock’ is also unique in that it has a very 1990s feel to it. There only ever was one Dr Who story on telly in the 1990s of curse and ‘The TV Movie’ failed partly because it looked like nothing else being made in 1996. This story, though, feels like Dr Who might have been had it never been cancelled in 1989 and had it tried to keep up with the era’s big breakout hit ‘The X Files’ (the way the late Troughton stories have half an eye on ‘Star Trek’ and the later Tom Baker stories are made by people who’ve clearly been to see ‘Star Wars’ at the cinema lots). The idea of an alien that’s been lurking, hidden, on Earth before annoying a student-age population (who aren’t easily believed by the authorities) is straight out the X-Files guidebook, as if the fact that they turn out to be insects driven by…something bigger and sinister than they are. Even the Landlord is dressed like one of the Men In Black and the way he arrives in the middle of the house unseen is totally at one with the idea of an X-File ‘conspiracy’ of something bigger than Mulder or Scully realise. Even the way the Doctor is at home in this world of aliens and Bill is a fish out of water in  every day life is just like the famous pair. It’s a genre that fits Dr Who too: it feels like we could happily have had a run of stories like this and an era known as the ‘conspiracy age’ the way we have ‘bases under siege’ and ‘horror’ years. Admittedly it would have got stale quick and would have needed a good pay-off to work, but then so did the X Files and that didn’t stop people watching it (they never got the payoff the series demanded either). This could have been a pilot for a whole new Who!

Except…that’s where ‘Knock Knock’ falls down badly. It’s an excellent comedy, a pretty good horror tale and has a nice moral message and had this been a standalone story from a different universe or even a pilot for a new scifi drama I’d have loved it. The problem is trying to fit it into Dr Who canon and seeing it in the context of a series that would be hugely shaped by this story, but isn’t. In a rushed ending (cut to shreds so Steven Moffat could fit in another ‘tease’ with Missy in the vault) all the survivors escape the house and…that’s it. Nobody ever mentions this story again, not Bill, not the Doctor, and we never see Bill’s best friend or the rest of her flatmates ever again. Wooden Mum promises to let not just Bill’s friends go but all the past residents which seems unlikely given that they’d all have been digested long ago and there’s nothing on screen to promise us whether this happens one way or the other. Either way this would surely be huge news in the ‘real’ world: either Bill lost lots of her friends that night or they’ve come back to life traumatised with memories of being eaten by woodlice. They’d almost certainly drop out of university, afraid of ever leaving the family home again (and thus sadly ending up like the Landlord). There would probably be a police enquiry (indeed it’s weird there hasn’t been one before now, every twenty years and when it happened the second time in 1957 in the exact same house as 1937, you’d think the house would have been fully investigated and bulldozed). Not to mention the repercussions of people considered long dead coming back to life and adjusting to life in a new century, their family long dead and their friends all twenty forty or sixty years older than they are. It would change this town forever: there would be alien hunters everywhere, cold case enthusiasts and I’m willing to bet only a fraction of the next year’s intake would arrive as students the following year, with the university shut in three. None of this happens.

You’d think at the very least for the rest of the series people would look at Bill funny and mutter darkly about rumours of an alien manifestation of insects and how all her friends seem to have disappeared. I mean, gossip and scandal travel quicker there than anywhere. I mean, my friend got hypnotised into believing he was a duck in a student bar in fresher’s week and strangers were still talking about it at graduation three years later. Bill should at the very least be sadder than she is that her new friends have died, but Bill seems to be less concerned by them than she is at the deaths of random aliens from the future or giant alien fish from the past (to be fair, I felt the same way about my uni flatmates too, who were all quite definitely alien, but it’s still out of character). And Bill ends the story homeless, again: that final scene should have had the Doctor becoming everyone’s landlord and letting Bill stay there for free, but all we get on screen is a cheery suggestion that he’s going with them to the estate agents: to all intents and purposes he’s just helping them get their money back. We don’t get to know the other students well enough but just for Bill alone this is such a crushing blow: she’s fought hard to find her independence and now it’s been taken away from her and she has to go back to her dreaded adoptive mum. This isn’t just a year’s digs for Bill: it’s the first place for her that’s a real ‘home’ (give or take the Tardis); losing that would have been devastating for her in a whole other level above Rose (who had her mum and Mickey), Martha (who was still just about tolerating her family), Donna (ditto) or Amy (who had Rory), but of past companions only Vicki and Ace were quite this family and friendless. Another thing too: when Bill dies/converted into a Cybermen/gets turned into a giant floating puddle in space, presumably she never goes back to the whichever home she does end up living in and presumably too her other surviving flatmates who never find out what happened to her (unless the Doctor nips back and tells them off screen). The poor things must have had a few sleepless nights and been digging up the floorboards thinking ‘oh no, the landlords back and the Dryards have eaten Bill!’  And don’t even get me started on the coincidence that the Doctor’s latest companion just happens to choose the one house in the town that’s infested with an alien landlord, in the one town that the Doctor happens to have chosen in his exile. Other Dr Who stories have whacking coincidences too but they tend to be explained away in the plot somewhere, as part of a bigger story arc, be it ‘Bad Wolf’ or Flux or something similar: not this one. Poor Bill really is unlucky isn’t she? Another plot hole is how the landlord ever worked out that the dryads needed human flesh to stay alive (something solved in the script with a cut scene involving a wandering tramp in 1937 who took shelter in a deserted looking house).  

Where this story falls apart, too, is that you still don’t feel as if you know any of the students by the end of it. Like so many other stories from 2010 onwards I have my doubts whether the production team have even met anyone under thirty because nobody behaves the way a real live teenager would. Although it’s not quite as offensive as Clara’s Coal Hill school pupils or Steven Moffat’s awful series ‘Excluding Douglas’, which makes teenagers into wet wimps who can’t take criticism and see everything as exist or racist, nevertheless they don’t feel like real people just walking talking stereotypes, obsessed with their phones. There’s no sense of what it’s really like to be a student: that agonising fight between the work piling up on your desk and the party going on down the street with neighbours who are both way cooler than you but also likely to fail and mess their lives up forever. They start off well, talking about how their meagre student loans mean they can’t afford anything good, but then they fork out what would have been a significant chunk of their budget on takeaway food: I’m not saying they couldn’t, or that I ever did, but it would be a big decision, not done on a whim with enough spare for the Doctor to dig into (this also raises another issue: Bill lives locally. Where is she getting the student grant to pay for her house from? She wouldn’t qualify. Unless rules are different in the Dr Who universe. Is she paying for it with the cleaning job she never seems to do? Surely that wouldn’t pay enough, student houses are expensive, even alien woodlice infested ones).

The best horror films, much like Dr Who ‘base under siege’ stories, work by having you get to know the characters and watching them being picked off one by one, worrying about who will get to the end. There’s none of that with this story: the deaths are just too silly and you don’t know the characters well enough to care. I’ve read the names of the characters several times trying to read this review and re-watched the episode lots of times, both for fun and for research, but I still don’t know which is which. The only one with any personality is (I think) Harry, the creepy one who offers to keep Bill ‘warm’ in the night if she’s scared, whose angry when she turns him down, then relieved when she comes out and reveals she’s a lesbian (the original script had him revealed to be Harry Sullivan’s grandson, as that was the writers favourite character, but the gentlemanly genes seem to have been lost; the idea got dropped partly because modern fans wouldn’t get the reference and partly because the odds of having two companions/relatives in trouble stretched coincidence way too far. Although it would have been sweet for old time’s sake if they’d included a scene of him accidentally blowing the house up and saying ‘sorry old thing’ to the others, before putting his hand in a tin of clam chowder). I think that’s Pavel who dies first with a terrible scream coming out of his room, which everyone else seems to think is a big joke instead of, y’know, investigating to make sure. Felicity snuffs it yet and people should be really creeped out by that point but no one ever comments on it. These are meant to be actual friends (with Shireen if not Bill) who’ve been together for a year’s worth of lectures and they all seem to be quite cosy in the living room yet no one seems to care the slightest for any of them. The only emotion is from Bill, watching Shireen disappear into a cloud of woodlice, and she doesn’t seem anywhere near as spooked or angry or desperate as you’d expect her to be (this is Bill, after all, not Amy or Clara: she doesn’t mind acting weak or emotional, especially when no one else is there). The original script, by the way, portrays Shireen as her best friend not only through university but through all of secondary school, with a pact that they never ever split up (something that makes more sense out of how annoyed Bill is when her friend gets a room far away from hers despite an earlier promise) – losing her, of having to betray that promise never to split not because they’ve grown apart naturally but because a ruddy great pile of woodlice have eaten her, should have Bill on the floor sobbing. After all, it’s the only friend we ever see her properly have in the series; love interests yes but her only actual friend. Bill had no one else in her life outside the Doctor. Taking that one step forward to make friends, only to lose the only one she had  before we ‘met’ her, is the thing nightmares are made of and would surely make her never trust anyone ever again; instead she just sort of shrugs it off.

The end result is a story that gets a lot of things ‘right’ in the first half (there are some cracking bits of comedy between the Doctor and Bill, which show how much Bartlett – the creator of Dr Foster who was one of the biggest names to write for the series and who was so much of a fan he pleaded for a commission rather than the other way round - ‘got’ this series. The idea of the ordinary hitting the extraordinary but in a whole new setting we’ve never had before is delicious, the twist at the end about what the dryads were and how it was all done out of love is very in keeping with the series and there are some great and very Dr Whoy moments (such as the Doctor boasting that he was the bass player for Quincy Jones, oblivious to the fact that a 1980s music producer isn’t impressive to anyone in 2017, the Doctors discussion about timelords to which Bill accurately says ‘they sound posh’ and asking if they have ‘big hats’ and the Tardis, the greatest vehicle in the universe, reduced to being a removal van). Things go downhill badly in the second half though when the threats stop being hinted at and become real: the revelation comes out of nowhere and the Doctor actually has very little to do with it (Eliza, wooden mum, makes the decision to pass on from her own realisations and might well have done it without him there). The story uses up its box of tricks far too early: it’s great in the first ten minutes hwne we don’t quite know what’s happening, then increasingly less so as we get more and more proof of what’s going on, all of it unlikely and a lot of it stupid. For this is a story that starts off an unusually ‘real’ Dr Who story turning into a house filled with sentient insects and a wooden human that doesn’t look convincing in the slightest, ‘Dr Whoing’ what seemed an impressively different kind of story. Too many of this story’s best scenes ending up on the cutting room floor whether for reasons of time and budget (there’s a very scary scene in the script of the dead students being kept half-alive, their arms reaching out from the walls pleading for help) or because of Moffat’s need to fit in a coda that doesn’t belong (fun as it is to hear Missy cheered up by a tale of humans being eaten it’s no substitute for actually finding out what happened in a story you’ve been wrapped up in for the past forty minutes or the very Dr Who scene as written, with the Doctor commenting that any house you’ve ever been in that felt a bit ‘odd’ probably had dryads in the flooring waiting to kill you too!) Had they stuck with the themes and ideas (which are sound), thrown in a few more bites about the cruelty of the Coalition government of the day’s austerity measures (which saw a lot of students, always traditionally strapped for cash, cutting even more corners) and given us a proper ending then ‘Knock Knock’ could have been one of the greats of series ten.

The result is a story that’s different, nicely quirky, properly scary, often funny and a little bit mad, all the things a good Dr Who story should be, though also far-fetched and more than a little implausible with some ropey effects, like so many of the bad ones. The dialogue has some nice bits of character (I love the way the Doctor is referred to as Bill’s ‘grandfather’, just like the 1st Doctor – much to his horror!) but not much of it actually soars and some of it is quite ropey (especially what the students say) without many truly memorable lines (the best one was, yep you guessed it, cut: the Lasndlord complaining ‘I lost my family, all of them, keeping them alive this way because the alternative of losing them for good was worse’. There’s so much more they could have done too: I mean, Bill has practically no possessions (the script specified a teddy bear, which is a start: this would have made her the first companion to have one since Steven’s’ panda Hi-Fi). Thankfully the acting is very much a plus with everyone making the most of the promise in the script. David Suchet was so eager to be in Dr Who that he’d ordered his agent to agree to any part that he was asked to play and he carries off the part of the Landlord well even though it’s a long way out of his traditional ‘brainy’ parts. He’s quiet and unnerving, but also believable as a force of nature who can stand up to the Doctor. He also knew Peter Capaldi well after working with him three times before (including a 1991 Poirot episode where he’s the ex of one of the Belgian detective’s best friends, a painter whose every bit as creepy and sinister as the Landlord is here) and you can tell that Capaldi is far more at ease than he usually is and turns in one of his best performances (having so much comedy to do, his best genre by far, helps). His Doctor is brilliantly alien, his natural brusqueness given free reign without Clara there to stop him and you really feel for poor Bill as the two worlds she’s desperate to keep separate keep colliding. Pearl Mackie is really developing her look of exasperated pain this series and she’s never better than as the gawky awkward teenager who finds being around teenagers her own age every bit as surreal as being on alien planets. For if the Doctor feels at home everywhere then her character is that she feels at home nowhere and here, where a girl her age is ‘supposed’ to be according to society’s demands that everyone have a degree for every job going, is where she feels least at home of all. The only trouble is this story works because of what we know about these two characters already and we can fill in the gaps for how they must be feeling: we don’t get to know anyone else. On the other hand the student actors are more wooden than the woodlice for the most part. To be fair none of them get much screen time so it’s not as if we get to know them well, but watching an episode like this one back to back with one from the RTD years really shows up how Russell The Davies could make a character come alive in a sentence, whereas none of these students seem quite ‘real’ after whole monologues.


The solution, in retrospect, seems obvious: have less students and give them more screentime, to give this story some more ‘human’ moments in between the jumpscares, maybe add a few pre-credits sequences of them trying to say hello to Bill round class and her being tongue-tied or give them a scene early on that, from what I’ve spoken to with my friends is pretty universal in your first night away from home: you sit around trying to be casual and adult and act as if everything ‘is’ normal until somebody is brave enough to speak up and say ‘this is weird innit? How are we supposed to get used to this?’ and everyone else nods (eventually, sometimes after copious amounts of drinking). For there’s a great story at the heart of ‘Knock Knock’ about the dangers of simply stepping outside into the real world and how there are monsters trying to eat you up, with the fear that despite a childhood of training you’re not quite ready to face that world yet and would rather stay at home forever. But you can’t: being grown up is also knowing that the bonds of love and safety that keep you at home can, in the end, be an even bigger trap that prevents you from  living your life than the scare of the unknown. Had we had that story, rather than the one about sentient insects and a wooden ageless girl, ‘Knock Knock’ could have been one of my favourites. Alas in the end it’s a nearly story, one knocking on the door of greatness that never quite walks in, with as much that goes wrong as goes right. Even so, I can’t knock ‘Knock Knock’ too much; it’s part of a definite swing upwards in the 12th Doctor era with a lot about it to love. In fact I hope they do another story like it some day, one set in the present day and about real situations like this again – only this time I hope it will be properly integrated into the series as a long running arc (knock on wood).

POSITIVES + The dryad/woodlice effects are somehow obviously CGI and yet also more realistic than the ones you see in real life and/or I’m A Celebrity. The way they crawl is very realistic and the method by which they rise up and ‘eat’ people by converging on top of them sent more than a few fans behind the sofa (where, if they were unlucky, they found some woodlice of their own). Usually in the Moffat era monsters are scariest when they’re about to strike – and generally don’t for the most part (think The Weeping Angels in mid-pose) but in this one you actually get to see it before you’ve braced yourself to be properly scared and it’s just realistic enough to creep you out. One of the scariest moments in all of new Who is the moment Pavel gets absorbed into the wall, though they’re ever so slightly less realistic by the end when they’re just gathering on top of people. ‘Dryad’ by the way, is a tree nymph in Greek mythology – not quite what we get here but maybe they were around in Ancient Greece too? The sound is pretty good as well: this was the first Dr Who story made available in binaural sound, the show being picked for an ‘experimental’ broadcast just like the olden days. Only because most people didn’t have televisions that could use them you had to watch a special version from i-player rather than the show as broadcast, something that wasn’t fully advertised at the time (and led to a lot of complaints that it sounded much the same as usual).

NEGATIVES -  Alas the other big effect doesn’t work as well as it’s not only sonic screwdrivers but Dr Who monster effects that ‘can’t do wood’. It’s just not believable: for all the developments of forty years of technology sticking an actress in a wooden suit, even a good one (Mariah Gale, who was an excellent Anne Frank in the 21^st century adaptation of ‘A Diary Of A Young Girl’) who can’t move or express herself in any way except her voice is always a difficult move. Keeping her out the way until the big reveal at the end, without a chance to learn more about her character when the plot needs us to feel sympathy towards her for it to work, is another big mistake. Mostly though it’s the looks, Eliza shyly peeping round a door seeming more like children’s telly than anything else the show had done in years. Talking of which that’s what inspired it: Bartlett is roughly the same age as me and, too, learned to read partly from Dr Who target novelisations and partly from ‘Puddle Lane’, the Neil Innes show about a magician and his dragon that did for kids TV what The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band did for music (Innes was in both). One of the spin-off books by Sheila McCullough, read in the series ‘Jacaknory’ style that stayed with me for years too, involved ‘The Sandalwood Girl’ who looked very much like Eliza, only more malleable, being an illustration. It’s a coming of age tale (unusual for the under five market but it works if school is the first step to adulthood) and she’s a Pinocchio style puppet whose desperate to leave home like the other girls, but her magician owner is worried about her safety. She sets off on tests to prove she can be independent and cope with life outside, which she does by befriending the people she meets and helping them on their life journeys too, not a million miles from the plot of this story. She’s just a bit really though; by contrast this clunky thing can’t move and – as Moffat realised, hence all his monsters caught mid-attack – it’s hard to be afraid of something you can outrun. It’s like that old joke: ‘Did you hear about the one about the wooden Dr Who monster with the wooden legs a wooden body and a wooden head? It wooden go’.

BEST QUOTE: Bill: ‘This is the bit of my life you’re not in’

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