There is a genuinely frightening episode inside “Can You Hear Me?”, and for about twenty-five minutes you are watching it. A man appears at the end of your bed while you sleep, detaches his own fingers, and sends them floating into your ears to take what is in your head. That is a properly nasty piece of nightmare logic, the sort of thing this show used to do to children in the 1970s and has mostly stopped attempting. Ian Gelder plays it beautifully. Then the plot arrives, and then the ending arrives, and the episode ends up saying something it plainly did not intend to say.
The best monster idea of the season
Zellin is a very good villain, and the reason is that the episode gives him almost nothing to do except be present.
He does not chase anyone. He does not threaten in the usual way. He appears where he should not be, in bedrooms, in hospitals, in memories, standing perfectly still and talking pleasantly, and the horror comes entirely from the violation rather than from any physical danger. The detached fingers are the image everyone remembers and they deserve to be. There is something deeply wrong about the casualness of it, a man idly removing part of himself and letting it drift across a dark room towards a sleeping person’s head.
The Aleppo sequence is the strongest thing in the hour. A fourteenth-century hospital, a young woman called Tahira who has been having night terrors, and a creature made of shadow and teeth that turns out to be hers. Aruhan Galieva is good in a part that could easily have been a plot function, and the setting is used with more care than the era usually manages: this is a place of medicine and learning, not a backdrop for peril, and the episode bothers to say so.
Ryan’s strand back in Sheffield is decent too. His friend Tibo has been sinking while Ryan has been off travelling, and Tosin Cole plays the guilt of the returning friend well. The idea that the price of the TARDIS is the life you are not living has been sitting under this era since Arachnids in the UK, and this is the first time the show has looked directly at it.
The plot lets the monster down
Where it comes apart is Rakaya, and the moment the episode explains itself.
Zellin works as an unexplained presence. Giving him a partner, a backstory, an imprisonment between two planets and a millennia-long grudge turns a nightmare into a filing entry. Clare-Hope Ashitey is fine, but the character exists to be freed, gloat, and be re-imprisoned, and the animated sequence used to deliver their history stops the episode dead at precisely the point it should be tightening. The animation itself is nicely done and entirely the wrong choice, because it hands you the answer to the question that was making the thing frightening.
The resolution is worse. The Doctor beats two immortal beings by talking to them and then trapping them in a crystal, which is roughly the same solution the season has used twice already, and it takes about ninety seconds. Whatever dread the first half built is spent in a scene where Zellin stops being unknowable and starts being a man complaining that the Doctor has ruined his fun.
The fam material fares better. The sequence where each of them is shown their worst fear, Graham back in the hospital, Yaz on the roadside at thirteen, Ryan seventy years too late, is well constructed and Bradley Walsh is as reliable as ever. Fan sites like The Doctor Who Companion rated the horror of this one highly and I would agree with them about the first half without hesitation.
There is a wider problem with how the era handles its immortals, and this is the clearest case. Zellin and Rakaya are presented as beings who have toyed with humanity across millennia, which should make them terrifying and instead makes them petty. They are bored gods who have spent eternity playing games with sleeping people, and the moment you attach a squabbling couple’s backstory to that, the scale collapses. The Toymaker worked because nobody explained him. The Beast worked because the show refused to confirm what it was. Naming a thing and giving it a grievance is the fastest way to shrink it.
The fam’s fears are the one place the episode uses its idea properly. Graham back in the hospital chair waiting for results, Yaz on a roadside at thirteen, Ryan returning to a Sheffield seventy years too late with everyone gone: these are specific, personal and quietly devastating, and none of them need a monster to explain them. Whittaker gets a decent moment too, glimpsing something in her own head that the show does not identify, which is the correct amount to show.
The scene everyone argued about
And then Graham tells the Doctor he is frightened his cancer will come back, and she does not know what to say, and says so, and moves on.
I understand what the scene was aiming for. The Doctor is an alien who is genuinely poor at this, and there is a real, honest version of that idea. The problem is the placement. This is the closing minute of an episode that has spent its runtime on nightmares, isolation, and people struggling to talk about what is in their heads, and it has been building towards the argument that speaking up is the thing that helps. Then a frightened man speaks up, and the person he says it to gives him nothing, and the credits run.
The episode does not seem to notice the shape of what it has done. There is no follow-up, no later scene where she does better, no acknowledgement from anyone that Graham has just been left hanging. An hour that wants to tell you to reach out ends by demonstrating what it costs when someone reaches out and is not met. If that were deliberate it would be devastating. Nothing in the surrounding forty-five minutes suggests it is.
It is a genuine shame, because the ambition is real and the first act is among the best things the era produced. An episode about the things that come for people in the dark, built around a monster who does nothing but arrive, is exactly the sort of story this show should be telling. It needed the confidence to leave its own questions alone.
What it leaves behind is Zellin, standing at the foot of a bed and posting his own fingers into a sleeper’s ears, the most genuinely frightening image the Whittaker era produced. It leaves fourteenth-century Aleppo, a hospital rendered with real care, and Tahira, whose nightmare turns out to be hers to command. It leaves Ryan and Tibo, and the first honest look at what travelling costs the people left at home. It leaves an animated history lesson that arrives exactly when the tension should be building and takes all the mystery out of the room. And it leaves Graham, saying the hardest thing he has ever said out loud, and being handed nothing back.
Rating: 2/5. Half of a properly frightening episode, with the best monster design of the era and a first act that genuinely unsettles, undone by an explanation nobody needed, a resolution recycled from earlier in the same season, and a closing scene that undercuts the entire point of the hour. The fingers will stay with me. So will the look on Bradley Walsh’s face.