1 Year On: Why I Still Dislike Listen’s Ending
Guest contributor Jonas Stanley explains his views on the story climax.
I recently bought the Series 8 box set and decided to do a marathon run of all of the episodes to refresh my memory before Series 9 starts. One episode that I remember liking a lot first time, and one that stood out again, was Listen. I loved the whole concept of questioning why a creature that was perfect at hiding didn’t exist, then following up with that it probably did exist and we just didn’t know it. The acting was superb throughout, especially from Capaldi’s Doctor. His obsession with this new idea is great, and shows the Doctor’s insatiable thirst for knowledge and answers. The scenes with Danny and Clara were excellent, and it utilized the TARDIS’ telepathic capabilities mixed with Clara’s bond with Danny perfectly.
However, the one thing that a lot of my friends and family who watched the show thought was truly great was the ending scene with the young Doctor and Clara in the barn. Now I agree that the speech was a brilliant piece of writing from Steven Moffat, but… I just utterly detest this scene more and more with each rewatch! And here is why.
My first gripe with this scene is that the entire way that they get there makes no sense. Yes, Clara managed to get into Danny’s time stream when he was young because she was thinking about visiting her own childhood when Danny rung her phone. The two thoughts go together and you end up with (everyone together now!) young Danny/Rupert. However, when she and Orson are on the TARDIS and the Doctor is unconscious, then she just wants to escape and she used her mental trace from the last time to do so. Somehow this makes her break through the time lock on Gallifrey, and get into the Doctor’s personal time stream while she’s probably thinking about the things that *might* be trying to get in (they left it ambiguous as to whether they were, real-top writing!).
Another problem that I have with this scene is that this is another event in the Doctor’s life that Clara is now the central figure in. Cast your minds back to May 2013, the Series 7B finale, The Name of the Doctor. In this story, Clara goes into the dying Doctor’s time stream, and rights all the wrongs the Great Intelligence caused, saving the Doctor in every adventure. This now effectively means that she has been in every story. Ever. Whether broadcast, written or in the form of a comic, every adventure that is canon has now been re-written to include a Clara to save the Doctor. Later on in 2013, we had the magnificent 50th anniversary, The Day of the Doctor, where, at the end, Clara spurs the Doctor into saving Gallifrey. Fast forward again, at Christmas 2013, she then breaks down the barriers between universes to persuade the Time Lords to give the Doctor more lives. See what I’m getting at here?
The Listen scene shows Clara telling the young Doctor it is okay to be scared, and in doing so, she unwittingly sets him on the course for good, making him steal TARDIS blah, blah. But my point here is that she is now so deeply ingrained in the Doctor’s life, she is now more responsible for the Doctor being the Doctor than the Doctor is himself! This seems just ridiculous and excessive that one person would or could have that much of an influence, and what’s more, it belittles the Doctor to a point where she is now equal to or more important than he is to the show. She is now wiser, cleverer, and probably saves the universe more than the Doctor, compared to the Doctor, who (see what I did there?) is now over 2000 years old, is cleverer and infinitely more complex than Clara is and to top it off is actually from a higher species, is now diminished by Clara’s presence.
The final problem that I have with this scene is probably the simplest, and here it is: it totally ruins the overall story. Hear me out, (God knows I’m going to cause arguments here) the story up until this point is really fantastic. The atmosphere is tense, the concept is disturbing and the acting really puts this story up there with episodes such as Blink and The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances. Furthermore, the idea that everyone had the same nightmare was still so good, and although in the context of the hiding creature, which I feel doesn’t quite mix, the idea was great. And then, it is gone, and it was such a shame, and a wasted opportunity.
The final scene makes it plummet from scary and tense, to over-complex and atmosphere destroying. The part in which it does this is when Clara is under the bed. This entire idea makes the story feel mundane, every day and strips any form of genuine threat away. It feels like Moffat has gone back into deliberately making the plot have some form of twist, which is what irritated me throughout series 5-7, and by contrast what made the rest of Series 8 so good up to that point.
The plots and concepts in Series 8 were overall simpler. Straightforward, easy to follow, and just good, thought-out stories. Stories such in The Caretaker where the Doctor had to get rid of the Skovox Blitzer while posing as a human. This then interlinked with the Doctor and Danny meeting, and Clara’s (tacked on at the beginning of Series 8) controlling nature. This was good as it allowed for a more complex dynamic between characters, which is what you get from a sturdy base story.
So in conclusion, I think that Listen’s climax was really totally unnecessary to the story as a whole, and feels like it was thrown in as some extra fan service (which we did not need after the previous year’s events) and because someone, somewhere, thought that a plot twist was the best idea ever (which, by the way, this episode is already full of, if you watch closely.) I feel that this scene also interrupts the general flow of the episode, and feels slightly out of place, which up until this point was one of my favourite stories in a long time.
