Day 779: Night Terrors

One Saturday evening in 2011, I decided that I was fed up. After five years of reading spoilers for Doctor Who episodes before I would have a chance to watch them myself; five years of having every little surprise ruined for me before I got a chance to watch it, I decided to take a stand. So instead of reading a synopsis of Night Terrors the next morning, I decided to go with the slightly less than legal method of streaming it. This all meant that Night Terrors was the first Doctor Who episode that I went into relatively unspoiled in a very long time*.

Now, whilst Night Terrors may not be the strongest episode in the world, it'll always be an episode that I'll look upon fondly because I was allowed to be surprised by it. Moments like Purcell and Amy turning into Peg Dolls, as well as the revelation of George as an alien all felt like gob-smacking moments, just because I found them to be genuine surprises. And being able to be surprised for those moments helped the overall tone of the story - taking the peg doll transformation as an example, I was far more struck by the overall creepiness of the stop motion transformation on first viewing than on my most recent viewing a couple of hours ago where I knew that it was just another quirk of the episode.

But that's sometimes the magic of watching a Doctor Who episode for the first time. Unlike almost any other programme on television, you're allowed to try and figure out what sort of story it's going to be. It could be a creepy story about transforming dolls hidden as a simple tale about a young boy afraid of monsters. It could be a beautiful piece about a woman realising who she really is beneath an adventure where you punch Hitler. Or, as we'll look at tomorrow, it could be something truly heartbreaking masquerading as just another story.

*Just putting a small footnote to say that I also watched A Christmas Carol without reading an episode synopsis beforehand, but I'm not going to count it because I seem to recall reading some fairly big spoilers regarding the end of the episode and Abigail's fate a couple of days before I watched it, which slightly damped that supposedly spoiler-free experience for me.