Rate and Discuss:In The Forest of the Night

[SiHart]

Burning bright or a damp squib? Can you see the wood for the tress this week?

How would you rate Forest of the Night?

[stephenhannan]

Doctor is super. Cara should not leave.

Why is this so different to DW hstory but so captivating?

[Rob McCow]

Beautiful direction, very entertaining. My toes curled at the explanation for it all, but that was just my toes. The kids on the TARDIS were far too much fun!

[SiHart]

It's good, isn't it?

[stephenhannan]

but where is the TARDIS exclusivity

Only downpoint

[Zbigniev Hamson]

That was like watching something that was being made up as it went along. Did any of that make any sense?

So... suddenly we're in a bit of the forest with a massive glowing light that isn't referred to or explained. Was that meant to be sunlight? Then the Doctor makes glowing things appear, that say they've been around forever and will be around forever, but it wasn't remotely clear what they were or what their motivation was or how Maeve could talk to them or what she had to do with making them do... whatever they did, or even what they were saying half the time frankly.

Then after that encounter the Doctor and Clara are suddenly convinced the human race is about to be wiped out... wtf? Did I miss something? Why?

Then we get the obligatory nonsense science part, then there's a big solar flare, then all the trees vanish and turn into the glowing things (whatever they are) and then.... there's a magic sparkly grow-your-own-sister bush just casually thrown in as the finale?

What?!


Things that were seriously rubbish:

Very poor CGI animals.

Not one single child wanting to go into space at the end. I know that's because the writer was trying to make the "not everyone wants to live like the Doctor" point, but that's not remotely believable.

Worst line of dialogue ever - "I'm getting stressed and when I get stressed I forget my anger management". Aside from being AWFUL, why was that even in there? He didn't then get angry did he? Zero relevance to anything, it just looked like some painfully PC preaching being shoe-horned in. No child/adult/human would ever talk like that.

But for once those awful bits don't even really matter because the whole thing was so bizarrely, insanely nonsensical that who even cares when you've just got sisters who have been missing for a year reappearing, smiling, out of a magic bush just for the hell of it, right after a load of stuff that makes no sense just happened.

Can I rate this ?/10 ? I have no idea what I just watched, it was like dreaming an episode of Doctor Who.

[Jon Masters]

Garbage - after such great stories, how did we end up with this sub CBBC pap ?

[SiHart]

Don't worry, you get the hour you spent watching Doctor Who back later on

[stephenhannan]

So what is so wrong in appealling occasiopnally to the childlike wonder in us all at sometime?

I was 8 when an unearthly child was shown and there is always a place for a childlike wonder in us all. That was the beauty inn this story.

[Jon Masters]

No problem with a less scientific, more fable based story. Lots of problems with an incoherent rambling poorly structured story that seemed more interested in putting pretty pictures on the screen than in giving us believable characters or any sense of progression. And the writer seems to have been given no idea about the characters of the Doctor or Clara. I felt embarrassed for both Peter and Jenna having to be in it.

[dalekkiller]

What is about the Kids at Coal Hill School such annoying little shits? After about five minutes I hoped that a wolf would eat them.

[stephenhannan]

Have you never been 11 with a childs eyes?

Try looking at this not through an adults eyes

And yes children can be little sh*ts but what magnificent Sh*ts they can be

[Andrew Curnow]

I must admit, I don't really know whether I liked it or not. A lot of it seemed to be almost a 'companion piece' to Kill The Moon - an almost-fairytale unscientific 'reimagining' of the real world, an announcement to the whole world, and ultimately a sort of "it all worked out OK in the end" kind of ending.

The floaty-light things sort of reminded me of the spirits of the forest floating around in The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe, so whether that was a deliberate thing I'm not sure. I sort of quite liked the reference to Tunguska, in that I'm sure I once saw a picture of the crater (may have been a drawing?) which showed lots of flattened trees all around.

It was certainly different, I didn't actively hate any of it, and the imagery of buses and taxis and Nelson in the middle of a forest was rather nicely done, but it just.... I don't know, it just sort of failed to really come alive I think.

Also, I agree with ZH about the sister bit at the end - it was sort of obvious there'd be some kind of pay off to the references to the missing girl, but what sort of ending was that? Have the floaty-lights had her all this time? Have they remade her to thank Maeve? Was she in that bush for two years but too embarrassed to mention it? Had she just come home today, but hid in the bush for ha-has? Sometimes, it can be nice not to get too much explanation & thus have to think about things (Tom's appearance in the 50th special being a good example) but this just felt like..... Dunno.

Odd, very odd.

[stephenhannan]

Dunno! Is often a good thing

that's the magic of Who!

I agree with your considered comments

Rage! Rage !the dying of the light

[Andrew Curnow]

I know it's an old & obvious 'trick' to have one character reuse the words of another to reflect a change, but it's one I always like to see used, so I rather liked the moment where the Doctor said to Clara "I walk your Earth, I breathe your air" etc.

I still don't really take to Danny, but he seemed to be well-served tonight and we do seem to at least be heading towards some kind of "you can't have it all" climax for Clara.

[stephenhannan]

Danny is not a character that as of yet I am warming to.
The New Doctor is as yet a different concept.

Is this really one who does not expect the usual 3 year tenure? Is this the one that creates an identity that lasts the decades in the way TB did?

[Zbigniev Hamson]

Have you never been 11 with a childs eyes?

Try looking at this not through an adults eyes

And yes children can be little sh*ts but what magnificent Sh*ts they can be

I've never thought this criticism holds much water. When I was a child that's when I was my most obsessively anally invested in the details and continuity and coherence of the things I loved liked Doctor Who and Star Trek. Things actually making sense mattered MORE to me then than they do now. Back then it was all a lot more real to me and I was less able to look at it like a TV production and excuse things on the grounds of narrative convenience or whatever.

But then, according to tonight's episode, we're not even supposed to expect 11 year olds to even know words like "navigator" and "defoliant" these days, so what would I know about the mental capacity of modern-day children

[dalekkiller]

I'm inclined to agree with Andrew like Kill the Moon there was just something about it that means for some reason I wasn't happy with this episode.

[egdcltd]

Did anyone else think the final scene with Maeve was just a little too... something? (Silly, schmaltzy, unbelievable, I'm not sure which).

[SiHart]

It was an excellent premise, but one I think that needed more breathing space. It would have been far better with another episode to fully explore it all and to make sense of some of the odder aspects of the episode- for instance the lack of people. It seemed unlikely that everyone stayed in their homes as ordered for instance- people don't do that often, do they?

[Andrew Curnow]

That's a good point, Si - the news reports & the shot of a green planet made it clear that this was a global phenomenon, but it somehow felt like a very isolated incident, on a small-scale. Some RTD style crowd-scenes would have maybe sold it a bit better?

[Dirk Gently]

I'm glad it wasn't just me that felt this episode missed the mark & lacked something. As much as I thought Robot of Sherwood was poor it at least had a fairly compelling story, as far as it went, but this just really failed to engage me.
It comes to something when I start noticing stuff on first viewing that I would normally over look until a re-watch...for instance when Clara has her phone in her hand & picks up Maeve's pink phone it is in her right hand, then we have a distance shot & the phones switch places & in the close up they are back in thier original hands. This should have been invisible to me on first viewing but I was so un-engaged that it actually stood out a mile.

I had a feeling this episode might not be my sort of thing when I saw it was going to be a school trip episode. But I was surprised that it wasn't just the child acting that put me off the episode.

6/10.

And the missus walk out of the episode after 15 mins & went to check facebook...that's what a non-fan does with this sort of tale, they leave/switch over!

[dalekkiller]

What exactly happened with Annabelle's sister at the end?

[Si Hunt]

I think I might be the only one that got what was happening with the sister. The little fairy light things communicated with Maeve right? So while they were creating the forest they saw in her mind that her sister was missing and 'recreated' her as a gift.

"I'm getting stressed and when I get stressed I forget my anger management". Aside from being AWFUL, why was that even in there? He didn't then get angry did he?

Did you miss the flash back to him bulling the other kid and beating him up?

Si.

[Si Hunt]

So that was a bit of a mixed bag. Sometimes I feel (as with Kill The Moon) that the production team always have in mind a really admirable approach to Doctor Who, one that harks back to 1963, that if you can imagine it you can have a crack at it on screen, no matter what resources you have. Unfortunately the scope of this was just too huge- good CGI shots of London but, as Si pointed out, it was just noticable that there were no people about. There are buses and people walking around London all night, so where are they? What about all the homeless people and night workers? And people who were miles from home when it happened and got lost? Plus a good 40% of people would, on discovering a huge lovely forest outside, ignore safety warnings and go off and explore.

The Creatures too, didn't work. It reminded me of when you used to get 'dog attacks' on TV (see K9 and Company!) where you get sound of a snarling animal then some footage of a rather tame alsatian trotting along. The inserts of the wolfs etc. pottering along just didn't match the audio and the CGI bits of the evil eyes.

The story left me a little confused. The scene explaining everything had very poor audio and wasn't scripted particuarly clearly. I know these days we are expected to understand things quite quickly, but I feel this very important and complicated explanation needed a "Clara asks what that was all about" scene immediately after it to clear everything up.

It didn't help that it was a far fetched notion piled onto another far fetched notion resolved by a bit of a magic. Doctor Who works well when the alien or fantastic collides with the mundane or familiar, but when it's two bits of alien logic on top of each other, like in "Rings of Akhaten", you just get lost. Again, maybe the solar flare threat could have been established at the end of last weeks, when we could expect the danger to what we know? Being revealed AFTER the weird forest thing made it hard to comprehend them as separate.

I actually thought the kids were very good, considering the risk of a cast of child actors, and this is a story I felt kids might have liked. The class on the TARDIS was very fun, and the forest made a nice setting. I just think the plot was a little far fetched and over complicated, and not explained terribly well. What we ended up with was the entire planet full of magic dust and things appearing and dissapearing leaving the viewer lost and confused.

A good idea, some good scenes, but needed another script revision to make it clearer what was going on.

Si.