Deja View: Dougray Scott, Doctor Who and Hemlock Grove 

Most people are probably familiar with Dougray Scott from his big screen career, which is where I got my first taste of him. He might be most well-known for Mission: Impossible II, but he’s also done films like My Week With Marilyn, Enigma, and Ever After: A Cinderella Story. More recently, he’s been showing up on the small screen and I could not be happier. Let’s talk about two of his most recent projects.

Doctor Who “Hide”

It’s 1974. Major Alec Palmer is a member of the Baker Street Irregulars, the ministry of ungentlemanly warfare. They specialize in espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance. Of course, The Doctor also happens to know he’s a talented watercolorist, a professor of psychology and a ghost hunter. He and his companion, Emma – an empathic psychic, are trying to contact a ghost who’s been traced back through lore as early as the 17th century. The Major had seen and done things during the war, and being in this house and trying to help this ghost be at peace is his penance. And even though it’s clear he and Emma have something going on, they don’t act on it. They discover their gast in not a ghost, but a lost soul; Hila Tacorian is a time traveler trapped in a pocket universe. The Doctor makes a device to amplify Emma’s abilities and goes to get her. He also gets trapped in the pocket universe, but it’s Clara to the rescue with the TARDIS after they come to an understanding. The best part of the episode? When The Doctor tells Emma and Alec that Hila is their great great great great great-granddaughter. Now there’s no getting around the fact that they’re meant to be together.

Interesting tidbits from the episode:

• Clara doesn’t see the possibility of romance in her future with The Doctor, which is good news to Emma. She warns Clara that he’s not to be trusted because he has a sliver of ice in his heart.

• Clara feels like she – actually everyone The Doctor encounters – are ghosts because he can travel to see the beginning and end of everything. He disagrees with that, and says they (and especially Clara) are the only mystery worth solving.

I always love it when an actor can talk in his or her native accent, so it’s a pleasure to hear Scott speak in either his own Scottish accent or do an English accent. He’s great at playing tortured characters and I really felt a sadness about his past and a longing for a better future here. But he didn’t feel like he deserved it, even though Emma was trying to telegraph her feelings to him. I think my favorite interaction between Alec and The Doctor comes when Alec finds out he and Emma have a great great great great great-granddaughter. He asks what comes next and The Doctor suggests they hold hands. So great, so so many levels.

Hemlock Grove

In this new series from Netflix, Scott plays Dr. Norman Godfrey, the psychiatrist-in-chief of the Hemlock Acres Institute. In Scott’s own words, Norman Godfrey is “a man of great contradictions. He didn’t want to be the one counting money in the big house at the top of the hill looking down on the small town below, and yet he deceives with the best of them.“ If you haven’t started watching the series yet, I don’t want to give too much away. I will say this: he’s got a twisted – but oh so interesting – relationship with his sister-in-law Olivia Godfrey, played Famke Janssen. They are in constant disagreement about how to raise their children and exactly what goes on at the Godfrey Institute for Biomedical Research, also known as The White Tower. After local teenager Brooke Bluebell is brutally murdered and with the sheriff’s department woefully unprepared to handle something like this, Norman is forced to ask Dr. Pryce to examine the body. Dr. Pryce determines the cause of death to be from an animal attack, although he has no idea what kind of animal could be capable of this kind of damage.

In this series, we get to see Scott play a very loving and concerned father to Letha Godfrey, but also a distant and inattentive husband. And there is a lot going on below the surface in this town. Is Dr. Pyrce responsible for Shelley Godfrey’s freakish appearance? Did Olivia have some part in the death of Norman’s brother JR? What kind of monster attacked Brooke in those woods? And what kind of “work” is being done at The White Tower? Through it all Norman must work to keep his family from falling apart and the town from descending into all out panic.

Doctor Who airs Saturdays ato 8/7c on BBC America and all 13 episodes of Hemlock Grove are available now on Netflix.