10.12: Fear Her

In which drawings come to life, but the episode doesn’t, possibly.

Broadcast: June 2006

Watched: August 2021

“Not you too, Bob!”

I’ve never quite understood why this one’s so reviled. The ending is schmaltzy, but the rest of it’s quite good? It’s actually about stuff (loneliness, the damage done by repressing abuse). The people becoming drawings and drawings coming to life idea is cool. 

Three possible explanations for the hatred:

1. There’s not enough animation because the money has run out (the scribble monster is rubbish), so it wastes a good idea.

2. The ending is really, really schmaltzy –  the Doctor with the Olympic torch, oh piss off.

3. It is, as Jonny Morris has pointed out to me on Twitter, the exact same story as Idiot’s Lantern a month later. (Disappearances, people looking away, one of the regulars getting vanished leaving the other to save them.)

Although fandom being what it is, we must at least consider the possibility of:

4. It’s the one the production team gave permission to be rude about.

Actually to be fair there’s another problem: Chloe is very sinister but also very badly acted. A lot of the minor characters are pretty annoying really.

...I said it wasn’t that bad, and I enjoyed it (I did!) but everything I can think of to say is criticism. Hmm.

Other things:

• It feels like creepy kids is a mini-genre now? Night Terrors is the obvious other one, but I feel like there must be others? There’s definitely a thread of evil Daily Mail reader episodes including Lantern, this, Midnight, Hungry Earth, etc.

• Interesting that Matthew Graham writes the regulators as investigators more than adventurers (we see signs for the East London constabulary: lol that in Doctor Who world the Met have been abolished, presumably for being awful racists).

• The double threat of abusive dad and aliens means a weird triple ending (the pod, the dad, the Olympics).

• 2012 is further in the past today than it was in the future in 2006, old fans.

• That housing estate looks really depressing.

• The last line, about a storm coming, is awful.