In the Forest of the Night

Chapter the 272nd, where the Doctor can't see the good from the trees.

Plot:
The Doctor lands in central London in the present day, but is confused because all around him is forest. Meanwhile, Clara and Danny Pink have been accompanying some Coal Hill School kids on an overnight stay at the National History Museum, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, Cardiff. They attempt to leave and find that trees have sprouted up overnight surrounding the building. People everywhere wake up to find the same thing has happened across the world, including the mother of Maebh Arden. Maebh is one of the children on the school trip, and she has - unbeknownst to Danny and Clara, as they are clearly the worst schoolteachers ever - already left the museum and run into the Doctor. Maebh is neurodivergent (it's not fully spelled out but that's the hint), and since her older sister went missing the previous year, she seems to have gained some kind of psychic powers. Everyone meets up and wanders around the empty forests (Londoners have been asked to stay in their homes, and for the first time ever seem to have complied) and avoids escaped zoo animals. Creatures that look like fireflies communicate to the Doctor through Maebh; they've created the forests to protect the Earth from a solar flare as they'll create an oxygen forcefield. They have similarly saved Earth several times before in history, but always made the humans forget (except for some residual memories that crept into fairy tales with dark, twisted forests). Danny discovers that Clara has been lying to him, and she's still travelling with the Doctor. Maebh and her Mum are reunited with Maebh's sister, who comes back home.

Context:

Watched on a Sunday in mid-July from the Blu-ray disc in the Complete Eighth Series box set. I was accompanied by all three children (boys of 17 and 13, girl of 11) none of whom could ever remember having seen the story before. They watched it without sarcastic remarks nor signs of restlessness, and at the end all agreed that "It was alright" (there isn't really a higher level of praise from them at this stage in their lives). Only one moment garnered any other comment during the runtime, and that was because one of the background artists playing a non-speaking kid had the same backpack that the eldest had at around the same time the story was first broadcast. It's the blue bag with a monster mouth design; I didn't care enough to get a screengrab, sorry, and its appearance in the narrative is very fleeting, but have a look for it if you ever watch In the Forest of the Night again. After this watch, will I honestly be encouraging you to watch In the Forest of the Night again? Let's see.

First Time Round:

Watched on the day of its debut BBC1 broadcast on the 25th October 2014, probably slightly time-shifted into the evening but likely not by much. The pattern in those days was for the Better Half and I to view the episode before the children on the Saturday night, and then I would watch again with them (if it wasn't too scary, they were all quite young at the time) the following Sunday morning. This one was deemed acceptable, though a couple of others in Capaldi's first year were not, as I remember. One thing I recall from around this first watch was something approximately a week later; at least one online wag commented after the cliffhanger of following episode, Dark Water - first of a Cyberman two-parter - that we didn't need to worry about Cyber-invasion because the trees would surely rise up and save us. Ho ho. A bit unfair, though, as In the Forest of the Night goes to great lengths to explain that the creatures that are able to make the trees appear overnight do so only to protect against cosmic-scale natural disasters. At the time of watching, though not so waggish about it, I was disappointed in this story. Would this latest watch cause me to reappraise?

Reaction:

Frank Cottrell-Boyce is a ridiculously prestigious writer to have contribute to Doctor Who. In executive producer of In the Forest of the Night Steven Moffat's tenure, special guest writers were often invited to contribute a script or two before and since this story: hit playwrights, writers of well-loved sitcoms, bestselling fantasy authors, founders of Comic Relief. Only Cottrell-Boyce, though, already had on his CV a once-in-a-lifetime thing like being a major creative force behind the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, as well as many other major credits in UK film and television, and a dozen novels. He clearly wanted to do something a bit different in this story, something much more fairy tale in its narrative and its aesthetic than Doctor Who had attempted for a good while, perhaps ever. He just had the bad luck that his story was positioned three weeks on from a story where the moon turned out to be an egg. Kill the Moon and In the Forest of the Night get bracketed together, I think, as the silly ones / stinkers of the year, but that's probably not entirely fair on the latter. Unlike Kill the Moon (see here for more from me on that story), In the Forest of the Night has been constructed to be singular in its nature, tone and intent. There's a girl in a red hood running from a wolf in it; there's a tiger in a forest that's arrived overnight in it. It even explains fairy tales in its narrative - they are the race memory of previous events with the trees from Earth's history. Unlike the story shown three weeks before, it doesn't lurch from one style and genre to another before ending on a scientifically implausible note - it's committed to the bit throughout.

The issue is that the singular genre Cottrell-Boyce chooses is not just one with fairy tale trappings, it's a full-on fairy tale: tree sprites sense an oncoming disaster and rise up to save the Earth. The script makes reasonable stabs at doing it in a Doctor Who way, don't get me wrong: the sprites appear to be undiscovered lifeforms with powers to accelerate the growth pattern of trees, as well as control oxygen in order to repel fire. I can accept all that as consistent with Who's level of scientific rigour (i.e. within wide but sane boundaries without being necessarily super accurate). When the trees disappear at the end, though, they just sparkle gold and glow and disappear. It's too much like magic. If the tree lifeforms grew these forests overnight, and all the stuff in the script about the different rings seen in cross-sections of tree trunks strongly suggests that this has happened, then I can accept that they can reverse that growth too. If there were signs of that happening, or at least some potholes left afterwards, it would be tangible and have some reality. If they can magic away the trees, though, then why not just magic them into place in the first place? The lack of even the slightest interaction with tangible reality harms the story. It also doesn't help that there's a lack of threat. There's escaped animals seen briefly, but that's it. What it needs is more people showing up in the forest than just our heroes - it needs looters, and the displaced, and the despairing, and the crazed; it needs more than just one mother searching for their child: it needs extras. Presumably it was budgetary factors that meant the forests of central London were left suspiciously under-populated.

With neither a sense of reality nor a sense of threat, the story is a bit weightless, liable to float off like a soap bubble and pop. What helps a little to keep it grounded are fine performances all round. The regulars give good value as always - Capaldi is still in grumpy mode, Jenna Coleman and Samuel Anderson, as Clara and Danny, have a little material to get their teeth into with a subplot about trust in their relationship. The child actors are all good too, and they're given (and give rise to) some great dialogue. "When I get stressed I forget my anger management" was a favourite for me. The kids' reaction to Clara and Danny kissing was played well too, and I liked all the stuff about how they would rather be safe with their Mums than witness a one-off cosmic event. Anything that's real amongst the mainly unreal elements of the story is welcome; this is perhaps why the strange cameo from Missy (put in to keep up the intrigue about the season's arc plot, the finale coming up next) doesn't fit. The ending where Maebh and her mother are reunited with the teenage runaway sister would count as a note of reality too, if it had been staged better. As it is, it looks like she's been hiding in a shrub in the front garden for the year, as the decision has been made to have the magic disappearing foliage reveal her behind it. Presumably, the director or Cottrell-Boyce thought it would look cool. It does not. Added up, I think I've been a mite unfair in my disregard for this story in the past. It's not a total failure, and is instead a valid attempt to do a Doctor Who fairy tale in a realistic contemporary setting. It's not ultimately a success either, but it needed only a few tweaks (and a bit more budget) to be so. 

Connectivity:

Similarly to The Power of Kroll, In the Forest of the Night features the TARDIS landing in an environment that's very green because of an abundance of plant life.

Deeper Thoughts:

Searching for the next segment (part 2). Five new Target Doctor Who novelisations were released in mid-July 2023. This is becoming an annual occurrence since the range was restarted in 2018 after many, many years on pause. It may even become a more frequent occurrence; no sooner were these five out than it was announced that the three TV 60th anniversary specials, still months away from being broadcast at that point, would be released as novelisations less than six months later in early January 2024. We've never had it so good! Capsule reviews of three of the current five can be found in the Deeper Thoughts section of the last blog post here. The fourth of the five is an adaptation of a Peter Capaldi story, from the year after In the Forest of the Night. The Zygon Invasion is the prose adaptation of Peter Harness's screenplay for the TV episode of the same name plus the second episode The Zygon Inversion, which Harness co-wrote with Steven Moffat. A reminder of the plot of the TV version, and my thoughts about it, can be found in its blog post here. Harness is the first author to adapt a story comprising two modern 45-minute episodes; with those to provide the basis for the novelisation, the challenge of expansion faced by those tackling one-parter stories is not there. The challenge is perhaps instead how to provide enough depth for a prose retelling without having to cut or change anything beyond the bounds of what would be acceptably faithful. If so, Harness manages this, I think.

He does this by the inclusion of humour and wordplay without inserting any lengthy new scenes; for example, there's a formal joke about the habit of Target books back in the day to have footnotes nudging the reader towards other books in the range. He also manages to smooth over plotting that seemed a bit jagged on the TV, explaining better the resettlement and subsequent radicalisation of a splinter group of Zygons. One addition that I think is a stroke of genius is a flashback including a cameo from Danny Pink (I won't spoil it). The Doctor's speech at the end is less overblown when written down too. The book version doesn't solve all of the problems I highlighted in the blog post from 2019, but the story overall is much improved. The use of they / their pronouns by and in reference to the character of Osgood (who is resolutely non-binary, on the human / Zygon axis) is a nice touch too. The next and final book of the five is a Kerblam! adaptation by Pete McTighe, based on his 2018 script for Jodie Whittaker's first season as the Doctor. McTighe doesn't slow the pace with too much inner dialogue of his characters, but picks his moments during the narrative to inject some relatively short flashback scenes to illustrate backstory and motivation (including a cameo appearance by a couple of characters, which I also won't spoil).

There aren't many characters in this story, which effectively operates as a whodunnit, and fleshing out one (the computer System of Kerblam itself) does sacrifice one suspect and a little bit of mystery in favour of depth. I still think that someone who hasn't seen the TV version could be surprised by the revelation of the villain. The one big thing that the book version of Kerblam! is denied is the magnificent visuals: the costumes and masks of the various creepy fixed-smile robots that work in Kerblam! and keep tabs on the 10% organic workforce, plus the physical performances and voices, contributed to a sinister atmosphere. McTighe works hard on the prose to recreate this; understanding that his robot Postmen have to seem cheery to be chilling, he gives them a prose-friendly catchphrase. Whenever they appear, it's with a sing-song "Ding Dong!" greeting. This is great apart from my inability - shared I suspect by anyone of my generation, including perhaps McTighe himself - to hear it in any voice other than the suggestive tones of Leslie Phillips. One thing I was anticipating reading the book was exactly how faithful the ending would be. I've seen a bit of a backlash against the story from younger fans online in the years since its broadcast, as it reads as siding with the corporation rather than the individual. Though some minor details are changed, that's still the thrust. Kerblam! might become a more caring company and hire a few more people, but that's as radical as it gets.

The one question that isn't answered, or even asked, in the TV or book version is who's making the money? Why isn't that wealth being distributed in such a way that the impacts of automation are mitigated? It's interesting to compare and contrast the books of Kerblam! and Planet of the Ood in this regard, both dealing with corporations making money from misery, with very different results for the corporations involved. All five of the books are worth buying for different reasons. Two, as mentioned, are interesting companion pieces. The Zygon Invasion is an improvement on a solid Doctor Who tale; Warrior's Gate and Beyond is an interesting take on old material, plus some newer material included as a bonus. And The Waters of Mars is The Waters of Mars; Phil Ford has effectively captured in prose what made the story an explosively good watch back in 2009. It's my personal favourite of the bunch, but I'd recommend collecting them all.

In Summary:

If only the performances - one of the best parts of this story, to be honest - were rubbish then I could do some joke about things being wooden. But I can't, so I won't.