Here’s Why Silence in the Library/ Forest of the Dead is Your Favourite Series 4 Serial

Jonathan Appleton is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

There were some strong candidates for the sought-after title of Kasterborous readers’ favourite story from Series 4 (mostly from the second half of the series, it would appear from the breakdown of poll results). Turn Left, Doctor Who’s take on Sliding Doors starring Donna Noble as Gwyneth Paltrow, was the top pick for many. Midnight, featuring that wonderfully unnerving performance by Lesley Sharp as the unfortunate passenger possessed by… well, we never found out, came in a close second. For some fans the epic finale The Stolen Earth and Journey’s End, with its blend of an Avengers-style team-up of companions, planets being hurled through space and German-speaking Daleks hit the spot.

But in the end it was Steven Moffat’s two-parter Silence in the library and Forest of the Dead, the story that gave us ‘Hey, who turned out the lights?’, ‘Donna Noble has been saved’, and ‘Count the shadows!’ (not to mention ‘Spoilers…!’) that topped the poll, indicating perhaps that Kasterborous readers like their Doctor Who to be chilling, intricate, mysterious and a bit cheeky as well.

Yes, it’s impossible not to mention River Song, the flame-haired archaeologist who has the Doctor an advantage, in any retrospective covering these episodes. The character has become so polarising in the years since that it’s easy to forget that the basic idea behind her introduction – that a time traveller can meet the same person out of sequence at different points in their life – is brilliantly apt for Doctor Who.

River’s timeline may have become so complex through return appearances that Doctor Who Confidential felt the need to devote a programme to explaining it, but in this story she’s someone genuinely new and different, even if Donna surely echoes what many viewers were thinking when she wails ‘You’re just talking rubbish! Do you know him or don’t you?!’

By this point we were becoming used to some of the classic features of a Steven Moffat script: an intriguing set-up with elements that veer off in different directions before coming back together; things from everyday life becoming monstrous; and an ending which involves key characters cheating death in some way.

The Vashta Nerada, fearsome ‘piranhas of the air’, will surely have made kids terrified of their own shadows for weeks afterwards. The lumbering skeletons-in-spacesuits feel somewhat less sophisticated, however, than the writer’s previous creations such as clockwork men and moving statues and it wasn’t entirely surprising when someone unearthed an image of a remarkably similar looking villain from a Scooby Doo story…

Nonetheless, this is a brilliantly sophisticated slice of Doctor Who, encompassing some strong sci-fi concepts such as the reveal that the little girl’s consciousness trapped inside a planet-sized computer is at the heart of the story as well as some unsettling moments like Miss Evangelista’s ‘ghosting’ that, in the best traditions of the series, were extremely effective even if they may not stand up to rigorous scientific scrutiny. All this and we get some proper RTD-era Doctor Who heartbreak as well with Donna lulled into thinking she has found lasting happiness, only to find it’s a computer-generated illusion… and sadly things weren’t about to get any easier for her.

A worthy winner, then, for our Series 4 poll – but did our readers get it right? Was there a more deserving candidate from this series? Let us know below!

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