Series 10, Episode 4 | 1 part | First broadcast: 6 May 2017 | Writer: Mike Bartlett | Director: Bill Anderson
Cast
- Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor
- Pearl Mackie as Bill Potts
- Matt Lucas as Nardole
- David Suchet as the Landlord
- Mariah Gale as Eliza
- Mandeep Dhillon as Shireen
- Colin Ryan as Harry
Summary
Bill and five student friends move into a spacious old mansion offered at suspiciously low rent by an enigmatic elderly Landlord, on the condition that they never enter its locked tower; the Doctor tags along, posing as Bill’s grandfather, and quickly grows uneasy at the house’s constant creaking and knocking. As night falls, the students begin vanishing one by one, drawn and consumed into the walls by insect-like wood-dwelling creatures called Dryads, and the Doctor discovers the Landlord has been feeding the Dryads a fresh set of tenants every twenty years to sustain them. The truth emerges in the tower: the Landlord is actually Eliza’s son, who as a boy unwittingly used the Dryads to save his dying mother by slowly transforming her into living wood, and has spent decades since renewing the arrangement. Confronting what her “life” has actually cost, Eliza takes control of the Dryads, restores all of Bill’s friends, and embraces her son as the house collapses around them, letting the survivors escape.
Interesting Facts
- Guest star David Suchet, best known as Agatha Christie’s Poirot, revealed he discovered partway through filming that his own family had rented the exact same real house (Fields House in Newport, Wales) for a Christmas holiday the year before.
- Fields House had previously appeared on the show as the haunted “Wester Drumlins” in the celebrated Series 3 episode “Blink.”
- An earlier draft of Mike Bartlett’s script would have revealed Harry, one of Bill’s housemates, as the grandson of classic-series companion Harry Sullivan, but the reference was cut before filming.
- The episode marks celebrated playwright Mike Bartlett’s sole contribution to Doctor Who as a writer.
- The Doctor’s closing line about Time Lords wearing “big collars mostly” nods to the ceremonial robes worn by Gallifreyans since “The Deadly Assassin” (1976), continuing a long-running visual gag about Time Lord fashion.
No Responses