After last years’ dismal ‘Victory of the Daleks’, renaissance man Mark Gatiss returns to his writing duties on Doctor Who with ‘Night Terrors’, a straight out fright-fest complete with spooky dolls and a creepy haunted house. Gatiss famously delights and revels in the macabre and the gothic, so “Night Terrors” should be a triumphant return to form…

It wasn’t.

Now don’t get me wrong, ‘Night Terrors’ has a great deal to recommend it. It’s beautifully shot and the art direction throughout is marvellous. There’s a fantastic atmosphere of gloom and mischief in the opening scenes and, at its heart, it has a decent, fairly solid sci-fi idea – a cuckoo in the nest. There was also imagery in there that I’m sure sent many of the nation’s little darlings scurrying into their parents beds, smelling faintly of wee.

But this was not enough to save it.

Firstly, the episode – with its monster in the wardrobe, parent at the end of their tether, ‘alien’ child causing mayhem, random old lady, and love-will-conquer-all ending – gave me a distinct and unsettling feeling of déjà vu. Hadn’t I seen this before? Yes I had, in the Season 2 Doctor Who story ‘Fear Her’.

While not a direct retread, it bore enough similarities and repetitions to make the story feel highly derivative and, as a result, deeply unsatisfying.

And then we have the pacing of the story which was nothing short of bizarre. New-era Doctor Who gives you 45 minutes within which to tell your story. To spend a whole 20 of those minutes on set-up and exposition is a brave move which, in this case, failed completely.

The problem was that the story doesn’t introduce an actual threat to any of the characters for half an hour. HALF. AN. HOUR. In 45 minutes of screen time!

Sure, people were occasionally whisked off to a spooky house but, once there, they roam the halls unmolested and unthreatened. Meanwhile, the Doctor, rather than actually talking to the kid at the centre of the trouble (or realising there was any trouble to be had) has a very long chat and a nice cup of tea. It took him even longer to turn his attention to the obviously dodgy wardrobe and, when he did, he got scared and… had another cup of tea and another long chat with Dad. Are you bored yet? Because I was.

Indeed, no one opens the sodding wardrobe at the centre of the story for a whole 35 minutes, leaving just 10 scant minutes for the Doctor to diagnose the problem, get chased a bit and finally convince the alien cuckoo child to stop throwing silly tantrums. This he does with a cunning combination of yelling at the child (which really works on scared kids, so I understand) and convincing his Dad, who has just found out that his son is a) not his and b) an alien, to give him a hug.

Now that all sounds like a bit of a rant on my part and, indeed, I may be being a little unfair. The aim of the episode was surely to scare the kids silly and I’m sure, in this regard, ‘Night Terrors’ was a roaring success. I’m probably being a little churlish and miserly to expect anything more from it.

But my issue is this. Mark Gatiss is a brilliant writer. A truly, hands-down, brilliant, wonderfully creative mind capable of structured, intelligent and inventive comic drama. So why is ‘Night Terrors’ such a dramatically dull, highly derivative, poorly-paced mess? This is Mark’s favourite show, his dream job, an opportunity that he’s dreamt of since he was a nipper. It should have been brilliant.

And that’s what’s so frustrating.