Doctor Who: Series 12, Episode 7 - “Can You Hear Me?” (2020)

I’m still mulling over this one, trying to decide how exactly I feel about it. At the moment, I’m falling down on the side of, “I really like the different parts of it, but something about it as a whole is just shy of clicking.” I’m still figuring it out.

When the Doctor drops Ryan, Yaz, and Graham off for a visit home, she follows a trail to some serious monster action going on in Aleppo in the far past. Past and present, however, turn out to be connected – the creatures plaguing a 14^th-century mental hospital are somehow tied to nightmares and visions her companions are having back in the 21^st, and a mysterious shadowy figure appears to be at the center of all of it.

I think managing the pace and the cast continues to be a problem with this era, because it seems like the companions are integrated most successfully in episodes where all three are separated from the Doctor for a stretch of time. Here, we get some nice emotional content for all three, exploring their inner lives through their nightmares. We see their past despairs, their present regrets, and their fears for the future, and it’s high time we get this kind of insight into them. But that extra fleshing-out comes somewhat at the expense of interacting with the Doctor and making meaningful contributions to the adventure.

As for the Doctor, we get brief allusions to some of what she’s been dealing with this season, but mostly, she’s in adventure mode. There’s some good stuff here: her annoyance at the companions being home and her having no one to explain things to, her own curiosity and cleverness getting the better of her at points, and a nice scene articulating what she appreciates so much about humanity.

We also get some neat content from our baddies for the week, featuring creepy villains and classic Who references (I feel like Chibnall has been trying to make up for the total lack of any and all past references last season, and I am here for it!) The one-shot cast is good, and I want to particularly mention Ian Gelder as mysterious shadowy figure Zellin. Gelder appeared on series 3 of Torchwood as that creepy/shady scientist Mr. Dekker, so even without the immediate evil vibes his character gave off, I still would’ve been prepared for him to be up to no good!

At the same time, it’s a perplexing episode, because even though I like pretty much all the individual parts, I came away still feeling like something was a bit lacking. Intellectually, I see how the different parts of the story fit together, but they don’t quite feel like they fit together. It’s like there’s some slight resistance keeping the episode’s various elements from interlocking as they should. I can’t even tell why or what would’ve improved it, but that was the feeling I got. As I said, puzzling.