TV Reviews - Doctor Who 0810: In The Forest of the Night

This week we have yet another Series 8 Doctor Who episode entitled The Happening...er...I mean In the Forest of the Night. Okay fine, not a good comparison. After all, in The Happening the trees actually were trying to kill everyone, while in this episode we only think that they are. Still, these two stories do have something in common: they are both really dumb.

I don't even want to talk about this episode. Keyword for this review: dumb. As in "this episode was so uninspired and unintelligent that it struck me only as dumb", though it was also pretty boring. And pointless. And DUMB. It felt like I spent the last hour wading through molasses, and that in all of that time I only made it a few feet.

And because this is now the second Who episode in three weeks that I don't want to talk about (and really Mummy on the Orient Express feels like masterpiece next to this slow crawl of an episode now, in hindsight), I'm not going to talk about this episode. There is a solar flare that will kill the Earth in a few hours, full-grown trees have grown up all over Earth overnight (even in the oceans somehow, if shots of the entirely green planet are any indication), a cute little schizophrenic girl can communicate with the trees somehow (it's explained how, but it's never explained why it was her), Clara proves that she is a truly horrible teacher, Danny and the entire class (except for any of the ones that we have seen before) are there, but play almost no role, there are pointless fairy tail images thrown in for no reason at all, which are never explained, and the end where we learn that the threes didn't summon the solar flare but are actually planning to stop it is almost as stupid as the revelation earlier that the trees summoned a frackin' solar flare.

This episode was slow, dumb, boring, dumb, headache-inducing, and did I mention dumb? If not for some really cool nature visuals and some adorable killer wolves (how sad is it when I'm routing for killer wolves?) this episode would have been a complete waste in all regards. We didn't even get one of the tacked-on resolution scenes this week or anything! The most interesting part of this episode (aside from the super-cute wolfies) was the opening sequence and the trailer for next week, which will finally address the Missy plot properly, and will again involve a Clara Sue plot, or so it would seem. I give this episode a dismal 1 out of 10. If you haven't seen it yet, don't.