It Takes You Away

From the folklore of witches to fairy-tale. Say what you will about Steven Moffat’s supposed fairy-tale approach to Doctor Who, It Takes You Away has it all, from a European Hansel and Gretel-evoking woodland cottage, through dark mirror images of dead mothers to ultimately, talking frogs. If Doctor Who were to be truly re-imagined as a fairy-tale, it would surely look something like this.

At its core, the episode has a delicious concept: the lure of dead loved ones. Like all the best Doctor Who ideas, the McGuffin is imaginatively intelligent and beautifully simple: a bedroom mirror on the other side of which is a world just like your own, only a place where you do not and cannot belong. Strikingly, in the mirror world, the images we see have been flipped and it’s disorientating watching a reflected version of our regulars for such a sustained period. It Takes You Away has all the hallmarks of a potential classic. However, it falls a draft or two short of working.

We start with the filmic language of the horror movie: an isolated home, an abandoned barn strewn with dead pheasants and bear traps; boarded up windows and a blind girl hiding under the table. This is the stuff we like to think Doctor Who is made of, but we know secretly never manages to sustain. Director Jamie Childs goes for every horror movie shot in the book though: close-ups of shaking hands on doorknobs, lingering camera shots... It works well but feels rushed because the story never has time to truly creep. It would have made the shock of another world yet more disjointed and unexpected if we were to journey there a good way into a story we assume we understand, given the familiarity of its cinematic tropes. As it happens, the mirror presents itself almost straight away and the thrill of a horror movie is quickly dispersed.

Beyond the mirror, the scenes in the anti-zone don’t remotely work. The first shot of Kevin Eldon’s Ribbons tearing away at the ground is filmed as if he’s just another character we’ve yet to meet. The strangeness of it isn’t marked. There’s no “reveal” shot and no real reaction from the cast. The eight-legged rats he is carrying are remarked upon but not properly seen. We’re simply told by the director: this is what’s happening now. So early into proceedings, there’s no reference point. We haven’t spent enough time in Norway to feel the otherworldliness of this place. There’s nothing bedded in for us to contrast against. I’m not even sure what purpose Ribbons has. He guides the regulars nowhere and they stumble accidentally on a second portal. The flesh-eating moths of which he is so afraid, whilst looking astonishingly robust and frightening in all their CG glory, are pointless. They harm no-one but the already useless Ribbons and Ryan and Hanne simply hide behind a rock to avoid them later. What’s more, the anti-zone is shot in some dingy caves, meaning that despite Childs’s best efforts to make the place seem strange, it just looks drab and unattractive.

I’d much rather have spent half an episode on one side of the mirror and the second half on the other, without the anti-zone in the middle. Even thematically, that structure would work. We could have enjoyed getting to know Hanne and exploring her relationship with her father, had time to allow for the horror movie atmosphere to fully set in and learnt more of the temptation of that mirror world. The idea that Hanne’s father left her alone for a few days whilst he spent a bit of time with the missus doesn’t sit right with the Machiavellian mind that places speakers in the garden to frighten his girl into remaining housebound. Resultantly, their tale feels underdeveloped and their ultimate reconciliation undeserved. No, it’s Graham’s meeting with Grace where the episode really wants to be. In fact, once Grace enters the fray, Hanne’s story is all but stymied. Having spent so much time in the anti-zone, there’s no time now to explore both. Disappointingly, whilst Graham and Grace’s scenes are directed with frosty, painful compassion, neither Bradley Walsh nor Sharon D Clarke really have the acting chops to make them work. There are places where Walsh is almost there but we can see him trying, just as we could at Grace's funeral back in Episode One. And Clarke’s monotonous voice makes dialogue which could be quite lyrical fall frustratingly flat. 

Speaking of dodgy acting, again it’s sadly Jodie Whittaker who disappoints the most, after two hopeful weeks of marked improvements. It seems that every chance she’s been presented with to give her “Doctor Moment” has been squandered. Her wedding speech in Demons of the Punjab was desperately in need of another approach. Here, at the story’s climax, in talks with a frog princess, she just cannot sell the beauty of the universe that Ed Hime’s script attempts to illustrate. Her hands are all over the place again, irritatingly uncommitted, and she doesn’t take the time to paint pictures with her words, finds no dexterity in her samey delivery. Whereas other actors to have played the Doctor have continually pushed at the boundaries of what is achievable in the part, Jodie seems content to muddle along doing the same thing without reaching for those defining moments, without showing us what she’s capable of. We know she can do incredible things. We’ve seen her in Broadchurch. Hers is an exasperatingly vacuous Doctor, lacking charisma and depth. Perhaps it’s the literally “flat team structure” that Joy Wilkinson introduced us to last week, which is responsible for side-lining the Doctor and making the three companions flatline over the last three weeks. Ryan still has Daddy Issues. Graham still misses Grace and Yaz is still nothing like a police woman. The Doctor is just there. After The Tsuranga Conundrum, I was convinced the unravelling of our companions’ journeys was something deliberately paced across the ten episodes. Now, it feels as if the last four episodes could have been broadcast in any order without damaging the leads' individual narratives even slightly.

That said, there is a pleasing imagination at work here and the episode is by no means a total failure. The idea of leaving the harrowing message in chalk on the wall for Ryan to read is gut-wrenching. Eleanor Wallwork delivers a terrific performance as Hanne and only in Doctor Who could a horror movie in the woods, a mirror world, a swarm of killer moths and a talking frog sit well next to one another. It feels however, that the stories Ed Hime really needed to tell, those of Hanne’s mother and of Grace, aren’t what this mish-mash is about. Instead, we spend too much time in darkness with a purple man and his two knives. The real meat of the story is missing. 

We finish with Jodie blowing a sad kiss to a frog. Fairy-tales usually end with our hearts squarely beating for our heroes. Here, we’re asked to feel for a fairly sad-looking prop rather than spending our energies with Graham, Erik and Hanne. There’s an effort in the coda scene between Graham and Ryan to give the tale a more obvious humanity but the characters should have been at the very crux of the story’s climax; not an afterthought. Let's talk with them; not the universe. It’s almost as if the story we were supposed to be told was warped in an alien mirror and we’re left with a disjointed, off-kilter version which, like Grace, like Hanne’s mother, is hollow and simply doesn’t feel right.

4/10

JH