Story 221 - Night Terrors

In which the Doctor receives a message on his psychic paper whilst the TARDIS is in deep space. It reads: "Please save me from the monsters". The Doctor is surprised at the strength of emotion which could have sent this message such a vast distance, and he also surmises that the sender is a child.
The TARDIS materialises in a housing estate, outside a large block of flats. The Doctor, Amy and Rory split up and go door to door, trying to identify the child. In one of the flats lives a small boy named George, who has a great many fears and phobias. His parents, Alex and Claire are constantly worried about him. He thinks that one of his elderly neighbours, Mrs Rossiter, is a witch, that the sound of the lifts is that of a monster, and he won't go to sleep at night until his parents have turned his bedroom light on and off again five times. Even then he is convinced that every shadow conceals a threat. The Doctor spots him looking out of his window and realises he has found who he is looking for. Alex is home alone with George, and he assumes the Doctor has been sent by Social Services. The Doctor invites himself in and starts asking questions about George. He overhears a visit from Alex and Claire's thuggish landlord - Mr Purcell - who has come to speak about rent money that is owed. After returning to his own flat in the same block, Purcell finds himself being sucked down into his carpet and disappears.

Mrs Rossiter, meanwhile, has been putting out her rubbish, and she gets sucked into the refuse pile. George had earlier overheard Amy and Rory talking about monsters, and when they go to use a lift they find themselves plunged into darkness. They suddenly find themselves inside a large stately home. All is not as it seems, however, as all the food and pots and pans are made of wood, and Amy finds a huge glass eye in a kitchen drawer. None of the doors have locks, so they are trapped inside. They hear child-like voices, and come upon a large wooden peg doll, life-size.
Later they find that there are several of these dolls, and they have come to life. They meet Mr Purcell in the house, and are horrified when they see the dolls seize him and turn him into one of their kind.
The same fate then befalls Amy.
Back in the flat, the Doctor has informed Alex that monsters are real. He has learned that George has been encouraged to imagine his fears transported to an old doll's house in his wardrobe - and he realises that this is what George is literally doing.

George is an alien with incredible psychic powers. When he thinks that the Doctor has come to take him away, and that his father no longer wants him, he sends both into the doll's house. The Doctor is reunited with Rory as they come under attack by the peg dolls. Panicking now that he has been left alone in his bedroom, George transports himself into the house. The Doctor has worked out that George is a Tenza child. This alien race leave their children for other species to raise as their own, like cuckoos. The Doctor had suspected as much when he noticed something wrong with Alex and Claire's photo-album - she was clearly not pregnant in the days immediately prior to his supposed birth. The Tenza children create a perception filter which changes the memories of the host family. The child's greatest fear is of rejection by the new family - which is how George has come to be behaving as he has. The peg dolls are about to attack George when Alex realises that he still loves him as his son. Happy at last, everyone is transported by George out of the dolls house. Amy, Purcell and Mrs Rossiter are freed unharmed. On returning home from her night shift the next morning, Claire finds a much happier family than the one she left. The Doctor promises Alex he should have no further problems with his son - though he might pop back around puberty time...

Night Terrors was written by Mark Gatiss, and was first broadcast on 3rd September 2011. Up to this point Gatiss had written for the series on three occasions (The Unquiet Dead, The Idiot's Lantern and Victory of the Daleks) and had acted in three stories (as Professor Lazarus in The Lazarus Experiment, and twice as the uncredited voice of the space-going Spitfire call-sign "Danny Boy").
From this point on, however, Gatiss would form a regular writing partnership with Steven Moffat which would see five further commissions for Doctor Who, as well as other work such as Sherlock and their recent Dracula. He would also make several more appearances in the programme, though not always credited.
Night Terrors had originally been intended as the fourth story of Series 6, falling in the first half of the season. However, the opening instalments were deemed to be too uniformly dark compared to the end run, and so this episode was pushed back. Had it remained in the first half we would also have had two stories where the Doctor receives a message in the TARDIS whilst in flight, to get him into the action. Or maybe not, as the two stories featuring the arrival of messages in the TARDIS ended up trading places, but it wasn't a straight swap, as we also have to take into account Tom McRae's unused script, and the one that replaced it.

Gatiss looked to childhood fears as the inspiration for his story. This was becoming a theme in the series since it was revived in 2005, with a lot more stories featuring children and the things that frightened children - The Empty Child, Fear Her, The Girl in the Fireplace, Blink and so on. Children had featured rarely in the original run of the series, mainly due to the way it was made (evening studio sessions). The more flexible way in which the series was made now allowed for children to be used on set more, though there were still a lot of restrictions.
However, way back in the planning notes for the very first ever episodes of Doctor Who, the BBC researchers had pointed out that children did not relate to characters who were younger than themselves - and this still holds true today. Most child viewers aren't keen on children characters in films and TV shows - preferring the adult characters as role models. Only the very young relate to smaller children on screen. Adults tend not to like kids in film and TV shows as well - finding them annoying - and they certainly don't like them being introduced to popular franchises where kids never boldly went before - Wesley Crusher, I'm looking at you. This might explain why stories which feature children prominently, apart from the very odd exception, don't fare well in the polls. This story came it at No.189 out of 241 in the DWM 50th Anniversary poll.

Apart from George, and the young actor's performance, fans disliked this story as it was another one of those ones where the "villains" are defeated by Love. Too saccharine. If you think this one's sickly sweet, just wait until we get to the penultimate story.
Another problem is that we get very good monsters - the creepy wooden peg dolls - but they aren't used very well. They are fine glimpsed or heard in the shadows of the darkened house, and the way they turn people into dolls like themselves is very effective, but in the end they aren't used enough. There was a similar problem with the Smilers in The Beast Below - a great design rather wasted.
The relatively small cast is headed by Daniel Mays, who plays Alex. His wife, Claire, is Emma Cunniffe, but she hardly features at all apart from the opening and closing scenes. Mays was best known for a regular role in Ashes to Ashes at the time, but he has since gone on to many other projects - including Good Omens (another dad who doesn't know the true origins of his son) and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
Playing George we have Jamie Oram, who has continued to act in children's TV shows. Mr Purcell is Andrew Tiernan, who I first saw in Derek Jarman's Edward II. He was the doomed astronaut Victor Carroon in the live TV remake of Quatermass (featuring Gatiss and David Tennant). Mrs Rossiter is played by Leila Hoffman.

Overall, a weak episode, for the reasons cited above. Promised a lot but failed to deliver.
Things you might like to know:

• As it was originally intended to be shown earlier, Karen Gillan is playing the Ganger version of Amy Pond in this. There's a clue that the Doctor already suspects she is a duplicate as he refers to them all being back together again - "in the flesh" - at the conclusion. One of Madame Kovarian's brief appearances was also included in the episode but had to be removed.
• Working titles included "House Call" and "What Are Little Boys Made Of?".
• This is the first story since the similarly themed Fear Her in which no-one is seen to be killed on screen. Three people are turned into peg dolls, but they're all restored at the conclusion.
• The Doctor mentions some of his favourite fairy tales. These are parodies of Earthly ones - such as 'The Three Little Sontarans' and 'The Dalek Emperor's New Clothes'. Another one he mentions is 'Snow White and the Seven Keys to Doomsday'. This is a reference to the Dalek stage play written by Terrance Dicks around the time he was leaving Doctor Who to go freelance. It featured a new Doctor played by Trevor Martin, and some of its story elements turned up in The Brain of Morbius.
• BBC Audio's series "Hornet's Nest" - the production entitled 'The Dead Shoes' - starring Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, with Richard Franklin as Mike Yates (stepping in after Nicholas Courtney became too ill to reprise the Brigadier), had earlier featured the Doctor being shrunk in size and chased around a doll's house by peg dolls.
• The original episode would have ended with the Doctor still looking at Amy's pregnancy scan, presumably, but the new version now has him looking at the information about his own death which he got from the Teselecta. We also get a new nursery rhyme introduced, which will feature in later episodes, about the Doctor's imminent demise.