Night Terrors (Doctor Who)
In the episode, alien time traveller the Doctor (in his eleventh incarnation played by Matt Smith) and his companions Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) and Rory (Arthur Darvill) decide to make a "house call" to Croydon, to an eight-year-old boy named George (Jamie Oram) who is terrified of almost everything and especially dreads the cupboard in his bedroom.
The Eleventh Doctor decides to make a "house call" after his psychic paper receives a message from George, a frightened 8-year-old child, asking his help in getting rid of the monsters in his bedroom.
The Doctor, taking the guise of a social services worker, finds the right flat, and meets George's father, Alex, while his mother Claire is working a night shift.
Meanwhile, Amy and Rory, while taking the lift down, suddenly find themselves in what appears to be an eighteenth-century house, but shortly discover most of the furnishings are wooden props.
The Doctor, suspecting that the wardrobe contains the evil George fears, opens it to find its contents are simply clothes and toys, including a doll house.
[7] In the scene in which Alex and the Doctor are in the kitchen they open and close the fridge as they are talking; this was not in the script, but improvised by Mays and Matt Smith on set.
[11] The scene in which Purcell sinks into the carpet was filmed with actor Andrew Tiernan on a hydraulic platform that lowered him into green-coloured liquid.
[18] IGN's Matt Risley rated the episode 8 out of 10, praising Gatiss's script which "moved the drama and horror straight into the miniaturised heart of a rickety creepy dolls house, with a set of villains that — while never as memorable or scary as their look may suggest — used sound design to its most effective".
[19] Russell Lewin of SFX gave "Night Terrors" three and a half out of five stars, saying that it had "many great things going for it but perhaps hasn't quite got that little extra something that would have turned it into a classic" and that nothing seemed especially unexpected.
She also praised Matt Smith's performance and Arthur Darvill's Rory, who was "quickly becoming one of the funniest companions of the new Doctor Who", though she commented that Amy's transformation into a doll was "kind of glossed over within the story itself" and "there was never any doubt that it would be reversed".
He criticised the idea to follow up a story arc-heavy episode with a standalone one, as he felt it "served as a speed bump for the forward momentum started in "A Good Man Goes to War" and continued through "Let's Kill Hitler".
He thought that its "biggest flaw" was that George was sidelined in favour of Alex, which missed an opportunity to make it a story "about little boys overcoming fear and fighting off the monsters in their closets".
[18][21] McPherson noted the "tacked-on" nursery rhyme foreshadowing the Doctor's death was included, though he thought it was "unintelligible" and did not count.
