Night Terrors

Chapter The 184th, Little George Tenza's Night of Terrors.

Plot:

Answering a message, seemingly from a young child, that somehow travelled through the universe into the TARDIS and arrived on the psychic paper, The Doctor, Amy and Rory visit a block of flats in an unspecified area of the UK in 2011. They split up to knock on doors looking for the sender. Amy and Rory use the lift, but it malfunctions, lurching downwards. They wake up to find themselves in an odd mansion house, being chased by life-size peg doll creatures. They should have worked out that they're in a dolls' house quite easily, but it takes them ages to twig. Meanwhile, the Doctor has located the child that sent the cry for help, George, who's alone with his Dad Alex in their flat. George is afraid of everything and - because he's really an alien that's got god-like powers - this is causing issues for lots of people around, including Amy and Rory. George is a Tenza, a cuckoo-like creature that assimilated itself into the lives of Alex and his partner Claire responding to their need for a baby that they could not have themselves. The Doctor realises that George has attachment issues, so he gets Alex to hug him and love conquers all: all the nearby residents, plus Amy and Rory, are returned from the dolls' house in George's bedroom cupboard (where his adoptive parents had told the young Tenza to put anything that scared him). 

Context:

Watched from the Blu-ray accompanied by all the children (boys of 14 and 11, girl of 8) on a Sunday afternoon. I don't know what it would take to encourage the Better Half to rejoin us for these viewings but she's not interested at the moment. The media-savvy kiddos anticipated much of how the plot was going to play out, more or less, with comments such as "Is he, like, an alien?" referring to George (and that was before the opening credits), and "The monsters in his head are coming to life!" and "They're being pulled into his nightmares". The youngest, who's the same age as George in the narrative, astutely asked "If he's that scared, why doesn't he switch his light on?". This is a very good point, and reminded me that George is 'TV series eight years old' which doesn't really relate to how a child of eight behaves in the real world. They have more agency, in my experience at least, than is depicted here, with George not consciously doing anything for himself in the story except for whimpering. He's really an alien, though, and projecting back the expectations of adults who wanted but could not have a child, so if he doesn't get it quite true to life, it's somewhat excusable.

First Time Round:

I have trouble remembering watching most of the stories in the Matt Smith era. I would have watched this on or slightly after its initial broadcast in early September 2011, and - as best as I can recall - felt vaguely dissatisfied. Anyway, as I have started to do lately in such circumstances, let me tell an anecdote unconnected to a particular Doctor Who story. It's a generally difficult time for one's mental health living through the latest Covid-19 lockdown in the UK; I have to console myself  on occasion that I'm lucky to be here at all; this is the story of how - on New Year's Eve 1985 - I died. Whenever I told the tale thereafter, I would always make the beginning as dramatic as possible by wording it thus, as Russell T Davies later did for the beginning of Army of Ghosts. Like Rose in that story, though, I didn't really die. I stopped breathing for a while and was resuscitated in hospital. As I mentioned in a recent festive reminiscence, by 1985 my parents were divorced, and my sister and I would spend Christmas with Mum, and New Year with Dad; he was living in Bognor Regis, and in later years I would find a lot of VHS releases in the shops when going to visit him. At that point, though, I had only just entered the video age. In the late autumn, my Mum had purchased our first VCR, which had allowed me to catch both the big Christmas day shows even though they clashed: ITV's Minder of the Orient Express, and the BBC's Only Fools and Horses special, To Hull and Back.

Doctor Who wasn't on TV over the festive period back then; in fact, it wasn't on TV at all. December 1985 was in the middle of the so-called 'hiatus', the roughly 18 month period after Doctor Who had been very nearly cancelled, when the production team were scrambling to plan a slightly different version of the show. The most recent Doctor Who story had been in August of 1985 when a radio story, Slipback, was broadcast, but I'd missed that. The next season would start in the autumn of 1986, and I'd make full use of the VCR to record those episodes to keep for always. At the end of 1985, Dad didn't yet have a VCR, but New Years TV wasn't normally that great. The three of us had watched the 1970s film Willa Wonka and the Chocolate Factory go out on BBC2. I was feeling a bit under the weather, my asthma troubling me, and went to bed eschewing watching the Whistle Test end of the year jamboree that would have taken us on past midnight. My sister was worried about me, and read to me for a while as I lay in bed. She then saw my face was turning blue ("like Violet Beauregarde"). The next thing I remember was waking up on a gurney in a hospital in Chichester.

I was on my own at first. My Dad and sister weren't there, as they hadn't accompanied me in the ambulance. Mum - who also travelled to the hospital in a rush that evening but also hadn't yet arrived - later tore a strip off my Dad for not coming with me, but he'd thought it would be too traumatic for my sister, then only 10, who had nobody else to look after her. With no one around to talk to the hospital staff at that crucial moment, I'll never really know exactly how close run a thing it was, but I was well looked after, and a few days into the new year, I was home. With the single-mindedness of youth, all thoughts of my mortality were ignored and I instantly reignited that early flirtation with video, catching up on the things I'd set to record while I was at my Dad's. If things had gone a different way, though, I would never have developed the enduring relationship with recorded archive media that I've honed since, and would never have started the VHS collection that would help me to experience every Doctor Who story. And this blog wouldn't exist, which would be a terrible shame, wouldn't it? (Don't all shout at once!) 

Reaction:

Forgive me those who think it's not a subject that should be broached, but in order to talk about Night Terrors, I need to talk about Fear Her. As discussed in my blog post on the story in 2018, Fear Her is the fans' new series whipping boy, usually coming at the bottom of polls, and a watchword for the nadir that the show can produce (just as The Twin Dilemma is for the classic series). As I said three years ago, I think this is unfair. It's not a perfect story by any means, but it has some great moments, and got perfectly acceptable ratings and appreciation scores when it first went out. Night Terrors is a more forgettable but more respectable mid-table placement, despite being exactly the same story as Fear Her. An ordinary looking child going through family difficulties manifests this through alien superpowers, making people in their neighbourhood disappear; in order to stop this, the child needs to feel loved and protected by their parent. What went so wrong in Fear Her that Night Terrors supposedly got right? The child actor performance is stronger in Night Terrors; Jamie Oram does well. A bad performance from the person playing George would have sunk the story. But it's not so many light years away from what Abisola Agbaje managed in Fear Her in terms of quality. It's an incremental improvement not the difference between night and day, and there are still a few awkward moments in the 2011 story.   

The other major embarrassment for fans watching Fear Her is where it overreaches by going big. There are only a few such moments, but they certainly leave an impression: the attempt to convey an entire stadium of people vanishing, the Doctor grabbing up the Olympic torch and lighting the flame, the heavy emphasis on a universal love required at the end to save the day. Night Terrors plays it much safer, and smaller (metaphorically and literally with scenes of our heroes miniaturised in a dolls' house). Instead of a mass love-in, it's just one Dad and his son, instead of a global disaster scenario, we have chamber horror: scenes of characters creeping around a dark enclosed locale, pursued by strange monsters. It's a safer bet for Doctor Who, being something that is easier to achieve than the aforementioned scenes in the earlier story. Is it better, though, not to aim big? Essentially, Night Terrors is just Fear Her with the lights turned down. And, though this approach might avoid some issues, it creates a few more. Gatiss has gone on record that the germ of the idea for this story came from his fear of dolls, and peg dolls in particular. The horror subplot with dolly antagonists, though, doesn't gel very well with a more grounded tale about one family sorting out their issues.

The way the script links the two incompatible-seeming strands is through the interface of god-like powers. Tenzas are explicitly confirmed by the script as able to assimilate themselves into any familial situation, and create massive psychic fields to prevent detection. They also appear able to telekinetically hijack lift mechanisms, create some kind of creature or force out of bin bags, make a person sink into a solid floor, miniaturise people, forcibly move people against their will, and turn people into dolls. It's possible but not spelled out that a lot of those scenarios may just be induced hallucinations. Are Amy and Rory really in a plummeting lift and scary dolls' house, or do they just think they are? It would be more consistent with a creature able to manipulate people's perceptions that it would be the latter; if it is, though, where are Amy and Rory physically while this is happening in their heads? Still in the lift? Possibly. The trouble is that's very close to "it was all a dream" for the stakes to mean very much. If we assume the threat is real, and Amy and Rory and the others have been physically transported (and the scene of Alex and the Doctor being pulled into George's bedroom cupboard does suggest this), then it's just as bad: if George is so powerful, and can do anything, is there truly any jeopardy for him? And, if there isn't, why should we care? 

The story seems to be pushing us to care by reflection of a family, and family worries, a grounded concept with which most of the audience can empathise; most of us have families, and have family worries at one time or another. The tone is so unreal, though, that it gets in the way of this empathy. Unlike Fear Hear's attempt (and your mileage may vary as to the success of the attempt, but it is clearly the intention) to create a normal-seeming domestic suburban setting for the story, even the scenes in Night Terrors in the quote unquote real world are stylised and starkly lit. George's life, even when he's not traumatised with out of control powers impacting everything and everyone around him, is a horror film. The Doctor leaves pretending it's a happy ending, but the family still has money worries, with an aggressive Dickensian cliché of a rent collector ready to come round again and demand his money (played by Andrew Tiernan, by the way, who's so wasted in this that I forgot he'd appeared in Doctor Who at all, though the scene where he moans about Bergerac still being on TV is fun). If irony or brutal realism was the point, it would be acceptable in a 'life's like that' way, but it's not. The story is set up as a fairy tale, but it doesn't have a conclusive happy ending.  

Connectivity: 

This is a toughie. Both stories see the Doctor and his friends searching for a specific person around whom the story revolves (George in Night Terrors, Davros in Destiny of the Daleks); both also feature at least one mention of the word Dalek (Mark Gatiss riffing on Gallifreyan bedtime stories has Matt Smith mention "The Emperor Dalek's New Clothes"). That's about it 

Deeper Thoughts:

Bad Dad Syndrome. Now I'm almost as old as my Dad was in 1985 and a father myself, I wonder what I would do in the circumstances of that New Year's Eve (see First Time Round section above for more details). He didn't have a car, and was looking after two children, one of whom needed to go to hospital for emergency treatment. There was no neighbour that he could have left my young sister with, he didn't know anyone well enough (and they may have been out anyway, it being New Year's Eve). His choice was to accompany me in the ambulance, taking her too, or to leave me to the professionals, look after my sister and sort something else out. It's hard for me to put myself in his shoes, as I'm together with the Better Half rather than on my own, but I think if I were him I would have insisted on going in the ambulance, and taken my sister along too. She would have got bored overnight in a hospital, yes, but that's better than leaving someone on their own when they are being treated in a hospital as an emergency. He chose instead to contact my mother, who was on her own, though further from the hospital, and had a car. She came along urgently that evening (and Dad probably would have guessed that she would do just that). I was told for many years after the divorce by my Mum that he was a bad father, and this was just one piece of evidence to add to many others for her. I'm not here, though, to excuse or condemn him. Parenthood is just a series of decisions, and one can't get them all right. Like anyone, I'm far from being a perfect parent and have made lots of mistakes.

In Doctor Who, the challenges of parenthood, and particularly fatherhood, became a theme picked up on in the early years of the 21st century series, after never having troubled the writers in the classic series years at all. This reflected changes in the wider world of dramatic works, of course, but for a few years it did feel like 'Bad Dad syndrome' was the province of Doctor Who. As well as Night Terrors and Fear Her, there are a few other stories in the first few years of the new series, like Father's Day, The Idiot's Lantern and The Curse of the Black Spot. Every one of the Russell T Davies era female companions is shown to have a father who's feckless or ineffectual too. It was probably a coincidence rather than a deliberate theme, but it did get noticed. I remember it being picked up and debated online at the time. Though the stories for a while after 2011 seemed to leave the theme alone, it came back with a vengeance in 2018, with Ryan's issues with his Dad becoming an arc plot that took a whole series plus a special to resolve. An interesting factor, though, of the brevity of the storytelling in rounding off a story in 45 minutes or so is that fatherhood is reduced to grand gestures rather than that unending series of small decisions.

Again, this is not a flaw restricted to Doctor Who, but does seem magnified in my favourite show because it has to cram aliens and excitement into those 45 minutes too. The reality of parenthood wouldn't necessarily make good TV, certainly not genre TV, but the alternative approach is over- simplistic to say the least. In Night Terrors, Alex just has to hug his child and say a few words to make everything all right. It's maybe not so bad here as Alex hasn't actually done anything that bad in the first place. He's made a slightly careless remark that George has overheard and that's caused an unlikely and overblown trauma (the Doctor jokes about how George will cope with puberty; on this evidence it'll be seismic). The other stories, though, follow mostly the same pattern, and the difference is just degree - Ryan's Dad just has to get taken over by a Dalek in exchange for forgiveness. Even if we excuse any specific work, collectively and cumulatively these kind of stories in western media let male parents off the hook too much, I think. Again, this might be indicative of real life, where males do seem to be held to a less high standard. In parenting, and in all else, men have to try harder. Don't say "Not all men" either. No matter how good or not we already are, we can and should keep trying to be better. We just shouldn't use Doctor Who stories as any how-to guide for parenting, that's all.

In Summary:

I prefer Fear Her, if I'm honest.