Listen Series 8 - Episode Four

Listen: Series 8 -Episode Four

Written by Steven Moffat

Synopsis:

(Doctor talking out loud to self, whilst writing notes on a chalkboard)

"Question - Why do we talk out loud when we know we're not alone?"

Conjecture -  Because we know we're not.

Question - Why is there no such thing as perfect hiding.

Answer - How would you know? Logically, if evolution were to perfect a creature whose primary skill were to hide from view, how could you know it existed? It could be with us every second and we would never know. How would you detect it? Even sense it? Except for those moments when for no clear reason, you choose to speak aloud. What would such a creature want? What would it do? Well? What would you do?!"

(Answer appears on chalkboard) "Listen"

Listen deals with the emotion of fear. And what is more fearful than that which lurks beneath your bed at night?

Review:

After a disastrous first date with soldier now turned teacher, Danny Pink, (who seems to be a bit fond of bashing his head against hard surfaces) the Doctor asks Clara for a favour. He asks her if she has ever had a dream in which there is someone else in the room and that when you sit up, you are then grabbed by the ankle. Apparently it's a universal dream which everyone including the Doctor has experienced. Er, I haven't.

In order to prove that this is true, the Doctor uses Clara's time-line to go back to the moment of experiencing the 'thing under the bed'. But being connected to the TARDIS, Clara becomes distracted by thoughts of Danny and they end up in front of a children's home somewhere in the 90s, where they encounter Danny, formerly Rupert Pink as a young child.

The Doctor and a young Danny

Whilst the Timelord questions the caretaker of the home about the spooky going ons of the house, Clara finds Rupert/Danny sitting on the floor of his bedroom, afraid of what might be under the bed. Of course Clara proves to him that there is nothing there at all. But what is that lurking on top of the bed?

There may not be monsters lurking under the bed, but what about on top of the bed?

There's a lot going on in this episode. With it's dark and scary overtones, it's a story that is very much reminiscent of Blink. We meet Orson Pink 100 years into the future, a time traveller who has been stranded on the last planet in the universe. But has he been truly alone all this time? And from the story that progresses, it seems likely that Orson is a distant relative of Clara and Danny, suggesting that at some point in the future, the two of them get together. We also discover that the Doctor is scared of that dark and learn that Clara was the hand that grab the child Timelord, which made him scared of the dark in the first place...or does she?

Clara scaring the bejeezus out of the possible Doctor

The scene is which Clara is seen to be consoling the young Doctor is a fascinating one. Not least because it involves the barn where the War Doctor (John Hurt) ended up in the 50th Anniversary Special The Day Of The Doctor, as he contemplated wiping out ending the Time War by effectively blowing up his birthplace of Gallifrey.
Also in the same scene, as the young boy cries, we hear to adults discussing why he cannot sleep with the other boys instead choosing to sleep in the barn, with the male arguing that he would never be a Timelord. As Whovians know, every Timelord is a Gallifreyan but not every Gallifreyan is a Timelord.

The War Doctor

The flaw in this plot-line however, is that Gallifrey is in a time-lock and so cannot be traversed through time and space travel. So were they really on Gallifrey and was that really the young Doctor?

Overall, I thought it was a good but not great episode, with the most interesting bits being the end scenes.