12.4: Listen
In which fear makes companions of us all.
Broadcast: September 2014
Watched: February 2022
One quote for each plot: “Did we come to the end of the universe because of a nursery rhyme?”
Or: “You said you had a date, I thought I better hide in the bedroom in case you brought him home.”
It’s great, but it doesn’t get me on the gut level like it should. (Oh, except for one moment – the shot of the War Doctor does for some reason, probably fan brain in action.) I think maybe it’s one of those that works best with the shock of the new. All the same, I do love that its starting point is a childhood nightmare like Blink or The Empty Child, and it’s clearly just Moffat wanting to take another pass at an idea he thinks a guest writer didn’t quite nail last year (honestly, it shares so much with Hide it’s hilarious)... but he still ends up writing an origin story for Doctor Who by mistake.
Loads of great bits. The intro – the Doctor sitting in the lotus position on top of the TARDIS, the random nature tours (though “perfect” hunting is surely bollocks) – is fantastic. Ditto the way we cut to Clara on a bad date, mythic Moffat switching seamlessly to sitcom Moffat (his work surely contains the vast majority of bad dates ever seen in Doctor Who). The way it ends on montage (Gallifrey, saying goodbye to Orson, inside the TARDIS, jumping on Danny) with a Clara voiceover feels like an inversion of many a Moffat pre-credit sequences. Murray Gold is really working his tits off, the music really sells the idea that This Is Important.
And... maybe this is why it doesn’t work for me as it should. The mythic moment in the Doctor’s past is meant to be balanced by the mythic moment in Clara’s present. We find out who the Doctor was, as we find out who Clara is going to be.
Only – she isn’t going to be that any more. That bad date isn’t the start of the great love affair of her life. Coleman messes up the plan by deciding to do a third year on the show, Danny doesn’t magically come back from the dead, and so Orson Pink winks out of existence. At one point she says, “Thing is, my timeline, it keeps on-” which is meant to cover for it, to imply that things keep shifting. But Clara’s story doesn’t have the gravitas it needs any more.
That said, there’ll always be an episode in which we genuinely don’t know if the monster is a kid messing about plus paranoia or something more, and the fact we don’t know is kind of the point. And that’s pretty cool.
Other things:
There’s a sort of meta reading, in which “Why do we speak out loud when we know we’re alone? Because we know we’re not” is referring to the audience. I like the idea that the entire episode is just here to explain Big Finish narration dialogue.
I love and had forgotten the twist that Clara is the creature that grabs the Doctor’s ankle. Hilarious how mid period Moffat’s main move is “insert Clara into the Doctor’s timeline at random”. In a couple of episodes he’ll make her one of the most important figures in human history, too.
The Doctor’s “need to recharge the TARDIS overnight” thing is slightly undermined by the fact he’s already taken Orson back to 2014.
The voiceover in the Gallifrey sequence is weirdly badly done, they sound entirely unnaturalistic and I can’t work out why.
The show gets away with the deeply uncomfortable moment of the Doctor yelling “do as you’re told” at Clara, only because it’s balanced by her saying the same to him.
Is this sudden fear of being alone related to the fact the Doctor was trapped on Trenzalore for a thousand years?