Doctor Who: Top 5 Two-Parters And What Series 9 Can Learn From Them

3. Silence In The Library/Forest Of The Dead

A library is a hushed, tranquil sanctuary for the avid reader. The silence is deafening, and not because everyone is studying. The Vashta Nerada are afoot, fostering a ravenous hunger for succulent flesh on bone. Hives proliferate in the books, and multitudes of them congregate in pitch-black shadows. Stay out of the shadows, so the Doctor says. Eviscerated, skeletal remains preserved in spacesuits implacably roam among towering, musty bookshelves. In this way, each member of Professor Song€™s archaeological expedition is devoured voraciously and gruesomely. One by one, their communicators ghost with eerie static, replaying the quivering, frightened voices of the freshly dead. All of these thematic elements contribute to an exquisitely dark, inventive narrative, leaving a substantial lump in one€™s throat and a not-so irrational fear of the dust in sunbeams. What Series 9 Can Learn From It: From one jump-scare or shocking revelation to the next, Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead keep viewers on the edge of their seats and on the edge of a disturbed psychological state. Nightmares are guaranteed, that is, if you can successfully fall asleep before the Vashta Nerada pluck the meat off your bones. A murder-mystery, teeming zombies, a child's imaginative dreamworld, and a heart-wrenching love story that never was are all woven into a 90-minute saga, enthralling viewers up until the rolling end credits. Every seemingly unrelated element shares a connection that no one could have guessed. A mixture of genres; sinister twists; thought-provoking imagery; and a jumble of deceivingly independent plot developments, all fused into satisfyingly coherent story during the penultimate scenes, describe the perfect ingredients for an engrossing two-part episode.