“Knock Knock” (Doctor Who’s there?) is a typical haunted house story with very little else to go for it. With only the minor twist of alien involvement, though “Smile” may still be technically worse and more obnoxious, this is easily the dullest episode of Doctor Who so far this series.
Bill moves into a new house with five other students, a manor that its mysterious Landlord (David Suchet) is willing to rent cheap, but one which hasn’t seen an update since the 1930s. Once the Doctor sees it though he senses something is afoot, and it’s not long into their first night at the place that they hear unnerving noises, strange things begin happening and people start disappearing.
This episode may be difficult to review because there’s so little substance. It’s plot is incredibly generic. Doctor Who’s done haunted houses before though not often, and for good reason. They’re a huge cliché and this episode doesn’t miss one of them (there’s even a point where Bill discovers a secret passage behind a bookcase for gods’ sake). Sometimes a horror movie can find an interesting avenue, but Doctor Who possibly because of its family-friendly image isn’t in a position to. “Knock Knock” is barely as compelling as a Scooby-Doo episode -actually Scooby-Doo somehow could still make the most bland haunted house premise entertaining. Even the idea of victims being consumed by the house itself which the Doctor discovers has been going on for decades is in no way new, ever since The Shining popularized the creepiness of that notion. The house trapping them in and even the visual of people being half frozen in wooden walls isn’t very scary; and the “dryads” as the Doctor calls them (which looks like swarms of slightly larger woodlice, hardly aliens) aren’t as convincing or as threatening as the scarabs from The Mummy -the Steven Sommers one. Nothing in the episode is genuinely surprising and even the minor plot twists don’t work because you’re never invested enough to care. A part of this is the fault of the writing. I think this is Mike Bartlett’s first script for Doctor Who and it’s not a good one, inconsistent in its plotting and awkward in its dialogue. The Landlord’s supposedly been renting out and sacrificing students since the 1930s, but no one’s ever missed them or suspected anything until now. There’s also a plot device about music being a soother for the house, but it ends up being irrelevant. It’s clear there’s very little care put into the story structure; it almost feels like a deliberate filler until a bigger sci-fi set-piece next week. Which is especially a shame for an episode featuring the great David Suchet.
Suchet is the breath of fresh air for most of his appearances, but when it gets to the climax, his performance is a little embarrassing. Hardly worthy of the great Poirot! Peter Capaldi likewise is trying to make the most of things, and trying not to come off as an old stalker who hangs around his students’ group house. It’s a testament to Capaldi’s strength as a performer and his comfort in his character that this mostly works. Pearl Mackie doesn’t come off as well though. She’s not particularly bad, but apart from some standard reactions, she adds very little. This part especially could have been played by any companion. I was impressed when she called out the Landlord’s story as insensible, but I think the Doctor giving her credit for his next train of thought was unwarranted. The rest of the students are just all boring. They come out of nowhere for one thing, all of a sudden they’re Bill’s friends in the opening seconds and they’re looking for housing. It’s a jarringly rushed set-up. Individually, none of them stand out. There’s a mini-arc with one guy awkwardly trying to flirt with Bill, which she shoots down a minute before he’s taken by the house. In fairness, it does convey okay the awkwardness of a straight person being attracted to someone who’s gay. But none of the other characters have any personality, and only exist to be picked off by the house. They’re mildly annoying millennial stereotypes at worst, forgettable monster appetizers at best.
The Landlord shows up at various points, and when he confronts the Doctor reveals his backstory: that the alien woodlice saved his daughter and that he’s been able to keep her alive by feeding them students, who like the woodlice, become a part of the house itself, every twenty years (this may not be a bad idea, depending on the students). But when they meet the daughter Eliza, in her secluded tower, it’s revealed she’s actually the Landlord’s mother -which changes absolutely nothing. There is no reason narratively why he couldn’t have just been honest from the start. As a child he’d found one of the bugs, saw how it kept his terminally ill mother from dying, and proceeded to spend the rest of his life devoted to keeping her alive -I guess because this episode hadn’t stolen from Psycho yet. But supposedly this twist was to mean that Eliza actually has the power over the woodlice more than the Landlord because she’s his mother, and thus can call the shots (did I mention this episode is poorly written?). There’s the implication of some gaslighting but it’s too late to be effective. Mother and son both die and the house collapses. But the students are brought back to life conveniently to avoid any real death like in “Thin Ice”, though none of the dozens of other people this house absorbed over the years are revived. And the Doctor just offhandedly jokes “back to the estate-agents’”, leaving a bunch of students in the middle of the night dumbfounded.
There were only a couple things in this episode I liked. Admittedly, the design of Eliza is pretty good, hearkening back to the look of mythological dryads and other wood spirits you’d see in fantasy. There’s a shout-out to former Prime Minister Harriet Jones when the Doctor tries to ascertain if the Landlord lives in a present-day time period -to remind the audience this takes place in the same universe as the Tenth Doctor’s era. And I appreciate it for the nostalgia. The only good scenes were the ones away from the house. While I don’t know if it makes sense, it’s a little charming the way Bill strategically places her luggage so the TARDIS will materialize around it (I assume there’s some “Blink”-like technobabble to explain the physics there). I’m liking more Bill’s reactions to the Doctor and that she’s learning more about him at a gradual pace. This week she found out his race are called Time Lords and rightfully makes fun of the name (yes Bill, they do wear robes and big hats -you’d really get a kick out of the outfit the Doctor wore when he became their president). The Doctor mentions regeneration in a comment and when she inquires further, he avoids answering. This may be the first foreshadowing of the Twelfth Doctor’s upcoming regeneration in the 2017 Christmas Special and I wonder if it’s not going to be until then that Bill finds out what regeneration is. Though if two incarnations of the Master are going to be appearing in an upcoming episode, it’ll be hard for the Doctor to avoid that explanation.
The majority of “Knock Knock” though was pretty bad, one of the most forgettable Doctor Who episodes of the Peter Capaldi era, and a humongous waste of David Suchet. The haunted house premise is just that at its most ploddingly basic, and offers no character, scares, or fun. In the words of Suchet’s Landlord “you have brought on nothing but misery and confusion!” The only thing the episode does provide is more clues in its final minutes towards an overarching thread. After a very fast wrap-up (of which I’m not complaining), the Doctor comes down to the vault where Nardole is still talking to whatever’s inside. The Doctor then asks Nardole to leave and talks to the vault himself, dropping more careful hints. The Doctor apparently put a piano in there which the lifeform plays well. He has an interesting line about them both being prisoners, presumably on earth and I wonder what that can mean. The Doctor’s casual around the vault, fearing no hostility as he asks it to have dinner. He offers to tell the story of his most recent adventure, clearly wanting to lull it to sleep. But the being apparently likes the idea of young people being eaten which suggests what many may have suspected, that it’s either a villainous or morally ambiguous entity. Finally, the Doctor enters the vault himself. We see him open the door, but glimpse nothing more than a bright light. It doesn’t look like this’ll be followed up on next week though, as the Doctor, Bill, and finally Nardole along for the ride, are going to be visiting a space station full of animated corpses, which sounds like just the right kind of goofy reprieve to follow an episode like this. How do you mess up zombies in space?
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