Now, this is more like it. After three episodes of varying quality, we get an episode from Steven Moffat that harks back to his scary best, namely The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances from 2005 and 2007's BAFTA-winning Blink. The best thing about Listen is that there is no definable monster (or is there?) This is a meditation on fear, deepening the characters of The Doctor and Clara, as well as new boy (and probably future companion), Danny Pink (Samuel Anderson), whose future descendent Orson seems to earn another of Moffat's titles for secondary characters - The Last Man at the End of the Universe, as Rory Williams was The Boy Who Waited and Clara, The Impossible Girl.
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Clara is becoming a more rounded character beyond her Impossible Girl persona - her job as a schoolteacher becoming particularly handy, here - yet she shows a little bit of her old self when she travels back into the Doc's past once more (albeit with his permission this time), ending up under his bed in a familiar barn, during his childhood. We only see this proto-Doctor in shadow but his hair has a distinct Tennant/Smith brunette wavy quality to it. Spooked by nightmares, the diddy Doctor is reassured by his far-future companion with words that will come to form the creed recited by Tennant, Smith and John Hurt in 50th anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor. Hurt even makes a cameo in flashback, making Listen a sort of multi-Doctor tale in the vein of Day (albeit only toward the end).
Earlier on, the Doc has slipped Clara's fingers into some new squidgy sections on the TARDIS console, creating a 'telepathic interface' that allows the timeship to hunt for a childhood dream of Clara's so it can take them to the point at which she dreamed it. 'If anything bites,' The Doctor says of the interface, 'let it.' I love the idea of actual creatures within the TARDIS console. I wonder what would happen if one stuck other body parts in those squidgy bits? No doubt that would be a pornographic interface, although a brief one if anything bit. If the TARDIS is the Doctor's 'wife', then…? No, I've taken that too far. but was the Doctor too afraid to telepathically interface with the TARDIS himself and travel to the point where he dreamed that nightmare? We end up there, anyway but only beknownst to Clara.
Clara can't help thinking of Danny when he phones her after a disastrous start to their date that evening, perhaps with the intention of patching things up so he can later have a pornographic interface with her.
I always like episodes that give a different angle on an established aspect of the show. Apart from possible bitty things in the TARDIS console, I loved seeing the Doctor sat atop his time machine, meditating as it floated in Space (top), then seeing it underwater (above). What I liked most about Listen was The Doctor's assertion that 'fear is a superpower…your heart's beating, you're more alert - ready to run faster and fight harder…' Of course, he means the flight-or-fight response but I'd never really thought of fear that way before. We've all experienced the kind of nightmares in childhood that the Doctor wants to explore, here, waking up to feel like we are not alone. After such dreams, I wasusually too scared to sit up in bed like waking sleepers of varied ages do in Listen, whereupon, a hand reaches out from underneath the bed to grab their ankle. (Better one's ankle than further up, I suppose. Imagine if, after waking from a dark dream, you stand up to calm down and find a hand clasping your crotch. 'Don't be scared.' Whispers a voice from beneath the bed. 'OK.' You say, more out of fear than relaxation. If that hand belonged to Jenna Coleman, as it does when she grabs the diddy Doc's ankle, here.)
The fact that Clara gets to meet The Doctor as a child, let alone whisper words that shape his future, annoyed me. As if being splintered across the Doctor's eleven adult lives wasn't enough in the last series, she gets to influence him as a child too - a privilege she hasn't earned, I don't think. She's only travelled with the Time Lord for, so far, half a series (give or take a couple of specials) and on and off at that. Clara isn't as established as, say, Rose Tyler and not even she got this close to The Doctor and they were in love, although revealing this much of his past that early one would not have had the impact it has now. Is Clara being given such influential scenes because Jenna Coleman is possibly leaving during this season?
'It's Time You Knew Him', is the tagline for this season. At this rate, we'll know everything about The Doctor by the end, bar his real name, which won't even matter, once we know everything about what lead him to become the man he is. If his home planet of Gallifrey features in the way it does here, there's bound to be more of it later on and perhaps at least one other Time Lord. It's rumoured that Michelle Gomez' Missy character and her Promised Land which everyone seems in such a hurry to reach, is a Time Lord and TARDIS respectively. Time will tell…
After affecting the course of universal history in giving a mini-lesson on fear to its frightened greatest champion, Clara returns to the TARDIS, telling the adult Doc to do as he's told and fly away from the barn (which, I couldn't help noticing, had supports not unlike the coral ones in the TARDISes of the Ninth, Tenth and War Doctors - maybe I'm getting a touch carried away, now) she met his younger self. 'I don't take orders, Clara.' Says the Doc, but still obeys. I thought, as in The Beast Below, the Doc dislikes companions making decisions for him. Here, he chose to obey Clara, she didn't pilot the TARDIS away for him but I thought our new darker, angrier, more serious Time Lord would not have taken such a bossy companion lightly. Kick her out, Doc!
In the barn, Clara grabs diddy Doctor's ankle to prevent him finding his future self's TARDIS, before entering it herself to stop his future self finding diddy Doctor. Something to do with big Doctor's earlier nonchalant declaration that meeting one's younger self is 'potentially catastrophic', despite having done so himself several times before. How could the Doctor and the TARDIS fail to realise they were on Gallifrey (if indeed, that's where the barn is? I could see how the War Doctor would head somewhere other than his home planet to detonate the device with which he intends to blow up Gallifrey in Day, if indeed, 'The Moment' weapon does destroy planets?!) or that it was the Doc's younger self outside? OK, he was talking to Orson Pink in the TARDIS but how did The Doctor or his time machine's telepathic abilities not read where they were? What would the Doc have done had he known? Maybe he does but chose not to reveal it…yet?
Gripes and questions aside, Clara's reassuring words to diddy Doctor are good - 'fear doesn't have to make you cruel or cowardly; fear can make you kind.' Thankfully for the universe(s), he listened.
Images courtesy of BBC iPlayer
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