Can You Hear Me?: Rank - 276

 

 Can You Hear Me?

(Series 12, Dr 13 with Graham Ryan and Yaz, 9/2/2020, showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writers: Charlene James and Chris Chibnall, director: Emma Sullivan)  

Rank: 276

In an emoji: 🖕

‘One finger, one thumb, keep moving, even though those around you are disapproving, Zellen’s digits need removing, maybe one day all will be merry and bright’

…Yes dear, you're shouting! The 13th Doctor goes to Syria via Sheffield this week and has a bad dream in both with a truly brain-swaggling plot. I can't put my finger on it but there's something truly bananas about this one. Perhaps it’s the fact that this week's alien can give visit people nightmares. Perhaps it’s the creepy way his fingers detach to stick in people’s ears. Perhaps it’s the idea that Earth is just the latest pawn of an age-long battle between two immortal Gods. Perhaps it’s the sub-plot about the Doctor’s curiosity being used against her by taking over the impregnable Tardis and sending her to a mental health clinic in 14th century Aleppo. Perhaps it’s the time-bending plot that gives the companions visions of past, present and future and hops all over the place. Perhaps it’s the fact that nobody the whole story seems to be able to afford any sodding lightbulbs. 

 Or maybe it’s because this is secretly the most ambitious and cleverest plot of the Chibnall era – however badly it comes over on screen – that’s bonkers precisely because it’s about the difficulties of holding onto your sanity in a world that doesn’t want to let you. The Doctor’s dropped her friends off in Sheffield between adventures, to go back to their own lives – but their travels in the Tardis have changed them and left a giant hole in the lives of the people they’ve left behind. We finally find out (nearly two years in!) some of the reasons why our intrepid trio left their lives to be with the Doctor: we discover Yaz was a bullied teen who ran away from home and contemplated suicide before being sorted out by a policewoman who took her under her wing, we see Ryan’s mate (glimpsed briefly in ‘Spyfall’) going through a depression of his own and Ryan’s guilt that he didn’t even notice and we see Graham still struggling to move on from Grace’s death while balancing that with his fear that the cancer he was given the all-clear from in ‘The Woman Who Fell To Earth’ might have returned. As far as these characters have run, as many travels as they’ve been through space and time, they can’t escape themselves and their guilt. All of them, however, battle their demons alone and even after going through these adventures together can’t bring themselves to talk about them openly, despite the emphasis in the 21st century (both the series and the world at large nowadays) of the good it does to talk about these things. Dr Who is a very British series (no American emoting for us!) so a programme about how that reserve and disconnect between people can be a hindrance is long overdue and how that Brigadier-style stiff upper lip is allowed to quiver sometimes. Modern Who is often about the consequences of the Doctors’ travels and how the story doesn’t end once everyone goes home for tea – this story is a natural extension of that theme, but one that impressively goes further than any had before. 

 By contrast the Doctor starts off the story in Aleppo in 1380, a country which once had once had mental health clinics at least as civilised if not more so than our own with characters openly talking about their fears and guilt, the sharp contrast between the two drawn very neatly. ‘We should be further on than this!’ the story screams from almost the opening minute, as we follow the 14th century hospital system of ‘bimaristans’ (literally ‘sick places’) where mental health patients were treated with more care in many ways than patients are in mental health wards today (there was an unwritten rule that no patient would be sent home until they were 100% well – would that the NHS had the capacity to do that nowadays). The villain in this story might be an ‘immortal’, one of the Eternals we last saw in ‘Enlightenment’, but the real enemy is ourselves, the darker impulses we keep hidden that haunt our subconscious thoughts and can’t bring ourselves to talk about. Though titled ‘Can You Hear Me?’ this is a story that’s really about how nobody is speaking what needs to be said. Though a few Dr Who stories down the years have wondered about the Doctor’s health and Ace had a whole series arc about coming to terms with her wayward youth, while ‘Vincent and the Doctor’ looked at Van Gogh’s mental breakdown in detail, this is the first episode that’s really tried to tell a story as complex as mental wellbeing for everyone in general and it’s long overdue. 

 The only problem is…it feels as if the writers of this one had a bit of a mental breakdown themselves while writing it. Ideas fly by without properly coming into focus, we get sub-plots and plot twists out of nowhere and instead of being solved properly the story just kind of fizzles out and ends. Even by Chris Chibnall standards it’s a plot that’s impossible to follow on first viewing and difficult even when you know it well. We get the continuation of scenes from near the beginning of the story near the end randomly, characters learn things then forget them again and it’s impossible to know what they’re experiencing as a ‘memory’ and what’s really happening in real time. The idea, I think, is to re-create the non-linear sense of a nightmare where time is all over the place, but for half the story we don’t know we’re in a nightmare and it’s never properly explained even by the end. It’s all very well studying your own nightmares this way, when you know all the elements that caused it, but this story has to keep stopping for exposition to bring us up to speed with realism, while at the same time being weird so that we don’t know which way is up or down by the end of most scenes. If you’re prepared to put the work in then the ideas are there and they’re good ideas – but honestly, we shouldn’t have to be doing this much work, watching television should be a treat or a reward, not a chore. This is a series suffering from a steady decline in ratings. It really needs episodes that grab people and hold their attention from opening titles to end credits. The last thing it needs is for people to get bored or confused or both and start switching off – yet no Dr Who story has made me want to turn the telly off more on first transmission and give up (well, not for pure plot reasons anyway: I confess ‘The Dominators’ were giving me a headache and Kylie Minogue was very very irritating). This is a story that’s far better once you understand what its doing and what it’s trying to say (but never quite does) but it’s a lot of work to reach that stage and a lot of fans just don’t bother. Things could have been so much better with just a few tweaks: had the ‘eternal’ plot been more obvious without the complex twists and u-turns, had we spent longer in Aleppo, had we actually stuck with each of the companions through to the end of their particular storyline without flashing between the four of them like a, well, nightmare. As so often happens with a Chibnall story the idea of doing something unusual and brave is to be admired and the story is full of good ideas, but the basics of storytelling are so far out the window they’re in another solar system. The result is a story that simultaneously really stands out, both for being surreal and for being darker than anything else in the Chibnall era (in more ways than one - put some lights on people, please!) and yet is utterly forgettable, with no scene that lodges itself in the mind beyond all the finger-pulling. And yet I still rather admire this story compared to most in the Chibnall era for at least trying something very different and worthy, even if ultimately it didn’t do it very well. Confused? So am I. I really can’t tell if this is one of the best Dr Who stories or one of the worst. Somehow it’s both. Which made trying to give this one a ranking almost impossible. A story all about mental health that’s well mental. Kind of makes sense at least, in a weird kind of a way. 

 This story does, at least, make the four regulars seem more like ‘real’ people this week, with more characterisation than the rest of the season put together. We’ve met Yaz’s sister Sonya before and seen their rather difficult sibling rivalry, but there’s more depth in a shorter space of time here than in ‘Arachnids In the UK’, perhaps because Chibnall knows these characters better now after eighteen stories. Last time round Sonya was a spoilt brat, but here she gets more nuance: she’s not actually that far removed from the Doctor, an anti-authority rebel unable to keep her temper when the people around her are doing something stupid and losing her third job in quick succession because of it. As much as she teases Yaz for being a stickler for rules and regulations, she needs her big sister to mentor her and keep her on the straight and narrow when she gets carried away and struggles without her guidance there– just as the Doctor needs Yaz or at least someone like her there to remind her of her humanity (a long running theme in modern Who that he/she should never be alone). Yaz used to be more like her sister before she had a talk with a policewoman the day she ran away (a rather patronising one I have to say – I’m not sure that would have brought me back from the depths of despair), before realising that she could never run away from herself. Yaz repays the compliment by tracking the policewoman down and showing that she made it into the force by story’s end. You need someone strong to lean on in life when you can’t prop yourself up and Yaz’s ‘nightmare’ vision is that her past unravels at this point and she doesn’t get the chance to turn it around, coupled with the guilt of not being able to do for her sister what her kind stranger once did for her. Anyone whose come through a tricky can past can relate to the fear of ending up in the same place again and that the difficult steps forward you once took can be removed just like that. It’s a scene that suddenly explains an awful lot and seeing this prim and proper, cool to the point of daftness character pushed to her limits not by a monster but by her own failures and self-doubt is a neat bit of storytelling. 

 If Yaz’s nightmare is the past, Graham’s is the present. He’s playing cards with his old pals and pretending that nothing’s happened since he was last in Sheffield - but of course it has. Graham is haunted by the guilt of not being able to rescue Grace in ‘The Woman Who Fell To Earth’ and seeing her accusing face asking why he didn’t do more (so unlike the flashes of Grace we see on screen, but then survivor’s guilt can do funny things; the hint is that Graham would be able to cope much better were that adventure to happen again here and that part of his Tardis travelling is to prove himself after ‘failing’ the first time round). Graham is also fed a vision of being in a hospital bed with the cancer of the opening episode returned, without the time to make amends or look after the people he loves, his biggest fear being that he’ll end up I the next life with an angry Grace having lost everyone in this world. Graham hasn’t talked about any of this to anyone and keeps it bottled up, so the nightmare visions of Zellin the eternal have a great deal to feed off. Anyone whose ever been poorly can relate to the sinking feeling that something is not right with your body and you’re about to be sick all over again, helpless in the face of your body turning against you. This bit of characterisation is a bit clumsier but Bradley Walsh’s saving-face haunted-by-Grace, get-me-out-of-this-place, escaping-to-out-of-space change of emotions is some of his best acting work in the role. 

 Ryan’s nightmares are of the future and the mates he used to be close to leaving him behind during his time in the Tardis, oblivious to his best pal’s depression (in true Ryan style he plays an entire football match on the computer before noticing that anything’s wrong and that his usually meticulous friend’s place is a tip; honestly given Ryan’s social skills in other episodes it’s a wonder he notices even after his mate doesn’t speak a word for several minutes). Anyone whose travelled and been away from home and discovered your friends aren’t the same as they were last time you met will share the same feeling of panic, of wishing you could undo time and spend longer as the person you once were. It is the weakest of the three sub-plots though. Not least because – take it from me – people suffering from dyspraxia don’t have the co-ordination to do very well at computer games (Chibnall’s forgotten this character point again!) All very worthy plotlines, if a bit soap opera-y in a way Dr Who has only ever been in ‘The Caretaker’ before this (a whole story about Clara and Danny Pink’s relationship): ‘Coronation Beep The Meep Street’ or ‘The B-East Below-Enders’ if you will, while the scenes of Graham in hospital are as close as you’ll ever see ‘Doctor Who’ being like ‘Doctors’. Unfortunately they’re all jumbled up, told at the wrong speed and in the wrong order so that you only make sense of what’s happening after you’ve seen everything and even then only maybe. 

 This could have been a valuable chance to look at the Doctor’s psyche too, returning to the ‘Dream Lord’ of ‘Amy’s Choice’ about how the Doctor is wracked with guilt at putting her friends in danger and how her curiosity constantly gets everyone in trouble. Especially given that this entire story is a trap, triggered by her curiosity at the short-lived Aleppo storyline and the monsters on the prowl (how come the Eternals can work the Tardis now by the way? That’s new and unexplained). But alas a quick glimpse of ‘The Timeless Child’ and the Doctors’ suppressed memories (which seems a bit random given that she’s still a story away from this series arc being even hinted at, by a rogue Cybermen in a haunted house attended by romantic poets…don’t ask) and a quick joke (the Doctor can’t cope with being on her own, so tries to nip forward a day to meet up with her friends again!) is all we get about her character. Instead the Doctor’s the one being nattered to by the baddy and this is another of the things the Chibnall era does so badly. None of the past twelve doctors would have stood around staring open-mouthed while the villain explained his plan in mind-numbing detail. Especially when a twist about what he’s actually doing (using nightmares not to kill off and terrorise humanity but to ‘feed’ his eternal twin, trapped in a quantam stasis something-or-other) means he tells her the entire plot again. There are some nice Doctory moments, some great lines scattered here and there and Jodie Whittaker’s getting better at nailing this doctor’s constant nattering as a desperate attempt to cover up the fact she’s scared and doesn’t know what’s going on – but a story that’s about her companions facing up to their own revelations on this level really needs her to do the same. She’s culpable for a lot of what happens in this story and doesn’t even think to say sorry while she’s as rude and offhand as she’ ever been (especially off hand to Graham at the end). If the Doctor had paid the price for this, or commented on how the others are brave for facing up to their faults while she’s still scared of hers, it would have been something. But the doctor doesn’t seem to be allowed to be a patient this week, which is frustrating because this is the perfect opportunity to fig into this particular regneration’s psyche now we’re heading to the big finale and the ‘Timeless Child’ arc revealing the Doctor doesn’t know themselves as well as they thought they did. 

 Reviving the eternals is a great idea and something I’d been longing to see for a long time, but they’re not used to the best of their abilities either. The script drops in a reference to ‘The Celestial Toymaker’, but really they’re impressively close to the beings we saw in ‘Enlightenment’, Barbara Clegg’s wonderful take on the upper class relatives staying with her family who always demanded constant attention and drifted through life emotionless, looking down their nose at her and her husband. There’s a great line about how emotions ‘burn’ ephemerals up because they don’t lead lives long enough to digest the things that happens to them – something that resonates a lot with all the Doctor’s companions this week, while Zellin and his twin Rakaya are brilliantly dispassionate, cold and uncaring in contrast to all the gooey human-ness going on around them. The nightmares that cause humans such insanity are to keep Rakaya sane in her boredom, because she needs to live in chaos for the good of her own mental health, even though causing harm to others for your own selfish ends is a sign of insanity as it is. Great stuff. Except the plot can’t give us anything as straightforwardly complicated as that, so they throw all sorts of extras into the plot it really doesn’t need: that whole monsters in Aleppo thing that gets forgotten a few minutes in, the fact Zellin is a myth and legend the tinelords half belief in (presented to us as a huge revelation even though its never been mentioned before and we have to take the Doctor’s word for it), the way Zellin manipulates the Doctor into a trap where she opens the lock of a prison Rakaya is trapped in and the Doctor somehow uses Zellin’s own fingers against him to spring a trap in turn. Or something. Honestly, I’ve watched the ending lots but it still doesn’t make much sense. Like a lot of the Chibnall stories it feels like it ran out of time so a final scene got grafted on at the last minute – something particularly irking given how false and hollow the very final closing scenes are. If ever a story needed more than just a glib ‘everything’s fine!’ kind of en ending, if ever a Dr Who story needed more of a solution than just ‘hoping for the best’, if a ever a messy story needed to end in a way that wasn’t neat, then it’s a story about the complexities of mental health and how you can’t escape the bad things that happen to you without working through them and meeting them head on. I wish too the plot didn’t leave us quite so much in the dark on our way to that ending (literally! Oi, put some lights on someone please!) It’s a waste, too, of the eternals and their fascinating concept: typical you wait 37 years to see one and when it turns up its just an eternal bore. The sad truth is that The Sarah Jane Adventures did this better with ‘The Nightmare Man’. Or, indeed, Oddbod The Clown who had similar powers of being able to haunt dreams (and at least someone on the production team would have recognised the similarities: he was played by Bradley Walsh). 

 I’m really not sure what I think about the villain giving us the finger – literally. It makes for a truly creepy Moffat-style level of scariness, especially early on when we don’t know what’s happening (not that we really know what’s happening even by the end) and the thought of being paralysed in your dreams and helpless is properly scary (especially to an occasional sufferer of sleep paralysis like me, which feels very much like the jumbled up surreal nature of this story – is Chibnall or co-writer Charlene James a sufferer too?) It’s a good effect, the CGI fingers/prosthetic glove (depending on the shot) looking impressively ‘real’. The metaphor of the ‘villain’ being the way we stick our fingers in our ears and go ‘la la la I’m fine’ is clever (even if, technically, it’s Zellin who does this, not ‘us’). That said though…its also very very silly. If you’re not invested in the story or the series then it’s literally a bloke going ‘pull my finger’, which is not the stuff of which nightmares are made. I mean, this is an immortal being treated as a God with immense powers and that’s all he can do? Pull your finger out! 

 So is this story genius or stupidity? Can it be both? My head hurts. But in a way that’s the point I guess. ‘Can You Hear me?’ is arguably the bravest of the Chibnall stories (I’ll overlook the ‘Timeless Child’ arc or the talking frog of ‘It Takes You Away’ which are both more foolhardy than courageous). In an era that’s mostly played things safe, whose best stories tend to be the ones that are the most traditional (‘Spyfall’ ‘The Haunting Of Villa Diodati’ and ‘Eve Of The Daleks’) and which has touched on the idea of mental health without really spending much time there before going further than ever before this story is a big success. In common with the best of the Chibnall stories it’s great to see the Tardis landing in a country we’ve never been to before (Syria looks amazing, the little bit we see of it – all the more so given that it’s apparently a studio set), Segun Akinola’s score is excellent (other composers would have milked the emotion for all its worth, but this score is as cool and aloof as the eternals) and having so many faces in the Tardis means we get a lot of plotlines running at once. There are some great lines scattered throughout like confetti. However, more than most, this story feels restricted by all the bad points of the era too: it’s all so static without much action, the characters still don’t feel quite as real as companions in other eras, some of the lines are just awful full of cliché and cheesiness and the jumbled up way we’re told the story is just too clever for its own good distracting when it really doesn’t need to be. So much so that I’d love to know the split of the writing chores: did Chibnall get a co-write for adding all the character points given that he created these characters in the first place and knew them better than newbie Charlene James? Or was he more responsible for the eternal aspects given his longstanding knowledge of Whodom? Or was the creepy stuff his? Or the mental health idea? Or were they all his ideas given over to someone else to write? Charlene’s other work, an award wining play about female genital mutilation and crime series ‘The Rising’ that’s kind of like ‘Randall and Hopkirk Deceased’ on fast forward, a dead cop coming back to help out her colleagues, don’t offer many clues. At least this story is pure Chibnall (whatever the co-write), confused and messy and often dull, yet groundbreaking and imaginative and worthy, rather than lukewarm Russell T or leftover Moffat like his worst scripts. Not quite a nightmare, not quite a wonderful dream, ‘Can You Hear Me?’ is at least a step in the right direction to having the show back to full health again, even if it’s not quite there yet, like a patient in rehab who can see what they have to do to get well but haven’t quite learned to kick bad habits yet, the equivalent of an astronaut who breaks new ground by venturing out into space only to trip up over its own front steps. Still, the fact that we’re exploring the unknown at all in a show as long-lived as this one is to be applauded and if this is another Chibnall-era script that fails in execution, at least the ideas are some of the best. 

POSITIVES + The best scene is the most unique: the ‘Legends of the Gods animation’, a sort of cross between the ‘fable of El-Ahrairah’ in Watership Down and the ‘Book’ in The TV version of ‘Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy’. This is, I think, is the first use of animation in Dr Who since the Medusa's heads came to life in 'The Mind Robber' in 1968 (animations of missing episodes not counting, obviously) and it makes a nice change, the silhouette style giving the feel of a story being passed down to us from the mists of time (nothing makes a civilisation come alive like giving a place its own myths and legends). Or maybe it’s so good because I can actually see it, unlike the other 45 minutes spent in the dark this week! 

 NEGATIVES – The worst scene is the least typical and one that came close to breaking the record number of complaints received by the BBC for a Dr Who story. Poor Graham. There he is, confiding in the Dr about his cancer scare, in a story about how hard it is to open up about your mental health problems, when she tells him she can't deal with it and not to bother her. Never before has a Doctor been such a dick to a companion. I mean, the 6th Dr had a bash at strangling Peri, but even he wasn't this rude while he did it. The BBC went to unusual lengths of issuing a statement about this and how the Doctor ‘wasn’t meant to be dismissive…we see her struggling to cope with the severity of the situation’ and that ‘when faced with these situations people don’t always have the right words to say at the right time’. Yeah, right. It’s just bad writing, an attempt to remind us that this Doctor is alien and socially awkward that went too far: what’s wrong with having her say 'I don't know what to say in this moment? That’s such a human thing and I’m not good at human things: to me everyone’s in the process of dying anyway and even though I have a time machine it would be wrong of me to nip forward and check. Sorry, hope you end up OK, have a jammie dodger and a hug'. Remember, this is a being whose seen practically everyone else die and has whose template reaction for thousands of years is to be emotional and/or make a speech Even this incarnation has spent more time looking sad over dead monsters than most. She knows the pain of grieving. She’s spent enough time mourning or being ill herself. She has two hearts, not zero. Given the context of the story, about how hard it is to talk, I get why it’s there but the Doctor’s from Gallifrey not Britain, she has talked about her feelings when she’s wanted to and it’s all so clumsy and unnecessary - it's not as if this is a plot point the Dr learns from and later puts right either; in fact Graham’s health is never mentioned again (the brief scene at the end of ‘The Power Of the Doctor’ suggests he’s OK though). 

BEST QUOTE: ‘I’m just in 14th century Syria. Is it tomorrow lunchtime already?’