I’ve been having thoughts again, I’m afraid.

About an episode of Doctor Who, titled It Takes You Away.

It’s not an episode I absolutely enjoyed on first viewing, but it’s grown on me during subsequent rewatches, and it’d be in my top three episodes from Series 11.

I’m at that age now where I like my Who experimental and psychedelic, even in morsels.

I was a big fan of Ed Hime’s radio play The Incomplete Recorded Works of a Dead Body’, so had an inkling he’d bring an usual but unique voice to Who, which pays off enormously in It Takes You Away.

And it’s easily the most imaginative episode of the Jodie Whittaker years thus far, with anti-zones and flesh moths and mirror universes and, to cap it off, a sentient universe which communicates to the Doctor in the form of a frog on a chair.

(I still maintain that the Solitract is a limp name. The Solitaire? The Deviant? I also think the big info dump that ties it back to the Doctor’s childhood is unnecessary. Steven Moffat used to cut that trope from scripts like Vincent and the Doctor and Hide.)

Anyway, it’s also notable for featuring Hanne, played brilliantly by Ellie Wallwork. Hanne is blind, and abandoned by her father, who has set up speakers around the house to keep her scared but ’safe’ inside the cabin, whilst he has a fling with the ghost of his dead wife.

God, I wish Series 12 had been half as interesting as this one episode.

Anyway, I really like this. We spend act one getting to know Hanne, whilst the tensions builds and we fear that something is trying to get in. Decent dramatic incline.

Then, the twists deliver. We’re led to suspect that Ribbons has taken Hanne’s father, just as we’re made to assume that Hanne’s father was taken by force and that there’s a monster in the wooded glades of Norway, trying to break into the cabin.

Yes, we’ve only got fifty minutes to tell a concise story, but even then, you want to take the audience on a journey, which It Takes You Away really succeeds at. We’re given a proper mystery, with developments altering our perception, our expectations subverted satisfyingly.

The Chibnall era, particularly Series 11, is really strong at ‘scapegoating’ characters to throw off our suspensions. See Demons of the Punjab, where the Doctor’s foreknowledge of the Thijarians as assassins prejudices her against them, and this is revealed to be wrong.

Basically, like Among Us. You really are in the dark as to who the imposter is, and often, you guess wrongly. But that adds to the fun and enjoyment.

This sense of a journey, gaining new information as we progress, piecing it together gradually, reflects the slippage of aesthetic. We go from Nordic ‘Cabin in the Woods’ horror to surrealist fairytale. Same canvas, but the picture changes.

Good stuff.

I think it falls apart a bit in places, particularly at the very end, where Hanne is left in the care of her abusive father, who abandoned her, kept her imprisoned through her disability. He exploited his daughter’s blindness and used sound to render her the prey of her own fear.

It’s not the fact that he abuses her that is the issue, it’s that this is forgotten at the end. They’re gonna move back to their home to enjoy Wi-Fi and friends when, only minutes ago, Hanne was talking about Eric being ill.

Nevertheless, in spite of that, it remains a thoughtful episode, in more than one sense. It’s bristling with ideas, so many that there was a second monster in the Anti-Zone scenes that had to be cut out entirely. Hime‘s Who is teatime Guillermo Del Toro, and I‘m very fond of it.

And yet.

Why didn’t I like it on first viewing? What threw me about the episode that prevented all this resonating with me from the very beginning?

It’s taken me two years. But I‘ve finally worked it out.

What I’ve never been convinced by is Eric abandoning Hanne in the first place.

Eric is a deeply flawed individual - who should lose custody over his daughter at the end! - but I never believed he would just leave her in that cabin.

There’s a line that papers over this crack, about there being food in the fridge and Hanne being a teenager, but going to that extent to keep her inside - it’s very elaborate for Eric. I just don‘t take him for a man who would *conciously* set about traumatising his daughter.

Eric doesn’t leave Hanne behind in the ‘real’ world because he’s estranged from her particularly. When she does end up in the Solitract world, Eric isn’t sending her away. He’s trying to reason with her to accept it. ‘We‘re in a place, and it looks close enough to home.’

And *that’s* when it hit me.

I’m not pitching this to ‘fix’ the episode per say. What we were given, I’m reasonably happy with. So this is purely an alternative approach. A ’what-if?’ musing. A mirror version of the episode, if you like.

What if... the TARDIS landed in the mirror world from the very beginning?

The Doctor suspects something is wrong... but all she finds is a happy family in a cabin in Norway. Hanne, Eric and Trine, smiling and safe and secure.

So why won’t Eric let his wife or daughter go near the mirror?

By going through themselves, perhaps with Hanne alongside, the gang arrive back in our real world...and find out that Trine passed away.

In this version, Eric and the Solitract Trine have lied to Hanne, and exploited her blindness to keep her ‘safe and happy’ in this false world. They haven’t told her that her real mother died, and now she’s been made to live with a ghost without her knowledge.

The Solitract, being a conscious universe, has facilitated this arrangement, because by masquerading as Trine, it can study these two human beings it has taken into its care. But of course, upon learning the truth, Hanne rejects this fantasy, in favour of the reality.

When the Doctor reveals this to her, Hanne cannot just continue to live out this lie, knowing that Eric kept the truth from her and the Solitract is using her mother‘s voice to keep her here, like a placebo. It’s not right.

Which is anathema to the Doctor’s morality, perfectly summed up by Colin Baker in More Than Thirty Years in the TARDIS.

’If things aren’t right (they) feel compelled to do something about it...right doesn’t always necessarily mean beautiful, or happy, or pretty, but *right*.’

In this version, Eric and the Solitract’s manipulation of Hanne - giving her the life *they* think is right for her - is put in direct conflict with the Doctor’s own ‘essential belief in the tightness of things’.

I think this would also, potentially, help to furnish more relevance to Ribbons’s function in the narrative; the jester, wickedly laughing and taunting, for only he knows the truth, and gleefully withdraws it from both victim (Hanne) and investigator (the Doctor) as an amusement.

So what do you think? Do you like this version where Hanne is unknowingly smuggled into a sinister ‘make-believe‘ parallel, or prefer the true, definitive original? Or do you have an even BETTER idea?

Let’s huddle around this fire, and keep warm, as we tell each other stories.