Doctor Who is almost 60 years old, and you'll never convince me that it isn't the greatest TV show ever made. You can do anything in Doctor Who, and it usually does it all, sooner or later.
One thing it has always done very well is scare the shit out of the kids, to the point that it's become a massive cliche about hiding behind the sofa when the Sea Devils rolled out. But I wasn't scared of the Daleks, or the Sontarans, or Vardans. It was a 12-year-old girl that really terrified the shit out of me
There is a weird theme of extremely creepy kids in the tail end of the classic series. And the epitome of this might be the unnamed girl in Remembrance of the Daleks. Played by the terrific Jasmine Breaks, she's part sixties schoolchild, and part Dalek battle computer who shoots lethal balls of energy from her fingers.
She was just another villain and pawn of the Daleks when I first saw Remembrance, but something stuck in my brain, because not long after that I had a dream where she came to our house and murdered the shit out of my family in front of me
It was one of those dreams where you're just so grateful when you wake up and realise it wasn't real, because it felt fucking real at the time, with the girl stalking through the house we lived in at the time and brutally killing my family, just like when she hit Nazi Mike with enough force to shatter a staircase.
When it comes to movies and TV, I don't scare much, but some things stick in the subconscious and you might not realise it until the monsters come knocking in the night. I've had a couple of deeply horrifying dreams about the Dark Judges from Judge Dredd, and I can always tell a good zombie movie because I get stuck in an apocalypse of the living dead in a post-film nightmare.
And this was one of those, especially because the anonymous girl was the same age as me, and looked a lot like all the girls I went to school with. Girls were already terrifying enough when you're a typically confused adolescent, and connecting them to the battle computers of a vast fascist intergalactic empire didn't help.
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