Inside No. 9: Season 7 REVIEW – Reliably Surprising

The horrors found inside no. 9 haven't lost their shine.

inside no. 9 reece shearsmith steve pemberton mark gatiss diane morgan

A couple of years ago, Inside No. 9’s ‘live’ halloween special Dead Line saw guest star Stephanie Cole start to burble on about ghosts getting into the technology as things began to get spooky. Reece Shearsmith (co-creator, -writer, and -star) duly responded “You’re thinking of Black Mirror, Stephanie – this is Inside No. 9, it’s more dark comedy and twists”.

To be sure, Britain’s two premiere anthology shows are very different subject-wise, but they’re still both anthologies, and one obvious commonality is that both have very clearly burnt through their initial stock of story ideas and are now playing things by ear. In Black Mirror’s case, it went from fleshed-out concepts like “so the people’s princess gets kidnapped, and he’ll kill her unless the Prime Minister goes on live TV and…” to one of the writer’s room raising a hand to suggest “um, shall we have people being uploaded to the cloud again?”.

Inside No. 9, at least, is not constrained by having to be about technology, and the seemingly limited number of stories that can stretch to (provided you ignore the existence of Isaac Asimov and William Gibson). But what it is constrained by is the idea right there in the title: being inside number nine, be that a hotel room, a semidetached house, a police car, or, as it is in one episode of this seventh season, a pedallo.

Here, though, having to reach a little bit further for story ideas every time, Inside No. 9 finds itself with a shocking number of scenes which take place – say it quietly – outside number nine. This isn’t unprecedented, as there have been episodes before which cold-open on someone approaching the door of whatever number nine we’re going into this week, but more than one episode of this run both begins and ends very firmly outside number nine.

Let me establish firmly that this isn’t some petty subjective complaint. Personally, I understand completely that not all stories can take place entirely inside one location. That’s fine, nobody would have a problem with that. But Shearsmith and Pemberton imposed this limitation on themselves — it’s their qualification, not mine. If Hitchcock’s Psycho did not involve a psycho, people would complain.

Tense comedy of errors Kid/Nap is probably the worst offender in this regard, with a number of significant scenes taking place elsewhere – granted, these are at the other end of a phone call from number nine, it’s not some massive abrupt disconnect, but shamefully they didn’t think to have the other side also happening inside a number nine. And I’ve already mentioned the episode set on pedallo no. 9, which never quite seemed completely committed to keeping its passengers on board.

So yes, by interpreting the title overly literally, it’s quite easy to score a few points off the anthology which, unlike its blacker and more reflective counterpart, hasn’t been reduced to repeatedly wheeling out the same gimmick. What about its other essential qualities, though? What about, as Shearsmith summarised it, the dark comedy and the twists?

The dark comedy, frankly, is a given. Shearsmith and Pemberton are still the same guys who did The League of Gentlemen and Psychoville, they know their craft. Even the not-so-dark comedy is worth sticking around for. There’s the occasional bit of end-of-the-pier stuff (declaring “I’m all ears” after having cut someone’s off), but frequently the context can elevate it (telling a taxidermist to “get stuffed”).

As for the twists, though, occasionally – and this is probably a sign of how long they’ve been at this, having exhausted usual levels of twist – they drop in one too many. Or, worse still, that special kind of revelation-twist which, in retrospect, makes what’s gone before it make absolutely no sense.

The obvious weak point (sadly, the first episode of this run) is when they ostentatiously get their old League of Gentleman collaborator Mark Gatiss back in, and then all play old friends who are getting back together. It’s waving its real-world subtext around like a pride flag, which is very rarely a good thing. There’s another episode in this run which also gets a bit metatextual, and that one’s our case exemplar for cramming in one twist too many.

It’s a shame to rag on the reunion episode, because there’s a lot of good stuff in it, especially Diane Morgan – but this stronger material all ends up shunted to the side in favour of a fairly sophomoric A-plot. Pemberton being crass yet vulnerable, always a recipe for success, ends up sidelined more than it should by Shearsmith wheeling out his rather trite grumpy persona, which is something he does very well but ends up wasted in service to a main plot more suited to lazy drama students than a flagship BBC production.

However, this is, at worst, a misstep, not a disaster – and when it comes to the stuff their heart’s clearly in, they can still fire on all cylinders. The strongest episodes of this year’s crop are both nodding to films throughout – specifically classic cult horror The Wicker Man (the original, not the Nic Cage version), which was once upon a time also a strong influence on the League of Gentlemen, and the unsettling public information films of the 1970s.

(This British ‘70s aesthetic today survives best in the form of Scarfolk, which itself owes not a little to the League.)

Could you accuse the show of unoriginality for this? Maybe, but The Twilight Zone, granddaddy of the teevee anthology show frequently featured scripts adapted from short stories straight out of the pulps. And here, they’re not remotely straight adaptations: these are most definitely Inside No. 9’s homages to these ancestral forebears.

Moreover, even the most caustic critic would have to admit that Inside No. 9 taking all these different tacks is a demonstration of real variety. From farcical thriller to surprisingly sincere sci-fi, even though you can boil it down to ‘dark comedy and twists’ it has never descended into the formulaic and predictable, even seven seasons and forty-three episodes in. If you switch on Inside No. 9, yes, you can be pretty sure it will be Shearsmith and Pemberton inside (or on, or near) a number nine, but beyond that it will surprise you.

READ MORE: Inside No. 9: Season 5 REVIEW – Magic Tricks And Old Friends

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inside no. 9 reece shearsmith steve pemberton mark gatiss diane morgan
Verdict
Inside No. 9 can still make you laugh and make you shocked, often both within five seconds. Is it a tautology to call something ‘reliably surprising’? Maybe so, but for an anthology it’s a very big feather in their cap.
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