@Patrick
No idea but seeing as this was originally Episode Four, I’d say it was another “peep hole” thing. The BBC website only says: “At one point Night Terrors was intended to feature in the first seven episodes of the current series and included a moment where viewers glimpsed Madame Kovarian.”

An okay episode, but definitely a letdown after last week. The idea of scary wooden dolls is great but could have been developed more.
In fact the two ideas of an alien child and evil wooden dolls didn’t seem very well woven together. I wish they had focused more on one or the other.
I agree with an earlier comment: I do like Mark Gatiss but I just wish I could like his stories.
This wasn’t as creepy as I would have liked, but I suppose it’s a good stand-alone episode. Similar to Fear Her, but marginally better.

Forgive my late review – I was working Saturday and Sunday so I’ve only just had a chance to watch the ep. Shocking, I know!

There have been a lot of comparisons to Fear Her. I feel I should duck preemptively, because I liked Fear Her. I also liked Night Terrors.

Alright, there were a couple of things I would have tightened up. Rory’s reaction to Amy becoming a doll was a little understated (she’s your wife, man!) and the ending, with the Doctor finding Amy and Rory sitting on a wall, was a bit lacklustre, but besides that, I really quite enjoyed the episode.

George was brilliant. Absolutely stunning. Hats off to little Jamie. Alex was… very good, given what he was doing. I thought Mark Gatiss dealt very well with character continuity – it would have been so easy at the end to present the perfect dad, whose fears had all melted away, but he didn’t. He stuck with the mindset of the character. Actually, my main niggle about the character (and this really is petty) is that the accent felt forced. Particularly towards the beginning, he sounded like he was trying too hard to sound uneducated, which bugged me.

The dolls house was great. Of course, it was rather easy to guess where Rory and Amy were, thanks to the preview from last week showing us the dolls, but the suspense was still very effective in that respect, since they didn’t know it.

George being a Tensa – I thought the explanation was a little garbled. I know, I know, they were about to be transfigured into wooden dolls, and enunciation is hardly the priority in a life or death(ish) situation, but I think I missed a few details. I got more from the single line “a cuckoo in the nest” than from the rest of the speech put together.

But anyway, all these little things are niggles. Overall, I thought it had a strong sense of direction in the script – unlike TCotBS, which went for a twist which felt more like a U-turn. It also had some great Rory/Amy banter (“We’re dead. Again.”) and a very nice contrast between the estate and the dolls house. I think we’ve become a little dependent on emotion-heavy, far-reaching storylines, the obvious one being the continuing arc of River/Melody or the Doctor’s death. As a self-contained story, I thought Night Terrors worked very well.

… still, I can’t wait for TGWW next week. Now that looks brilliant!

Personally i thought it was a very scary episode, espcially since small children watch it and it was on at 7o’clock at night.
I espically hated the song at the end whcih included the doctor dying. Very creepy.
Overall i didn’t real enjoy the episode but next weeks looks very good, can’t wait.

Personally I didn’t like this episode for me Dr. Who has always been fairly upbeat with a few things to give you goosebumps or make you step back, the horror in this way so overdone I was consoling the kids all night who are Normally Avid Whovians… They seen every episode since the original and although there have been a few episodes they required guidance and reassurance never have they been downright terrified and not wanting to watch again.
Doctor who should be accessible to all ages and any “Horror” in it should be in small doses used to create a sense of urgancy or real danger- not to force the younger aspects of the audience away.
I’ll see if they’ll watch next week with me.

@Jimmy
That’s a good point, I don’t have any little Whovians to watch with so I often forget it’s meant to be for children as well. I didn’t think it was scary but I remember being afraid of a Scooby-Doo movie when I was young! So I guess I’ll retract my earlier comment about it not being scary enough :)

After watching Let’s Kill Hitler, I approached this episode with a sinking feeling. Expecting this to be another SM obsessed theme riddle east enders soap opera, I was surprised that this harkened back to what Doctor Who should be. Stand alone drama which entertained. Saying that, the problem with this story is that it is a remake of “Fear Her” The worry is that SM is fast running out of ideas. The comparisons between this story and Fear Her are so very similar. The story itself failed to be scary when it was so obvious that the story was intended to be a scary. I thought the boy, George, was amazing. He was very clever at being a blank canvas and using the fears of those around him to create a world where he frightened himself. I see in earlier comments about the level of “Horror” in this story but basically there was hardly any horror in this story and the directing never really gave the story a chance of being able to being scary, creepy and in any way frightening. The Dolls House, I think failed, in a number of ways. The light from the outside was constant and no one bothered to look out to see where the light was coming from. Overall, a very mixed bag. The ending was the most pointless to date. SM obsession about killing off the Doctor is getting boring and his tendency to try and be over clever is driving away a lot of people that I know. (It’s a good job the BBC are releasing DVD’s from other Doctor’s!) This story could have worked very well without the last 5 seconds.

@Dave
To be fair this episode wasn’t written by Moffat so I don’t think it’s an indication of him running out of ideas. Nevertheless without the last 5 seconds it could have been a stand-alone episode but I think that was a way of tying it together with the rest of the series. Whether or not that was necessary is personal opinion, I suppose :)

@e.p Fair point about SM but the reality is that it is SM responsibilty as head writer to go through these and collect the stories, (I often wonder why they have changed the name from Script Editor to Head Writer?) which in turn leads me to believe that he is running out of ideas. Surely a good head writter would have returned the script to the writer and say “This reminds me of Fear Her”?
As for tying the story to the rest of the season, it doesn’t wash with me. I think it needs to be a stand alone series, so people are able to follow what is going on and enjoy each story on it’s own merits. But, as you say, this is a personnal opinion.

@Dave
Many, many,many shows have stories that go through the whole series; people seem to follow those well enough. Unless you think they should aim this at the people who only tune in every now and again.

I thought it was nice to have a standalone episode; you need those. Sandwiched between “Let’s Kill Hitler” and the much-anticipated “Girl Who Waited”, this episode faces the same problem as the pirate one — it’s bound to suffer from comparison. I found it an interesting story, and probably quite accessible to children as it addresses something many of them deal with — the terrors in the night. Sort of like the whole bit about the crack in young Amelia Pond’s bedroom; grownups dismiss their fears, knowing them to be ridiculous, but that doesn’t make the fears less. It just leaves the kids feeling alone. I liked that this addressed the helplessness parents feel in such a situation. I also liked the performance of the boy; many people thought he came out flat and wooden until the very end, where he’s suddenly happy, but that was precisely what the script called for. The boy who never cries, who has strict rituals to cope with his fear, who shows little affect and struggles to communicate his terrors — as the mother of a high-functioning child on the autism spectrum, I could relate to that very much. I screen these before letting her watch these, as she is easily frightened; I think she’ll like this one, actually. We’ll see. It did unfortunately remind me a little of the Indigo Child nonsense that was fashionable in the 90s.

Some have commented on how similar this was to “Fear Her”. That’s a fair opinion, but I don’t think it’s a serious criticism. Everything is like something else; that’s the nature of storytelling. It’s all derivative. This had some crucial differences; for one, the child never became malevolent, even when possessed; he was putting them in the cupboard not because he was angry but because he was absolutely and utterly terrified. For another, he wasn’t possessed; this was actually him being him. Which leads me to my biggest concern in terms of plot holes — the Doctor seems pretty unconcerned with the tremendous power this child wields, even though the child has already demonstrated the ability to seriously harm people.

That plot hole likely wouldn’t have been as much of a problem if it weren’t for my single biggest pet peeve about the revived series — the stories are too damn short. 45 minutes is not enough time to properly develop an idea like this. You could easily get three nice cliffhangers into a story like this, really milk the claustrophobic environment of the dollhouse, and explain some of the “huh?” moments in the episode’s backstory, as well as the fact that the father has to accept the Doctor’s story far too readily in order for it to resolve in time to fit the broadcast slot. So that’s my biggest complaint about the episode — I wanted more. ;-) It does work, but it’s another short, almost vignette-ish episode when I’d really prefer some meatier stories.

As far as story arcs versus individual stories — one of the things I always loved about Who was that you could jump in anywhere. I’m not sure that’s true anymore; for the past season, I’ve been almost completely unable to discuss it with my husband for fear of ruining his future enjoyment of it. It’s like Seasons 3-4 of “Babylon 5″, which I actually enjoyed thoroughly. It can be a lot of fun, but it does have a drawback, and that’s that it’s not the “adventure of the week” format that it started out as. Moffatt has said that once the River Song arc is resolved, it will be returning to a more traditional form (though I doubt it’ll ever go back to the 4-parters with 25-minute episodes, alas) and as much as I’m enjoying these arcs, I’m actually looking forward to that as well. Both formats have their strengths, and it’s good to do both.

I’m still not expecting The Girl Who Waited to be brilliant given MacRae’s track record with Doctor Who so it’s nice to have a good episode and a brilliant episode to cover up what could be a failure this week.

i new i wouldnt like this eipisode since i seen the trailer and i didnt it was stupid in my opinion to come from the last one to this and this weeks looks like it will be rubbish too i heardly ever moan about doctor who but i was really dissapionted with this one and im not certain and this saturdays on either