Listen [SPOILERS!]

[jjpor]

Well, after last week's delightful Sherwood Forest romp, this week we have what the trailer suggests is going to be something very dark, moody and scary, which according to the director who made it might be one of the best Doctor Who stories ever (and Moffat's first "ordinary" story that wasn't a premiere, two-parter or finale in a long, long time, possibly since he became showrunner) . He would say that, though, wouldn't he?

The proof of this pudding will be in the watching, and this is your official DbyA thread for discussing this episode. Please keep all discussion in here and out of other parts of the boards (and the DW Live chatroom!), and also please be sure to use whatever your preferred method is to conceal any spoilers you post here.

And with that...prepare to be scared...!

[johne]

]I think the show lost me at the beginning, with the line about how everybody has a nightmare about someone being under their bed. Because I never did. I remember reading The Midnight Folk, where Kay is frightened of imaginary tigers under the bed, and it's taken for granted that the child reading it will get what he's on about and (presumably) sympathise. I had to have it explained to me. But then, my childhood bed only had an inch or so of ground clearance, and my childhood nightmares therefore came out of the walls

I think I also have a philosophical aversion to the theory that a given facet of one's personality can be traced back to its own specific childhood incident. It reduces people to automata: pop in the stimulus, and out comes the programmed response (or, in this case, the wodge of verbatim monologue). I tend to think of it as the All Day Sucker theory, after the terms in which P G Wodehouse parodied it.

'I don't think I can go as far as that,' he said, 'but he certainly ought to see a psychiatrist.'
'A what?'
'One of those fellows who ask you questions about your childhood and gradually dig up the reason why you go about shouting "Fire" in crowded theaters. They find it's because somebody took away your all day sucker when you were six.'

I didn't care for it when RTD did it with the Master, and I didn't particularly care for it rearing its ugly blanket-covered head tonight.
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