In the Forest of the Night

It's that way.

I'm not going to lie, I do not like In the Forest of the Night. It is by far the worst story of Series 8.

The plot of the episode is very thin. The Doctor shows up on Earth to collect Clara and find the entire planet overrun by a forest that has sprung up overnight. There is much running around to keep track of the kids that Clara and Danny are watching on a field trip to the museum until they finally head off into space to watch the flare that they are expecting to destroy civilization. Instead the forest absorbs the energy from the flare and then disappears and everyone goes back to normal.

This feels like an episode where a person had an idea for a neat visual in the form of the forest over London and then tried to write something that would match that visual. Aside from a few good one liners and some nice interplay between Danny and Clara, there is nothing good about this story. The children are uninteresting, either fitting some sort of stereotype of weirdness or just downright rude.

Worse is the mental ineptitude of all our main characters, especially the Doctor. It becomes painfully obvious to the viewer within the first ten minutes that the trees have grown up as a means of protection for the Earth. Yet the Doctor and the rest continue to mope around under the idea that they are all doomed due to the incoming solar flare. It becomes painful as you wait for the characters to come to a conclusion you did over twenty minutes earlier.

Even the tone of the story is off-putting. There is a syrupiness in this story that makes you sick after a while. Everything is good, everything will work out, there is no real danger. The cherry on this treacle-fest is the return of Maebh's sister Annabel at the end. She emerges from a bush like she has been playing a game of hide and seek, except that she has been missing for months. You get the feeling that the creatures Maebh had been communicating with recreated her from whatever it was that took her in the first place. It makes no sense and it's an extra tack on of feel-goodness that the story could do without.

About the only positive I can come away with is that the visuals are impressive. The Doctor himself is also funny when he is not distracting by overlooking the obvious. But those moments are few and far between.

I borrowed the disk that this story was on from the library before it was loaded to Netflix to watch Mummy on the Orient Express and Flatline again. It never passed into my mind to rewatch this story. I might someday, but I doubt I would enjoy it.

Overall personal score: 0.5 out of 5