First broadcast 3 September 2011.

A request for help goes directly to the Doctor’s (Matt Smith) psychic paper, taking him to a London housing estate, where the monsters in the closet of a young boy may be real.

When reviewing “The Curse of the Black Spot” I noted it had been pulled back in the broadcast schedule to prevent the first half of Season 6 having too many ‘dark’ episodes in a row. “Night Terrors”, directed by Richard Clark from a Mark Gatiss script, is the episode with which it swapped place. To be honest it did not need shifting: there’s nothing here more frightening than your average Doctor Who episode, and certainly nothing more dark than what is in “Black Spot”. I have read criticism that “Night Terrors”, by failing to acknowledge the events of “A Good Man Goes to War” and “Let’s Kill Hitler”, feels jarring and out of place. “Black Spot” would have done the same thing. Wherever it is placed in the running order, “Night Terrors” is either a self-contained diversion or filler – depending upon on how each individual viewer rates it.

I have been quite harsh on Mark Gatiss’ contributions to Doctor Who in the past, and it is something of relief to find that this is much stronger than the typical scripts he writes. “Night Terrors” boasts cool-looking monsters, makes good use of a limited cast and setting, and even incorporates a clever surprise midway through the episode. This is not top-tier Who by any means – in fact one could be forgiven for forgetting they had ever seen it – but it works in ways that are appropriate to the series and boasts some decent performances and dialogue.

The episode trades in very familiar Doctor Who tropes, including humans being transformed into monsters, a base-under-siege set-up, and an alien menace lurking in suburbia. Perhaps the most striking similarities are with Russell T Davies’ first four season of the new series. It is not just the working class housing estate as the setting, there is an awful lot of Davies’ tenure as producer in the “love defeats aliens” climax. I think it is probably this, and not the lack of story arc connections, that leads the episode to jar with some viewers; it isn’t five or six episodes out of place, but two or three years.

Some decent attempts at a spooky atmosphere are ruined by a particularly boisterous musical score from Murray Gold. I am not a fan of much of his Doctor Who music, but his work here really emphasises my frustrations with his approach. Guest performances are generally decent, including an impressive young Jamie Oram as eight-year-old George and Daniel Mays as his concerned father Alex. Arthur Darvill continues to represent the TARDIS team’s most valuable player, with a typically downbeat line in stressed-out dialogue. ‘We’re dead, aren’t we?’ he despairs, ‘the lift fell and we’re dead. We’re dead again.’

“Night Terrors” is far from faultless, but after the panicky, over-stuffed shenanigans of recent episodes it actually feels like something of a relief.