The Monster Under The Bed

There once was a Rose that was trying to Hide. Sometimes, it had to Blink, and at such times, it could not look, but it could...

Listen.

The Story

Are you struggling to have a date? Can you not make it five minutes without putting your foot in your mouth?

Pictured: Foot
Not Pictured: Mouth

Then hop on the Terrifying TARDIS Telepathic Time Travel Train, and find the answer to the age-old question:

What is under your bed?

First Stop: West Country Children's Home, Gloucester, Earth. Here, we meet Rupert Pink, who, like everyone else, is afraid of the underside of his bed. Little does he realize that he should really be afraid of what's sitting on top of it.

Pictured: A young boy wakes up one morning and learns about growing up.

Next Stop: The End of Time, Last Planet. Our guide here is one Colonel Orson Pink, an amateur time traveller who's also scared of the dark, and quite possibly a distant descendant of Clara's. Attractions include doors that unlock by themselves, creatures of questionable existence and definite evil, and my favorite: The Super Air-Pressure-Removal Flying Through the Air Fun-Ride!.

Pictured: Clara watching a commercial for the Fun-Ride.

Final Stop: The Time Barn, Gallifrey. Here, you can see such sights as a stereotypical grumpy man and kindly woman, a dilemma of Military versus Academia, and a Baby Doctor.

And we learn the answer to that age-old question:

What is under your bed?

Clara's under your bed.

The moral of the story is this: Fear can make you strong, and Danny Pink and Clara Oswald are both really forgiving of bad first dates.

The Review

Successes

With its spooky atmosphere, romps through time, and single-word title, this episode was begging to be compared to Hide. And on first viewing, I thought it did quite well. I have been a fan of the stylized stories, and Listen is no exception:

We got the spooky house,

With a spooky caretaker,

And a spooky floating ghost blanket thing,

The end of time, always a frightening idea,

Mysterious writing (written by Colonel Orson Pink),

And a creepy attic in a creepy barn.

So in the spooky atmosphere category, Listen succeeded wildly. Let's talk about one other category where it excelled.

We have this big mystery: What's under your bed? And in Doctor Who, the answer to questions like that is usually aliens of some sort. Moving along through the episode, I'm thinking that we'll find some sort of link between the ankle-hand grab, Rupert's floaty ghost thing, and Orson's friends from beyond the univers's grave, and all of a sudden, Clara becomes the nightmare she's been searching for. Imagine her surprise. Oh wait, you don't have to.

Fear really is a Companion.

Everything about that scene was amazing. The direction, the camera, the music, and above all, the acting. Coleman packs so much emotion into so little flexibility: that sequence of "gotta stop him", "oh no I'm the nightmare", "what do I do now??", "here's what I'll do". And she conveys all of that with no dialogue and nothing but her eyes. If that's not genius, I don't know what is.

I will also commend everything after that: The monologue about fear, Clara and Danny making nice after their awful date, the warmth between Clara, the Doctor, and Orson.

What Was Missing

With the atmosphere, the Doctor, and the heartwarming moments, Listen did quite well, on first viewing. But on second viewing, I ended up feeling a bit cheated. Clara grabbing the Baby Doctor's ankle was an interesting spin on the nightmare, but that ending didn't explain anything else.

What was the floating creature that haunted Rupert? Was it just another kid, hiding under a blanket? If so, considering how convinced Rupert was that there was no one in the room before Clara came in, how did he/she get in?

We even got to see it, kind of.

That doesn't look human - it looks more like something out of Star Wars.

But even if it was just another kid playing a prank, why did he/she just happen to pick that night, when Clara and the Doctor were there? Coincidence? Why couldn't the Doctor tell that it was just a human? How was the child able to leave so abruptly without any of the three hyper-alert people hearing him/her walk away? Why would the prankster continue his/her prank even when there were several adults in the room?

The blanket creature was not acting the way a human child would. But then what was it?

The real monster is those Commie Liberals, who took away Dan the Soldier Man's gun!

No answer.

Then we get to the end of the universe, where something, who knows what, has terrified Orson Scott Card Pink to the point that he can't stomach the thought of a few

Something is mysteriously opening the door. What is it? Could it be the pressure lock system? Or could it be the same evil monsters that haunted poor little Danny Rupert.

It was the pressure lock system. No aliens here!

Listen ended up being a huge disappointment because of that. We got this sequence of spooky events, but none of them were related to each other at all, only happening together by coincidence. The whole thing was really three completely separate episodes, broken up by a series of commercial breaks attempts at salvaging a bad date.

Don't you hate it when your first date gets interrupted by an astronaut wandering through the restaurant?
Fortunately, none of the other patrons cared.

One last continuity point. Look at the chalkboard when the Doctor and Clara are just taking off for Gloucester.

That looks an awful lot like what the Doctor wrote at the beginning of the episode, before all that writing was erased and replaced with the word "Listen". Could it be foreshadowing, that the Doctor seeing that word was really a hallucination? Well, no, because Clara looked at the word "Listen" also...

Maybe he has two chalkboards?

Overall

Spooky, beautifully directed, skillfully acted, Listen was a bold attempt to try something new. We got several small narratives, tied together thematically by Clara's attempt to secure a new relationship, but unrelated causally. And what could have been better than Clara finding out that she was behind the Doctor's obsession with the ankle-grab nightmare?

Pictured: The Doctor watching Listen, waiting for all the threads to come together.

But as happens when you try new things, they don't always work. Ultimately, two thirds of Listen could have been chopped without affecting the narrative at all, and investing so much time in the spookiness, only to have it be a kid in a blanket and ... physics... was a huge let-down.

NEXT EPISODE: TIME HEIST

She must be the villain because she wears giant glasses, has minions who wear masks, and pronounces it "loCATE".