Listen: A Date Gone Wrong and Something Under the Bed

In Doctor Who Listen, the Doctor hypothesizes that no-one in the universe is ever alone. He travels to Clara’s flat to share his theory, and finds her home from a date with Danny which went horribly wrong after the topic of his military service came up. The Doctor wants to use Clara’s childhood to investigate a common dream that he thinks proves his contention. Clara connects with the TARDIS’ telepathic circuits to find the dream in her past but, still thinking about Danny, they end up visiting him in a children’s home in Gloucester in the 1990s.

In trying to protect the child from a mysterious figure under his bedcovers, Clara inadvertently causes him to change his name from Rupert to Danny and become a soldier. The Doctor takes Clara back to try and salvage her date, but they are interrupted by time-traveller Orson Pink, Danny’s grandson, who the Doctor has rescued from the end of time. All three return to the last planet to try and ensnare the elusive eternal companion. Upon leaving, Clara ends up on Gallifrey, comforting a childhood version of the Doctor scared of the dark, which is what motivated his original hypothesis.

A Doctor Who Story Without a Monster

This is very much an episode of two halves. The first is a suspenseful piece of paranormal horror, and after the sunny Sherwood Forest romp in Robot of Sherwood the change of mood is quite a jolt. It’s written by Moffat, who has been scaring kids off the sofa since the Weeping Angels, and you can feel him reaching for that same trick here: ordinary things, a bed, a blanket, a dark room, made to feel wrong. Nothing in the first half needs a rubber suit or a CGI creature. It needs a boy, a shape under the covers and the sound of someone breathing, and it works.

The idea of a Doctor Who story without monsters is so unique and powerful it could easily stand on its own. Think about what the show normally does with fear. There’s a threat, the Doctor works out its weakness, there’s a speech, and the threat is beaten. Here there’s no weakness to find because there might not be anything there at all, and that leaves you sitting in the dark with Clara, waiting for something to happen. I was so enthralled by the monster under the bed segment that I’d have been happy for the whole forty-five minutes to stay there.

The script also goes to rather elaborate lengths to keep Danny out of the TARDIS, which is one of many odd choices made here by Moffat that you idly hope will eventually come to fruition in later stories. Samuel Anderson gets plenty to do as the adult Danny, awkward and defensive on his date, and the scenes that put Clara in a much less sympathetic light than we’re used to are some of the most interesting ones. She’s rude, she’s distracted, and she’s visibly using the Doctor’s time machine to fix her own love life. That’s a nice bit of grit for a companion who’s been mostly sunshine up to now.

Capaldi’s Doctor is also good company in the quieter stretches. He’s sitting in the TARDIS talking to himself about what it means to be frightened, and for once he doesn’t have an answer ready. That kind of scene is exactly what the new Doctor needs, because it gives him something to play beyond sharp edges, and the dark, stripped-back look of those scenes suits the mood nicely.

When the Second Half Gets Crowded

The second half teases out the Doctor’s psyche and timeline, much like the 50th anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor. It’s not surprising that the two should come together in an episode written by Steven Moffat, as they are both his writing defaults, but the two don’t really gel. The horror half is much stronger dramatically and though the twist is wholly original in the history of Doctor Who, trying to tie it into the Doctor’s past history goes a step too far.

In hindsight, the concept would have worked better without the futuristic section and Gallifrey scenes. Orson Pink on the last planet is a perfectly decent idea, a lonely man at the end of time who thinks he hears something outside his door, but it arrives right when the episode should be leaning into its best scene. The biggest problem is that tension cultivated in the first half is undone by the time-hopping of the second. By the time we’ve jumped from a children’s home in the 1990s to the end of the universe and then to a barn on Gallifrey, the quiet creeping dread has turned into a puzzle about who was under which blanket and when.

There’s also a redundant time cannon sub-plot that I wouldn’t have missed. It’s the kind of thing Moffat does where an object or a gimmick gets set up and then you spend the rest of the episode waiting for it to matter. Maybe it will, later on. For now it’s just another piece of furniture in a room that’s already pretty full.

The Doctor’s Childhood and a Brief Clip

Although the Doctor’s psyche is at the centre of the episode, the idea that his personality comes from childhood fear of the dark is something that Moffat has rather forced upon his characterisation in this episode rather than it explaining past behaviour. Either that or Moffat’s cod-psychological explanation of how this forged the Doctor’s ‘superpowers’ is simply unconvincing. Fear is a superpower, we’re told, and being scared is what makes you brave, and that’s a nice line, but it doesn’t feel like something that’s been true of him all along.

That said, these biographical nuggets give Capaldi’s authoritative Doctor some much-needed vulnerability. After a couple of episodes where he’s been prickly, hard to read and a bit unsure of who he is, seeing him genuinely rattled in the TARDIS is a good change. We get a better sense of Danny’s backstory (and hints about his future) while Clara’s encounters with Danny’s past and future lead to a rapid development of their romance. Otherwise the episode consolidates what we found out about the Doctor last season, with a brief clip from The Day of the Doctor bridging the gap.

It does leave a few loose ends sitting around. Why does the Doctor care so much about a dream every human seems to share? How much of Clara’s meddling was always going to happen? The episode raises those questions and then walks away from them, which is fine if you take it as a fable and a bit frustrating if you were hoping for answers by the end of the hour. I’m happy to wait and see whether the show picks any of them up again.

It’s indicative of how this season lives in the past rather than giving Capaldi’s Doctor a clean break. The season arc is ignored (for once!) and for the most part this is a self-contained story with some mythology revision thrown in as an afterthought. Though I suspect we might return to the episode later on.

Still Not Sure What to Think About Listen

I’m not really sure what to think about this one, and I’m clearly not alone, because other Doctor Who fans have been picking over the same ending. Even with the innovative ending, it was disappointing when it once again boiled down to a series of coincidental time paradoxes. Part of me would have been happier if it had turned out to be a monster! There’s too much going on too fast for the episode to be as suspenseful as it could have been, and I’m not sure it knows what its strengths are.

We’re supposed to find more satisfaction in seeing the Doctor as a child on Gallifrey than the unprecedented twist that for once there is no antagonist. I’d have gone the other way, and kept the mystery wide open. If nobody ever finds out who was sitting on the end of the bed, the idea that we’re never really alone is a much more unsettling place to leave things than a barn and a little boy who needs a hug.

Still, the episode contains the most concentrated bout of scares we’ve seen in Doctor Who for a while, and it’s good to see Moffat experimenting for a change rather than resting on his laurels. I’ll take an ambitious episode that doesn’t quite land over a safe one every time, and I suspect I’ll be watching this one again with the lights off.

What do you make of the ending: should the figure under the blanket have been a monster, or was it better left as nothing at all? Tell me in the comments.