It’s always nice when Doctor Who does a horror episode. It sure has come a long way from an educational-ish program in the 1960s to today. I find it kind of funny that the rebooted Doctor Who does the horror episodes better than the time travelling or The Doctor doing battle with classic foes. That was definitely the case with this week’s Hide.

Over the last couple of weeks, I had been lamenting the lack of tension in scenes and stories that quite obviously should have been a little bit on the scary side. However, they had fallen flat. This time out, I was very happy that writer Neil Cross (who wrote “The Rings of Akhaten”) was able to make it work this time.

While Rings took a while before the tension ramped up, we got the spooky ghost treatment right off the bat as a pair of scientists try to sort out the ghost living in their house. Then The Doctor and Clara show up as ghostbusters as Clara put it.

Even with The Doctor and Clara, there wasn’t a lot of Time Lord gadgetry to sort out what was happening. There was flickering candle light, sudden indoor cold snaps and creepy photos of ghosts. It was a proper ghost story for the first half of the episode.

About halfway through, I thought the episode took a bit of a turn. That’s when The Doctor determined that the ghost was actually in a “pocket universe” that was crumbling and needed saving. It was sort of wibbly-wobbley timey-wimey. I can’t say that I was a fan of that direction of the episode. However, it was salvaged by a creepy forest and creepier monster in said forest. I’ll just pretend that apparently impossible inter-dimensional TARDIS rescues and monster love stories didn’t happen because they brought the ending down a bit.

Hide was my favourite episode of the second half of this season and probably the best since Christmas. Neil Cross did well with this attempt at something slightly scarier. I felt that the story of who the ghost was and how she got stuck in an alternate reality was a missed opportunity. They could have made something of it but chose not to. That last five or ten minutes was definitely the weakest of this episode after a strong first thirty.

Next up for The Doctor and Clara is a “Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS.” It would appear from the trailer that the TARDIS crashes and Clara gets lost somewhere in the vast inner depths of the TARDIS. I seem to recall that we had one of these sorts of adventures with The Doctor, Amy and Rory. However, this time, there’s something evil lurking in the depths of the TARDIS.

This episode is being written by Stephen Thompson who previously wrote The Curse of the Black Spot. Since then, he did write Sherlock’s The Reichenbach Fall which was the absolute epic finale to Sherlock’s second season. That gives me plenty of hope for Saturday’s episode.