Doctor Who 10x04 "Knock Knock" Review

“Knock Knock” was an okay episode. I think the setup was stronger than the resolution, but that’s just my opinion.

I liked the way they are continually making Bill into a very realistic character. She’s in her twenties. She gets into a group of five other people and they start looking for a house to share. I liked the little montage as they looked around, with how tiny some of the spaces were. I also loved how she used the TARDIS as a moving van and told her housemates the Doctor was her granddad.

Haunted house I was into. Moving in all alone at night? Yeah, that’s a recipe to die, or more accurately, be eaten by the alien lice that live in the walls. Creepy landlord, the sound of little footsteps moving around them, knocking in the walls. Some of these moments were a bit eerie. You knew Bill and the Doctor were going to be fine, but I figured everyone else was fair game to get eaten up. Everything was sealed up and they were trapped in different parts of the house. All seemed lost until they found their way into the tower. Then the episode went downhill.

The Doctor tries to reason with Eliza.

I was getting major season 1 vibes from the entire episode. Not that that’s a bad thing – I really liked season 1 as a whole, and “The Doctor Dances” is one of my favorite two-parters of the series. But the whole resolution of the “daughter” actually being the mother and her sacrificing herself to bring back all the kids who had just died really felt like old hat. As someone said on Twitter, “Everybody lives, Bill. Just this once, everybody lives!” Four out of four episodes which seem to really feel like retreads of past episodes, and I can already see how next week’s episode is going to have a few familiar elements as well. Am I being narrow-minded, or am I not the only one noticing this?

I’m glad they had another scene with Nardole and the vault. So whoever is in there can play the piano and knows that Twelve likes Beethoven. That points toward it being Missy, but I still feel like it will be Simm!Master.

So as we look to next week, we’re given something serious to ponder over: is Bill going to die in the next episode? I saw a headline somewhere a while back that said she was fired, but I didn’t look further than that, so it could have been inaccurate. It looks like it will be the kind of episode where I’ll hold my breath the entire time, and that might be the point.

8.5/10