Unconditional Love
Doctor Who: Night Terrors
Mark Gatiss is responsible for some of my favourite Doctor Who episode synopses ever. Gas monsters on the rampage in a Victorian funeral parlour? Brilliant. Aliens pouring out of 1950s bakelite tellies? I’m having that. Daleks in Churchill’s bunker? Where do I sign? He’s the king of the one-line pitch – which may explain why he keeps getting commissioned, despite the resulting episodes proving so disappointing.
And I do mean disappointing – not terrible (okay, Victory of the Daleks was a **bit** terrible), but nowhere near as good as the picture I’d painted in my head based on what it said in the Radio Times. To stretch for a footballing analogy that I’m pretty sure neither he or I are entirely comfortable with, Gatiss is great at creating chances, but his finishing is weak.
Despite this, I still went in to Night Terrors with high hopes. Partly because, his Who track record notwithstanding, I’ve had an affection for Gatiss ever since I saw him performing an early version of his laser-targeted sci-fi spoof The Teen People in a college bar in Leeds, a good 10 years before The League of Gentlemen. But also because, from everything I had gleaned about this episode, it appeared to have been written especially for my benefit: not being much of a sci-fi fan, I like my Doctor Who spooky, earthbound and with no silly spaceships or Bug Eyed Monsters to make me embarrassed about watching it in front of normal people. I want it, basically, to be Sapphire and Steel – still the high watermark of British fantasy television, in my opinion. And Night Terrors was as Sapphirey and Steeley as Who gets. What’s more, I have a little boy called George, who I live in a state of perpetual, paralysing terror about, so this was pretty much beamed straight at my primal fear centres from the get-go.
And was my touching, Pollyannaish faith in Gatiss’ capacity for redemption rewarded? Reader, it was. Because I bloody loved this episode. And here’s for why.
Well, for one thing, it’s possibly the archetypal Doctor Who episode – Who’ s ur-text, if you will, showcasing an “average day at the office” for the man who fights the monsters under your bed and behind your sofa. Fans often canvass each others’ opinions about the best story to introduce Doctor Who to a newcomer; the short answer, if you’re sensible, is: seriously, don’t bother. But if you are going to try, this strikes me as as good an entrée as any. It’s like a much better version of Rose – or certainly a more fundamentally Doctor Who version of Rose, freed from that early timidity over throwing in too many sci-fi and fantasy trappings.
Because, let’s face it, Night Terrors chucks well-worn fantasy, horror and literary tropes about like an industrial trope dispenser: ghostly children’s laughter, nursery rhymes, dolls houses, pyjamas, Edwardiana: all used slyly and knowingly to create the right atmosphere and punch the right buttons. And punch buttons is exactly what it does. In pure story terms, this could be seen as very much a companion piece to 2006′s unloved Fear Her, but the presentation couldn’t be more different, and gives us a glimpse of how much better that story might have been if they’d taken a more obvious route and set it at night, with scary monsters and taffeta petticoats and no Huw Edwards.
Fear Her was a cautionary example of writer and director pulling in different directions, but here Richard Clark serves Gatiss’ vision with great sensitivity, particularly in the lighting and grading – the dolls house scenes immersed in terrifying shadows, the council flats the colour of thin gruel and broken dreams. Murray Gold is also singing for the same hymn sheet (not literally for once, thankfully) – listen to the quite lovely way he underscores the Doctor’s showdown with Alex in the kitchen.
And what a showdown. If Night Terrors is made of pure Doctor Who DNA, here’s where we get to unravel its sequencing: “Whatever’s inside that cupboard is so terrible, so powerful, that it amplified the fears of an ordinary boy through all the barriers of time and space; through crimson stars and silent stars and tumbling nebulas like oceans set on fire. Through empires of glass and civilisations of pure thought and a whole terrible, wonderful universe of impossibilities. You see these eyes? They’re old eyes. And one thing I can tell you, Alex: monsters are real.”
Besotted fanboy that he is, Gatiss is clearly staking his own claim for a pull-out entry in The Quotable Who, alongside Survival’s ‘cities made of song’ sign-off and The Family of Blood’s ‘ice and fire’ soliloquy. And it’s all the more effective for the way he neatly undercuts any pomposity with Alex’s wonderfully bathetic: “You’re not from social services, are you?” (In fact, Who’s patented fantastic/domestic mix is another element that finds the perfect showcase here, the family’s worries about health, money and dodgy landlords proving genuinely affecting, in contrast to the broad brush familial histrionics of The Idiot’s Lantern. Though a fair bit of the credit for that is due to Daniel Mays for a sympathetic performance that takes the term ‘hangdog’ to a whole new level.)
The pacing was also spot on – especially after last week’s giddy kinetic overload – and pacing is one thing that Doctor Who, in all its multifarious incarnations, has always struggled with. And it was funny. Really funny, Matt Smith yanking back the show that Arthur Darvill stole from under him last week with one of his finest, shamelessly showboating comic turns to date. I mean, where else but on this gloriously daft show could you even contemplate hearing the phrase “giant termites trying to get on to the property ladder”?
If anything is going to lose Night Terrors points, it’s the ending. Because yes, it was pat and yes, there was more than a whiff of fromage about it. But you know what? I even loved that as well. Because I’ll take the simplicity of a kid opening a wardrobe door and having faith in his parents as the deus ex machina du jour (hey, it’s Latin French, what’s your beef?) over White Point Diamonds and Zed Neutrino Biological Inversion Stabilisers every time. And, true, re-channelling ‘psychic energy’ is fast becoming the new ventilation shaft in terms of easy get out of jail cards, but the ‘cuckoo in the nest’ concept was an elegant sleight of hand to explain boy George’s ever changing moods (or why he was such a karma chameleon, if you like. No? Please yourselves). Also, when Alex says: “Whatever you are, whatever you do, you’re my son,” he’s doing more than loving the alien: he’s vocalising the unconditional love of every parent who ever lived.
And therein may lie the key to my dopey great love of this story: I’m a sucker for a bit of father-son bonding, but it has to be done proper, and this one, unlike the horrific coda to The Almost People, was done proper (if you’re keeping score: that’s Real Dad Fake Kid 1, Fake Dad Real Kid 0).
I’m quite open to the possibility that large parts of my brain have turned to mush since I became a father. And maybe the fact I’d spent most of the night before I watched this sitting up with a poorly George of my own had some bearing. But, whatever the reason, I’m pleased as punch that that nice Mark Gatiss has finally achieved his boyhood dream of writing a classic Doctor Who story, which I love, unconditionally.
[dcs_darkspliter]
Paul Kirkley was born in Leeds approximately two-and-a-half hours before episode three of The Daemons, but they kept you in hospital for ages in those days, so he missed it. Four decades on, he is a journalist and editor in Cambridge (a lovely city, though technically non-canonical thanks to that bloody Play School clock), where he lives with his wife Rachel and their son George. He recently beat off competition from literally some other journalist to win the coveted-ish title of Newspaper Columnist of the Year (East of England) for his column/blog, About A Boy. Another son is due in November. He is so very tired.
