Listen: Rank - 277

 Listen

(Series 8, Dr 12 with Clara, 13/9/2014, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Douglas MacKinnon)  

Rank: 277

'There’s a monster under my bed
I like to call him Fred
He gets noisy when he hasn’t been fed
Could it be he’s in my head?
Maybe, but I don’t want to wind up dead
So I just feed him sandwiches instead
Handing out chunks of bread
And hide behind my ted
Just keep it quiet what I’ve said
Because y’know, my street cred!'

 

 One of the things Steven Moffat always got praise for was the way he made everyday things that you could see in your everyday life scary without the need for CSO or CGI. Libraries with shadowy corners? Scary. Gargoyles? Terrifying. Gas masks? Time to panic. Cracks on your wall? Run! That thing talking to you from the fireplace? Well you should probably go to the psychiatrist actually but it could be a timelord from a future space-station with your name on the side. One of the other things Moffat was always praised for was the way he used time travel not as a fourth dimension but as a fourth character with ‘Day Of The Daleks’ style plots caused by accident through a conundrum that would only have taken place because of events that take place in the episode (think ‘The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang’ or anything involving Clara before ‘The Name Of The Doctor’). Another thing Moffat liked doing was the theme of ‘nightmares’, of having something come to you in your sleep and being paralysed to do anything about it. Only once, though, did Moffat stick all three of his favourite traits together and…it’s a bit underwhelming, a story that ends up more of a summary of Moffat’s weaknesses rather than his strengths. Deliberately cheap to counteract the lower budget available this year according for inflation in the early credit crunch years  (no effects, few sets and a very small supporting cast), monsters who don’t actually do anything (Moffat likes his monsters to be in a continual state of being about to pounce, from The Weeping Angels through to the gas mask child and The Silence and Monks but this is ridiculous!), oddly confusing (I’ve seen this story lots of times since it was first on and I still had to keep scrolling back to work out what was really going for this review) and weirdly boring (please will something happen!) ‘Listen’ is the sort of story that happens, ironically, when writers stop listening to their first instincts and start being clever, thinking that they’ve hit on a formula to write a series that doesn’t need a formula. 

On paper it really shouldn’t be. I mean even in new Who it’s not many stories that travel back to the very end of the universe and back to the Doctor’s childhood, two incidents that come automatically with a level of peril and danger that we don’t often get to see. There are moments of real tension here too, as it feels many times as if we’re going to get a whole different sort of story, one where a race of monsters has been the universe across its entire history for reasons of its own hiding in the dark or where eerie shapes hide under bedclothes and loom at you (or at nay rate children in orphanages: scared children is Moffat’s fourth favourite trope). But it turns out that (half-hearted spoilers here) that the monster that’s been haunting us all this time has been…us! That scary noise outside in the future? It’s either the pipes gurgling or the hull of a spaceship cooling. That thing under the bed clothes?  Most likely another child playing a prank. And the thing that made the Doctor a gibbering wreck his whole life through? It was Clara. Trying to solve the mystery of what monsters exist out there which made the Doctor so scared in the first place  (check out William Hartnell’s legs in the days before ‘The Timeless Child’ turned up to contradict everything!) Our fright is a paradox, caused by us looking over our shoulder and thinking that there’s something out there to frighten us when there probably isn’t anything at all. Which is, yknow, clever and symbolic and all that jazz and had this been a one-off drama or even a Dr Who spin-off branch (like the novels or the audios or a comic strip or short story in the annuals) I’d have liked it a lot as a side dish to the main course. But this is Dr Who. A series that has genuinely scary things in it more weeks than most. We know that there are scary things out there to listen out for because we also get to see them every week. But a monster we don’t even get to see is the ultimate low budget monster – not even an invisible monster but a monster that genuinely isn’t there because it never existed and was all in our heads. I know they have to save money and all but that’s taking things too far! There’s no imagination in this story and dammit all that’s Moffat trope five or whatever we’re up to now, usually the bit that allows him to get away with all the other tropes because his ideas are so good and so different.  There’s a monster-sized shaped hole in the middle of this story and even Moffat’s sixth favourite trope (some seriously funny sassy dialogue) can’t rescue this story from being disappointing. I mean for the most part we’re watching a date go wrong. This isn’t ‘The Undateables’. Well, I guess it kind of it is actually, some weeks, but it’s generally ‘The Undateables’ in space, with monsters, which is much more interesting (and no, mother-in-laws don’t count as monsters whatever they look like and however they’re portrayed on those shows).

The scariest thing in the whole story, though, is the slow-burning romance between Clara and new teacher Danny Pink, the ex-army substitute teacher. How you feel about this episode really depends on how you feel about their growing relationship, which has gone from the pair seriously fumbling asking each other out on a date to the first date proper. Personally I like him more than most fans seem to and his calm, placid demeanour in the middle of a crisis, while his self-deprecating side allows him to be more than just the peril monkey he might have ended up becoming. Had he been alone in the Tardis or even in the Tardis once I’d have been all for it. I like Clara more than most fans too: the Doctor’s been surrounded by so many yes-girls it’s good to have someone to tell him no and her sassiness makes her what Peri was meant to be without the old ‘having to be saved because she’s a girl’ vibes. The two together though?  Not so much. Danny and Clara are a complete non-starter as a couple and their date is littered with red flags. I mean, they've got so much in common haven’t they? He's an ex army no nonsense maths teacher, she's a time and space travelling impossible girl who teaches English. Sometimes. When she's not saving the universe. He’s a reformed adventurer who wants to settle down and has retired because he’s incredibly guilty about the people he had to kill and desperately needs to believe that his work abroad did more good than bad. Clara’s an adrenalin junkie whose stayed with her dangerous and weird best friend because an ordinary life bores her and who seems to carry no remorse for any of the things that have happened to her (because she can just blame the Doctor – Clara rarely if ever blames herself). After his war experiences Danny needs someone kind, bland and straightforward. Clara, though, is addicted to adventure, struggles to tell the truth even when she isn't protecting the universe, is capable of kindness but finds sarcasm is her safer go-to place  and can't sit still for a second. They both have hugely different parenting styles given how they treat their classes, both insist on having the last word and can make each other bitter and jealous in a single sentence. He hates the idea of being told what to do. She’s a control freak. Because of their backgrounds and the ability to know when someone else is lying (they are both teachers, after all, it comes with the job) both know the other are carrying secrets and don’t trust each other for a second. It’s a disaster.. The moment when Clara gets up to leave in a huff (because Danny didn’t like her joke about him building wells as an army soldier, something he’s desperate to impress on her because he doesn’t want her to think being in the army is just shooting at people – like the Doctor its important to him he be thought of as a ‘good man’) that should have been the moment when they call it a day and remain as colleagues and friends. But they keep on trying (because the season finale demands it as much as anything else) even though it’s an obvious disaster. In a way it's almost a good thing Danny ends up (huge spoilers) being turned into a Cyberman when he does, as this was always going to be a story with an unhappy ending. How are they ever going to progress forward when she admits to always opening her mouth too soon and he admits to always putting his foot in his? Sometimes I root for odd couples and usually in Dr Who not giving up hope is as good thing, but honestly in this case its flogging a dead Myrka.

To give Moffat his dues, though, it’s a very clever ‘B plot’ to put with the ‘A’ one because both are really about the same thing: mankind being so wrapped up in itself that it forgets to trusts its instincts and instead listens to things that are just not there. The conflict is caused by something that neither Danny nor Clara intends. Danny accidentally creates a double entendre about the idea of having ‘extras’, then realises it and panics – Clara’s not even noticed and probably wouldn’t have done without him drawing attention to it, which just makes everything worse. Some of Clara’s jokes to calm things down just make puts fuel on the fire: Danny thinks she’s laughing at him. Next Danny is still defensive and twitchy about his soldier past: as future stories will show he’s still guilty after he shot a child, by accident yet under orders and he hates the way people think that soldiers only do bad things like shoot people when he’d much rather people think of the things he did for people (especially the wells he dug for children to have water). Clara, for her part, is defensive that Danny doesn’t find her funny when she’s trying to tease him, with banter’s that helped her get close to people in the past and takes umbrage at his peace offering that he’s just tired of ‘people like you’ getting the wrong idea about his army days. If both could just relax and be themselves they might well have had a lovely time together, but it’s that voice in our heads that we listen to that tells us that we’re in danger that screws everything up. Where did it come from this need to protect ourselves? Well, as the rest of the episode shows it would be nice to blame it on something that came from outer space or sits under our beds in the dark waiting to pounce but really we invent it ourselves, to keep us from harm that isn’t there and terrified adults afraid of the future and things going wrong continue to do this in their everyday lives every bit as much as terrified children wondering what the noises in its bedroom are. We are all, to some extent or another, driven by our fears even though most of the time nothing happens. As Clara says, in a mirror of one of Moffat’s favourite lines as spoken right back near beginning, in the third ever episode of Dr Who (part of ‘An Unearthly Child’ in 1963) ‘fear makes companions of us all’. It’s a clever bit of mirroring, however unsuitable Clara and Danny might be as a couple, even if it does seem like Steven Moffat is trying too hard to copy series five writer Richard Curtis (who made a career out of this sort of thing) and not quite getting it.

I would say it slows the plot down, too, except…there really isn’t any, with ‘nothing happens’ the big theme of this story. Moffat’s starting point was wondering what the Doctor would get up to now that Clara isn’t by his side and off living a life of her own without him. What would he do? Moffat figures he’d probably travel the universe a bit alone (like we see at the start of ‘Into The Dalek’) then sit in the Tardis twiddling his thumbs, bored. And what is the Doctor afraid of most? Boredom (I never did understand, though why the Doctor didn’t simply zip ahead and pick Clara up on, say weekends, skipping every Monday to Friday so for him they’d have just left their last adventure but Clara had time to go to work. Maybe with Sundays off to recover too). The Doctor’s big hangup is being alone. As much as Tom Baker wanted his Doctor to travel solo for everyone else working on Dr Who it’s a team project – the Doctor only gets to appreciate how wonderful the universe is by seeing it through newer, jaded eyes. He’s no good at spending time alone: you can see it in his despair when Steven walks out on him and his delight when Dodo walks in the Tardis in ‘The Massacre’ (even hijacking the poor thing who doesn’t quite know what she’s let herself in for), his pain when Jamie and Zoe are sent home in ‘The War Games’, when the 9^th Doctor wanders around lost before meeting Rose, the entire year of ‘specials with the 10^th Doctor in 2009, the 12^th Doctor moping post Amy and Rory in ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’ and its following stories and especially ‘The Runaway Bride’ where Donna says to him that ‘you need someone to save you from yourself’. So the Doctor’s subconscious invents an ‘excuse’ to come and get Clara: something scary at the foot of his bed (sorry. Tardis).

He’s also just had a scary dream and finds out Clara had one too. You think this sub-plot is going somewhere (is it the Dream lord from ‘Amy’s Choice’ again or something similar?) but no (that comes at the end of the year in ‘Last Christmas’, well sort of): it’s never explained why the Doctor and Clara share similar scary dreams (after teasing us with an alien entity the more prosaic reason is probably just that they’ve faced so many monsters their heads are still trying to process it all, ditto most Humans in our own sort of a way). It’s also plainly daft: I can guarantee no one has dreams like mine (I have ones that would make Salvador Dali confused): I’ve certainly never heard anyone discuss a dream I’ve also had. Anyway, to test his theory out, though, the Doctor makes Clara remember her dream, only her phone beeps (with an apology from Danny for her date, a clever way of getting plots A and B to collide) so she accidentally thinks of Danny and soon we’re in an orphanage with Danny as a child hiding from a  ‘monster’ that’s under his bed. Only he’s called Rupert.

Now Moffat misses a trick here; Rupert gives away his surname ‘Pink’ almost straight away and for all of Clara’s wondering if he’s a distant relative, we at home have seen  enough Dr Whos by know to know that it’s Danny himself. It could have been an interesting moment had they led us up the garden path that this was plot A not plot B (the scary one not the drippy one) but instead Moffat wants to scream at us how clever he is: look at how little Clara knows about Danny and all the walls he’s built up to protect himself, the name change (he liked the name ‘Dan’ for a ‘soldier man’), the toy soldiers he keeps round his bed to keep him safe (weirdly Clara gives him the idea) or the fact that he grew up an orphan, wanting someone to keep him safe. You can see why Danny ended up the way he did: both the need to get tough and fight his own fights but also the gentle soul whose scared and wishes someone would come along and fight for him.

 It ought to work this sequence, allowing Clara to understand her new boyfriend and the barriers he’s built to put in place that can still be knocked down and pierced with a cruel word or an uncomfortable joke: it might have explained, if nothing else, why Danny felt so oddly drawn to Clara on day one of their meeting despite her not being his type personality wise at all. Only Moffat isn’t quite clever enough: instead of Clara showing remorse for what she (understandably) didn’t know and bowing to do better, discussing what she’s seen to herself or with the Doctor she blurts out Danny’s real name to him by accident on their revived date and gets on his adult nerves again. And the Doctor scrambles Danny’s brain so he forgets everything (though apparently he keeps a soldier as a souvenir). Clara is also weirdly uncomfortable round Rupert too even before knowing who he is: she works with children. Admittedly much older children, but you’d think she’d be better with the lad than this. It’s the Doctor’s comedy act that calms him down, not her fake ‘there’s no such things as monsters’ shtick (which as it turns out is probably true but is a really odd thing to say in a Dr Who story and even more so when you’re on the hunt for monsters). Yes Clara’s probably lying to make him feel better, but why now? She doesn’t normally lie unless it’s to the Doctor – or to herself (she never lies to her class, for instance). There’s a bit more, the script comparing Danny to the Doctor, with Clara’s line that the most important soldiers don’t carry guns and that not having one doesn’t mean he’s ‘broken’ but special, but Danny won’t remember that either and the comparison between the Doctor and a potential boyfriend is always done more clumsily with Clara than it was with the 11^th Doctor, Rory and Amy (she’s always wanted to be the Doctor, not be with the Doctor, and mourns the 11^th not as a lover but as a best friend, while finding the 12^th far too old). It’s an odd sequence that never really goes anywhere, despite some really good lines (such as the Doctor’s dialogue that he can’t find Where’s Wally’ in a book and that he’s in every book; we never get a date for Danny’s childhood but it has to be somewhere around the late 1980s when the books were all the rage).

The date ruined again, a distracted Clara walks out to follow a passing astronaut ready to give the Doctor a piece of her mind…only to find that it’s Danny in a spacesuit. Only it’s not Danny but a distant relative (who, weirdly, is his exact doppelganger, just with a beard: how many great-grandchildren do you know who are the exact replica of their great-grandparents?)  And this leads into a weird old sub-plot that fills up another ten minutes without much happening as Orson Pink, the first time traveller, has been to the distant ends of the universe and heard noises and sent out a distress signal. The hint is that he’s Clara and Danny’s offspring, resulting from them actually getting together after their disastrous date (presumably Orson’s timeline doesn’t exist anymore and he’s effectively ‘murdered’ by the season finale too). Which is a most stupid way of getting plots A and B to collide. I mean, what a coincidence that is: the Doctor tracks down someone who looks like Danny, the only astronaut in the far future on the very day he decides to investigate scary noises. And Danny, a properly trained time traveller who could have just stayed at home, is scared by what turns out to be…some pipes gurgling. Plus Orson never really does anything as a character: he’s there for the fun ‘mistake’ that Clara thinks he’s the Doctor and nothing more. Had they given Orson more of the contrasting character traits of both of them he might have been an interesting character: both cautious and careless, brave yet wary, enthusiastic yet reserved. Basically all the contradictory traits you need to be an explorer that both parents would have provided. The trouble is Orson doesn't act like their of them (he's just an excuse for Samuel Anderson to dress up and show he is acting in his part as Danny, honest). There is, to be fair, a lot of excitement when we think there really is a monster, when we hear knocking (as per ‘Midnight’) and a foolhardy Doctor going out to investigate gets whacked by…something. But Moffat tries so hard to tell us it might just be the wind that we believe him. So there’s no one out there at the end of the universe (‘Wild Blue Yonder’, like so many Russell T comeback scripts seems ‘inspired’ by one of Moffat’s and tries to rewrite it by saying there are invisible beings that latch on to your darkest fears, but that’s even more stupid). And no reason to have this part of the story at all. And we never see Orson again once the Doctor is dragged back into the Tardis.

Instead we get a third sub-plot that doesn’t go anywhere and which ignores plot B altogether in favour of an old sub-plot from 50^th anniversary special ‘The Day Of the Doctor’, in which we return to the barn on Gallifrey where the Doctor once lived and where he used a button (that looked remarkably like his companion Rose) to blow up his own people and end the time war. Only this time we’ve arrived in the Doctor’s childhood. And he’s alone, scared stiff, in the same barn while two voices (presumably his mum and dad, which is weird in itself given he never refers to them and spin-off novels don’t even have timelords being born from biology but ‘looms’), refusing to come into the house with the other children, in an orphanage not unlike Danny’s. originally this sequence was just to be shot outside in wales  somewhere that could potentially but by chance the set designer found out the barn set from ‘Day’ was still complete and scheduled to be scrapped soon, Moffat slapping an injunction until it was used for this episode. It’s nice to have another peek at the Doctor’s childhood and it’s a sweet touch that Clara gets to comfort the Doctor when a scared little boy: it fits her arc of becoming gradually more like the Doctor and helping him more than perhaps any other companion has provided for a Doctor rather than just accepting help. However it’s weird for a whole bunch of reasons. One is that of all the writers who’ve ever worked on Dr Who only one has ever considered that the Doctor does what he does because he’s ‘scared’. You can’t equate it with any other Doctor before no 11 comes along: ‘The War Games’ indeed spells out exactly why he left (because he’s a non-conformist) and only very rarely have we ever seen the Doctor frightened (usually at the point of death or because someone has done something to The Tardis). Honestly I thought the child was going to turn out to be Susan (now there was a timelord who spent her life afraid of her own shadow!) A second is that, if you were scared of noises, where would you rather spend the night? In the big o’ creaking barn in the middle of nature all alone or in a house where, sure, some of your peers might be teasing you but at least you’re warm, cosy and safe in the knowledge that the monsters will probably eat them first. A third is that, at this point, Clara doesn’t know whether there any real monsters out there or not – and she certainly doesn’t know Gallifrey that well, having only been here once, long into the future. Really she shou;ld be keeping an eye out – and if she learned anything from the debacle with danny eaerlier it’s the importance of telling the truth. No wonder the kid’s scared – nothing’s scarier than adults lying to you and then finding out they’re wrong and you can’t trust anybody. A fourth is that the Doctor, whose memory is super intact across all his generations, doesn’t spot Clara/Oswald straight away and go ‘wait, I know you, you’re the one who came to visit me when I was little). Oh and ‘The Timeless Child’ means the Doctor’s childhood almost certainly wasn’t like this (and he didn’t look like the 1^st Doctor if it was: the production team went to the trouble of hiring a child who does indeed look a bit like childhood photos of William Hartnell. If you squint a bit. And dammit all those are clearly his legs).

So it’s a story in which both the Doctor and Danny are comforted by a pixie dream girl from the stars/future – at a time when Moffat was getting stick for doing this sort of thing and treating female characters badly. I never understood it myself (Lynda Day in ‘Press Gang’ is one of the greatest of all female characters: she’s as tough as all the male ones out together without just being a tomboy or sacrificing her feminine side ever) but in Dr Who the critics might have a point. Amy spent her arc being torn between the 11th Doctor and Rory, as if he had to make a choice between one man in her life. Now it’s the same for Clara, torn in two between the 12^th Doctor and Danny. She comforts both of them in different ways, turns them into what they’ll become but is also sort-of responsible for their paranoia. At least the Doctor and Rory were two very different people though, an exercise in contrast: one uncomfortable thing this series but particularly this story keeps doing is drawing the parallels between them. They’re both reformed soldiers who loathe killing but on very rare occasions find it necessary. They both grew up alone. In an orphanage, where they didn’t get on with the other children (and are clearly both teased, even if it’s off screen and mentioned by other people). They’re  both scared and vulnerable, too pure for a scary world (a quote that’s similar in both scenes ‘they’ll never make the army behaving like that’). No wonder they clash so much when they meet later in ‘The Caretaker’ – they’re too similar by half. The problem is they ought by rights to be friends, doing much the same job by trying to do good even when under orders and expectations to do bad (Danny’s guilt over killing a child is exactly like the Doctor’s over the time war, albeit on a smaller scale): in a story about the need to tell the truth and put prejudices aside to make the most out of our short lives and to trust without assuming the other person is a monster it’s a crying shame that they never bury the hatchet and become friends, not in this story or any story. It’s the most obvious payoff this story could have and might have finally made it mean something. But Moffat seems to forget all about it.   

     
So there we have it, a story about monsters where the monster that never quite arrives, about romance even though it’s a dinner date that keeps interrupted and where things keep going wrong and where none of the characters learn any real lessons or take anything away from any of this: Clara continues to upset Danny with her big mouth (all those jokes from the Doctor about her ‘wide face’ should surely have been jokes about this instead, given it plays such a part in the story symbolically, Moffat missed another trick there), Danny continues to be defensive and unable to talk about his childhood having forgotten that Clara was there, the Doctor will be scared of monsters again in a few stories’ time and Orson probably doesn’t exist past the end of this year. Instead we’ve watched the Doctor and Clara chasing their own tails and accidentally causing most of the things they’re afraid of without realising it. ‘Listen’ is a well shot, well made, well written piece of nothing. Great. File ‘Listen’ under ‘most pointless Dr Who episode ever’.

Which is different to saying that it’s the worst. The construction, the parallels, the dialogue are all very clever and show off the best of Moffat’s writing as well as his worst. Even when there’s nothing there he’s a writer who knows how to conjure up atmosphere out of knowing and knows both what little boys are secretly afraid of (scary things under the bed, because nothing hurts you more than a monster) and what elder boys are secretly afraid of (scary things in the bed, when nothing hurts you more than love). There are moments where it feels as if this story has just gone up a gear, that we’re going to get all the answers (even though a lot of these were left behind with the draft script: the original plan, for instance, was to open with shots of big scary animals like lions and sharks running away from something unseen, with the hint that all of life is scared of it’s own shadow) and the fact we don’t get any of them (I take back what I said earlier with my numbering system: this is surely Moffat’s biggest trope) is as clever as it’s irritating. ‘Listen’ is a story that had to be there so that he could afford to make the bigger budget episodes around it and it’s a valuable chance to get to know the three most central characters of the year a bit better. Jenna Coleman continues to be great, even if Peter Capaldi struggles (he desperately needs an actor to bounce off and spends a lot of this story muttering to himself) and Samuel Anderson is a great character badly miscast (Danny should be a reformed gruff tough guy who has a tough outer shell and a warm fuzzy inner one – more like Clara in fact – but he’s played as a lovable doofus the kids and Clara manipulate both). As clever as it is to write a story that’s empty though, as clever as a lot of the dialogue is that covers up the fact that it’s empty, as worthy as the characters might be that we follow with more screentime than almost any other Who episode since ‘The Edge Of Destruction’, an empty episode is still empty. As much as non-fans are shocked at the amount of Dr Who episodes we fan consume on a regular basis and just how many extraneous books, comic strips and audios we collect (and even toys to make our own adventures) there are still only a very few episodes on telly every year and they never seem like enough. To waste even one of them, on a nothing story about a threat that isn’t there, feels like a waste. Few fans would rather have a story about a monster that isn’t there when we can have a story that is and while this is an elastic format that can encompass everything given the choice we certainly don’t want the space filled with a love story. It feels, in fact, as if our showrunner has stopped listening to us. And as the episode demonstrates, its when people have stopped listening to each other that things go wrong. Worryingly things will get worse on that score before they (finally) get better…

At least this story was responsible for one of my favourite behind-the-scenes anecdotes (which is going here because I’m not sure where to put it). Capaldi was old friends with director Douglas MacKinnon. They had a bit of a competition on set to see who could out-brusque and ‘Scottish’ the other, much to the amusement of the rest of cast and crew. The director won on points, telling Capaldi who was disputing a point ‘I’ll have you know I was the first choice as director – and you were only the twelfth choice for the part of Dr Who!’   

POSITIVES + I can see why they decided to make the 12th Dr a teacher full-time in a couple of series. Peter Capaldi's incarnation of the Doctor really suits being a lecturer (just as the 6^th Doctor really should have been), as pontificating instead of emphasising and teaching rather than understanding is exactly what this darker, brusquer, more alien incarnation would do in most circumstances. And of course he has a chalkboard in the Tardis so he can give lectures.  Even when there’s no one there. These are some of the funniest scenes in the story, even if Capaldi’s a tad too uncomfortable talking to himself at speed in front of a camera to fully pull this off. Maybe this is why they didn’t do this more in series ten when he actually is a lecturer (I expected lots of scenes like this one!)

NEGATIVES -  Clara is obsessed across this year with the thought of Danny being a soldier and horrified by it. Why exactly? We know why the Doctor is, because of what went wrong with an army of his friends in ‘A Good Man Goes To War’, but Clara wasn’t there. If this was peace-loving Martha (more used to patching people up than blowing them to bits – how the hell did she join UNIT and Torchwood exactly?) or Jo (again how did she end up with UNIT?) or Vicki (who would have given Danny seven pet names during the first date and re-named him Wellington Wells) then I would understand it. But an army man is exactly Clara’s ‘type’: assertive, fast-paced, action orientated, used to travel and exploring alien cultures. She should be in the army herself: it’s far more in keeping with her character than being a teacher. And yet it turns out that Clara is the one who gave Danny the thought of being a soldier in the first place, buy having his toys keep guard over his bed. Oops! Yet Clara never reacts guiltily to this later on, or asks Danny to tell her about his wells in a desperate attempt to make herself feel better about the fact she accidentally changed his career trajectory. Sometimes it really does feel as if the most impossible thing in the world for the impossible girl to do is apologise.

BEST QUOTE: ‘Evolution perfects survival skills. There are perfect hunters. There is perfect defence. Question. Why is there no such thing as perfect hiding? Answer. How would you know?’ 

PREQUELS./SEQUELS: Uniquely Steven Moffat provided a poem for the lockdown tweetalong of ‘Listen’ rather than prose or a prequel or sequel, included in the ‘Adventures In Lockdown’ book (2020). In a fun and very postmodernist poem Moffat returns to his favourite theme of the scared child under the bed hearing all sorts of creepy things around the house (‘wait the door is knocking – oh no, this can’t be right!’) before he has every writer’s true phobia: his creation has come to life to tick him off! We don’t know which generation of the Doctor this is (‘he’s pale and learned and wise’, which does cut out a few of them) and tells him that ‘this poem you’re now writing you must throw away, the shadows you are righting I fight them every day’, worried that people will be too scared to read it! Moffat’s very unMoffaty reply: ‘Words, like seeds, once planted towards the light must go’. The Doctor replies ‘Please cast them on the rocks. I’m the reader of this poem – a madman with a box!’ He’s not just a pretty face that Steven Moffat, this is a clever twist on old ideas. What say a book of Dr Who limericks one day, eh? (‘There once was a Face of Boe, trapped in a box he couldn’t go, but he defeated strange cats, the last Human in a posh hat, with old age his ultimate foe’). 

‘Corner Of The Eye’, a story from the 2007 DrWho Yearbook, feels in many ways like Moffat’s first draft for this story, an existential story about a threat that’s existed across time, only this time there is an alien menace and they have a name: The Floofs. Like many a Yearbook story it’s not told from the point of view of a Doctor or companion but about two lonely children, Tom and Kathy, and Tom’s insistence that he keeps seeing a strange bald man standing behind him, one who even turns up in photographs. Looking for help he puts n advert in the local paper and the 10^th Doctor answers it. If you’re thinking to yourself, as I was reading this the first time, that it’s weird Tom didn’t put an advert online then, ah, that’s the twist: he doesn’t have an internet connection (unheard of today but not that rare in 2007, I had to use the library to post my music reviews in those days). So the Doctor asks, how has he been able to chat to Kathy?!? It turns out that (mega spoilers) she’s been dead for ten years and is still lying under the floorboards (so much for these yearbooks being for children!) and it’s her ghost whose been doing the chatting. The Doctor also reveals the presence of Floofs who could be hiding in any house and get up to mischief like stealing belongings you can’t find (I must have an infestation) but are usually quite benign: this one, though, is lonely and wanted to cut Tom off from the rest of the world and keep him for himself. The solution? The Doctr invents a computer programme to talk to fake-Kathy and everyone is happy and can get on with the rest of their lives (well except poor Kathy, whose still dead). A rather disturbing read, not a patch on Moffat’s ‘Sally Sparrow’ book from the first new Who annual. Still better and a lot more logical than Listen’ though.

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