13.18: Can You Hear Me?

In which Who gets animated.

Broadcast: February 2020

Watched: July 2022

“All right, mate, try not to freak out, yeah, but you’re on a floating space platform in a gravitational pull between two colliding planets halfway across the universe cos of the guy who was stealing your nightmares through creepy detachable fingers.”

And now, in a very special episode... This week, the captions in the pre-credits are taking us off the 14th century Aleppo. Ian Gelder is intensely creepy as the main villain, Zellin; Chibnall’s commitment to going to new times and places and trying to stake out new ground remains strong. As so often under this regime, you can’t fault the ambition, it’s just the delivery that’s found wanting. 

I like that it tries to do something different – in fact it does two interesting things:

1) It’s an episode about the regulars’ feelings! So we get lots of dream sequences offering insights into their darkest fears. A good version of this: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Restless; a bad version: Torchwood: Fragments. The latter, alas, is the one the showrunner wrote.

2) It’s an episode in which evil gods use the Doctor’s good nature against her! I love the way Zellin tricks the Doctor into freeing what looks like his prisoner but is actually his missus. The animation sequence setting out the backstory is *gorgeous*, one of the best things in ages. The independently moving fingers are *almost* creepy, until you see one lodge in an ear at which point they’re just silly.

I’m not sure these two things particularly mesh, though: the mental health half of the plot, and the imprisoned god one, don’t really need each other. Worse, the fact we get 10 whole minutes at the end to unpack all the character stuff means that the *actual gods* get defeated a bit too easily. Surely there must be a way of doing that more organically?

Anyway, we do find out some things about the characters, which is nice. Love the idea the Doctor sometimes gets so bored on her own that she just skips forward to the next time the fam are around: the “Puff the Magic Dragon” version of the Doctor. The inevitable Big Finish 13th Doctor audio series will ignore this and create multiple other fams for her, of course. Also, this episode almost manages to use that to disguise an info dump about how great medieval islamic medicine was as a character note.

The Doctor is also worrying about the timeless child bollocks... she’s only going to be disappointed by that one.

Yaz is worrying about her own inadequacy and need to prove something (which, while people often talk about the inconsistency of her characterisation, is a clear running thread.) The flashbacks to her attempted suicide on the moors are a bit tell-not-show, but the handing over the 50p to the cop who saved her is actually quite affecting.

I sort of like that Ryan’s fear is of the monsters from Orphan 55 – of the earth dying – but that the reason it bothers him is he was letting his mate down. The show is actually setting up the idea of a companion deciding to leave for normal, human reasons.

The biggest problem with this episode, though, is the bit where Graham is terrified of his cancer coming back. The Doctor is *so* rubbish in this bit and there’s never any come back on it. I think it’s meant to show us the Doctor is an alien, but it accidentally just makes her look like a dick. Also, it totally goes against the theme of the episode. 

Oh well. At least they tried.

Other things:

• “I've got plans crashing through my brain all the time. You want a plan? Come to me. Identifying which plan’s going to work, that’s the tricky bit.” Nice line accidentally contrasting the 13th Doctor with her predecessor.

• I’m torn between thinking it's nice to see the same guy we met in Spyfall, and that it’s a shame Ryan only has one friend.

• The actress who plays Tahira is of Kazakh heritage but grew up in Leeds. Cool.    

• For the 754th time this era there’s a major bit of cosmology that the Doctor has always known about and never mentioned before. Still, it’s nice of Chibnall to try to merge it with some things we’ve already heard of for those of us who are too far down the rabbit hole: “We immortals need our games, Doctor. Eternity is long, and we are cursed to see it all. The Eternals have their games, the Guardians have their power struggles. For me, this dimension is a beautiful board for a game. The Toymaker would approve.”

• Ian Gelder the evil god was last seen as Mr Dekker in Torchwood: Children of Earth, and last heard as the voice of some tea towels in The Ghost Monument.

• I was surprised to learn Yaz was meant to still be in school three years ago  because Mandip Gill is very obviously 30 ... this lot make the cast of Buffy look like actual kids.