NuWho Review: Series 2 Episode 11 "Fear Her"

Matthew Graham

**Spoilers**

If you have not yet watched this episode, please go and do so before proceeding do yourself a favor and never, ever do so!

                Is there any chance that I could spontaneously combust or fall into a coma? I’m not particular about the details I just want something to save me from having to watch this episode again. No one is going to take up the invitation to hit me over the head with a shovel? Drat! Guess I have to go through with it. Okay – take a deep breath and have your tranquilizers ready. After seeing this episode you’ll either need them to restrain yourself from murdering the writers or you’ll be dead to the world from boredom. But before we dive into the shark-infested waters, here’s a completely unrelated GIF of Chekov to cheer you all up:

               Feeling better? I know I am. In interest of my keeping my sanity I’m going to structure this review a bit differently than usual – just so I don’t have to spend too much time thinking about this travesty of an episode. First I am going to list all of the good things that happened within the story. Really I am going to try hard to find something good about this episode since it is my experience that there is rarely an episode that doesn’t have at least one cute or funny or strong moment hidden somewhere midst all of the crap. It often takes some digging but I can usually find something. Even within awful episodes like The Long Game or The Idiot’s Lantern there is usually a scene (like Adam’s head –hatch or The Doctor messing with the minds of the police) that attempts to help make up for the rest of the episode. Whether or not is succeeds is what makes the difference between a mediocre episode and a total bomb.

So – happy thoughts, happy thoughts…

1. We get to see The Doctor emulate Spock.

2. The Doctor also absently helps himself to some marmalade like a naughty little boy. This scene is rather adorable whenever you are first watching it - along the lines of his spying on Madame de Pompadour.

3. The Doctor carries the Olympic Torch. While admittedly forcibly over-emotional and cheesy, not to mention highly improbable, somehow this particular scene makes me absurdly happy. It is also responsible for crushing my dreams and shaking my faith whenever 2012 came and David Tennant was not there in full Doctor costume carrying the torch…

4. Rose actually does something of merit this episode! One of the biggest problems I have with Rose is that she rarely does anything to help (while being lauded as the best companion) and whenever she does it is usually so small that we almost miss it. Most of the time The Doctor will spell something out for her, she will react, and then he will praise her like she just invented four-dimensional physics. None of her character flaws are ever addressed and she is given undue praise that manipulates the audience into liking an unlikable character. But in this episode Rose actually earned a few stripes. This is the one move I think Matthew Graham made in the writing that actually benefited the ‘plot’: he took The Doctor out of the action, removed the TARDIS from the equation, and left Rose to figure out the mystery and solve it herself. Thank you, Graham! Your episode stinks and I never want to see it again – but at least you did right by Rose.

5. The Doctor diagnosing the little girl is another scene that has a wee bit of merit. Seeing The Doctor interact with children is always interesting (that’s one of the things I love about Eccleston in The Doctor Dances) and it was nice – if a bit oddly placed – to hear him clue Rose in to the fact that he had children before. The Doctor is very giddy and silly this episode. In some parts it worked (like the tingly grass scene) and in others not so much (like the fingers on lips nonsense). But it is always nice to see the writers man up, even if just for a few moments, and give The Doctor a few mature lines. There’s only so much of the over-caffeinated Tigger I can take before it just becomes tedious and dull.

         And that’s all of the happy thoughts I can possibly dredge up without serious pain or mental ruination because no amount of pixiedust or goodwill can save this train wreck of an episode from the horror of bad that it is. So let's take a look at the bad before my nerve fails me.

1. The plot is missing. This episode is such a mess! First it is about children disappearing, then about a huge graphite bouncy ball, then about a little girl who is possessed by a lonely alien child, then about that admittedly original idea going clichéd and trying to consume the world, and then it is about the little girl having to overcome the spirit of her abusive father. It would be one thing if all of those things were merely plot elements that tied the whole thing together; but while watching it I was never sure what exactly was going on and why I should even care.

2. The premise is badly executed. To be quite honest, when I was reading the description of this episode I thought it sounded interesting, if a bit childish. The idea of a little girl using some sort of telepower to trap people in her drawings could have been a decent episode. The plot of an alien child lost and alone and just wanted friends to help warm their cold life could also have been interesting, and it would have been nice to have a villain that wasn’t interested in subduing the entire world. Even the plot about the girl (for the life of me I can’t remember her name – even while watching the episode) having to overcome the specter of her dead abusive father could have been done right. Hey – they managed to pull off a story about Satan, didn’t they? The problem here is the way they did it. Not only is the focus all over the place – but we have ‘the power of love’ again save the day. Sometimes that works, given the right combination of explanation and acting, but here it really doesn’t.

3. The guest stars’ acting are deplorable – especially the little girl. Granted this can’t be an easy part to play, and she clearly didn’t have the best direction, but every time she was on screen I just wanted to shake her and give out a few pointers of what not to do. The scribbling looks completely fake (there’s no way sweeping a pink crayon back and forth in a zigzag could produce the TARDIS) and that whisper thing she does, while slightly effective the first time, quickly went the way of “FEED MEEEE!” and just became an annoyance. The mother was a bit better, but she had absolutely no chemistry with her ‘daughter’, which is a shame because it could have saved that scene at the end with the demon dad.

          This episode is easily the worst out of the Tenth Doctor’s run – beating out The Idiot’s Lantern because at least that episode had a plot. There is little to like about this episode, the fun moments being brief and quite sufficiently buried under all of the mediocre, lazy awfulness. I would like to call this episode forgettable, but I can’t. It’s actively bad. Episodes such as Fear Her are the ones that make me question just why I ever started watching Doctor Who in the first place. Because of the marmalade scene, I’m going to conservatively give this episode a .01/5. There – in the immortal words of Frodo Baggins:

What did you think? Do you agree with my rating? If not - what would you say differently?