Who’s there?
Get it?
This week’s episode has been a tough one to write about because it’s the first episode of this series which didn’t do it for me. I’ve been trying to work my way through some thoughts - to conjure some thoughts, even - and it’s been difficult. The episode just hasn’t left much of an impression on me. Perhaps it was damaged by the fact that I watched Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2. the night before which is a film designed to fill your senses. In comparison the sci-fi adventure in Knock Knock seems a paltry affair, the sound design is subtler, the jokes are gentler and the songs, instead of being retro pop hits (as Bill would probably listen to) they’re Little Mix. Perhaps it’s a little unfair to entirely judge a production team’s months of hard work on such fading impressions but I have seen it twice and that’s what I’m left with. It is not bad. There are bad things in the episode as there are good things. Lets go through some of them now.
Knock Knock, like the rest of series 10 draws its inspiration heavily from the show’s past. The story is structured like a classic base-under-siege story but with the fresh twist of featuring students as the side characters in the place of underwater scientists, space technicians or future salvage crews. The students make amusing characters, coming in a number of shapes and sizes, they make a racially diverse ensemble. Mike Bartlett has taken his ability to write hyper-realist contemporary tales, as displayed in his 2015 series Doctor Foster, and applied it to his memories of being a student. It seems as though everyone has memories of living with a peculiar array of characters when they first enter the flat share scenario. From the crowd stands out Harry, the bug-eyed oddball who accompanies the Doctor to the basement in the later half of the episode, acting as a surrogate companion. Perhaps actor Colin Ryan is a ludicrous over-actor, one of those who doesn’t take their role in Doctor Who very seriously, or perhaps he is portraying a believably insecure young man who is overcompensating by pretending to be individual, to stand out in his new group of friends. There’s some special moments of authenticity, such as when lanky Paul takes the rejection of his advances on Bill with a smile, because she’s gay, so he didn’t stand a chance, so his masculine pride can remain untarnished. Although it’s impossible to know what was written by Bartlett and what was written by Moffat moments like this seem a little further outside of Moffat’s wheel-house so I would congratulate Bartlett on bringing that impression of authenticity to the Doctor’s crazy adventures.
Speaking of “Doctor Who” Capaldi is on full ludicrous-mode this week. It’s hard to tell whether Bartlett is just a fan of the moments when Capaldi’s Twelve fails to comprehend social cues or whether Moffat felt that this slightly grimmer episode deserved a little levity in the form of wacky-Doctor high-jinks. Capaldi’s behaviour reminded me of those Gareth Roberts scripts which launch Doctor Who into full-on pantomime. The Unicorn and the Wasp, The Lodger and The Caretaker differ from Knock Knock in that they are focused on the ridiculousness of Doctor Who with threats ranging from background to completely forgettable. Comparing Capaldi’s performance in The Caretaker it does please me that Doctor Twelve has left his bullying days in the past, his treatment of Danny Pink in those episodes verging on vile at times. His current personality combines elements of the dotty grandfather with the personalities of those posturing students who just want to belong. His is a cocktail of young and old much like the Matt Smith Doctor and yet it feels fresh. I like the imagery of this Doctor’s development. His first series revolved loosely around Clara’s workplace of Coal Hill School, High School. His second series saw him take a series of adventures throughout a wide array of landscapes and planets, Gap year (he even took up playing the guitar moodily in his room). And in this series he lectures at Bristol University, University. We’ve seen this Doctor go through an identity crisis in series 8, break up with his first codependent companion (almost analogous for girlfriend) and now advance into adulthood. Capaldi’s time, by coincidence or by design has been a coming of age story. How relevant for a Doctor at the beginning of his new regeneration cycle.
I do miss the moody guitar, though.
The problems with the episode are shared with the other episodes in this series but they matter more to me here because the whole thing failed to grab me. Perhaps because Doctor Who is in it’s tenth season, it’s twelfth year since its revival, this season feels a bit like a “Best of Hits” CD that a band might release after their tenth year together. On the one hand all of the wheat has been picked for you and only the strongest elements of their work remain but on the other you rather miss the odd little track which captivated you while listening to their earlier albums. Honey Pie doesn’t appear in The Beatles’ Blue album but it’s one of the highlights of the White. It’s a bizarre song, experimental and not for everyone but then, it’s that it’s charm? It’s an idiosyncrasy. This series has been filled with excellent episodes but the beats have been familiar. This episode, rather than having familiar beats is more superficially familiar to me. It feels like a retread. We saw wooden people in The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe, we heard knocking in Midnight, we saw an old haunted house in Hide, we experienced a science fiction fairy-tale and spirits of wood (dryads) in In the Forest of the Night and we saw a load of random stuff happening before everything was explained in a single room by the Doctor for ten minutes in Time Heist. Repeating ideas is not a problem for me as long as those ideas are handled well, if they say something new or experiment with them like variations on a theme but I’m not sure that Knock Knock holds together particularly well as a story.
What an episode like this needs is one central concept for all of the characters and scares to revolve around. Smile had simple emotions vs complex emotions. Hide had the concept of a love story being disguised as a ghost story. The Girl Who Waited had the notion of devotion between two people at it’s core. Knock Knock is messy in this way. I don’t know where the story comes from, what it's core concept is meant to be. I understand that the plot is an attempt to “Make the ordinary scary” which is fair enough, it’s a classic Doctor Who writer’s trope but the central gimmick of “Monster under the bed” (Listen/ Girl in the Fireplace) “Mimicking” (Midnight) “Plastic straws” (Smith and Jones) needs to connect to something more meaningful and emotional. I simply don’t see his working. I don’t understand the logical connection between real life thing (creaking wood and knocking), alien (alien woodlice who eat people) , way to fight the aliens’ effects (high pitched sounds) and emotional core of the episode (oedipal relationship between damaged son and sick mother.) I can imagine children staying in a big, old house on holiday and being spooked when they see a woodlouse sneak out of a crack in the wall or see the rings in the wood panelling and imagine their faces being sucked into it but I think that as a story, Bartlett needed to have more glue to hold together the components of his episode. Without it it’s not a story, it’s just things happening.
All of this said, I really don’t think it’s a bad episode just a flawed one. It is held together by a lot of good ideas - even the repeated ideas are improvements on their predecessors. I like the episode more than I like Forest of the Night, Hide and Widow. It’s stronger in terms of pure entertainment. It’s funnier, the idea of a human woman who has been preserved as wood is a more nuanced idea than The Doctor just meeting some people who are made of wood who proceed to do nothing. Also, the guest star David Suchet is, obviously a very strong actor. His performance is good because it clearly represents one consistent character who contains within him stark contrasts, kindness and anger, the innocence of a child and the drive of a self-righteous killer. During my first watch I felt the twist that swapped the parent/ child roles between himself and Eliza was just peculiar because it didn’t have much significance on the plot. The second time I enjoyed it more because I saw how it shone a completely new light upon the character. The revelation makes him all the more sinister, taking him from a selfish killer to man whose oedipal dedication to his mother has preserved him in time as the Dryad’s witchcraft has preserved her. They are both sick. His house with its outdated power-cables is like his mind which doesn’t recognise the prime minister of the present day. His pale skin and awkwardly formal dialogue make him stick in the mind far longer than the alien woodlice will.
Overall, I’m sorry that this episode didn’t do so much for me as I recognise a great deal of inspired story telling and interesting ideas going on here. Perhaps I just have a little Doctor Who fatigue which would be a real shame. Lets hope Oxygen can revive me.
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