Doctor Who Recap: In the Forest of the Night

By Edwin Davies

November 11, 2014

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I've been watching a lot of The X-Files lately. I've been slowly working my way through the show over the last year or so, but I've been a little more diligent recently because I've been listening to Kumail Nanjiani's very entertaining podcast The X-Files Files, in which he and a guest watch and talk about different episodes every week. One of the more common criticisms Nanjiani has of The X-Files is its tendency to produce episodes in which Mulder and Scully function as little more than witnesses to a strange occurrence which resolves itself by the end of the episode. Those stories can still be good thanks to the dialogue and the performances, but they're not terribly dynamic because they turn the heroes into passive figures, rather than active participants in their own story. I couldn't help but be reminded of that while watching "In The Forest of the Night," an episode in which something crazy happens, The Doctor does almost nothing to solve the problem, and then the credits roll.

Now, that doesn't mean that the episode itself is irredeemably bad, but it does mean that it falls flat as a narrative. A young girl named Maebh finds the TARDIS and says she needs help. The Doctor is shocked to discover that the area around the TARDIS is covered by a dense forest when he should be in the centre of London, and he's even more shocked to discover that he is in the centre of London, and that the entire world has been overrun by trees. Meanwhile, Clara and Danny have taken a group of children to stay overnight at the Natural History Museum, and upon leaving it they find themselves surrounded by the mysterious forest. The two groups quickly meet up and start trying to figure out how the trees appeared, who created them, and what their purpose is.




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And that, for the most part, is it as far as the plot of the episode goes. There's a bit in the middle where Maebh runs off and is menaced first by wolves and then a tiger, only to be saved by Clara and the Doctor, then Danny and the rest of her classmates, respectively, but there's little in the way of plot development until the very end of the hour. Everything else is about funny little moments, such as The Doctor introducing himself to Clara and Danny's class by leaning around a tree like The Cheshire Cat, funny little quips (a girl, upon hearing The Doctor say that he can't believe that none of the children are impressed by the spatial dimensions of the TARDIS: "There wasn't a forest, now there is a forest. Nothing surprises us anymore.") and character development.

Specifically, the episode gently prods the relationship between Clara and Danny. He sees a pile of the children's workbooks in the TARDIS, which in turn makes him realise that she is still gallivanting around the galaxy with The Doctor. Which is weird, because I thought that Danny already figured that out in "Flatline." I like Danny as a character, and I think that Samuel Anderson has done a good job of fitting in to the world of the show, but the show has been a bit slapdash with his relationship to Clara, and what he does and doesn't know about her work with The Doctor.


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