'Night Terrors' was much much better IMO: discrete storyline, monsters, a problem with a solution and not much of a deus ex machina element.
Oh my goodness, I thought "Night Terrors" was awful. So many unexplained and unbelievable facets to this story. The franchise seems to be veering off into the land of magic and abandoning it's science fiction basis.
We have an alien that arrives on planet Earth in the form of a baby, not knowing it is an alien or why it is here. The mother and father cannot remember anything about it, in fact the mother was never pregnant, but thinks she gave birth to the boy. Apparently none of her friends question this either, despite photographic evidence to the contrary.
When the 'boy' is 8 years old he starts to think there are monsters in his room. What monsters? Why are they after George? Where did they come from? It's so scary for George that he sends out a psychic message across vast light years of space and time that flashes onto the Doctor's psychic paper. This seems to be a new and utterly fantastic feature of the psychic paper, never mind the concept that a thought can travel through space and travel faster than light.
The Doctor tracks down the boy and makes a house call. Why doesn't Dad wonder why a social worker is showing up at 8:30 at night despite the fact that no one called one?
The boy has placed all his scary stuff in a cupboard, including a doll house. The Doctor's scans the cupboard with his sonic screwdriver and it returns terror that is off the charts. Why would a boy have a doll house? Why/how does the sonic screwdriver have a terror detector?
The boy thinks that if someone blinks the lights on/off five times it will keep the monsters at bay. Why does he think that will work because, man, that cupboard is full and it certainly didn't work on this night!
The boy, through some unexplained magical process and ability, banishes an old woman, his family's landlord, Rory, Amy, his Dad, and the Doctor into the dollhouse. He miniaturizes them then sucks them through solid materials like elevator doors, brick walls, floors, etc. and into the dollhouse. No really, he does.
Exactly how is he doing this? Why would an alien with that ability be afraid of anything? You can make anything that scares you disappear. I guess the old woman was guilty of making noise as she shuffled past the boy's window. The boy is afraid of the noise that the elevator makes, Amy and Rory happened to be inside of the elevator. Really? Are these things scary?
Why do the scary bits need to be miniaturized and put into a dollhouse? How does George do it?
Once inside the doll house there are wooden dolls that walk like zombies hunting the humans. If a wooden doll touches you, you will turn into a wooden doll. What, really? Amy is touched and is turned into a wooden doll. Then what? Amy starts hunting humans so she can touch them and turn them into dolls. And this makes sense, because....?
So what is happening here? Is this all a projection of George's overactive imagination? Yep, I think so.
The Doctor is able to talk to George through the dollhouse walls, and through the cupboard walls, which is an amazing feat since his vocal chords are probably a hundredth of a millimeter in size and he couldn't project his voice more than a couple of inches. And even if he could, only dogs could hear him. But George hears him, opens the cupboard, shrinks in size, enters the dollhouse, receives his Dad's declaration of unconditional love, whereupon everything is set to rights and everybody lives happily ever after. And there's your deus ex machina.
In other words, it was all a dream. The End.
Aaaarrrgghhhhh!!!
