Doctor Who: Fear Her

Who could have imagined after the stupidity of Love & Monsters that the next episode, Fear Her, would have been just as bad... if not worse?

Doctor Who has always had a light-hearted, humorous side, but Fear Her has you laughing at the show, not with it.

The Doctor and Rose turn up in a suburban London street (Dame Kelly Holmes Close) in 2012 and discover children have been going missing.

A 12-year-old girl in the close, Chloe Webber (Abisola Agbaje) has bonded with a stranded alien 'child', called an Isolus, which is lost and alone and wants the love of a large family - it came from a family of four million! However, it achieves this end by getting Chloe to draw people and objects and then absorbing their real-world counterparts into the drawings.

The episode's faults are plentiful, ranging from silly monsters (the "scribble creature", which might have been a great idea but in reality just didn't work) and a tedious, linear script from Matthew Graham (better known as the co-creator of Life On Mars) to a most uninspiring, unconvincing and unsympathetic assemblage of supporting characters (I really had no interest in their trauma because I couldn't relate to anyone).

The Doctor seems slightly 'off' in this episode, as if the writer couldn't quite get a handle on his character, but nevertheless David Tennant does his best, with Billie Piper's assistance, to hold the story together.

The script may touch on key themes of Doctor Who, such as "loneliness" and "alienation" (albeit in a very heavy handed way), and drop in mythos buzz words like "The Shadow Proclamation" and The Doctor's status as a father, but it lacks any drive and excitement, actually veering heavily into boring for much of its duration.

Fear Her is a wet, sorry script choking under an avalanche of cheap, easy chiches about love and hope, and nightmare monsters that can be defeated by singing a happy tune.

Famously, Fear Her was a last-minute replacement for a Stephen Fry script that would have been too expensive to produce without major rewrites. Perhaps, in years to come, Fry's schedule will be clear enough to do the necessary revisions and - under Steven Moffat's guidance - we might finally get to see the story that should have been here instead of this disappointment.

Love & Monsters was frustrating because it was simply bad, but Fear Her commits the worse crime of being tedious.