This episode is probably best described as The Exorcist for kids. The film is one of the darkest ever made and still has the ability to shock those with the strongest stomachs. However, a film where a demon possesses a young girl, shouts profanities, vomits and head twists round wouldn’t be suitable for children. Therefore, there are a number of changes that have been made.

For instance, Chloe hasn’t been taken over by a demon, but an alien. The events don’t take place in a spooky looking house at night but an ordinary suburban street during the day time. The entity doesn’t start performing sexual acts with a crucifix or head turning to gain attention, but instead merely draws the victims to make them vanish.

In a bizarre way, these events are arguably darker than the demonic events of the 1973 thriller by setting the events in the ordinary world. It makes the scares feel closer to home, and we have such events as parents reacting to suspicion to the arrival of the Doctor and Rose. Events such as seeing a child go missing from a garden make the episode darker in a much more human way than the film that inspired this story.

There could have been a problem with this episode, which is something that the makers of The Exorcist almost found, is that it can be a problem to rely so heavily on a child’s performance as the makers of the Harry Potter films have found. This isn’t a problem with the casting of Abisola Agbaje who plays the possessed child so very well. There’s a perfect pitch to her performance as both the child and the alien inside her.

The material she was given could have been so very dark, but it’s a credit to Agbaje that she got it right so that it scared children and would make the alien sympathetic. It’s a performance that is perfectly in tune with the tone of the episode.

It would be wrong to not to mention the supporting cast as they all add realism to their parts. To push The Exorcist inspiration further, Nina Sosanya plays the Ellen Bustyn role while the Doctor takes on Max Von Sydow parts. It her penultimate adventure, it gives Billie Piper the chance to play hero when the Doctor goes missing and indeed does the kind of things that the Doctor does. Making ordinary people better and inspiring them to become better.

This episode though has several plot holes. You can’t imagine a professional runner would just collapse while carrying the Olympic flame and if the alien inside Chloe Webber wanted to gain some friends, why does it gradually snatch people from the estate? Why not just draw a picture of the world in the first place, especially when Chloe has a copy of the Atlas in her world.

What’s even more improbable is that an event that is as well marshalled as the carrying of the Olympic flame, surely the Doctor wouldn’t be able to appear out of nowhere and carry the flame without someone stopping him.

However, these are minor points as the rest of the production is up to the usual high standards and Russell T Davies has always said that getting proper emotion into the script is always more important than a water tight plot, and there’s nothing wrong with that vision of the show than there is anything wrong with Barry Letts and Philip Hinchcliffe vision of the show.

Therefore, Fear Her will be the perfect example of Russell’s vision of the show and the episode will be praised as good entertainment by those who share Russell’s vision of the show.

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