On the whole, Series 2 is considered to be one of the weakest seasons of Doctor Who, because its quality tended to swing rather drastically from one extreme to the other. There were certainly some strong episodes, including “School Reunion,” “The Girl in the Fireplace,” and both parts of the series finale, but the season also included some of the worst-rated episodes in the show’s history.
Barring one episode of Series 9, nothing comes close to having as low of ratings as two Series 2 episodes (“Love & Monsters” and “Fear Her”) until the arrival of the Thirteenth Doctor, where ratings become less reliable due to review-bombing campaigns and a lower number of people providing ratings overall. With all that in mind, Series 2 is an excellent chance to explore why some Doctor Who episodes succeed and others don’t.
For this article, we will look back at “Fear Her,” which currently rates at a 5.8 out of 10 on IMDb. Despite having had an actual impact on the 2012 London Olympics, this episode was just not particularly memorable, with several plot elements that didn’t land well. Read on to see what we each thought of this episode and whether it deserves this shockingly low score.
Plot summary
The Doctor and Rose land in London during the start of the 2012 Olympics, where they see that children have gone missing and cars are breaking down for seemingly no reason. After some investigation, they discover that the incidents were caused by a young alien that had bonded with a human child named Chloe Webber.
The alien species is accustomed to billions of siblings, so it uses Chloe’s drawings to trap other children in their family. Chloe’s mother is increasingly concerned by her behavior, especially after Rose reveals that Chloe had drawn a nightmarish version of her abusive father. Chloe and the alien get more ambitious with their drawing-abductions, capturing the Doctor and the Olympic Stadium audience before trying to claim the entire planet.
However, Rose realizes that she can reactivate the alien’s spaceship using the Olympic torch, allowing it to return to its own family. This works, returning all of the stolen people, but the residual energy allows the drawing of Chloe’s father to come to life. Her mother soothes her, so she can finally release the nightmare and be free.
What worked?
James Aggas: Personally, this is the trickiest section to write because so little of “Fear Her” works for me. It feels like an episode that should work, as it has many great ideas. But a lot of it suffers from disappointing execution.
Having said that, the idea of a powerful force turning people into drawings is a brilliant one. The opening scene worked well. But even better were the moments when the drawings moved when you weren’t looking. Re-watching the episode, I was surprised at how little that actually happens, as it was so effective. (Thankfully, Steven Moffat used a similar idea far more effectively with statues the following year.)
I also have to admit that Tennant and Piper are great to watch, as always. I do forget how great their chemistry was. In terms of writing, I think Nine and Rose were more interesting, but the chemistry between Tennant and Piper does help to make even the worst episodes at least watchable.
Meagan Bojarski: There are only a handful of moments that I enjoy in this episode, most of which aren’t really necessary to the plot. When they first land, the Doctor accidentally orients the TARDIS the wrong way, trapping himself and Rose inside until he dematerializes and lands again facing the correct direction. This is just a fun little moment where the show admits that the Doctor isn’t perfect. That kind of quirky character moment is something I miss in recent years.
The other moment is the most famous one, when the Doctor picks up the torch from the previous runner and lights the Olympic Flame. It’s clear just how much he loves being a part of that moment, which is frankly the most enthusiastic he seems all episode. It doesn’t hurt that, when the 2012 Olympics actually took place, they had Matt Smith run the torch part of the way to bring that near-future prediction to life.
Kate Willis: I sat down to watch this episode and was surprised by how little of the actual story I remembered while living for the memeable moments. All in one episode we have the Doctor parking the TARDIS wrong, being jealous of a cat, going on about “edible ball bearings”, holding Rose’s hand, and carrying the torch for the Olympics. David Tennant and Billie Piper were also in fine bantering, flirty form.
Rose was definitely the standout of this episode. The empathetic way she listened to and counseled people while the Doctor was surprisingly flippant, her curiosity to track down clues, and her pickaxe and axe skills really saved the day.
What didn’t?
James Aggas: As I mentioned before, so much should have worked about this episode that didn’t. Children going missing, a possessed child, drawings coming to life - it all should have been much scarier than it actually was. Especially with the whole story set on an ordinary English street. Not on a distant world or in the past, but in a completely relatable setting. This should have been one of the scarier episodes of the season, if not the New Series. So what went wrong?
First of all, the monster itself isn’t scary enough. I get the sense that what the writer was going for was something a little more subversive. A monster you think is meant to be malevolent but is just lonely. We’ve had monsters like that in Doctor Who before, and they can work extremely well.
But in this case, it goes against what the story is trying to be: something dark and scary. Again, we have a monster that possesses one child and abducts others. No matter how lonely it is, it’s hard to make something like that sympathetic. If the episode had gone for a monster that was more traditionally evil, I can’t help but think it would’ve worked better.
Also, as Meagan explains much better below, the episode tries to explore mature themes, particularly abuse, without actually exploring them. It feels like the writer really wanted to tell a Doctor Who story that presented dark, real-world elements in a child-friendly way, but unfortunately didn’t know how to do that. That might be the biggest failing of the episode overall.
Meagan Bojarski: I have two complaints about this episode, one of which is pretty broad but innocuous and the other of which is much more upsetting. The first is that this was clearly meant to be a take on the scary children subgenre, but it’s the most boring Exorcist knock-off I’ve ever seen. This is in part because the episode was written for a younger audience. Because of that, it doesn’t go very far in the horror direction, and it certainly misses the distinctly adult elements of why possessed children are engaging to watch.
More importantly, though, the episode hinges on serious topics like child abuse and kidnappings, but it refuses to actually do much with them. When Rose first notices the missing posters, she asks how a person could abduct children. The Doctor quickly retorts, “What makes you think it's a person?”, and then the episode bears that idea out by having it be the misguided acts of an alien child. But people do kidnap children, and sometimes terrible things do happen. If you’re going to include a topic like that, it’s uncomfortable to have the main character not even consider that a truly evil human could be responsible.
Turning to the abuse angle, Chloe’s mom mentions feeling relieved when her husband died because he was a bad person and Chloe “always got the worst of it,” but it’s just presented as a plot device that explains why the alien chose Chloe. Nobody demonstrates any concern for a child who was being hurt by her father, and he is depicted in a wildly sanitized format. After coming to life, he just keeps yelling “I'm coming to hurt you.” That’s the most vague monster in the world, and certainly not how a victim of abuse would remember their abuser.
I’m not saying that they had to go all-in on the dark plotlines, but why put them there in the first place? The episode was supposed to be fairly light-hearted to cushion the blow of the Series 2 finale, so there was no reason to make it be about child abuse in the first place. But if they were going to, then they should have had Rose and the Doctor be more compassionate toward Chloe. They should have made it clear that the father, when he was alive, was a genuine monster. And they certainly should have had a more impactful way of handling a resurrected abuser than “sing and the trauma will go away.”
Kate Willis: Besides the issues others have mentioned, I felt like this episode was less about a story and more about portraying iconic moments. I do love some fanservice, but the new lore thrown in as well as the overall comedic and disjointed tone made it a weaker episode. I also felt like the fakeout of losing the Doctor was not as compelling or useful to the episode as it could have been leading up to the finale.
Do you agree that this is a bad Doctor Who story?
James Aggas: Definitely. More than that - it’s a disappointing one, at least for this fan. The writer of this episode, Matthew Graham, co-created Life on Mars, which is probably one of the greatest TV series ever made. It has time travel, comedy, deep character exploration, and even scary moments. With a show like that, you’d think Doctor Who would be a perfect fit for the writer.
Unfortunately, “Fear Her” just feels like a letdown. The elements are all there, but rather than working together to create a memorable story, they completely clash. As a result, it stands out as one of the weaker episodes from Davies’s first era as showrunner.
Meagan Bojarski: Yes. I don’t really think this is a good story in general, but it really doesn’t work as a Doctor Who story. The Doctor and Rose are kind of just there, and they don’t grow in any tangible way. There’s no message to the audience, no exciting new additions to our understanding of the world. You can skip it entirely and not miss a thing.
Kate Willis: I don’t think this is as bad a story as it has the reputation of being, but it’s definitely a weaker episode in a weak season and would only be important if you’re looking for more shippable Ten/Rose moments.
What have we learned?
James Aggas: The best Doctor Who stories are the ones that can work for children and adults in equal measure. Quite often, the stories will work because the children will enjoy the monsters and the adventure, while the adults will enjoy the deeper and more mature themes. When it happens organically, we can get some truly amazing stories.
But when a story has different elements for the children and adults that not only feel separate, but clash against each other, that’s when Doctor Who can be at its worst. “Fear Her” is a perfect example of such a story. It wants to be darker, more horrific, and deeper than it actually is. But it doesn’t know how to do that in a child-friendly way, and as a result, badly overcompensates. An episode that’s both frustrating and disappointing in equal measure.
Meagan Bojarski: I think the TL;DR of my rant above is: Don’t make serious topics part of your episode if you aren’t going to honestly engage with them. There are human monsters in the world, and some of my favorite sci-fi and horror episodes showcase that sometimes the aliens or supernatural beings aren’t actually the ones to be horrified by. This episode could have done that, but it chose not to.
By not addressing this side of it, the episode never got to a place where people were really locked in, caring about what happened to the characters. I don’t really think this is an issue of “Was ‘Fear Her’ too childish?” I think it’s that they handled adult topics in such a shallow way that they were neither scary nor enjoyable to watch. Either dive all the way in, or just don’t go there.
Kate Willis: I think this episode had the misfortune of airing after another panned episode (“Love and Monsters”), and viewers who watched it hoping for a return to good form must have been pretty disappointed. It’s not an objectively bad episode, in my opinion, but it’s definitely forgettable.