Twice As Many Teeth: Ignorance is Carlisle

Which of these is not like the others?

What you should do when someone is chasing you and you're not a fast runner
The part of the cow used to make leather
What comes before "and go seek"
The result of trying to say "high tide", but being unable to pronounce the letter "t" ("d" is still fair game)
Any word that is not the title of this episode

The Story

There's a haunted house. A really haunted house. Like, legit haunted.

High five! You saw a ghost!

The ~~Ghostbusters~~ Doctor and Clara arrive and start investigating both the ghost and the lovely couple, Alec Palmer and Emma Grayling, who are inhabiting the Caliburn House. After a deliciously creepy scene, and a beautifully disturbing scene, the Doctor figures out that the Caliburn Ghast is none other than Hila Tekorian (spelling obtained from BBCAmerica), a pioneer of time travel.

"Tacorian"? "Tukurian"? Wikipedia has both of these spellings, and BBC's website just has her listed as "Hila".

She's not actually a ghost; she is merely trapped in a pocket universe where time runs much more quickly, and a ghostly image of her is bleeding through into the real world, disturbing generations of superstitious people, one of whom built a spooky mansion there.

"Hey guys! I just had a great investment idea! Let's go to that field that's been haunted for centuries, and build a really creepy looking mansion there! Guys? Guys...?"

Anyway, the Doctor goes in and finds Hila, only to discover that she's being chased by a creepy thing. Hila makes it back safely, and the Doctor gets stuck for a little while. Clara and the TARDIS have their first fight, but they kiss, make up, and eventually rescue the Doctor from the pocket world.

Happy Endings!

Then, the Doctor thinks some more about the creepy clicky-noise things that were chasing Hila in the pocket universe and him and Clara in the haunted house, and he realizes that, while they're not quite Mr and Mrs. South Carolina, they are just two lost loves, trying to find their way back to each other.

In an alternate universe: "...and so like as ... the Gallifrey..."

The Mystery

Finally! The mystery of the episode was actually interesting! I really enjoyed the spooky spectacle that was this actually-haunted house, and the timey-wimey aspect was nice, but what really held Hide together for me was the explanation.

"A universe is like a balloon. They change in size, there are a lot of them that look similar, they have whimsical colors, and people like to inflate them at parties. Oh, and they're really easy to pop."

The idea that the Caliburn House has been haunted for generations does suggest some sort of timey-wimey explanation, and the answer of having it be someone moving really really slowly in a parallel yet connected universe fits beautifully. To my mind, it's the best explanation for a mystery that we've gotten in a very long time.

Compounding that with the reveal at the end of the two ugly ducklings getting back together, and you have a pretty compelling story.

Timey-Wimey

There was another beautiful thing about Hide that a lot of Doctor Who episodes don't have.

This story could not have been told on any show other than Doctor Who.

Above: Totally relevant to the story

Think about it. Any show could do a soviet submarine, and I'm pretty sure that The Bells of Saint John was just a slight tweaking of The Social Network, but how many other shows could have the main character casually traverse the entirety of the planet's history just to go Ghostbusting?

Giant prehistoric insects. I'm glad they didn't use a spider.

The Atmosphere

Spo~oky!

Gah!

This episode was complete with ghosts,

Candles going out,

Inexplicable cold,

Visions of another world,

Things suddenly appearing over people's shoulders,

Creepy text magically appearing,

Floating mirror-wormhole things,

Gah! And that face inside of it!! What is that?!?!?!

And to top it all off, what could be scarier than a collapsing universe?

All of the actors played the terror of their parts really well, especially Coleman, who again pulled off an amusingly cocky, yet appropriately terrified Clara. Alec Palmer and Emma Grayling were equally convincing as a wannabe-couple that hasn't quite figured out their stuff, either in terms of their ghost or themselves.

But again, I have to give the major acting Kudos to Matt Smith for his portrayal of the Doctor's fear. I can't say that I'm thrilled when this Doctor goes all goofy, but when he's not cracking bizarre jokes, he can really pull off convincing emotion.

The producers are holding his bow tie over the edge of the collapsing universe and threatening to let go.

The Opposite of Bliss

The phrase "ignorance is bliss" always struck me as both horribly offensive and extremely impractical. Not knowing the causes of events around us is one of the most frustrating things, and humanity's collective dissatisfaction with ignorance is the very reason that we spend billions of dollars to send a telescope into space to take pictures of the sky. So even though it was a throwaway line, and done in a humorous way, I really appreciated the Doctor's nod to the absurdity of that phrase.

Next on "The Doctor tackles ridiculous sayings":
"Less is... what's the opposite of more?"

The Grayling-Palmers

Wuv, twue wuv.

Aren't they such a cute couple?

I could tell from the whole episode that Alec and Emma clearly had that kind of nervous attraction to one another, but watching them interact, I never really felt any chemistry between them. It was all either nervousness or business, which doesn't really breed a good long-lasting relationship.

If the romance between the two had been a more central part of the story, I would probably have had more of a problem with the way it was portrayed, but the Grayling-Palmer affair was pretty much relegated to a few throwaway lines in between the interesting parts of the story. So it's really more of a missed opportunity than a glaring problem.

Nitpicks About Time

Here is the Doctor, talking about Hila's time travel.

"What if a second to her was a hundred thousand years to us?"
"From her perspective, she landed three minutes ago."

That tells you how long she's been there in normal human time also! Since three minutes is 180 seconds, this universe will have seen her there for 180 units of 100,000 years, which is 1.8 million years. That sounds like a long time, but for reference the dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago, or approximately 37 Hilas ago. And the age of the Earth is 4 and a half billion years, or about 2500 Hilas. So the molten beginning of the Earth must be a lo~ong time before... wait, what?

Much more than 1.8 million years ago

Admittedly, the show doesn't explicitly state that he took a picture of her at this point in time, but it carries the very strong implication that he found Hila's image there and snapped a photo.

The things is that this mistake would have been really easy to spot and really easy to fix. Just do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, and then either have him say "What if a second to her was 25 million years to us" or allow her more than three minutes, and say that Hila's been there for half a day from her perspective.

Speaking of three-minute increments, the Doctor pretty clearly says that the TARDIS will not be able to make it into the pocket universe and back, and that the pocket universe will collapse in another three minutes. But he spends a good ten or so minutes in the pocket universe, and the TARDIS manages two full round trips. One could argue that he was simply mistaken, but why did he have to give those numbers at all? To increase the tension? Both of those assertions were made in a single throwaway line that procede to then become totally irrelevant in the rest of the episode. There was absolutely no reason to include them to begin with.

Get Rid of

That. ****ing. Screwdriver.

Staring intently at an inane piece of metal.

On the bright side, it's not a plot device. The screwdriver plays zero part in the Doctor's ability to solve the mystery of Caliburn House. On the downside, the Doctor is still wandering around, waving that thing around.

Overall

I loved Hide. I really, truly, did. Hide had a wonderful mystery, a gloriously spooky atmosphere, and a brilliant timey-wimey resolution.

But it still carries with it the smell from all of season 7: the smell that results from writers being careless and not actually paying attention to the content that they write. Fortunately, in Hide, whatever sloppiness there was was relegated to the sidelines, and the important parts of the episode (the characters and the story itself) held together pretty well.

Because of all this, I would definitely rank Hide as a very strong episode, and I enjoyed watching it the many times that I did in order to write this review.

Maybe next time will be more of a... Journey.