'Knock Knock' review [Mike Bartlett]

Synopsis

Bill is looking for student accommodation when she and her future housemates are invited to rent the creaking old house at 11 Cardinal Road. The house is creepy and the landlord creepier, and soon they find that they aren't alone.

Mike Bartlett is one of several new additions to Doctor Who this series.

Spoiler Zone

The good, the bad and the ugly

David Suchet is a revelation, simply wonderful as the spooky landlord. It's such a shame that he's not able to stay around - couldn't he have been the next incarnation of the Master or something recurring? Unlike a number of villains in the show's history, Suchet underplays the role with a sinister subtlety and then again with his heartbreaking delivery of the line "But I don't want to" as he dies. He is without a doubt the best thing about this episode. The reveal that Eliza was his mother rather than his daughter failed to hit as we had only just learnt that Eliza was up in the tower, but Suchet manages to sell it. The make-up for Eliza is fantastic, although it's a shame that we had seen her already in trailers and in promotional materials.

The landlord's love for his mother and how he can't bear to lose her clearly strikes a chord with Bill, particularly when he rhetorically asks if the Doctor would save his mother if he had the power to. This seemed to set up Bill's asking the Doctor to take her back to see or save her mother. Strangely this never comes to happen, perhaps because it might be a repeat of series 1's 'Father's Day'.

The Doctor and Bill are once again delightful to watch, but the softened and likeable Doctor we (through Bill) have met has become, once again, the embarrassing out-of-touch old man in his scenes with Bill's housemates. He lingers because he has a feeling something might be off, making him feel an encumbrance. Bill's embarrassment of him doesn't help with this; no humour comes from it and we know that her housemates think he's great, so what was the point in this?

In this episode we find that Bill hasn't chosen to fly off into the universe with no ties to Earth, like the companions of Classic Who or the Russell T. Davies era. Instead, like Amy and Clara, she returns to Earth between her adventures. This somewhat lessens how life-changing travelling with the Doctor can be, but with the Doctor having to guard the vault this is inevitable and can't be helped.

Bill's housemates all have some personality and feel like distinct characters, albeit not very interesting ones, but they aren't all particularly strong actors. Harry is almost permanently wide-eyed. The fact that they are all brought back from the dead at the end cheapens the threat of the episode. The Ninth Doctor proclaimed in 'The Doctor Dances' that "just this once, everybody lives" all the way back in series 1, with the implication that this was a rare occasion. Not anymore, it seems. After having the audacity to kill a child in 'Thin Ice', not following through with keeping all of the students dead is quite disappointing. How were they brought back, anyway? Weren't they devoured? Why weren't their predecessors brought back as well?

A good quotation

The landlord: "Hope is it's own form of cruelty."

A bad quotation

Paul: "But either way I was saying we should throw our own party. You know, pop-up! Freestyle! Boom!"

The Doctor: "Put some tunes on!"

The verdict

The episode is somewhat scary and David Suchet is brilliantly sinister as the landlord, but this is very much an average story. The guest characters aren't ones we really care much about and they're brought back at the end anyway. The story most like this one would be the very complicated 'Ghost Light', by the end of which almost all of the guest characters are dead. Why can't this be the case here? The dryads aren't memorable villains and aren't hugely original either as we've seen a number of insect-type aliens on Doctor Who. The prospect of a house devouring its inhabitants was far scarier. Overall, this story stands with 'The Pilot' and 'Thin Ice' as okay episodes.