Review of Listen
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.
I had an even harder time than usual this week making myself go back to re-watch the episode before reviewing it. Once I did, I finally figured out why.
It’s not that I didn’t like Listen—quite the contrary. It’s that I enjoyed it so much that my extreme disappointment with the last three minutes utterly ruined it in retrospect.
Knowing what was coming the second time around, I found I could isolate the ending from the rest, preventing it from tainting my appreciation. Perhaps, like the whole “half human on my mother’s side” thing, I’ll end up just putting my fingers in my ears and chanting “I can’t hear you!” about this, too.
So let’s go back to the beginning, and look at what Moffat’s pulled out of his hat this time. Continuing in his usual vein of finding ordinary things to make extra scary, the Moff has decided this time to prey on the idea that the urge to talk to oneself when alone just means we’re talking to an invisible companion.
It’s full of ambience and a lovely creep factor—at least on first viewing. Unlike his previous memes (any statue could be an Angel; the Vashta Nerada aren’t in every shadow, but could be in any shadow; you can’t even remember you saw a Silent), the bogeymen of Listen—the breath on the back of your neck that makes you talk to not-yourself when you’re not-alone—lose all their power once you realize it’s the Doctor’s imagination running away with him. From the get-go, everything now has a rational explanation, even the word scrawled on the chalkboard in the Doctor’s own hand. “Well, I couldn’t have written it and forgotten it, could I?” he insists. But when Clara counters, “Have you met you?” I can’t help but nod and agree there’s no reason he couldn’t have.
The other big problem is that since I myself have never had the “hand grabbing your ankle from under the bed” dream, the basic narrative conceit failed right off the bat. Since I knew firsthand that not “everybody” has had that experience, I was no longer immersed in the story, and instead spent my time looking for the rational explanation (which, disappointingly enough, we actually got at the end).
However, the character aspects of the story were fascinating. The Doctor’s single-minded insistence that something had perfected hiding, and that only he could ever truly know what it was said more about his belief system than about the supposed creature. It shows that even he can suffer from confirmation bias, insisting they haven’t ended up in the wrong place “because the Time Zone’s right.”
Moffat cleverly seeds clues to the ultimate answer to the bogeyman’s identity (read: it’s just your imagination) throughout the scenes at the children’s home. The caretaker’s coffee mug goes missing, only to show up in the Doctor’s hand. And later, the Doctor enumerates the possible explanations for The Thing On the Bed:
“Possibility 1: It’s just one of your friends standing there. He’s playing a joke on you.
“Possibility 2: It isn’t.”
Turns out it’s Possibility 1.
Once they reach the end of the universe (seriously, how many times can the Doctor end up there?), and things go all Midnight with the clanging, pounding noises, he’s full of rational explanations that he’s nevertheless unwilling to believe himself. On the one hand, it’s interesting to see how human the Doctor can be; on the other, that wasn’t quite the way I’d ever envisioned his fallibility. It didn’t fit my vision of the Doctor, so made me a little sad.
Then there’s Clara. I have really been enjoying her this series, loving the way she’s come into her own as someone with her own ideas and goals, and her own unique ways of approaching difficult situations. Her developing relationship with Danny delights and puzzles me in turn, but I really enjoyed the parallels between Clara’s recall of the terrible date and Danny’s rehashing of their awkward first meeting in Into the Dalek.
And when she meets his younger self, she goes full nanny. It’s easy here to see how her alter ego in Victorian England got into that profession. She seems to have a natural affinity for kids, and to understand how to talk to them. (No wonder she works so well with the Doctor…) Better yet, she can talk to both young Rupert and the Doctor on different levels, with the same words, and does so handily with some toy soldiers.
“This one’s the boss one, the Colonel. He’s gonna keep a special eye out.”
“It’s broken, that one,” objects Rupert. “It doesn’t have a gun.”
“That’s why he’s the boss,” she explains. “A soldier so brave, he doesn’t need a gun. He can keep the whole world safe.”
It’s a lovely, reassuring story. Apparently, it sticks with him, because the colonel turns up again, in Orson’s possession, as a family heirloom.
Oh, that toy soldier. It really throws a wrench into the works. We’re given to believe by the dialog and the way Orson reacts to Clara that he is her descendent (great-grandson, by the sound of it). After all, time travel “runs in [his] family,” and why else would he press said heirloom back on her?
But then she steers the TARDIS to a mysterious barn, where a scared boy lies crying. And here’s where things start to fall apart for me. The reveal that this boy is neither Rupert nor Orson nor any other human child, but a young Gallifreyan who wants to become a Time Lord sent the exact thrill through me that it was meant to. I could even find a way to handwave an explanation for the TARDIS getting there if necessary (although slaved to Clara’s timeline, the safeties were off, and Clara had been all along the Doctor’s timeline before).
Even the part where Clara’s instinct to prevent this boy from meeting his future self by grabbing his ankle is what instigated this whole fear of the Thing Under the Bed had me on board. But then, as he so often does, Moffat had to over-egg the pudding. He just had to turn Clara into The One Who Defines The Doctor.
Anyone who reads my posts regularly knows by now what I think of Moffat’s tendency to make Companions into puzzles. I’m no more fond of the idea that the Doctor didn’t become the person he is without one single über-Companion shaping him across time. Why does everything have to be about Clara ****ing Oswald? I was really looking forward to getting back to the Doctor, instead of the blasted Companions, but it turns out I was overly optimistic on that front.
The cherry on top, though, has got to be the damned gunless toy colonel. If Clara gave it to the Doctor before he even became a Time Lord, how the hell did it get back to Rupert and eventually on to Orson, to go back to her? I suppose it could become the next Crack in the universe, but frankly I’d rather just be done with it.
So I’ve come out the other end of the episode with much my usual Moffat Hangover. It was a glorious ride the first time—even quite enjoyable the second—but there are just enough flaws (Clara ****ing Oswald, man!) to keep me from loving it. So when I go back and hear the Doctor say, “Listen!” all I hear is “blah blah blah.”
The Soldier’s Timeline
The soldier doesn’t go back. It was manufactured, ended up with a set in a children’s home and became important to Danny, was passed down through his family and was given to Orson, Clara took it from Orson and gave it to the young doctor. The end.
And there’s absolutely nothing to preclude the monster being real as well. The point isn’t that the monster was imagined, but that it doesn’t matter whether it was real or not.
I agree with your point about Clara, though.
Point taken
Okay, I see what you mean about the soldier’s timeline. Not sure why it had my brain in such a twist.
I’m still a bit iffy on the real v. imagined monster, though. Maybe it says more about me than about the story that I interpreted it as I did…
Clara ****ing Oswald
I agree with the entirety of the review. I though the concept was interesting and was fascinated throughout, but the ending was kinda rushed and anticlimactic and while I really enjoy Clara (even in Series 7) I did think this was a bit much. The Doctor hasn’t been the focal point since Deep Breath and I hope the next episodes change that. Companions should be carers and the audience’s POV, not the most important person in the universe as Clara has become or already was.
“Main character”
Yeah, I’m not excited about Clara being the focus, especially not the Key Person In the Doctor’s Entire Existence she’s become. Moffat, OTOH, seems to think it’s natural for the Companion to be the “main character”:
http://www.cultbox.co.uk/news/headlines/doctor-who-writer-moffat-clara-is-the-main-character-in-series-8
Sixth Sense
Maybe your viewing 2nd time round is like watching the Sixth Sense knowing the twist? Also I do wonder if part of the problem is The Grand Moff’s occasional tendency to leave somethings unresolved. I think that you believe that it was a fellow resident of the Childrens’ Home under the bedspread, but to me the out of focus blob that was seen did not look like a child (although that may be why it was out of focus!) and the throwaway line by The Doctor was hardly a clear cut resolution, which I find somewhat unsatisfying.
I have not bought into the hype about it being a scary episode and I think the selective clips in the trailer may have had more to do with that.
I also have never had the dream about hands under the bed but I have (and I would like to think many people have) lain in bed as a child and wondered if there were monsters under the bed, so I can cut them some slack on that.
So not a brilliant humdinger, but certainly not a clunker. It sounds like I enjoyed it more than you though, perhaps? 🙂
Enjoyment
Actually, the review makes it sound like I didn’t like it at all, but I actually did. I loved it up to those last three minutes, and the second time I didn’t hate the last three minutes quite as much, since I knew they were coming.
Time Tots
Oh, and another thing, while I could imagine the hair Clara was stroking turning into the First Doctor’s silver locks/wig, I wouldn’t put it past the Moff to have the barn sleeper as actually being the young Master blubbing after viewing the Untempered Schism (or whatever that Total Perspective Vortex thingy was called) even if the hair was all wrong.
That child
Sure, of course Moffat could be tricking us, and it was someone else. However, given the fact that he had the iron-clad balls to insert himself into the very first episode ever by making one of his characters tell the Doctor something that he’d later say himself in “An Unearthly Child,” I expect he’s keeping that one.
Master
Clara would’ve messed up bad in that case, as she says “Fear doesn’t have to make you cruel or mean”
the next big reveal
Will be that Clara is the Doctor’s mother – half-human on his mother’s side, after all.
Oy…
Bite your tongue!
Amelia
At least the Moff didn’t try and convince us that Amy was the Doctor’s mother. Crikey, the implications if that had happened!
PS Given that my daughter’s name is Amelia, I prefer the name Amelia Pond 🙂
Names
Yeah, “Amelia” is much more “fairy tale,” which is what Moffat was going for with Matt Smith’s Doctor.
Best Episode
While you seemed to hate it I really enjoy when Doctor Who gets “time wimey” (however they spell that. LOL). To me this was probably one of the single best New Who episodes in it’s entire run, and certainly the only one this series in which I’ve actually enjoyed watching.
Poorly Written
I failed somewhere along the way in writing this review; you’re not the only one who came away from it thinking I hated the episode. I actually rated it 5 stars in the poll. There was a lot to like. Maybe I felt obligated to point out the flaws where I saw them since just gushing tends not to make a very interesting read. 🙂