Doctor Who: Listen

Posted on September 15, 2014

docwho804PinPeter Capaldi in BBC America’s “Doctor Who”

 

Pre-airing buzz informed us that this was going to be a very “divisive” episode. We tend not to react well to that sort of “Here’s how you’re going to think about it” hype, so our eyes were ready to roll at the slightest hint of pretension as we sat down to watch this episode the first time.  Then we stayed seated and watched it a second time. Then we walked away from it, had brunch, started typing up some notes for this review – and decided we simply MUST see it a third time.

And the hell of it is, we STILL don’t know what to think of it. It’s so divisive that it’s impossible for us to make up our minds about it. Let’s start with what we do know before we get to the much bigger part of what we don’t know.

First, we truly appreciated the unusual structure of the episode, with several rather predictable (although not so much in the long run) Doctor Who tropes (the fears of children, closed time travel loops, monsters that can’t be perceived conventionally) playing out with romantic comedy bookends on either side of them. There was a tonal shift halfway through the episode when Clara went back to her date (the first time) and we realized that something was a little … off about what was being said and the way it was being said. There was a masterful sense of menace throughout the whole episode, but it was at the halfway point that you shift uncomfortably in your seat because you realize that you can’t tell if the menace comes from unseen monsters or from the deeply flawed people who are populating this tale. And attention must be paid to both Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman, who may just be the best acting duo this show’s seen since the days of Tennant and Tate.

Second, it definitely had the feel of a game-changer by the time we got to that final scene, which seemed designed to be debated and pondered for years to come. Steven Moffat has a lot of flaws as a showrunner, but if there’s one thing he understands very well, it’s the nerdery and obsession this kind of show can inspire. He knows how to play into that segment of the audience. He also seems to be making a much larger and more ambitious statement about who the Doctor is at this point in his life. Every new regeneration gets at least an episode or two to make their mission statement, but we’re starting to believe that this entire season will be delving deep into the psyche of the Doctor – and it’s an not entirely reassuring picture. Immediately post-regeneration, this Doctor wandered around making alarming or nonsensical statements while talking to himself and showing a rather poor grasp on reality. Four episodes into the new regeneration and he’s STILL wandering around an empty TARDIS, talking to himself and losing his grasp on reality. Is this what happens after a Time Lord uses up all his regenerations? He goes a little nuts? After all, why would he suddenly become obsessed with an idea that first occurred to him 2000 years before; that there are real monsters under the bed? And while the episode is meant to be ambiguous in a lot of ways, it seems to come down pretty hard on the side that says there were no monsters in this story; that the Doctor, who has been fighting monsters face to face for well over a millenia, worked himself into a lather and convinced himself there were monsters where there were none. And why? Because, we come to find out, he’s always been scared of the monsters under his bed and he’s been using that fear as his “constant companion” his whole life. It’s a very “Bruce Wayne” take on a character that had, in immediately prior seasons, been written more like Superman. Gone is the “lonely god” version of Tennant and Smith, to be replaced by the “angry man, tormented by fear” Capaldi version. In typical Moffatt manner, that recasts the entire history of the character in a different light, but thematically, it’s interesting and worth exploring.

But what concerns us about this episode was this: Moffat doesn’t always show a very good grasp of the consequences in his stories. The prime example of this is River Song, whose life, in retrospect, was a massive tragedy; the story of a woman ripped away from her parents as an infant and used as a puppet her entire life, demonstrating no agency or interest toward anything other than that which was planted in her head by her kidnappers: a total, all-consuming obsession with the Doctor. Moffat unfortunately wrote a paper-thin reaction to all of this: River and her parents are just so in love with the Doctor that not one of them minded how much their relationships with him irrevocably fucked up their lives. It would have been a really interesting thing to explore, but Moffat swept it all under the rug, leaving us with three characters whose entire lives had been written out, but who remained weirdly unknowable by the audience because their reactions to things made no sense. Amy Pond had her daughter taken from her and then had her entire life taken from her – all because of the Doctor. How did she respond to that? “Goodbye old friend. Don’t you worry about us. We had fun.” It just doesn’t scan.

We bring this up because, whether Moffat intended it or not, we got the very best illustration of just how screwed up time travel can be when you’re reckless with it. The Doctor scares himself by wandering around an empty TARDIS for too long, and pretty much traumatizes the young Danny Pink by basically telling a scared little boy that monsters are real and he’ll never be safe from them. Going so far as to take the EXTREMELY un-Doctor-like (and highly disturbing, the more we think about it) position of making a young boy promise that he will never look at monsters. This quite naturally affects him for the rest of his life, as does Clara’s well-intentioned ploy to get him obsessed with soldiers (and even to choose a different name). All this happens to poor Rupert because the Doctor told himself a ghost story and recklessly decided to use a time machine to conquer his fears. Then Clara follows that up by traumatizing the young Doctor himself and taking it upon herself to essentially structure his whole life for him going forward. This was presented as something kind of beautiful and charming – and to give credit where it’s due, Jenna knocked that scene out of the park – but we still found it really, really creepy. Both the Doctor and Clara are playing around with people’s lives and neither of them seemed particularly concerned about that.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. Clara seemed pretty weirded out about how her whole timeline keeps looping back on itself and how she keeps learning things she’s not supposed to learn, but that had more to do with how it was affecting her, rather than how it was affecting anyone else. As an aside: How many times this season has she had to remind someone not to tell her the particulars of her death?

But why would she lie to the Doctor about having a connection with Rupert? And then she lied to Danny as to how she knew his real name. We can understand why you’d want to keep the time travel side of your life secret on a first date, but once you’ve interrupted that date, first to hide under a bed with a scared 8-year-old version of your date, then to go to the end of time with the great-grandson you may or may not have with your date, maybe the ethical thing would be to call off the date instead of returning to it time and again? Maybe it’s not entirely fair to Danny because you know way too much personal information about him and you’re withholding it from him?  Something simply did not sit right with us, watching her go from bonding with Rupert as a scared, vulnerable little boy, casually (albeit inadvertently) shaping the entire direction of his life, and then returning to her time to “correct” the bad date she had with him now that she’s become so irrevocably tied up with his life and destiny. And when he quite reasonably got creeped out by the revelation that she knows more about him than she should and is lying to him about why, she ran off again with the Doctor, learned even more about the destiny of the Pink family and her own possible place in it, and then returned to her date AGAIN, flush with all this knowledge she really shouldn’t have and hasn’t told anyone she has. She directly altered the destiny of two little boys (the second one, totally deliberately) and told neither of them this information even though she has relationships with both of them as adult men. As time travelers go, she’s an amazingly reckless and irresponsible one – and it bothers us tremendously that she’s keeping information from the Doctor. Throwing “Do as you’re told” back in the Doctor’s face could either be read as an empowering moment or an ominous one.

And yes, the Doctor routinely fools around with people’s timelines and visits child versions of adult companions, but he doesn’t wind up dating those people and he doesn’t keep that information from them. It’s creepy when he does it, but it’s MUCH creepier to see her making out with Danny mere hours after she hid under a bed with his child self. The thing is, we’re overtly examining the darkness of the Doctor this season, but it seems we’re also examining the darkness in Clara. Or at least, we should be, given her actions.

We sound really doubtful about the whole thing because we have reason to believe Moffat won’t be exploring these various nuances. In fact, we have reason to believe he has no idea these nuances exist. There was a time when we were convinced that the Doctor would rewrite time to save Melody Pond, because we simply couldn’t believe he’d allow such a horrible fate to happen to one of his companions, and we couldn’t imagine a story where Amy and Rory could ever forgive him for what happened to their daughter. But Moffat allowed the story of River Song to unfold without context, and as it did, it damn near destroyed the credibility of every single character involved in it, simply because Moffat didn’t want to explore the emotional impact of what he was doing to his characters.

It was a thought-provoking episode that could possibly be considered a classic, if it’s being used to set off a further exploration of what was revealed about the characters. If this is a one-off that doesn’t get referenced again? We reserve the right to call it a mistake down the line.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Photo Credit: Ray Burmistan, © BBC/BBC Worldwide 2014]

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