James Willets continues his run-down of Series 7b, but ‘Hide’ isn’t chilling him for the right reasons.
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‘Hide’ is one of those weird episodes that happen every series or so, when the team in charge of Doctor Who get bored of the usual sequence of historical-alien-future adventure serial, and decide that what the show needs is a good old retreat into other genres; primarily horror. And as with all of those episodes before it, the classic horror setting and tropes are abandoned two thirds of the way through to explain that it’s all just another sci-fi baffler, and that’s not a Werewolf, or a vampire, or a ghost, or a great pumpkin; it’s an alien pitched up on Earth.
These episodes usually aren’t all that great – ‘Vampires in Venice’ stands out for its campy attempts to create an accurate flavour of medieval Venetian life, if medieval Venetian life had included the threat of consumption by horny cosmic piranha girls. Add to that the ‘witches’ from ‘The Shakespeare Code’, the ‘Werewolf’ from ‘Tooth and Claw’ and the Evil Living Scarecrows from the ‘Family of Blood’ two-partner, and you start to build up a picture of Doctor Who struggling to do the monster mash in an enjoyable or sensible manner.