Doctor Who Series 10: 7 Big Questions After 'Knock Knock'
Who's there?
As mysteries go the cliché ridden
haunted house story is full of them, and Mike Bartlett’s debut Doctor Who
episode Knock Knock is no exception. This deceptively simple tale, filled with
many unanswered questions, hints at Bill’s desire to have a life outside the
TARDIS as well as the Doctor’s reluctance to leave her alone.
The Doctor ought to be guarding that mysterious vault of his, as Nardole would no doubt be telling him, but instead he seems determined to keep a close watch on Bill. Good job too if this latest episode is anything to go by. With or without the Doctor, Bill seems destined not to have an ordinary student life.
We are a long way from the rift in Cardiff and as far as we know, in a welcome break from recent companions, Bill’s backstory is unexceptional. So why are alien forces at work in Bristol, seemingly independent of the Doctor and the TARDIS?
It’s unlikely that we’ll get an answer to such a question, for if such coincidences didn’t happen we’d be left without a story worth telling, but from the allusions to past Doctor Who adventures to the contents of the vault there are plenty of things we can reasonably conclude.
7. Where Else Have We Seen People Made Of Wood?
If Eliza looked very familiar then that’s because she’s not the first wooden character to have appeared in the show, and that's not counting the various acting disasters over the years (and Mariah Gale's performance is anything but).
In series
one, the Ninth Doctor and Rose met the representatives of the Forest of Cheem
among the alien races gathered on Satellite One to watch the Earth’s
destruction. Another tree-like race appeared in the series four adventure
Silence in the Library, but only after they’d been pulped and turned into reading
material.
A more likely antecedent to Knock Knock are the wooden inhabitants of the mysterious forest in the 2011 Christmas special, The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe. Both stories revolve around motherhood and loss, and find their resolution in the power of a Mother’s love.
We’ve never seen a human turned into wood in Doctor Who, but there have been several movies where a similar metamorphism takes place (Mr Sycamore 1975, Cheluvi 1992). There are more potential homages in the notion of humans being trapped in walls, with Doctor Who’s example being Flatline. The chilling image of the half-converted student calls to mind Han Solo’s frozen in carbonate form and Robin Williams being sucked into the floorboards in Jumanji.