Hide

Ooh this is a good one. Writer Neil Cross seems to be on a mission to make new Who more like the original series. The Rings of Akhaten (commissioned on the back of Hide but transmitted first) felt like it needed the space of four (or more) parts to unpack its compressed tale, harking back to expansive stories like The Keys of Marinus. But this script, although clearly inspired by Seventies Who (the Doctor visiting a country house to poke his nose into a scientist's supernatural experiments sounds like a Third Doctor version of Image of the Fendahl; even the 1974 setting splits the difference between Pertwee and Baker), is perfectly adapted to the slicker modern format.

It helps that this very pared down. It starts off with just two other cast members, the excellent Dougray Scott and Jessica Raine, and, apart from two excursions, the story is contained within the house. Atmosphere is everything. The quiet of the empty rooms; the unspoken, almost despairing tension between Grayling and Palmer (who is haunted himself of course); the legend of the ghost, told in clippings and notes and hand-developed photographs; the restless twitching of the needles on Palmer's equipment. The Doctor does his best to puncture all this - shouting "Boo!", taking selfies, prattling like a jackanapes ("Toggle. Nice noun. Excellent verb.") - but even his manic excitement becomes tempered when he starts to explore the house and encounters unexpected chills, odd sounds and ominous shadows.

The diversions, when they come, advance the story without ruining the atmosphere. The trip in the TARDIS is excellent but it also exposes Clara to a new unsettling perspective, one in which she has already lived and died (and not in the way that concerns the Doctor either). The reveal that the ghost is in fact a time traveller, stranded between moments and stretched out through the aeons, is an excellent 'scientific' rationalisation, but it also fuels the rescue effort, pushing the story forwards into the final third. When the Doctor ventures into the pocket universe it is a strange and disturbing place: only pale grey trees in the mist of twilight, and a twisted thing... It's very nicely realised. The location is not over-complicated; it is eerie and subtly disquieting. The thing itself, the Crooked Man as it is listed in the credits, is brilliantly done: we are given just glimpses, recorded backwards, so that it lurches unexpectedly, an unrecognisable shape, entirely unnatural. The effect is very good indeed.

At the end of all this we find out the real reason the Doctor came here in the first place. He wanted to meet Emma, and to ask her to use her powers to tell him about Clara. It's an important exchange.

THE DOCTOR: What is she?
EMMA: She's a girl.
THE DOCTOR: Yes, but what kind of girl, specifically?
EMMA: She's a perfectly ordinary girl. Very pretty, very clever, more scared than she lets on.
THE DOCTOR: And that's it, is it?
EMMA: Why? Is that not enough?

It may only be a seven episode season, but we have been conditioned to expect an arc, a mystery. As far as the Doctor's concerned, as far as the TARDIS is concerned, there is something odd about Clara, and therefore that's what we think too. We are wrong.