4: Listen

 

Writer: Steven Moffat

Director: Douglas Mackinnon

Originally Broadcast: 13 September 2014

 

Cast

 

The Doctor: Peter Capaldi

Clara: Jenna Coleman

Danny Pink/Orson Pink: Samuel Anderson

Rupert Pink: Remi Gooding

Reg: Robert Goodman

Figure: Kiran Shah

 

Since taking over Doctor Who in 2010, Steven Moffat has been preoccupied with writing the big, blockbusting episodes – season openers, finales, Christmas specials, and so on – often centred around major turning points in the Doctor’s life. For the 2014 season, he deliberately reserved a slot in the schedule where he could tell a small-scale story focusing on the kind of creepiness he displayed during the Russell T Davies era, with acclaimed episodes like The Empty Child (2005) and Blink (2007). Rather than simply duplicate his past successes, though, Listen brilliantly combines the two approaches with a highly innovative story structure, mixing unnerving ideas and a slowly developing mystery that reveals a part of the Doctor’s life we have never seen before, to produce the best episode of the season so far.

Right from the start it is apparent that this is going to be an unusual episode, as the opening shot shows the Doctor sitting cross-legged and meditating on the roof of the TARDIS as it floats in space, before he suddenly opens his eyes, looks straight at us and fiercely whispers, “Listen!” The single-word story title will recur at a number of important moments throughout, the first one being at the end of the pre-titles teaser that consists entirely of the Doctor talking to himself, making notes on his blackboard and setting out the premise of the story. His informal appearance, with a simple pullover and jacket replacing his more tailored costume of previous episodes, tells us this is a day off for him – for once he is pursuing his own interests, rather than randomly arriving somewhere and getting swept up in other peoples’ concerns. He is mulling over the concept of a race of creatures capable of “perfect hiding” – creatures that are constantly near us but never leave any real evidence of their presence. If such a creature existed, how could it be detected? Capaldi spins a compelling soliloquy as he shows the Doctor intrigued by the idea of a creature that cannot even be sensed (“except in those moments when, for no clear reason, you choose to speak aloud…”) and wonders what it would do. He is answered when he notices a message has been chalked on his blackboard: the single word, LISTEN – the first of many delicious moments where this episode conjures an unsettling atmosphere from the simplest of means.

As usual, he decides he needs Clara with him while he explores this intriguing idea. Since her “impossible girl” mystery was resolved last season, Clara has really blossomed as a character, and Jenna Coleman has been given a much greater range of material to play. Clara is still striving to keep the two strands of her life separate, and part of the enjoyment of this episode is the way the weirdness of her adventure with the Doctor becomes intimately interwoven with her disastrous first date with Danny Pink. Coleman and Samuel Anderson have fun portraying these two people who are obviously attracted to each other, as shown in an unguarded moment when they are relaxed and laughing at their shared experiences at work, but who keep tripping themselves up thanks to mutual edginess. In Clara’s case, as she will later admit, “I mouth off when I’m nervous… Seriously, it’s got a mind of its own.” Danny is extremely touchy about his soldiering past, which evidently contains some painful memories we haven’t yet seen, and a passing joke from Clara implying he might be quick to kill provokes an angry flare-up about the work he has done providing humanitarian aid. In turn, she is offended by his dismissive reference to “people like you” making assumptions about him, and storms off. The date and its aftermath are told in Moffat’s characteristic quick-fire mix of flashback and real-time scenes, which helps to make a fairly standard dramatic situation (albeit one new for Doctor Who) fresh and interesting.

Back home, Clara is surprised to find the TARDIS parked in her bedroom. The last time the Doctor landed in his companion’s bedroom was back in 2010’s Flesh and Stone, when Matt Smith’s incarnation found himself hastily fending off Amy’s confident advances. Here, there’s absolutely no sexual suggestion in the atmosphere at all; the Doctor impatiently dismisses Clara’s dating woes as he bustles her into the TARDIS. “I haven’t actually said yes,” she says, mostly to herself – but by then she’s already inside, and soon caught up as usual in pursuit of a new adventure with the Doctor. I could do without the repeated jabs at Clara’s weight and appearance, though; almost from the beginning Capaldi’s Doctor was tossing disparaging comments at Clara, but in Deep Breath they could be considered part of the usual disorientation that follows a regeneration. Their continued use, however, both in Into the Dalek and here, indicates a more permanent change in the Doctor. Derogatory remarks about her makeup, or the shape of her face or eyes, are obviously intended as humour (and sometimes even work in that regard), but they would be very unpalatable if they were not so patently ridiculous (due only to Clara being played by the obviously attractive Coleman) – and if Clara didn’t let them just wash over her without any reaction, or occasionally respond in kind. The goal is clearly to establish a contrast with the previous Doctor’s relationship to her, but I think the point has now been quite sufficiently underlined.

The Doctor being in full-on investigation mode, driving the story from the start, provides a showcase for Peter Capaldi. He is full of energy as he shows Clara how he has been looking through records of dreams (or are they dreams?) recurring throughout history in search of his “perfect hiding” creatures. The startling image of a hand reaching out from under a bed to grab an unwary ankle is a wonderfully spine-tingling idea that anyone in the audience can relate to – and an excellent new twist on the “monster under the bed” concept Moffat previously employed to great effect in 2006’s The Girl in the Fireplace. When Clara admits that she had that dream when she was a child, he links her to the TARDIS’s telepathic interface in order to navigate to that time and place, and is grinning with almost disturbing intensity at the prospect of finding out “what’s under your bed.” Moffat’s virtuosity is on full show, as he constructs a plot that will jump through an assortment of wildly contrasting settings, and yet manages to link them together with clockwork precision. A post-date phone call from Danny distracts Clara at a crucial moment, causing the TARDIS to land in his childhood rather than hers, at a gloomy children’s home in the 1990’s where a lonely boy called Rupert (“It’s a stupid name… I’m going to change it”) has been scared by a dream.

Clara’s experience working with children enables her to quickly establish a rapport with Rupert (an excellent, believable performance by first-time child actor Remi Gooding), and soon they are both scrambling under his bed, as she demonstrates to him that there’s nothing to fear. Except that there is: without warning, the bed above them creaks as something climbs onto it. It’s an unnervingly still figure hiding under the bedspread, which could be simply one of the other children in the home trying to scare Rupert as a prank – or, just possibly, an alien creature of unknown power that should never be seen, now accidentally cornered. When the Doctor turns up, he too treats the thing on the bed seriously, even as he indulges in antics like pretended disappointment at learning that not every book is a Where’s Wally book (“Really? Well, that’s a few years of my life I’ll be needing back”), and delivers an earnest speech reassuring Rupert that being scared is good (“scared is a super power. It’s your super power”) in an engagingly silly manner calculated to gain the boy’s trust, so that he will be willing to turn his back on the unknown figure, and let it go in peace.

The central uncertainty about the nature of what the Doctor is pursuing is at the heart of the story. Does the “perfect hiding” creature he postulates actually exist, or is the whole thing a chimera, based ultimately on fear of the unknown? The marvellously original idea of having a “monster” that cannot be shown or heard presents a tough challenge for director Douglas Mackinnon. Every strange manifestation the Doctor and Clara encounter has to support both possible interpretations. Mackinnon mostly succeeds at this careful balancing act, although he does add an unjustified flash of light when the figure disappears from Rupert’s bedroom, which interferes with the ambiguity the script is trying to achieve. There are also a few odd, non-naturalistic touches in the storytelling. Some are just harmless quirks, like the Doctor’s ability to silently vanish in an instant while Reg the caretaker has his back turned, or his appearing in Rupert’s room just as suddenly. But the disappearing coffee ring on Reg’s desk, which simply fades away in plain sight while the man looks on, is a bit of unnecessary weirdness for its own sake. Nevertheless, the whole sequence in the spooky old building is well told, with the tension relaxing after the crisis is over as Clara helps the boy place a ring of plastic toy soldiers protectively around his bed. Given who Rupert will grow up to become, it’s not surprising that he says “Dan” when she asks what they should call the chief soldier, to Clara’s consternation. Fortunately for her, the Doctor brings the scene to an end by putting Rupert to sleep with the touch of one finger to the boy’s forehead, recalling an ability displayed by Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor in Survival (1989). His passing it off as “Dad skills” is both a funny punchline and a useful reminder of how much of his background remains a mystery – hidden preparation for the ending of the episode.

Clara’s expression when she realises that, thanks to her and the Doctor’s visit, Rupert will grow up to become “Dan the soldier man” is hilarious. She asks the Doctor for a favour… and so a (slightly) older and wiser Clara returns to the restaurant and tries to patch things up with Danny from the point where her earlier self had left off. But the date is destined to remain a disaster; after accidentally dropping Rupert’s name into the conversation, she is unable to recover – and is certainly not helped by the surreal appearance of a spacesuited figure in a corner of the restaurant beckoning to her. This time, it’s Danny who gets upset (“I don’t do weird”) and walks out. An angry Clara stalks back into the TARDIS in pursuit of the spacesuited man, only to find herself confronting a characteristic Moffat surprise. While she was with Danny, the Doctor (using her telepathic connection with the TARDIS) extrapolated her timeline into the future, and has brought back her and Danny’s descendant, Colonel Orson Pink – a pioneer time traveller from the 22nd century whose experimental ship malfunctioned (an echo of a plot strand in 2013’s Hide) and left him marooned at the end of the universe. I’m in two minds about having Samuel Anderson play Orson as well as Danny. On the one hand it provides a moment of instant recognition (and confusion) as he takes off the spacesuit helmet. On the other, it’s a serious challenge to believability; as Anderson plays them, they are so similar that the unavoidable impression is of Danny dressed up in a rather unconvincing wig.

The canvas of the story widens hugely, even while it remains focused on just three characters, as the Doctor takes them back to the farthest future, to Orson’s crashed time-ship (which, in a clever piece of set design, has its walls studded with round lighting features that echo those in the TARDIS). This location is essential to continuing the Doctor’s quest; he wonders if after all other life has ended, the shadowy creatures he is pursuing might finally show themselves. The script exhibits a weakness here, though, by not bothering to provide any kind of justification for Orson’s ship, which had only been intended to make a short, exploratory journey, ending up somewhere even the TARDIS would normally have difficulty reaching. (To play armchair script editor for a moment, perhaps a line could have been included explaining how the ship – built by humans unfamiliar with the hazards of time travel – became trapped in some kind of self-perpetuating instability, a cycle that kept repeatedly kicking it forwards in time, until it could literally go no further. A small amount of hand-waving like that would have been enough to paper over the plot hole.) Nevertheless, this sequence is even more successfully creepy than the earlier scenes in the children’s home. The Doctor again exclaims “Listen!” – drawing attention to the complete silence at the end of everything. He tells a transparent lie about the TARDIS needing to recharge so they have to spend a night here, to Orson’s dismay. Despite a show of bravery, the man is just as jittery about the dark and the unknown as the boy, Rupert. When Clara leads him into the TARDIS to wait in safety, she discovers that Orson carries with him the little plastic chief toy soldier – now a family heirloom. She tries to lighten the mood with a joke (“Take my advice… when you get home, stay away from time travel”), but as he gives her the toy, they both recognise the connection between them.

Appropriately for an episode called Listen, sound design has a crucial part to play. As in the children’s home, the sequence of the Doctor and Clara waiting in the darkened time-ship foregoes the show’s usual lavish incidental music in favour of long stretches of silence or spooky ambient noises, to excellent effect. The essential uncertainty about the existence of the Doctor’s hypothesised creatures is carefully maintained amid various scratching and hissing noises that might or might not be mechanical in nature. A loud, repetitive knocking starts – but, as the Doctor points out, it could just be an effect of the hull cooling in the night. The tension is as extreme as in 2008’s Midnight, except that in that episode there was no doubt that something was outside, trying to get in. Here, though, they are not trapped – at any point, they can simply get in the TARDIS and leave. But the Doctor refuses to go; his need for information and knowledge has always been a central characteristic, and the prospect of finally getting a definitive answer to the mystery holds him there, even after Clara cracks and he angrily orders her back into the TARDIS. Thanks to a highly convenient (for the writer) failure of the scanner screen, she and Orson are unable to see what happens at the crisis, when the Doctor faces the opening airlock of the ship. He is found unconscious – either from an attack, or from flying debris. Clara quickly takes the TARDIS away from there, meaning the truth of what happened will never be revealed; it seems like the story can go no further, with fear of the unknown having triumphed.

But now comes the totally unexpected twist as, thanks again to Clara’s link with the TARDIS (it’s not spelled out, but we must presume that, as with Danny’s phone call, the Doctor’s sudden lurch and gasp while Clara is connected to the console provides the distraction that diverts them here), they arrive in a dimly lit, nondescript barn where another young boy is quietly sobbing, afraid of the dark. This is not somewhere the TARDIS is ever supposed to be, but as the Doctor confessed earlier, they only got to the end of the universe because “some idiot turned the safeguards off.” Hiding under the boy’s bed as a couple of adults enter, Clara overhears a comment about how he’ll “never make a Time Lord” – and her horrified realisation that she is in the Doctor’s own childhood is superbly played. No doubt some will be aghast at Moffat pulling back the curtain on a part of the Doctor’s past that has always been (and, for the most part, should remain) shrouded in mystery, but for me it was worth it for the jaw-dropping revelation of the significance of that random barn that John Hurt’s Doctor found in 2013’s Fiftieth Anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor. As the Doctor in the TARDIS starts awake (with a fan-pleasing cry of “Sontarans, perverting the course of human history!” – Tom Baker’s first line as the Doctor nearly forty years earlier), Clara knows she has to do something to stop him from interfering with his own past. Instinctively, she reaches out from under the bed to grab the boy’s ankle as he stands up – and her quick thinking, persuading him that this is all just a dream, and that he should go back to bed, turns the whole story into one of Moffat’s patented loops of cause and effect.

As usual with Moffat’s best scripts, many lines or scenes echo or mirror each other to bind a deliberately disjointed collection of story pieces into a cohesive whole. Both Rupert and the Doctor must make a promise not to investigate something. The Doctor’s “Do as you’re told” to Clara in the time-ship is reflected back at him when she has to convince him, without telling him why, to take off from the barn without looking at where they’ve been. Fear, and how to react to it, has run through the whole story, from the Doctor’s universe-spanning quest to the mundanity of Clara and Danny’s first date. And everything comes together in a final monologue from Clara, which begins (how else?) with the word, “Listen…” Having successfully kept the Doctor’s timeline intact, Clara goes to leave – but cannot help being drawn back by the boy’s continued crying. She comforts him with words inspired by those she had earlier heard the Doctor himself telling Rupert. Murray Gold’s music comes to the fore in this ending sequence; a steadily unfolding string melody underpins Clara’s words, with gentle harmony changes marking each stage of the final montage. “Fear is like… a constant companion, always there,” she says, and all the characters are rewarded for coming to terms with their fears: Orson gets to return home, Clara and Danny finally share a kiss, and the Doctor, with satisfaction, underlines LISTEN on his blackboard, giving a sense of “mission accomplished.” Whether or not he ever realises that his “monster under the bed” all those years ago was Clara herself – fittingly, the ending remains ambiguous on this point – the important message that it’s OK to be scared strikes home. As the little toy soldier completes its journey – from Rupert, to Orson, to Clara, to be left with the young Doctor – what threatened to be just a shaggy dog story turns into something truly exceptional.

 

Classic Who DVD Recommendation: A difficult decision, since there really isn’t a story like this anywhere in the classic series, but I’ve decided to go with the first Doctor Who story ever shown, 1963’s An Unearthly Child. The introductory episode is justly famous, but the following three, where William Hartnell’s original Doctor and his companions are stuck in the Stone Age and desperately trying to escape, are often unfairly dismissed. They do, however, feature the very first occasion when the Doctor shows empathy towards his human fellow travellers, a moment which also provides Listen with its evocative final line: “Fear makes companions of us all.”

 

Reflections: As can be gathered from the above review, for me Listen is Moffat on top form, packed with original ideas and intricate technique, but also with a very satisfying emotional core underneath all the surface fizz. It looks forward to his episodes at the climax of the next season: Heaven Sent will take the idea of the Doctor monologuing and investigating on his own to the limit, not to mention drawing central plot elements from the Doctor’s past and letting the music carry the story during critical sequences. Then, Hell Bent will revisit both the barn and the end of the universe, and will also restrict the greater part of its storytelling to just the regular characters. It’s not perfect, of course; I’ve already mentioned the plot hole of Orson Pink’s over-contrived arrival at the end of the universe. Another such issue is that while the story thoroughly explains where the Doctor’s dream came from, it offers no hint as to how other people all through history have come to have the same dream. (Interestingly, the leaked dubbing script of this episode reveals that the intention was to have voiceover lines from Clara – copies of her “This is just a dream” from the final sequence – during the earlier montage, implying that their dreams did originate from the Doctor somehow. Dropping this must have been a late decision, but a good one; it doesn’t really address the objection and would just have been confusing.)

As for Orson himself, after one fleeting reference in The Caretaker he is never mentioned again, and his very existence becomes problematic in the light of Danny’s fate at the end of this season. But Moffat always places more importance on making each of his episodes as effective as possible in its own right. In Listen, the story requires Danny and Clara to have descendants; in Dark Water and Death in Heaven, the story requires Danny to die and stay dead. The inconsistency that emerges when the season is considered as a larger whole is of less concern to him (as is apparent in this case by the fact that in the latter story, Orson is not even brought up in the Doctor and Clara’s confrontation over Danny’s death). This treating of season-arc plotting as a lesser priority (which is hardly new; see the entire Matt Smith era and its only partially successful tying up in The Time of the Doctor) flies in the face of the usual practice of current science fiction series, and has led to some criticism of Moffat within the hard-core fandom. However, I think that as long as Doctor Who retains its paradoxical status as a sci-fi show aimed primarily at a large audience of general viewers who tend not to watch every episode (as is certainly the case in its home country), its structure as a string of separate and more or less self-contained stories is inevitable and right. Still, in this particular case, the discrepancy is such that I wish that the season finale had at least acknowledged it, even if just to wave it away with a bit of “time can be rewritten” dialogue.

Other negative reactions came from those who felt that Clara was threatening to take over the show. After preserving the Doctor’s entire timeline in 2013, she now turns out to be part of a crucial formative experience of the Doctor’s childhood, and future episodes of this season would dwell heavily on her relationship with the Doctor and its effect on her. However, I think the impression of “Clara overload” is largely a product of her involvement in two quite separate storylines. After The Name of the Doctor, a line seemed to be drawn under the whole “impossible girl” business with Matt Smith’s Doctor, and it has rarely been even alluded to since; one could easily envisage an entirely new companion being introduced (as a teacher at Coal Hill School) to fill Clara’s place alongside Capaldi’s Doctor and go through similar experiences. But it is hard to imagine the character arc Clara goes through in this season and the next being better handled than by Jenna Coleman; I can only be glad that such a fine actor ended up staying with Doctor Who for a year longer than she originally planned.

Meanwhile, the Doctor’s personality continues to evolve. Fortunately, the worst of the grating snipes at Clara’s appearance are now past; from now on, they will tend more towards standard comic banter (see, for example, his failure to notice her dressed-up look in the next episode). The avuncular connection he develops with Rupert is the first crack in his dour facade, looking forward to the more relaxed persona he will develop next season. And Clara rewarding him with a big hug – and his “No, not the hugging!” reaction – is a laugh-out-loud moment perfectly placed to lighten the emotional final sequence. Given the stormy weather their relationship will soon be travelling through, it’s reassuring to keep in mind that they can be, after all, good friends.