Fear The Little Hellraisers…
Last weeks episode of Doctor Who, though providing an interesting point of view and a fair few laughs, was a very weak link for taking the series. This was remedied with Fear Her, an episode that follows a few really basic suspense points that have always scored high: children are scary when they are strange; you don’t need monsters to scare people; avoid the closet; and, you can scare people by foreboding music and slow movement.
Ok, so the story has some points that match the episode The Idiot’s Lantern, this series’ other suspense-filled episode. There is no physical enemy, it’s all done by power. It takes place in a street during English celebrations, with flags waving outside. People get sucked away. Rose does some deduction. One of the TARDIS crew gets seperated by the power.
Not surprisingly, I liked both episodes, as two of my favourites in the series despite this slight repetition.
Any time there is evil/possessed/creepy children in Doctor Who you know it’ll be good. Look at the happy, skipping girl in Remembrance of the Daleks, the teenage girls who were being evacuated in Curse of Fenric, the young gasmarked child in The Empty Child.
It does seem quite fundamentally evil in any medium too, look at The Midwich Cuckoos, Damien of The Omen or Anthony Freemont of The Twilight Zone‘s episode, It’s A Good Life. The only thing usually more scary is inanimate or everyday items turning murderous.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see this week’s Doctor Who as I’d not long got home from a day of LARPing before it was on. We shall have to do something about that soon though because it did look like it was going to be a good one (and last week’s really wasn’t that good. Peter Kay really didn’t help.)
I’m usually a fan of Peter Kay’s comedy, and there is a very strong history of comic actors being used in Doctor Who, the problem was that they put such a strong personality in such a large role and not as a cameo. Compared with the role of Maureen Lippman and
GodAnthony Stewart Head, earlier in the series, it was quite a disappointing shambles.It was also rather cheap to have the monster be a neighbour of the Slytheen homeworld.