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.

Knock Knock

Chapter The 53rd, in which everyone gets wood.

Plot: 
[Warning: This is a current episode, and there will be some spoilers ahead.] Bill Potts moves in to a house-share with five other students from St. Luke's University; the rent's cheap as there is no central heating, and it has a major problem with woodlice. Plus, it eats people. The landlord is clearly a Norman Bates type (ooh, what a giveaway), but these kids are desperate not to have to deal with letting agents any more, and who can blame them, so they sign the contract anyway. Then, on a dark and restless night, when the Doctor's there too to embarrass Bill / help her move / investigate, they're picked off one by one, sucked into the wooden fabric of the house. The landlord hides a dark secret in a tower in the house, a secret that has meant the deaths of six tenants every twenty years: so, eighteen students have been killed in the last seventy years; now, that doesn't sound that high a death toll when you spell it out, and - yes - statistically this house is safer than the M4, but it's creepy, okay? Sheesh. Nobody explains why it's only six tenants required each time, or why every twenty years exactly, but it was getting a bit hectic at the end there, and there was definitely no time for a lengthy info dump. Oh.

Context:

Before Doctor Who came back on TV this Easter, I used the random number generator to pick which episode I would blog; it came up with a 4, which meant I would be posting about The Haunted Hub, as the story was rumoured to be called then. I wonder if that was ever a proper title, though, as the house is not a hub, unless the idea was that it's the central base for the Dryad creatures to roam about to infest the trees in the area. It was shown that this was the case a couple of times, but that was early on before it was clear what the nature of the threat was exactly. It's not haunted either, come to think of it. A few days after the original broadcast, I watched the special version of the story formally known as The Haunted Hub on the BBC iplayer with binaural 3D special sound. I couldn't tell any difference to be honest, but I enjoyed the fun intro with an announcer doing a Peter Serafinowicz Darth Maul voice telling me to make sure my headphones were on the right way round. I suppose it could have been Peter Serafinowicz himself doing the Peter Serafinowicz voice, that's a thought.

First-time round:

We watched the first three episodes of this current series live on BBC1 on Saturday night, with all the family together; but, the trailer after Thin Ice made Knock Knock look pretty scary, so myself and the Better Half screened it, timeshifted using the PVR, on the evening of broadcast. We thought it was borderline, so prepped the kids and they watched it with me in the middle of the day when it was bright outside, to take the edge off it. All three (boys of 10 and 7, girl of 5) enjoyed it, and thought we were making a fuss about nothing.

Reaction:

The big draw of this story is the special guest star: David Suchet is excellent throughout: a subtly malignant presence as he slides in and out of the action during the earlier part of the narrative ("For a man such as myself, discretion is second nature"); he doesn't play it as Rigsby from Rising Damp, so much as an actual patch of rising damp, spreading creepily over every scene he's in. He's pitch perfect doing the traditional bad guy act (and, of course, it is an act) in the middle, with a nice change of tone at the end when the true nature of the character is revealed. Perhaps he pushes on that last note a little too hard in places during the conclusion, but it's a minor quibble. It's been a while since a guest actor has been served so well by a script; this year's other contenders so far - Ralf Little, Nicholas Burns, Mina Anwar, Jennifer Hennessy - have all had little more than cameos.

This is doubtless deliberate. These early stories have all been about showing off the new TARDIS duo, and the dynamic between them. This explains why no-one - including the other regular cast member, Matt Lucas - has got much of a look in until now. Pearl Mackie and Capaldi have a natural and effortless chemistry that's presumably the result of lots and lots of effort, not just from the two actors, but from the writing, and from every one of the crew too: the production is showcasing something new here, the engine for the show's new direction. The stories so far have been enjoyable because of this, but perhaps a bit low-powered - there's a definite tension felt when watching that events have yet to shift into a higher gear. It seems that's going to happen soon, with hints about regeneration being dropped, and whatever's locked in the Doctor and Nardole's underground vault - this year's MacGuffin - looking like it (she?) will be escaping before too long. Unfortunately, most fans at least will know none of this can last. At least one, if not both, of these main two actors is not going to be employed on the show after Christmas, and that's a shame - it's working so very well.

For the moment, we have to put that out of our minds and enjoy what we have. A new twist is given  in Knock Knock with the Doctor being forced into the role of embarrassing older relative dropping off his charge at college, hanging around too long, and showing her up; Bill doesn't mean to be ashamed of him, she just wants to be independent. I recognise this, as I'm sure anyone would, from when I was young and starting at university, and I'm also preparing myself for the day - soon to come - when I'll be the old buffer having to make myself scarce. The script milks so much out of this simple set-up: as well as the recognition factor and the deepening of the central relationship, there's humour with the Doctor's vanity that he only looks old enough to be Bill's father, and a magnificent fan frisson at the companion calling the Doctor 'grandfather'. Most of all, it foregrounds the counterpoint between the two different big adventures Bill is embarking upon, which I suspect is the thematic touchstone of the whole series, encapsulated in the little moment of Bill talking to herself: "Stop it - there's no living puddles, or weird robots, or big fish. It's just a new house. And people you don't know. Not scary at all."

Capaldi is at his best here, with Suchet bringing out his A-game: there's some great moments, such as when the Doctor crunches a prawn cracker to disrupt the tension, or later when he challenges the landlord to name the Prime Minister. The remaining cast is also good, with each of the students nicely drawn in a few quick strokes, believable and sufficiently different from one another. I'm confused by a few details, though: is Bill enrolled properly in college now, or is she still just being tutored privately by the Doctor? If there's a freshers' party happening, then it must be September or early October, which means that Bill and the Doctor have known each other for the best part of a year at least (The Pilot covered a stretch of time that encompassed Christmas). Consciously being aware of this - which admittedly wasn't until after I'd finished watching the story - did damage it a bit, as they still feel like they've only known each other a limited time. And it seems either very generous or very cruel of the university to be kicking Pavel out of halls at the start of the Autumn term: they'd have kicked him out before the Summer vac, or not at all. These minor details aside, first time Who scriptwriter - but massive TV and theatre talent - Mike Bartlett has delivered a fine story, and he can definitely come again (though he may well be too busy).

Connectivity: 

Both stories follow the template that's commonly tagged 'Base Under Siege' in Doctor Who critical writing, but in the wider world is known more simply as 'horror': a group of characters are trapped somewhere, and stalked by an unknown - and possibly supernatural - assailant or assailants, who do for them, one by one.

Deeper Thoughts:
Not just a London (or Bristol) Hopper. On the Saturday evening after watching Knock Knock, I read some fans on an online forum bemoaning that the companion in Doctor Who never fully commits to the adventure anymore, and always ends up coming back home every three or four episodes. There are dramatic reasons for this, grounding the audience identification figure to throw the extra-terrestrial shenanigans into sharp relief, and creating further options for story texture within "the part of my life you're not in”, as Bill refers to it when talking to the Doctor. The show could prosper without this, of course: Ian and Barbara were perfectly well grounded, but the Doctor never managed to get them back home once, and we knew very little of their personal lives. It's telling, though, that even in 1963 it was felt necessary for there to be a reason for the characters not to go home (the wonky steering of the TARDIS) or else they should want to, or at least the production team must have thought the audience would question it if they didn't.

The new series has generally taken the 'pop back home' approach, but the classic series also did this, starting in the 1970s, with the Doctor's companions returning periodically to their normal lives as he returned to his Earthbound mission with UNIT; this is very similar to the set up now, with the vault needing to be guarded and the Doctor doing a bit of lecturing on the side. Companions both old and new have been kept linked to the Earth by a strong vocation (medicine, teaching, journalism, being an air-hostess). Even when not applying this approach, the classic series usually got its excuses in; there were a few orphans, a few 'professional' adventurers like Leela or Steven, and even a reintroduction of the TARDIS's navigational issues for a while. Tacitly - subconsciously, perhaps - the series is putting forward the idea that being rootless, travelling without some sense of a place of your own, is not a good thing. Travel broadens the mind, but endless travel maybe flattens it out, removing all the individual features. This is even more explicit in the new series; the following is probably the strongest example, but representative. From 2006's Army of Ghosts:

JACKIE: Do you think you'll ever settle down?

ROSE: The Doctor never will, so I can't. I'll just keep on travelling.

JACKIE: And you'll keep on changing. And in forty years time, fifty, there'll be this woman, this strange woman, walking through the marketplace on some planet a billion miles from Earth. But she's not Rose Tyler. Not anymore. She's not even human.  

I don't know if Russell T Davies believes this wholeheartedly, he's probably just having Jackie playing a part she plays well, that of Devil's Advocate; but, he must believe there is some truth in it, or else the conflict in the scene would not work. Right now, this is a charged political discussion; the incumbent Prime Minister of this country, whose name I can't bring myself to type, said in a conference speech last year “If you believe you're a citizen of the world, you're a citizen of nowhere." She had her own political reasons for saying it, and I bristled at the suggestion, just as I did when listening to Jackie Tyler ten years earlier. I examined why I felt this way: home is very important to me, for many reasons. I believe that patriotism, even nationalism, can be perfectly fine if they don't lead to intolerance and violence. It's intolerance and violence that are the problems, whatever the motive behind them. But they are two abstract nouns, whereas a Union Jack is a real physical thing. It's a concrete reality that a love of country can often cause people to do terrible things.

Also, I have to go with Ian Brown or Rakim here: it's not where you're from it's where you're at. If you're too rooted in one place, you'll never get anywhere; progress requires diversity. Bill returns to Bristol because that's where she is studying, developing herself. Everyone should have that right, that equality of opportunity, even if it takes them far from home. Any tension or conflict between the nowheres and the somewheres is a false battle; the real enemies are intolerance and violence, and those that would stoke them up. In the end, everyone and every community must find an acceptable balance between the familiar and the alien. It's possible for me to be English, and British, and European (no matter what happens); and it's even possible for me to be "a citizen of the universe, and a gentleman to boot"! 

In Summary:

Well constructed, laying foundations for building excitement to come; not at all creaky.