Quick Take: Doctor Who, "Night Terrors"
The Doctor takes a house call.
Quick Take: Doctor Who, "Night Terrors"
(S0609) This week's ultra-fantastic episode of Doctor Who takes us on a super-duper adventure in modern day England where a little space boy creates his own nightmare in the cupboard and everyone's invited. The Doctor gets to use his crazy-cool sonic screwdriver to do neat tricks, but it's ultimately the little space boy's dad who saves the day.
Awww.
The cold, hard truth is that Doctor Who's a variety show for the whole family masked as a serial drama. This means that we sometimes get filler episodes, catering to a different age category, and sometimes these filler episodes are total crap.
So what do we do? Do we complain about how whatever fourth graders this episode catered to belong watching reruns of the Sarah Jane Adventures instead of muddying up our show? Do we petition the network to pay more attention to the people who buy the DVD box sets? Or do we just let these episodes be because, as sad as it is, the abundant family audience is what ensures we'll be able to see the Doctor and friends running through time and space thirty years from now?
I thought so.
The truth is, the episode wasn't terrible. In fact, after checking Wikipedia, and discovering that this episode was supposed to come much earlier in the season — after "The Doctor's Wife" and before "The Rebel Flesh" — it alleviates my biggest complaint. That's right. Amy and Rory don't seem to give a damn about finding Melody because Melody isn't even born yet. Funny enough, the Amy running around in this episode is actually a clueless Ganger.
All this makes the metaphor of the episode prescriptive, that future parent Amy and Rory should accept their child no matter who it is. And isn't it amazing that who their child turns out to be is none other than the murderer and savior of their best friend, the Doctor? The Doctor, mind you, who accepts River/Melody unconditionally.
Interestingly, "The Curse of the Black Spot" was supposed to air last night, instead of way earlier in the season. But that episode is just as episodic as "Night Terrors" and has much less metaphoric content for any part of the season. Why then the switch?
I think that somewhere during production, someone, somewhere decided the show needed more of an edge this season; they needed to lead big. But the season was already mostly filmed, so they wrote an episode with pirates and stuck it at the beginning of the season. The problem then was that the cliffhanger had to fall on episode 7 and they had to pull an episode back. The only candidates were "Night Terrors" and "The Doctor's Wife" and clearly they weren't moving Neil Gaiman's episode any close to all this River stuff than it already was... After all, how many wives can one Doctor have?
We can only hope that at least for the DVD set, they'll move this episode up to its rightful place, where the episode can breathe a little better and the rest of us, concerned less with the scheduling of the BBC and more with the adventures of the Doctor, can enjoy the episode's strong points a little bit more.
This is so random but everytime I hear/see "night terrors" I think of the line as uttered by Christopher Walken in Wedding Crashers. In any event, great review mike !