2. At first glance (or at least judging from the trailer) Listen is the requisite scary monster episode. And let’s face it – Moffat is good at these. The Weeping Angels, the Silence, Prisoner Zero, that kid with the gas mask... you know they scared you.
But as it turns out, this wasn’t the requisite scary monster episode. Everything was shaping up to be another round of “don’t look, don’t blink, don’t hold your breath, it’s there in the corner of your eye, in the reflection, just behind your shoulder” suspense, with all the usual boxes ticked: the creepy noises, the spooky atmosphere, the shrouded figure you couldn’t see or understand.
Yet at the denouement of this episode we learn ... there was nothing there at all. Or if there was something there, we don’t get a proper explanation for it. Was it a kid playing a prank? A figment of an overworked imagination? A creature that just doesn’t want to be seen? The embodiment of the nightmare?
We don’t know. More importantly, it doesn’t matter. Whatever it is or isn’t, it only exists in order to get us thinking about fear.
And that’s what fundamentally separates the episode from what is otherwise its closest relative: the entity in Midnight. Whatever the Midnight creature was, it was real. It was a character. It had power and impact. The terror of it came from the fact that the Doctor couldn’t define it, couldn’t identify it, couldn’t explain it. It was the focus of that particular story.
Not so here. From a Doylist perspective, whatever is lurking in the shadows of Listen is less important than how the characters respond to it. The focus shifts from it to them.
2. It starts a little randomly, with the Doctor ruminating aloud to himself about the theory of evolution and the possibility that some creatures having perfected the art of hiding.This sequence is mostly just to introduce the premise and themes of the episode (though I give Moffat credit for trying to justify the Doctor’s audible pondering by speculating that talking to oneself is an unconscious side-effect of someone else listening), but from this point the script jumps a little too abruptly to the hypothesis that everyone has had the same identical nightmare at some point in their lives.
How do we get from Point A to Point B? No idea. But it gives us a mystery to solve. In this case: a nightmare that everybody throughout history has had (except me, apparently). There’s even a short montage of people in a variety of eras experiencing it: of waking up, sitting upright, and feeling something under the bed grab their ankle.
3. So already there are some classic Moffatisms at work. He’s the master frightener, so of course he would raise concepts like a nightmare shared across history/around the world, and a theory that postulates you’re never truly alone. There are also plenty of echoes of his previous work: the orphanage filled with the Silence (here a boy’s boarding school) and the Weeping Angels that you can’t take your eyes off (inverted here when the Doctor orders Danny and Clara to ignore the thing on the bed), as well as bits and pieces of other episodes: the aforementioned Midnight entity, an early time-traveller that ends up in the wrong place (Hide), and a visit to the very end of the Universe (shouldn’t there be a rocket ship heading for Utopia somewhere out there?)
Another Moffat staple is of course giving ordinary happenstance a sinister edge. We’ve all had those moments where we’ve glimpsed something out the corner of our eye, heard something we can’t understand, gotten dizzy for no particular reason – and Moffat loves to spin out out supernatural explanations for such things.
Here it’s not only talking aloud to oneself and the prickle on the back of your neck, but of putting things down and finding them elsewhere: a piece of chalk, a coffee cup – and yet a second after it disappears, we realize the cup that goes missing from the janitor’s desk was taken by the Doctor himself.
This is a clue.
4. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The Doctor has a plan to investigate further by using Clara and the Tardis to travel back to a point in her past – the point in which she had the nightmare. Slight problem: she gets distracted by her terrible date with Danny Pink and takes the Tardis back to a point in his past.
Naturally it’s the Doctor’s meddling with Danny that inspires him to become the very soldier that Clara was struggling with on their date with each other. Textbook stuff. But then we get the chilling scene that depicts Clara proving there’s nothing scary under the bed, only for something unseen to get on top of it.
As the episode goes on, more Moffatisms pile up. The practical utilization of the Tardis that allows Clara to return to her date moments after leaving it (despite a lengthy interim). A random appearance from an equally random individual that’s only given context afterwards. A spooky nursery rhyme. And of course, a Brick Joke – specifically the merging of Clara’s wide face and her need for three mirrors.
It all accumulates in the sublime twist that it was ultimately Clara herself who was the bogeyman hiding underneath the Doctor’s bed.
But how do we get to that point?
5. As we’ve already seen, Clara and Danny find themselves on an excruciatingly awkward first date, even though the writer of Coupling can’t help but give them dialogue that’s a bit too witty for actors who are trying to act tongue-tied. Never mind; Danny is still super-touchy when it comes to his military past and is soon listing all the life-saving activities he did whilst serving.Clara storms out, only to be dropped off at the restaurant mere moments after her past self left it. She doesn’t fare much better during her second attempt; Danny is suspicious that she’s somehow picked up the name Rupert, and then a guy in a space suit strolls in and gestures to her.
Assuming it’s the Doctor, complaining that this night can’t get any more surreal, she storms back into the Tardis only for the helmet to come off and reveal that it’s Danny.
Actually it’s not; it’s Orson Pink, a man heavily implied to be Clara’s descendant. He’s a time traveller; one of the first in fact, only he was accidentally shot way too far into the future.
The episode is evenly divided between Danny’s past and Orson Pink’s future, with Clara’s date taking place at the beginning, midpoint and end. You have to admit, it really is wonderful the way Moffat actually uses time-travel like this, slipping back and forward to the recent past and the distant future within a forty-five minute time frame. It’s only when he tries to pack too much into any singular episode that he fails; tries to convince us that the multiverse is at stake at the end of every season finale, that things spiral out of control. But this? A lengthy expedition that’s enclosed within the beginning and end of a single date? That works.
6. Here’s another Moffatism – the way he sets up scares. Remember in The Girl in the Fireplace how the Doctor noticed that all the clocks were broken and then asked what was ticking? Or in The Eleventh Hour when he noticed how blasé Amelia Pond was about his appearance and so inferred that whatever was in her room MUST be terrifying?
Here the same logic-based build-up is used when the Doctor tests Danny by asking him if he wants to stay one more night and then pointing out that even though they’re at the end of everything, that there’s nothing else left alive in the entire Universe – the door is still locked.
7. Significantly less scary than the thing on the bed is the Doctor and Clara hearing knocks and creaks at the end of time. It’s the same general premise, but simply not as immediate as the bedroom scene. Still, the same logic applies – there are definite noises, but nothing’s there. Just as the thing on the bed could have been a child playing a silly prank, all the rational explanations the Doctor and Orson give to explain the end-of-the-world phenomena might well be the correct ones.
But the Doctor is determined to test his hypothesis, to learn whether creatures that have evolved into the perfect hiders will emerge when there’s only one person left in the Universe to see them. He’s knocked unconscious before finding out.
8. And there’s a final stop once the Doctor is knocked out and Clara ends up in a barn. Assuming she’ll be somewhere in Orson’s time line, she doesn’t realize she’s in the Doctor’s childhood.This is where things get a bit ... iffy.
Clara goes exploring the loft where a child lies crying in bed and swiftly hides under it when she hears people coming. My first problem is that both the crying from the child and the voice-overs from the adults were awfully fake. Both sounded like a tape recording, and left me with the false impression that Clara was walking into some sort of trap.
The adults come in for no real reason but to drop exposition that the child in bed is the Doctor before leaving almost immediately, and when the boy sits up in bed, Clara instinctively grabs his ankle. Aha!
She gently tells the boy that it’s all a dream, and he goes back to sleep. Nicely done. But Moffat just can’t help himself. Clara doubles back and starts a seemingly endless monologue about fear and superpowers and listening and what it all means.
Oh, and on top of that, we learn that this is the very barn that the War Doctor will enter to detonate the Moment. And yes, I recognise the thematic relevance of a reluctant soldier that was established with Danny earlier in the episode, but at this point it just felt like overkill. Much like the play on the word “fear” as the Doctor’s constant “companion.”
Too much, Moffat! Rein it in!
At the same time, I felt that the episode was too coy over not showing us the young Doctor’s face. I know there are some hard-core fans that freak out every time there’s even a hint of the Doctor’s past or the interior of the Tardis, insisting that it must remain mysterious at all costs, but honestly. It wouldn’t have harmed anyone to see this boy’s face; in fact, it would have been an amazingly humanizing moment for a character whose current incarnation is extremely irritable and aloof.
10. The sight of Clara comforting the Doctor by his bedside as a child will no doubt lead to another round of Mary Sue and Special Snowflake accusations, confirming my belief that a Mary Sue is generally defined as a character who does anything important whilst female. Clara’s rapport with children has already been well established, and her behaviour in the barn had more to do with closing a Stable Time Loop (in giving him his treatise about fear) than authorial insistence on how special she is.
The glorious fact that she’s currently being given a personality outside her travels with the Doctor means that she’s no longer the Impossible Girl, she’s a normal girl who occasionally gets the chance to do impossible things. Seeing her in these past few episodes: dating, teaching, even just curling up on her bed, make her more real than anything else she’s done since her arrival on the show.
And I even dig her arrangement with the Doctor – instead of being a constant fixture on board the Tardis, she instead lives her own life on a day-to-day basis and gets picked up by the Doctor when he needs her. It’s a change in dynamics, and that’s good.
Plus I loved her outfit in this episode; that dress, those rings. They should start a website where you can track down these clothes.
11. I still wonder if perhaps the colour “pink” is going to be thematically important later on. Danny was very much linked with this colour throughout: first the pink shirt he wore in the restaurant, then the pink lighting in his bedroom, and finally the desolate pinkness at the end of the world. Stay tuned.12. Finally, I want to point out that there’s a big difference between perfect clarification and deliberate ambiguity. Some readers demand answers to every question that’s raised – I don’t. In fact, I think shining a light too brightly on a story can be detrimental to its sense of mystery and beauty. So I don’t mind if we never find out what was really under that blanket.
But of course, you can definitely go too far in the opposite direction, which is when you end up with the likes of Lost and A Series of Unfortunate Events. I’m on the fence about certain things in this episode and whether or not they could have used a bit more clarity – namely the nightmare.
From what I gather, everyone got the nightmare because of this experience the Doctor had in his early childhood. Somehow the psychic emanations from this event “leaked” out into the dreams of all mankind. But every other supernatural occurrence in this episode, from the “listen” on the chalkboard to the monster on the bed to the noises at the end of the Universe was a manifestation (or perhaps just a symbolization) of the Doctor’s own fears.
This is demonstrated with him adding a flourish to the “listen” on the blackboard, to taking the coffee from under the janitor’s nose, to Clara being the monster under the bed – everything we saw and heard was just him in some capacity the whole time.
Right?
Ultimately, this was an episode about fear and Moffat had a LOT to say about the subject. Perhaps a little too much. He has his characters rhapsodize about the superhero qualities of fear and giving instructions on how to deal with fear sitting on/under your bed and why being a soldier without a gun is so important when it could all be distilled pretty effectively into the old adage: “there’s nothing to fear but fear itself.” And that’s something you can easily show instead of discussing at length.
And naturally a hefty dose of sentimentality – the Doctor is the toy soldier without a gun! So brave he can protect the whole world without one! Get it?!
You know what worked better? Joining the dots in hindsight. The Doctor writing “listen” as an echo of his experience with Clara, just as Danny was inspired to become a soldier after his night-time talk with her. The Doctor’s evolution theory and obsession with “poking in the shadows” being traced back to his old childhood fears. The fantastic foreshadowing that it was the Doctor himself who was the cause of the nightmare, hinted in him taking the coffee cup and switching off the television, or of the ultimate non-reveal of the monster by having the Doctor search for Wally in a book that isn’t even a Where’s Wally book.
None of this is spelt out, so it’s much more rewarding to think about. Similarly, the journey of the toy soldier. Blatant symbolism aside, tracking its passage through time is a lot of fun: from Danny’s childhood to the very end of the universe to the bedside table of the Doctor in his childhood. Suck it, Steadfast Tin Soldier. You only got swallowed by a fish.
Oh Moffat. You do so infuriate, but sometimes you write stuff like this. I may even watch it a third time.
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