Fear Her

This is another one with a dodgy reputation. I'm pretty sure that it's not as bad as everyone thinks it is - but it's still on the wrong side of middling. Fear Her has a few nice moments, but it's a hodge-podge, a muddle of different ideas that don't quite gel and steal time from each other. What's worse is that it feels undercooked and is seriously lacking the confident glow that The Christmas Invasion had in spades.

For a start there's the alien. Normally, this creature lives as part of a hive, emotionally dependent upon its billions and billions of siblings. When it crashes on Earth, it is so desperate to regain this sense of community that it infests the first human it finds and starts grasping other children and stuffing them into some other dimension. It's a good idea (although why send the other children away if it is so lonely?), but the name of this alien that wants to be with its family, indeed the name of its species, which lives (as I said) in swarms of many billions, is Isolus. What? As in 'isolation'? Why would it be called that? That's the opposite of what it should be called. That's like calling the Cybermen 'The Emoticons'. Doctor Who has a long tradition of silly names, but at least the planet Arridus was dry and the Monoids only had one eye. Isolus is a name that only describes the business of the story itself. This is a silly, tiny thing to complain about, but it's an example of how Fear Her feels as if it has not been fully thought out.

Which brings us to the Olympics. Firstly, there's no harm in trying something audacious. Good for them for wanting to show glimpses of the opening ceremony, or the torch relay, that far in advance. And, okay, it looks much worse post-2012, now that we've got an image in our heads of how big and splendid and spectacular the actual Olympics turned out to be. But really, what's on screen here looked quite rubbish even in 2006: the entire hoopla of the greatest show on Earth reduced to half a street, some stock footage of a stadium and a Huw Edwards voiceover. And again, behind the lacklustre execution, the ideas don't make sense. When the people in the stadium vanish, nobody other than Huw cares. The horrendous, startling, Earth-shattering news that 80,000 people have disappeared from the Olympic Stadium either does not reach or does not matter to those lining the streets and cheering on the torch relay just a mile or so down the road. In Series One, in episodes like Rose and Aliens of London, ridiculous incidents like this were sold to the viewer with utter conviction. It was a real strength of the show, but Fear Her can't manage it. This feels fabricated and unreal, even down to the freezing breath pluming from everyone's mouths in 'July'.

The third strand of all this is the drawings. It's a neat idea, a great spooky SF concept, perfect for Doctor Who. But it should have had a whole episode devoted to it, not thrown into this mix. All these good ideas are jostling with each other for screen time, for a chance to be developed and, as a result, it's never totally clear what is going on. The 'real' pictures release their captives at the end, including the Doctor and the TARDIS, but the drawing of Chloe's dead father also comes to life. Why? What happens to the picture she drew of the Isolus? Or the Olympic torch that the Doctor (er, somehow?) drew whilst himself trapped inside a drawing? Did they make it through to the real world too? Why not? If there are rules, then it feels like they are being applied inconsistently at least.

But for all that, the heart of Fear Her, the emotional heft, does feel convincing and genuine. Chloe's mother, Trish, nicely played by Nina Sosanya, is scared of her daughter and desperately pretending to herself that everything is going to sort itself out. But it is her very inability to engage with Chloe that draws the Isolus to their house, and it's only when Trish and Chloe connect that they can dispel the ghost of Chloe's father. It's good, it feels true - but it's a very slender spine that can't quite support the rest of this episode.

And also, as William pointed out, how does the singing make the living drawing go away? "I didn't understand that at all," he said. "Just how was the Father defeated? And how did Rose throw the ship-thing into the torch? It can't have flown there if it needed the torch itself to make it wake up." For all that, he still gave it a 7.

Chris was also a bit confused. "So the girl was the baddy and the goody then? Is that right? They really needed to explain how the song killed the monster." And he gave it an 8! Which, for him, admittedly, is quite a low score.


NEXT TIME...