Live-Blogging Doctor Who, Season Two: "Fear Her"

I would normally begin a live-blogging session with a brief, pithy account of my day thus far. But I can’t. So I shall only say this: I am so, so, so tired, and I haven’t even had a class yet this semester. If I don’t sleep through the night at least once this week, I think I might die.

Also, it’s going to cost me $700 to repair my car. (Which could be worse, I suppose.)

So it’s convenient that I really hate this episode.

And here we are for the London Olympics 2012. It looks to be a normal, if slightly Edward Scissorhands style, suburb, but there are missing-child posters up on telephone poles and a sense of foreboding.

RANDOM MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN: May, are you all right?
RANDOM OLD WOMAN: No, love I’m not.
RANDOM MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN: Do you want me to call a doctor?
RANDOM OLD WOMAN: Doctor can’t help.

Ow! An anvil hurts when it bounces off the top of your head.

Either way, the old woman is begging people to take their children inside, but as we see a young girl scribbling and singing “Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree,” a young boy disappears out of his own garden.

Then the TARDIS materialises the wrong way in between two shipping containers, so he can’t open the doors—he has to dematerialise and rematerialise so he and Rose can get out and enjoy the 30th Olympiad.

The Doctor is blathering about cakes with edible ball-bearings (they’re called “cachous,” I believe, Doctor), but Rose spots the missing-child posters and makes the Doctor behave himself for once.

Of course, once she draws his attention to it, he’s off down the street without paying her any further attention. Sure, he has great hair, Rose (apparently). But I bet he doesn’t listen to you talk about your day—and God forbid he would do the washing up.

Then Rose helps push a Mini down the street, and I have no idea how this relates to the rest of the narrative.

Nick laughs at this episode, and I tell him to behave himself.

Meanwhile, the Doctor is blathering in the front garden of the boy who disappeared in the beginning, and the father is not terribly impressed. Honestly? I can’t say I blame the father in this instance.

The Doctor claims to be a policeman, but no one believes him.

Instead, the people start eating each other—blaming the council workers who are fixing the roads in preparation for the Olympics. Of course, I assume it’s coincidental that when they say “people like him,” they’re talking to the only Afro-Caribbean character on screen. Doctor Who has done some interesting work with immigration issues in the last couple of seasons, but not in this episode.

Oh, the plot? The Doctor is sniffing things (literally sniffing: Rose asks him if he wants a hanky) and blathering on about his “manly hairy hands.”

The girl we saw in the beginning is still drawing—her mother asks why she drew Dale (the boy who disappeared in the beginning) so sad, but the girl—Chloe—says she didn’t draw him sad: Dale made himself sad, so she’s going to draw him a friend.

The mother tries to distract her with the Olympic torch, but I’m with Chloe on this—the Olympics are dull.

Chloe is drawing Dale a cat, just as Rose sees and tries to befriend a tabby cat. But the cat dashes into a box, and when Rose turns the box up, the cat is done.

The Doctor is thrilled that something has enough power to pull a living organism out of space and time.

DOCTOR: I mean, this baby is like, “Whoa, I’m having some of that.”

What is wrong with me that I’m not seeing the dialogue in this as charming? It could be my general tiredness. This episode just feels distinctly flat to me.

Rose and the Doctor are wandering around looking for clues, and Rose finds a garage door that is banging ominously—behind it is an animated ball of string. Well, no—it’s an animated scribble. We just saw Chloe scribbling frantically on a piece of paper, furious that her drawings weren’t working the way she wanted.

In the TARDIS, the Doctor comes to the same conclusion as I just did. Which wasn’t really a conclusion, because we just saw it.

But Rose remembers the girl she saw in the street: Rose says even her own mother looked scared of her. (Rose’s conclusion is based on an apparent assumption that all children can and do draw, but that’s not Rose’s fault.) Chloe’s mother is not keen to let the Doctor in, but even though the Doctor doesn’t try to persuade her at all, Trish (the mother) lets them both into the house and, in passing, tells them that her husband was a bastard.

(And why would Rose ask why Chloe’s father isn’t involved in her upbringing? Rose of all people is familiar with the concept of a single-parent household.)

The plot? Oh, Rose is hiding in a cupboard and then sneaking into Chloe’s room.

In Chloe’s room, she sees the drawings (and we see that they’re changing, but not changing on camera), but she’s startled by something banging in Chloe’s wardrobe.

Chloe is downstairs: she’s aggressive and says she “tried to help them, but they don’t stop moaning.”

Rose, meanwhile, opens Chloe’s magic wardrobe, but instead of finding Narnia, she finds a drawing of a face of man, a drawing that bathes the room and Rose in red light.

Trish is furious and distressed that Chloe would draw her father. But she won’t accept that Chloe’s drawings are actually moving until the Doctor hypnotises her—or whatever you call that thing he does where he convinces people to trust him even though they’ve only known him for five minutes, and he’s been really rude to them and stuck his fingers in their jars of food.

Oh, wow! He’s doing a Vulcan mind meld on Chloe! That’s awesome. I wonder if Spock taught him how to do that.

Oooh, Shadow Proclamation! I wonder if that will come back at any point?

There’s been some technobabble about what Chloe can do, and now Chloe is whispering about being an alien, separated from her siblings. (Apparently, they’re intensely empathic beings, and they require their siblings and the imaginary worlds they build while floating through space for thousands of years. And this one has been separated from its siblings and its pod—the pod is drawn to heat, which will probably be a plot point later.)

At this point, the wardrobe doors start banging and the man’s voice behind it starts screaming again, but Trish’s singing to Chloe calms both of them down—her daughter and the drawing of the man.

I really don’t think Rose should be lecturing Trish about how she copes with the recent, sudden, traumatic death of her abusive, drunken husband. Rose is, after all, about nineteen. I’d be furious if she lectured me about my parenting.

The alien is looking to replicate her family, and we see a shot of the Olympic stadium as the Doctor talks about the vast number of siblings that the alien would have. But oddly the Doctor doesn’t seem to wonder about whether or not the alien would seek to trap a large group.

Ah! And there, as Rose says to the Doctor he doesn’t know about children, the Doctor says, “I was a dad once.” Oh, we know, Doctor. You were a grandfather once, too. But I don’t think your nineteen-year-old girlfriend needs to know that, do you? Or she doesn’t want to know that, at least.

In the interim, Chloe has drawn the Doctor and the TARDIS into a picture.

Cut to the Olympic torch getting even closer to the stadium.

Rose, on her own, chats to the council worker, asking him if anything has landed in the street—he chats about his lovely smooth road surface, which Rose starts hacking to pieces with an axe, trying to find a spaceship. Which she does, but I don’t think that’s much comfort to the council worker.

Yes, why did Chloe’s mother leave her alone? That makes no sense!

But Chloe has drawn the entire stadium of people—80,000 spectators plus athletes—into a drawing. This wouldn’t have been possible if her mother hadn’t left her alone.

Thankfully, Rose has an axe, with which to chop down a young girl’s bedroom door.

Wait, what?

Chloe is now drawing the entire world on the wall. But the Doctor has managed to add something to the drawing—how? Does his sonic screwdriver have a crayon setting?—and Rose realises that the Olympic torch will provide the heat necessary to restart the alien spaceship.

Wait, what?

The Olympic torch is a beacon of hope and fortitude and courage and love? No. It’s a torch. It’s a bloody expensive torch. And that’s it.

Oh, whatever. Rose throws the spaceship into the torch, and all the children reappear. The Doctor doesn’t, but why not?

Wait, if all the drawings have come to life, that means all of them have—and Chloe and Trish are trapped in the house with the dead, abusive husband. Except this is different, because he wasn’t a real person trapped in a picture, but just a memory and a nightmare.

But apparently he can be banished by a rousing chorus of “Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree.” As someone largely raised in Australia, I question whether that song has any particular magic to it. But what would I know?

The Doctor still isn’t back, but the spectators in the Olympic stadium are. But the torch bearer is in some trouble. He might be in trouble—well, he fell onto the ground.

The commentator asks whether the Olympic dream is dead. Well, the torch bearer is, apparently.

But, no! The Doctor grabs the torch and—leaping over the dead body of the previous torch bearer—carries it triumphantly to the cauldron. Because the torch is a beacon of hope and love! Except the love that might extend to a man who has collapsed in the street in the middle of a public event and might actually be dead.

I’ll repeat that: the torch bearer has collapsed in the street, but no one cares.

Some blathering about cakes and a reunion between Rose and the Doctor.

ROSE: They keep on trying to split us up, but they never, ever will.

Ow! And I’d only just shaken the headache from the last anvil to hit me.

But the Doctor says there’s a storm coming—and that’s the credits.

Only two episodes left this season, but thankfully they’re both better than this one.