Masterpiece Theatre
Number 4: Fear Her
Sometimes the omens are bad. Midway through Chapter 5 on the
DVD of Fear Her, the DVD player
decided to give up the ghost and jam the disc.
Twice.
Maybe it was trying to tell me something. After all, when
mindless technology decides that something isn’t worth playing, you know you’re
in trouble.
Of all the modern stories integrated into the Mighty 200
survey conducted by Doctor Who
Magazine in 2009, Fear Her ranked the
lowest of them all, in a terrible 192nd
place, just ahead of my beloved Paradise
Towers and behind such horrors-to-come as Warriors of the Deep and the spiky green abomination that is Meglos. The next lowest modern story was
nearly thirty places higher in the survey.
This by some distance makes Fear Her the worst story since Doctor
Who came back in 2005. So what went wrong? Previous Masterpiece Theatres
have pinpointed problems with the script or the direction or the lack of money
available. To some degree all three of these apply here.
Watching Fear Her
is like watching a Doctor Who by
someone who doesn’t quite get it. It feels slightly off, much like the TV movie
did. Now Matthew Graham is a good writer and a very good showrunner; Life on Mars and most of Ashes to Ashes prove this. But Fear
Her (and The Rebel Flesh/ The Almost
People a few years later) indicates that he finds it hard to write to the
constraints and rules of show that he has not created. Initially, the Doctor
and Rose cast themselves as policemen investigating the disappearance of
children, and are reduced to poor pastiches of Inspector Morse and Lewis. They
are better characters than that. No characterisation should hinge on pretending
to be someone from an entirely different show. The Doctor is reduced to
skulking around paths and gardens looking for clues until Rose points out the
obvious to him. And this, as Steven Moffat has quite correctly said, is meant
to be the cleverest man in the room, several steps ahead of us, not a man who
doesn’t know what’s happening until he is told by a chav.
There is a certain lack of logic to the storyline too. If
three children went missing from the same street in the week of the Olympics,
wouldn’t that street be crawling with police making sure it doesn’t happen
again? Bad publicity for London and all that. Alternatively it just needed a
single line stating that the police were too busy with the Olympics to care.
I’m all for setting a story in a recognisable historic event, and pre-empting
the 2012 Olympics is a good idea. However the execution is poor. A group of
about twenty spectators watching the torchbearer pass by is probably incorrect
by about a thousand. I’m writing this a few months before the Olympics so I
could yet be proved horribly wrong and actually only a few spectators turn up –
we’ll see. If I’m wrong I’ll watch Meglos
as punishment. The Olympics subplot seems uneasy with the rest of the story, as
if Matthew Graham was asked to add it in order to ground the story with an
event the audience could grasp. Unfortunately it leads to the scenes on the TV being
mangled by a multitude of melodramatic lines from poor Huw Edwards, and the
bad, bad climactic scene with the Doctor and the Olympic flame in which David
Tennant gives in to the annoying over-exuberance that occasionally marred his
first year in the TARDIS.
The money had obviously run out by now. The CG flame
lighting up is one of the worst effects in modern Doctor Who, and the cast is
kept to an absolute minimum. The locations are minimal and there’s a general
sense of ‘We can’t afford to change it so it’ll have to do’. It’s a shame, as
the concept of the Doctor turning up on your road is a good one, as Night Terrors would prove a few years
later. That said, the fact that the audience never actually sees Chloe’s
nightmare representation of her father actually makes that more powerful,
proving the old tenet that less is sometimes more.
The thing that frustrates about Fear Her is that there is something good there, hindered by a
not-quite-there script and not-quite-there money. Its main crime is being,
well, a little bit dull. It’s certainly not a travesty and is certainly
undeserving of its place in the bottom ten. And, as usual, there is a great
deal to enjoy.
Ten Reasons Fear Her
shouldn’t be left alone:
1.
The TARDIS landing joke. Landing between two
large containers, the Doctor opens the door to find he can’t get out. With a
perplexed ‘Oh’, he closes the door and parks properly. It is reassuring to know
that the Doctor still can’t fly the TARDIS after all these years. The biggest
laugh in a story light on chuckles.
2.
The Scribble Creature is a good way of allowing
Rose (and eventually the Doctor) to make the connection between Chloe and the
disappearances. It’s plausible and clever. Of course a child will scribble out
its mistakes.
3.
Chloe’s Dad in the cupboard. As I said earlier,
the fact that you never see the picture actually makes it scarier. I’m
interested in the scene where Rose finds the picture and she is drawn into the
cupboard by an unseen force which is never mentioned again. Is this the remains
of a dropped idea from when the dad was going to be a CG creation?
4.
Fingers in the marmalade. Pondering the facts as
he stands in the kitchen, the Doctor absent-mindedly picks up a jar of
marmalade and scoops some out with his hand. Rose shakes her urgently as
Chloe’s mum looks on in disapproval. The look of childish dismay on the
Doctor’s face is very Troughton and links nicely to Matt Smith’s subsequent
portrayal. It allows us to remember that the Doctor is an alien and at times
oblivious to social conventions. This is the Doctor, Mr Graham, not the bloke
who pretends to be a policeman. That’s Colin Baker...
5.
Chloe ‘Voldemort’ Webber. Abisola Agbaje does a
very good job in giving the Isolus a different voice to her own. So good, in
fact, that its whispering anger would be nicked wholesale by Ralph Fiennes in
the Harry Potter films.
6.
‘I was a Dad once.’ And so the Doctor’s
backstory begins to creep into modern Doctor Who. For us folk old enough to
remember the old series, this is not a surprise, but for the kids, and
certainly for Rose, suddenly the Doctor is older than they realise. Subtle and
elegant.
7.
Bob, Huw Edwards’ imaginary friend, who never
speaks and is never seen. Real-life newsreader Edwards is saddled with dreadful
lines throughout the episode, and struggles to inject them with any sense of
realism, undermining all dramatic tension. His heartfelt cry of ‘Not you too
Bob!’ is my personal favourite.
8.
The Doctor vanishes off-screen. Chloe Webber, or
rather the Isolus, follows the Doctor and Rose back to the TARDIS. Recognising
the Doctor as a threat, Chloe draws him. As the camera follows Rose, we hear
the smashing of the contraption the Doctor has created to help the Isolus,
leaving Rose alone with no idea how to bring him back. It’s a diluted version
of the Reapers eating the Doctor in Father’s
Day, but it’s an effective scene and probably the stand-out moment in the
episode.
9.
The downbeat ending. The Doctor’s monologue
stating, ‘There’s something in the air. Something coming. A storm’s
approaching’, segues into an epic Coming Next Time trailer that promises Rose’s
death. In a lot of ways this was better than watching Army of Ghosts. At least then we wouldn’t have the watch the
terrible Ghostbusters moment.
10.
David Tennant and Billie Piper, throwing their
all into a story they must have known was weaker than usual. The Doctor and
Rose’s easy rapport demonstrates that they know each other so well by now, and
the arrogance of earlier episodes has gone. It’s the last time we see them
happy together, but the end is fast approaching for this particular pairing.
Fear Her is an average Doctor Who story, but compared with some of
the gems of the 2006 season (The
Impossible Planet/ The Satan Pit, The Girl in the Fireplace, School Reunion,
Tooth and Claw, Doomsday) it looks impoverished and unfinished. It takes
place at the back end of a season that has clearly gone to the limit with its
budget, and pays the price much like Time-Flight
and The Twin Dilemma did, although Fear Her is in a different league to
those two horrors, possibly playing a different sport too.. Another draft would
have ironed out the rough spots and turned it into something sparkling. As it is,
we would eventually see the story in all its glory, but by then it would be
called Night Terrors and be written
by someone completely different. But let’s be clear about one thing: I would
rather watch an average Doctor Who
than almost anything else on television, because to be as good as average Doctor Who is all most other programmes
can hope to achieve.
Next Time: Arc of Infinity
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