Sigh…
This episode gets off to such a good start and really has a lot going for it,
but it seems to splinter in the middle and ends with a lot of hand-waving that
doesn’t actually resolve anything. It’s frustrating,
because I’m a total Whovian, and truly, all I want to do is love this
show. I want to love the stories and the
characters, the jokes and the aliens, the thrills and the heart and the wonder,
I want to love it all to pieces, and it would be so easy with just a little encouragement. But the writing gets so haphazard and sloppy
that it makes it hard for me to love it.
I could
tell before the credits that this was a Moffat episode – the nightmare fuel of
the week is Moffat all the way. In
“Listen,” the Doctor brings Clara on a search for the truth between everyone’s
shared bad dream, the inexplicable fear that one is being watched in an empty
room and something is listening under the bed.
It’s cut from the same cloth as the Weeping Angels, the Vashta Nerada,
and the Silence, and while there’s a law of diminishing returns whenever a
writer keeps drawing from the same well, it’s eerily done with some genuine
creepiness.
However,
this rather straightforward horror plot gets tangled up with a timeline-jumping
tour through the past and future of one Danny Pink, the
handsome-but-emotionally-damaged fellow teacher with whom Clara just had a date
(don’t ask how these two storylines get stapled together.) This thread is also very Moffat, with
circular timey-wimeyness all over the place.
There’s nothing the matter with it, but it distracts from the
already-engaging creature-under-the-bed story, and as a result, neither plot
feels complete. Both ideas could easily
have been given their own episodes, so each could’ve been fleshed out and
carried to more satisfying endings.
The
good news is that this is the best yet for Twelve’s characterization. While his consuming need to discover this
unnamed creature comes out of nowhere, I like his curiosity about it, that
itching, Doctory desire to know. He also has a beautiful, encouraging scene
with a small frightened child that’s pure Doctor, and it’s high time his
character had a compassionate moment like that.
His default orneriness seems to be finding a good balance. As long he doesn’t drift into jerkiness, I
like him sharp and curmudgeonly – he may give a rousing speech to the aforementioned
child, but he’s not about to be bothered with bedtime stories, and his
eye-rolling at Clara’s three bedroom mirrors (“Why don’t you just turn your
head?”) is a riot. Peter Capaldi is
terrific here – funny, intense, probing, frightened, cranky, and insightful. If the show’s current problems continue, I hope
they’re rightfully acknowledged as writing issues and not shunted onto him in
particular or an older Doctor in general.
If I can see this version of Twelve from week to week, it’ll definitely
help me get through the plot holes and overall slapdashery.
It
seems like I have more Moffat complaints every week (again, I am in fact eager to love this show – give me an
inch, and I’ll gladly go the rest of the mile,) but it’s been bugging me that
every one of his episodes this season have included at least one critical
comment from the Doctor about Clara’s appearance: ragging on her height, saying she’s getting
old, mistakenly thinking she’s removed her makeup. I get that Twelve isn’t attracted to Clara,
and that’s fantastic, but you don’t need him to casually criticize her looks to
convey that. Not being attracted to
someone isn’t the same as finding
someone unattractive, and it doesn’t need
to be explained or justified. He’s not
attracted to her because he’s just not.
It’s conceivable. Ten wasn’t
attracted to Martha or Donna, and you know how I know that? He
treated them platonically. Simple as
that.
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