A Few Thoughts on “Listen”

As I’ve observed before, new Who’s series 8 episode “Listen” is several neat ideas wrapped in something of a mess.  It often feels like halves of two completely different episodes jammed inelegantly together, and neither one concludes very satisfactorily. Today, there’s one particular thread of the episode I want to look at (spoilers.)

So here’s the set-up:  the Doctor is entrenched in a fair-to-middling obsession with the shared universal nightmare about creatures under the bed, and he links Clara with the TARDIS’s telepathic circuits to find the point in her timeline when she first had that nightmare.  As the TARDIS sifts through her thoughts, she’s distracted by her ringing phone (thinking it might be Danny,) and they’re taken to Danny’s childhood instead.  Clara at first tries to fess up to getting distracted at the critical moment, but when the Doctor dismisses her efforts, she switches gears and denies any knowledge of why they would have ended up with young Danny instead of her. 

The mystery is still puzzling the Doctor, and he picks Clara back up shortly after he drops her off, having followed the telepathic circuit looking for an explanation and having found (presumably) Danny’s descendent, pioneer time traveler Orson Pink.  “Do you have any connection to him?” he eagerly asks Clara, wondering if Orson could be a distant relative from her future.  He tells her that the telepathic circuit brought him right to Orson, “so, he is something to do with your timeline.”  Since Clara has only just finished her disastrous first date with Danny (twice!), this is a huge possibility to contemplate, and Orson’s remarks to her later in the episode seem to confirm that he can trace his lineage back to both Danny and Clara.

Never mind what comes later in the season – goodness knows the show doesn’t revisit this story to address the contradiction – the crux of the matter here is that meeting Orson, and the Doctor’s insistence that Clara is connected to him, suggests to Clara that she and Danny are meant to be together, which helps her to get passed the failure of their first date and give it another try.  But here’s the thing:  the TARDIS was never aligned with Clara’s timeline.  Because her thoughts her were on Danny while it was locking on, it’s his line the TARDIS followed, meaning Orson is a continuation of Danny’s timeline as well.  He doesn’t have to be connected with Clara because it’s not her timeline the TARDIS is moving along; it’s just that the Doctor doesn’t know that.  Since he’s unaware of the distraction issue, he assumes the TARDIS went where he intended it to go, and he can’t figure out how they wound up with a little Black boy with a London accent instead of a little white girl with a Northern accent.  But he still thinks it must fit somehow, so he goes looking for a connection when, in truth, there doesn’t need to be one at all.

This is where it gets messy for me.  The Doctor may not know what happened, but Clara does.  She knows she got distracted, she knows the boy they met was Danny, and she knows the Orson looks just like him.  So why does she get drawn into the idea that she and Orson (and, by extension, Danny) must be connected when the Doctor, who doesn’t have the necessary facts, tells her so?  I could buy her feelings for Danny clouding the issue a bit and then having her snap out of it and remind herself whose timeline they’re in, even as she might hope it’s true anyway, but why does she seem to conclude that it must be true when, no, it really doesn’t have to be?  That’s weird, sloppy writing that feels like it’s trying to make a big point even as it’s forgotten where it’s coming from.  Tsk, tsk, show.