C+Q - Knock Knock (2017)
We have [2] weeks to wait until Missy's next episode.
It's definitely the Master who's in the vault, aye? We'll get to this week's episode in a minute, but like, aye, it has to be the Master. Question is, which one? Are we being led to assume that it's Missy only for them to reveal it's actually Simm!Master? Personally if I were in charge I'd throw everyone a curveball and have it be Jacobi!Master. There just isn't enough Jacobi!Master in the world damn it. Maybe he was extracted from his timeline at some point before his regeneration in Utopia. Either way, something tells me Series 10 is about to get interesting.
Knock Knock is sort of the end of the first act, not only because the first four episodes are exactly a third of the series but because next week kicks off a string of vaguely interconnected stories that will take us deeper into the main arc. Of the four introductory adventures, Knock Knock is the weakest but at least it isn't following a formula. It isn't the introduction to a new companion or the companion's first trip to the future or the companion's first trip to the past. Instead, it feels like we're actually learning a bit more about Bill as a person and the series is finally gaining some momentum after being on autopilot for the last three weeks. Only two real issues jumped out at me on first transmission: the editing/direction and how 'scary' it is.
Tackling those issues in reverse order, I hate that Doctor Who, a show with infinite potential, still has to lower itself to using haunted houses when trying to be overtly scary. Now I love a good cliché as much as the next sci-fi fan, but it's weird that the episodes that get marketed as the particularly scary ones like Knock Knock, Hide, and Night Terrors are all about scary houses with thunder outside and creaky floorboards. If anything I feel kinda embarrassed for the show. I know for a fact this show can scare the piss out of me in very creative ways but none of those ways are on display in Knock Knock. The most repulsive part of the episode is where the lice are revealed and start crawling all over everything, which to give credit where it's due is properly unsettling. Everything else is kinda meh on the fear scale. As for the editing/direction, some moments are simply unintelligible. One minute someone is wrestling with the shutters and the next they've fallen out the window. Wait, what? And some shots just needed more time to breathe or more context, like the montage at the start that goes by way too quickly with not enough information given. Why is Bill suddenly moving out of her house from The Pilot? Who is this group? Are they her classmates? Apparently not because in the first scene they're just being introduced. Why was Poirot just hanging out outside the estate agent placey? And speaking of Poirot, why is he able to just show up out of nowhere in some scenes? Can he teleport? The bit where Shireen suddenly reappeared out the floor at the end is presented in a pretty jarring and sudden way too, and it doesn't even make sense. It would have made sense if every single student who'd ever lived there suddenly reappeared, or if there was a line about how the new flatmates hadn't been fully digested yet and could still be saved or something, but instead it's clearly just a nonsense happy ending for the sake of it. I wonder if any reference will be made to Bill's flatmates in future. I hope so because otherwise there's no reason why they all lived. Oh, and why is there a photo of the insects with the photos of the old flatmates? That's just stupid.
So what works about this episode? Well I quite like the twist that Poirot is actually Tree Lady's son and that's why he came to show her the fun insects he'd found. I suppose the flatmates are fun too, although I wish the line about Harry's grandfather actually being Harry Sullivan was kept in. It would've given me more of a connection to him as well as it being just a nice bit of gratuitous fan service. David Suchet is good but he goes a little too far to be considered creepy. Suddenly snapping "You don't." in response to an innocent question isn't unsettling so much as blatantly cartoonishly evil, which is a fine acting decision, but the press surrounding this story made me think his performance would be a bit more mysterious and spine-chilling than cartoony. Maybe I shouldn't factor things like marketing in to my episode reviews but to be fair it's part of the way media is presented and consumed these days, and I'd be lying if I said I went into every episode with no expectations. If the BBC didn't want me to engage with each episode in the week leading up to it they probably shouldn't have any overarching stories and just release all the episodes at once like Netflix do. That, and I'm not writing an academic essay here. I don't want to be cold and clinical in my analysis of things that bring me genuine joy, so all of the emotional and metatextual baggage that comes with these things is getting thrown in too.
Knock Knock is a perfectly good episode of Doctor Who but given all the stuff that's about to go down with the vault, I think it's destined to become boxset filler. There just isn't enough here to hold my imagination once it's over. Capaldi is good as always, Bill Potts and Pearl Mackie as Bill Potts continue to be incredible, but the promise of things to come continue to overshadow anything in these introductory episodes. Series 10's first four stories are pretty basic as far as introductions go. Hopefully I'll have more to talk about in the weeks to come.
Next: Oxygen