10.6 Extremis

So, it is Missy in the Vault. Well, of course it is. It had been heavily trailed (everything is heavily trailed) that she was appearing in this season. Who else was it going to be?

Do you remember the one with the Sea Devils, where Missy is in prison on an island fort (with crossed dueling swords over the fireplace, just in case) and the Doctor visits her, because she is his best friend, and remarks “there were a lot of people who thought you should be executed.” The Doctor intercedes on his enemy’s behalf, but she gets out, and does terrible things. So by all means lets take that one tiny little line amplify it into a huge set piece with a cast of thousands. Taking small lines and amplifying them is very much what New Who is for.

We’re not quite half way through the season, and it feels like we have already reached the end-of-season cliffhanger. We’re consuming our plot-biscuits faster than we can bake them. In Season 8, it was obvious to most of us who “Missy” had to be; but we still went through the motions of pretending to be surprised when she said “I couldn’t very well carry on calling myself the Master” at the end of episode 11. This time, we’re told before episode 6 is quite over that, yes, the least imaginative fan theory is right and, yes, it really is Missy in the vault. Which means that either Moffat has something very big indeed lined up for episode 12, or else he is is doing something very peculiar with this season’s structure.

Or, of course, that it’s a huge red herring — a gigantic magic haddock — and when the Doctor opens the door in episode 12 it won’t be Michelle Gomez at all but John Simm.

Or Matt Smith.

Or which ever lady the Doctor is going to regenerate into at Christmas. 

“Or John Hurt” is sadly no longer an option.

*

I wish I had been present at the original meeting; when someone looked up from his paper and said “I have it, Doctor Who does the Da Vinci Code” at the exact same moment when someone else looked up from his notes and said “I have it, Doctor Who does the Matrix” and Moffat looked up from his dark throne and said “Both together.”

Doctor Who does the Da Vinci Code is probably an historical inevitability. Robert Holmes destroyed Doctor Who so comprehensively in the winter of ‘76 that most of us don’t remember anything before that. He consciously re-imagined Gallifrey as the Vatican, full of scrolls and parchments and ornate robes and forbidden documents and forgotten heresies. (I am sure the Vatican isn’t a bit like that in real life. I imagine it's more like the common room of a rather exclusive boys school, or the dusty vestibule of a very old parish church.) The Da Vinci Code always had a whiff of the Deadly Assassin about it, whether Dan Brown had heard of Doctor Who or not. One of Doctor Who’s most renowned supporting characters first appeared in a Patrick Troughton story called The Web of Fear which also featured the iconic Yeti taking over the iconic London Underground. It was written by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln. The crackpot conspiracy theory novel The Da Vinci Code was based on a crackpot conspiracy book called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, although not sufficiently closely for a claim of plagiarism to stand up in court. And the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was written by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. It follows that Brigadier Alistair Gordan Lethbridge Stewart shares one sixth of his cultural DNA with Robert Landon.

The Web of Fear was suppressed by the BBC, and the story of the rediscovery of the lost text would be worthy of Dan Brown, or at any rate Indiana Jones.

The Deadly Assassin was based on the conspiracy theory thriller The Manchurian Candidate, which was based on I Claudius, and so on. It includes one of the most infamous episodes in the entire history of Doctor Who. It seems that when a Time Lord dies, an electrical scan is made of his “brain pattern” and these “millions of impulses” are stored on “electrochemical cells”. The Doctor projects his living mind into the system, to try to find out who has infiltrated it. People trying to summarize the story say that the Doctor interacts with “brain storage system” via virtual reality — but the term “virtual reality” didn’t exist in 1976. They also describe it as a kind of “cyberspace”, but the term cyberspace certainly didn’t exist in 1976. The weird landscape through which Missy and her agents pursue the Doctor is referred to, simply, as the Matrix.

If you are maybe between the age of about 30 and about 35 you probably think that The Matrix is the greatest film ever made. If you are significantly older you probably think that it is pretty good and stylish but that the bullet time thing has been done to death now and you aren’t quite sure what all the fuss was about. Which isn’t really to say anything against The Matrix. We all have to encounter the Cartesian paradox for the first time. Maybe everything, including me, is a dream, or a simulation, or an illusion; and if that were true, how could we possibly tell? And the first time we encounter it, it blows our mind, even if the dusty old Philosophy Prof thinks it’s a silly question. If you bumped into it for the first time in the Matrix, then the Matrix rightly blew your mind; us older dudes came across it first in Ubik, or the Republic, or, if we aren’t lying, Tharg’s Future Shocks.

The Doctor shouts “I deny this reality!”; Neo is given a choice between a red pill and blue pill. We sort of take it for granted that if we found out we were in the Matrix, we’d want to get out of it.

The idea that reality is an illusion, created by a malevolent force, and that knowing that it’s an illusion is the first step to escaping from it is very much the kind of thing that the breakaway Christian sects known as gnostics believed in. The Gnostic Gospels are very much the sorts of things you might find in forbidden corners of forbidden shelves of forbidden sections of the Vatican. Or failing that in a nice one volume Penguin Paperback translation in the R.E section of Waterstones. Every single person who has ever tried to read it falls asleep.

*

Last time we talked about the kinds of things we wanted from a moderately good Doctor Who episode. This episode is fully of them. The central motif is a library in the form of a maze with a mad man and some zombie monks hiding in it: a house that is actually haunted and properly frightening, containing a secret worth the effort of revealing. I like the idea that the Catholic Church, being even older and even more significant than Torchwood, automatically knows who the Doctor is. Sort of like Winston Churchill having a direct line toe the TARDIS and the Doctor being mates with Father Christmas. I like the idea that the Pope has to ask for an audience with the Doctor. I like it that the Pope and the Cardinals are played entirely straight and completely sincere and not at all corrupt and even (shades of Godfather III) offer to hear the Doctor’s confession. I like it that the episode still embraces the absurdity of the situation, with Bill finding her first date with Penny being gatecrashed by the Pontiff. I like the broadness of it; that a secret library in the Vatican is not sufficiently cool, and we also have to have scenes in the Pentagon and CERN and that the final scene takes place in the Oval Office because it can. 

I like it that Bill is familiar, but not very familiar with science fiction ideas. Familiar enough to understand the idea of simulated reality when Nardole tells her it is like the holodeck on Star Trek; not familiar enough to say “Oh, what, you mean like Valis by Philip K Dick” when things get really strange. After all, the audience is divided pretty evenly into those who already know and those who don’t want to know, so either way long expositions are a waste of time. Doctor Who is (and has probably always been) a collection of science fiction tropes -- spaceships and ray-guns and robots and virtual realities -- which work in the way everyone expects them to work. So I don’t know in what way the projectors in the big white room were meant to projecting a simulated universe on the walls; and I don’t know in what way Nardole putting his hand behind the projector makes him dissolve into computer artwork, or in what sense blowing yourself up with dynamite frees you from the simulation. (Would Super-Mario kill himself is he suddenly became sentient? Wouldn’t he be just as likely to become obsessed with preventing you from turning the game off?) But it sort of fits into a science fictional consensus of how virtual reality and cyberspace ought to function. We don't ask too many questions. We are really just running headlong to the denouement in the Oval Office where Peter Capaldi and Pearl Mackie get to do a lot of acting.

H.P Lovecraft once remarked that if we knew what we really were we would all do as someone called Sir Arthur Jermyn did and goes on to explain that Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one night. (His family apparently do not even admit that Sir Arthur ever existed.) Which is certainly a jolly good opening paragraph; but when we read on it turns out that Arthur Jermyn had discovered that one of his ancestors was married to a black person alien ape goddess. Which, you know, must have been a bit of blow to him, but still feels like a bit of a let down for the reader. The punchline of the Da Vinci code is a real shock if you are a cultural Christian and haven’t read Holy Blood and Holy Grail. The idea that everyone who has read a certain document commits suicide is bit creepy and a bit silly and certainly had me breathless to know what the big secret was, so it couldn't afford to be a let-down or a cop-out. I think I was expecting a big big revelation about the Doctor Who universe: the Doctor was half human on his mother’s side; the Daleks are descendants of the human race; Curse of Fatal Death is canon. The actual twist is really clever: it really is the biggest secret in the universe, but it’s only the biggest secret in the universe in which the story is happening, which isn’t our universe. Role credits.

*

Is Doctor Who a series of relatively sensible adventures about ghosts and robots and Roman emperors which could have happened to practically anybody, but all of which happen to have happened to one guy during his infinite wanderings? Or is there something about the format which permits and indeed requires you to tell completely mad stories that couldn’t possibly have happened to anyone else? Moffat’s Who has been at its best when being completely mad: the Wedding of River Song and a Good Man Goes to War and The Big Bang are what we’ll remember his era for. Extremis is certainly one of his "mad" offerings.

There’s a certain familiarity to it; the vault is more than a little bit like the Pandorica, the space monks have a touch of the Silence about them. And the resolution, that a simulation of the Doctor inside the Matrix is still the Doctor because what makes the Doctor the Doctor is the idea of the Doctor, is another take on the one single idea which he has been hammering away at since 2010. The Doctor is kind of like an imaginary friend come to life. The Doctor can’t die because he’s a story. The Doctor will have to think of a new name for himself because if he does a bad thing he won’t really be the Doctor any more. The War Doctor isn’t the Doctor because he betrayed the idea of the Doctor. I'll be a story in your head. But that's OK: we're all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one. Maybe the universe itself can’t bear to be without the Doctor.

But I think back to mediocre space cities and risible haunted houses and think "Why on earth doesn't Moffat let rip and be a complete lunatic every week?"

*

If Extremis is a stand alone episode, we can lie back and enjoy the Pope and the zombie monks and the library and the drunk particle physicists blowing themselves up. We can even say that “the whole universe is a computer game” is a decent punchline and carry on as normal next week. But if we think of it as a component in a longer story then all the suicidal gnostic platonism is just there to signal that next week's alien invasion is a much bigger and more important alien invasion than all the other alien invasions there have been over the years. (Telling us how big and bad it is; not showing us it being large and awful.)  And maybe next weeks story will be big enough and grand enough to have been worth the curtain raiser. Because if it isn’t, we are all going to feel very shortchanged. Stories like this run the risk of writing cheques that the rest of the series can't cash.   

10.5 Oxygen

Good Doctor Who stories are all very much alike. Each bad Doctor Who story is bad in its own way. 

I really don’t ask very much. I am aware that Doctor Who is a children’s TV show about a dotty old man and his little friends going to different planets and saving the world from space monsters. I am very happy to curl up with a cup of Earl Grey and a crumpet (with Marmite) and say “injecting micro clones into yourself to defeat a giant prawn, who would have thought it” or “Loch Ness monster swims up the Thames and threatens Big Ben, now there’s a thing.” Doctor Who has to work really, really hard to draw attention to its own stupidity before I stop believing in it. Very rarely have you heard me say “but that’s not what the word ‘galaxy’ even means, you bumbling old duffer.”

Spacemen and monsters, for a start. Spacemen that look a bit like Apollo spacesuits, which is what spacesuits are meant to look like. I guess there is a reason they have to be dome shaped, something to do with pressure, I shouldn’t wonder. I had a space helmet for my fourth or fifth birthday, a plastic one with a visor and a NASA sticker. I think the dome-shaped hats is probably the main reason space is exciting. A big space station, wheel shaped, that makes you think of the Blue Danube waltz and salt and vinegar crisps. There’s an aesthetic which says that space ships are all white and gleaming like a very posh kitchen owned by someone who doesn’t really like to cook; but there’s also a space aesthetic which is all bare wires and metal, like an oil rig, like the distilled essence of a machine. (The question, indeed, is about whether the doors should go shush-shush or budda-budda-budda.) And the idea of space-walking, or just being in space, with nothing between you and the stars, which is both incredibly fun and incredibly dangerous. Give us a ghoulish description of what actually happens to a person’s body in a vacuum, like watching film of surgery or seeing waxworks being tortured in the Madame Tussuad's. 

Obviously, monsters, which are frightening, but not too frightening, but not trying too hard to not be too frightening. If you can come up with something that hasn’t been done before, or not recently, that’s good too. Zombies are good. Spacemen versus zombies. Dead bodies of dead astronauts still walking around in their suits after they have suffocated trying to kill the living ones. Living space men space walking around the outside of the space station in space suits and being confronted by the space walking dead. Very good. 

The Doctor, of course: he’s what it’s really all about; and a grown up human lady to scream and get rescued (although this is the 21st century so she shouldn't scream and get rescued too much.) But she mustn’t have been with the Doctor too long. If she's hung around and got the hang of time and space and became the most impossible person in the universe and the Doctor’s girlfriend, that would stop being much fun. Better for her to be a bit wide eyed and surprised, partly because when she looks through the space ship window and says “wow this is a proper space ship” we can look through her eyes and be all wide-eyed and surprised as well, but mostly so we can shrug and say “oh, yes, the Doctor has shown us space ships before”, a bit like Piglet. But the Doctor being brilliant and the pretty lady being wide-eyed can get a bit much, so it’s even better if you can give the Doctor another friend, maybe say a bald alien man, who is a bit more cynical and on the Doctor’s wavelength and keeps telling everyone to go back to the TARDIS where it’s safe.

(Maybe the bald cynical alien man should be taken to one side and asked not to act quite so much? Maybe he could sometimes just read the line “Let’s go back to the TARDIS” without turning it into “Letttts… GO. Back tooooooooo ther TAR DIS”?) 

Now obviously we’re not kids any more so it’s probably not good enough to just have spacemen and zombies; there probably has to be some reason for it, and there probably has to be some ideas for us to think about. Some good Doctor Who stories took something ordinary and made it frightening (what if your mobile phone turned into a plastic daffodil?), but nowadays they mostly try to be a bit more subtle. Ever one of us checks his mobile phone to see how much battery he’s got left dozens of times a day, so what if that little battery marker was counting down not just your battery-life, but your actual life. Maye the spacemen have to pay for their own oxygen? Very good. How often have you heard grown ups saying “Next they are going to charge us for the air we breath?”  I feel a metaphor coming on. Doctor Who always did incorporate little moral lectures about the true nature of courage and how chess would be better if the black pawns and the white pawns fought the vampires together. 

I’d leave in the joke about workers getting together to fight “the suits”, but drop the bit about  how the Doctor rescuing the spacemen from the zombies accidentally precipitated the fall of capitalism. Grimy industrial futures where everything is ruled by The Company are just as much a Thing as space men and corridors and zombies. 

There has to be a bit where you want to hide behind the sofa only not really. Dead bodies are bit macabre: the space zombies will need to be nasty enough to be scary, but not nasty enough to be really scary. Heads lolled on one side is a good start, and we should definitely see the grown up human lady freaking out when she first sees a dead person standing up. But the properly scary stuff needs to be a bad thing happening to one of the characters and imagining that it might be happening to you. So if you’ve told us all the icky things which happen to a human body in a vacuum, you have to follow through and show us the grown up human lady being stuck in the air lock without a helmet, with ice forming on her face, mostly from her point of view, everything going blurry and fragmented. If you are not careful, that could come out a bit too nasty and scary and gripping for Doctor Who, but that’s okay, because the best bits of Doctor Who always are. 

Maybe, though, don’t go through the whole thing again and try to convince us that grown up companion lady is dead the second time, because we all know perfectly well she won’t be. 

And of course, the Doctor has to save the day in the end because he’s the Doctor and saving the day in the end is what he does. Almost the most important thing in a Good Doctor Who story is that the Doctor should suddenly understand what is going on, and make a plan to defeat the baddies, and not quite tell us what it is, but when at the last minute it works we see how clever the Doctor has been being all the way through and remember why we love him so much. It could involve using scarecrows to make the evil alien robber baron think the castle is better defended than it really is, or it could involve setting up a suicide bomb so that the space zombies can’t kill the surviving humans without blowing up their own spaceship as well. It just has to be clever and a bit mad. And not, in any way, a big red button or a giant haddock that just makes the space zombies go away by magic.

Cliff hangers are good. We don’t get as many of those as we used to in the olden days because there are less serial stories. Arcs and “big bads” are all very well, but really all they do is tantalize us about the final episode, and frankly, we've all worked out why the words “Bad Wolf” are scrawled on the secret vault already. (It has the Doctor himself locked in it. Duh!) The best cliff hangers aren’t the “how will he get out of that” kind, or the “is he going to die” kind, they are the “That changes everything” kind. The Doctor sustained a permanent damage rescuing his little friend from the vacuum? But he won’t tell her about it? Provided you don’t just cop right out next week, that’s just the kind of thing we’re looking for. 

All of which leaves us with not very much to talk about. It is a strange thing, but stories which are good to have watched are easily reviewed, and the reviewers are not much to read; while stories that are illogical, inconsistent and even ridiculous may make a good review, and take a deal of reviewing anyway. 

Bristol Nativist / Slave Trade Apologist Bingo, continued

For no doubt others from our recorded pasts are also likely to suffer the similar biased cultural shredding of Colston and I suspect there will be further opposition from authentic Bristolians…
      R L Smith

The music committee's sole aim, it would appear, is to change the name of a certain Bristol building - something I supsect 90 percent of genuine Bristolians do not want.
     H. W White

And to the rest of you people living here, born and bred: do something. Don’t less this happen. Colson Hall is Bristol’s. It’s ours, yours and mine. It’s not theirs. 
     H.W WHite


While we’re about it why don’t we get rid of everything Italian (restaurants, food shops, etc) for all the slavery the Romans brought to our shores…and whilst on the subject, all our Danish pastry shops for the raping and pillaging the Vikings did to us.
     Tim Lalonde

My family came from France in the late 19th century…We’ve never sought an apology for Trafalgar, Waterloo, Agincourt…
     Tim Lalonde

…if we change the name of the Colston Hall then we also have to look at Wills, Cadbury’s and Fry’s, all philanthropic dynasties but no doubt something in their past would offend some people.
      “A Bristolian with a voting bug.”

While there are  those who would clearly prefer to see the name of Edward Colston eradicated from Bristol altogether, he was and always will be a part of our great city’s history, warts and all…
     Adrian Courtney Smith

Slavery was bad and we all say that now, but…
    “A Bristolian with a voting bug.”

10.4 Knock Knock

Knock-Knock?

Who’s there?

Doctor.

Doctor Who?

Yes, Doctor Who, you know, Doctor Who, off the television, do you get it? 

Doctor Who isn’t the name of the character, it’s the name of the TV show. Also, Frankenstein is the guy who made the monster, not the actual monster

You spoil all my jokes.

Knock knock jokes were really popular in the 1930s. They are a very lazy way of generating puns. Certain first names sound a bit like the first syllables of certain words and phrases. Ha ha.

Amos who? 

A mosquito. 

Arthur who? 

A thermometer. 

Theodore who?

The a door wasn't open which is why I knocked. 

I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue has an item called Late Arrivals at the Ball which is based on the same idea, but starts from punchline and leaves your to work out the feed. So while

Knock Knock

Who’s there?

Archie

Archie who?

Archipelago 

...barely even qualifies as a joke 

“Will you welcome to the geographer’s ball, Mr and Mrs Peligo and their son.....Archie…” 

…really does. Something to do with the time it takes your brain to process what is going on, I shouldn’t wonder. 

The knock knock joke was intended for children, but taken up in a big way by adults. The form is now very tired indeed, and neither children nor adults are particularly interested in it. However, you can still raise a laugh, at any rate from a small child, by using a knock knock joke to make a joke at the expense of knock knock jokes: to make the form of the joke the joke's subject. At a particular age: 

Knock Knock 

Who’s there? 

Europe 

Europe who?

No, you're a poo

is the funniest thing in the world, even though it breaks the rules of the game because Europe isn't anyone's first name. 

Knock knock

Who's there

Doctor...

is such a perfect example of an anti knock knock joke that it both effectively terminates the genre, and justifies its having existed in the first place. But I can't help thinking that it removes all the updock from the original idea. 

This week's Doctor Who story is called Knock Knock. Its one redeeming feature is that it doesn't contain a single knock knock joke. 

We are no longer in the days of benign amateurism, when Douglas Adams beat out scripts in his bedroom on a manual typewriter, so what they lacked in coherence and polish they made up for in being amazing. Knock Knock was written the same Mike Bartlett who wrote that Prince Charles thing which the Daily Mail wet its knickers over. He wins Olivier Awards and everything. Was the Beeb too nervous to tell him just how bad this script was? Or maybe he submitted something coherent and Mofffat’s editing job cut out all the improvements? Would the National Theater accept a challenging new work about students who say "awesome" and "wicked" and use mobile phones as a signifier of youth and modernity? Would any science fiction or horror magazine accept “there are these insects which turn ladies into wood and make them immortal because they just do okay” as a premise? Was it a spoof where the jokes somehow got lost in the post? Or are we in some twilight zone where this is what everyone expect light fantasy-horror to be like.

I mean, it’s a haunted house. A fucking haunted house. Has anyone treated the haunted house as anything other than a joke — as anything other than a fairground attraction, come to that — in the past hundred and fifty years?

I read the Mysteries of Udolpho during a course on English romanticism, which is the only reason to. It’s the classic gothic novel from which all other gothic novels come: with a heroine stuck in a romantic but mysterious house with a romantic but mysterious host; and lots of mysterious noises; mysterious locked rooms; and above all a mysterious black curtain that you mustn’t look behind under any circumstances.

In this or any gothic story the house itself is the main character. Mind you it doesn’t have to be a house. It could be a mansion or a castle or the Paris Opera. It translates into bricks and mortar a particular model of the human mind — all very pretty on the surface, but with locked doors and hidden tunnels and a vast cellar or labyrinth or sewer or bat-cave underneath it, full of terrible memories and forbidden desires…all of which magically go away if you pull down the veil, tear off the mask, or simply switch on the light. The Painfully Freudian Castle also pops up in Jane Eyre and Dracula and other books people actually read voluntarily. H.P Lovecraft is more gothic than the goths but he doesn’t really deal in castles. Too Euclidean, possibly. 

Jane Austen lampooned Udolpho in one of her earlier, funny books, and the Haunted House now survives mostly as a comedic idea. Bats fly out of towers; unreasonable amounts of lightening forks; floorboards creak; doors and shutters slam at random; people are heard moving around in empty room; mysterious music plays. Haunted houses are scary, but no-one is scared. They represent fear without being frightening. They are the kinds of places where you might encounter a funny sheet ghost, or even a friendly baby one, but definitely not the where you’d have a disturbing encounter with a relative you thought was long dead. The original Scooby Doo cartoon opened with the image of a gothic mansion (well, a New England colonial pile) replete with bats and lightening bolts to invoke the idea, not of horror, but very specifically of spookiness. 

Knock Knock is the result of a collision between two non-disastrous ideas for Doctor Who stories. They are smashed together with no regard for disguising the join or making even the vaguest amount of even fairy-tale sense. 

What if a group of students rented a house and found out that it was infested with cockroaches…but it then turned out that the cockroaches were actually evil alien monsters intent on invading the earth? 

What if a group of students rented a house and found out that it had a Jane Eyre style mad-woman in the attic? 

Both ideas would have worked better in a bog standard semi-detached des. res. but the Olivier Award Winning playwright places them in what is obviously and explicitly a Scooby Doo mansion. (Oh god, that lightening!) This requires absolutely everyone to be far stupider than any human being could ever actually be. David Suchet appears from nowhere, shows our characters around a house with no modern wiring, heating or wi-fi and a tower that the are not allowed to look in under any circumstances, and says “Would you like to sign….the contract” and no-one sees any potential downside. 

The house is populated by alien insects which hide in the woodwork but can be called to the surface by certain sounds  — a tuning fork, a record, but not, oddly, a sonic screwdriver. They can emerge in huge groups and consume humans in seconds — a bit like the invisible robot piranhas in Smile, but without even the decency to leave behind some bones for the garden. In the secret tower which no-one is allowed to visit lives landlord’s beautiful daughter. She was dying of movie-lady disease but the cockroaches saved her by turning her into wood. But the cockroaches have to periodically eat other humans to keep this one alive. We are given no hint as to any mechanism which makes this work: no magical explanation which says “they feed on human emotion” or “they survive by sucking the sparkle out of David Suchet’s acting”; but no pseudo-scientific explanation about harvesting squigglon gas which can only be found in burbleon neurons of adolescents either. 

The solution to the mystery is not ingenuity or bravery, but — once again — exorcism. Presumably, someone told the Olivier Award Winning Playwright was that that was what happened in Doctor Who: someone is bound to something, and some third party comes along and unbinds them by very emotionally giving them permission to depart. 

Thousands of questions about the scenario pour over us like a swarm of cockroaches. The Landlord’s beautiful daughter is actually the Landlord’s beautiful mother — this is what passes for The Twist. Many years ago in the Olden Days when his Mummy was sick a little boy found magic cockroaches in the garden and they made her immortal but also turned her into wood while he carried on getting older and older and finding students to feed the cockroaches. The cockroaches also give him the power to to manifest and disappear at will but this is not explained at any level. The Olden Days do not appear to have been any further back than the 1950s. How did it come about that a Little Boy and his Beautiful Mother were all alone in a gothic mansion and what happened to all the doctors and social workers and relatives?

Oh Andrew you spoil all my jokes you aren't supposed to ask questions like that it's only a children's programe no-one but you pays that much attention to it it isn't supposed to make sense. 

For the final denouement, the Landlord’s beautiful mother reveals that she can control the cockroaches with her mind — for how? And can infect her father by touch — for why? And as a final going away present she can bring the dead kids back to life. How? But only the recent ones. Not the ones who died in 1997 or 1977. Why not? 

Bill has acquired five friends who are looking for digs. There is the shy Asian one who Bill is kind of friends with. There is the tall Scottish one who tries to hit on Bill but is relieved when it turns out that she’s gay. There is the geeky one who retires to his room with violin music and gets eaten. And there is the geeky Northern one who hooks up with the Doctor, acting (and I use the word loosely) like an exceptionally gormless old-school companion, wide eyes, gibbering, at no point recognizing what is going on at any level. He is not un-coincidentally called Harry. I suppose Hogwarts is a kind of haunted house; he kept making me think of the very early Ron Weasley.

Apparently, in an early version of the script he was going to be the grandson of an exceptionally gormless old-school companion named Harry. (This would have been the one redeeming feature of the episode, so they cut it out.) 

It appears that these students have only just started at college (the episode ends with fireworks going off for the freshers party) -- but what student only starts looking for accommodation in the first week of term? Don’t most colleges arrange for you to live “in hall” in your first year? And aren’t most university towns full of private blocks of purpose-built student housing? And why are they using an estate agents rather than a specialist short term letting agency? And why doesn’t the letting agency point out that there is no point in looking for somewhere to live in a group of six and tell them to split up into pairs and be prepared to share rooms?

Thin Ice ended up more or less working as a story, despite plot holes large enough to drive an elephant through, because Fun Stuff kept on happening. Fun is in short supply here A 1950s house isn’t as interesting a place to visit as a Georgian Frost Fair, and finding that the kitchen windows have mysteriously locked themselves isn’t as exciting as scuba diving into the mouth of a mile long haddock. 

It is tempting to wonder if there is an overall story ark going on. Knock Knock has a house which is in some sense made of person-eating cockroaches; where Smile had a city which is some some sense made of person-eating robot piranhas. Thin Ice was set in a fairground, and Haunted Houses are mostly things you encounter in fairs. The Doctor excuses the inability of Frank Cottrell-Boyce to think of an ending to Smile by telling a story about a magic haddock, and Thin Ice has a giant haddock hidden under the Thames. This story is called Knock Knock, and the prisoner in the vault keeps knocking, and there was a prophecy at the end of David Tenant that the Master would knock four times. 

But that implies that someone is thinking about what they are doing. On on the evidence of this story, they really, really aren’t. 

In 1964, the First Doctor, on the run from the Daleks, materialized in what he believed was an alien dimension populated by the dark side of the human imagination — Dracula, the Wolf-Man, Frankenstein’s creature, Universal Pictures copyright lawyers, etc. It turned out that he is actually in a literal Haunted House: a “spooky” fairground attraction full of animatronic monsters. This is approximately five times more convincing than anything in this episode.