Doctor Who 804: Listen

I was staring to look forward to Doctor Who episodes, starting to like season 8. I definitely like Capaldi and Jenna Coleman. Sadly, this episode of Doctor Who has too much timey-wimey for my liking. Some people are comparing it to Blink and other Moffat greats, but let's be honest, Blink had a story-line, a self-contained, logical, storyline. This episode just doesn't.

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. 

World-Building: Shoddy
Characterization: Awesomely portrayed by actors
Plot: headdesk-inducing "timey-wimey" nonsense

In writing this episode Moffatt seems to have forgotten that things happen for a reason. Clearly, he had many things he wanted to say about fear and the Doctor's character, and all that, but he ended up, as usual, wasting a lot of time to say nothing at all, and we didn't even get a creepy story out of it. This story seemed good for the first few minutes, maybe the first half, but then the internal logic of the tale just started to fall apart.

I'm a complainer and I've come to accept this so I'm just going to list my complaints in as concise a list as I can. Before I do, let me just say that the acting here was superb. I love the new Doctor and I'm starting to love Clara, but I really don't like the things they're doing...

OK, here goes.

1) When you intend to write a story that is literally about NOTHING try not to start it with the Doctor having a conversation with nothing, about nothing. And if you do choose to use such a monologue try to then come up with some motivation for the characters' actions and the storyline other than this hollow monologue... showing us a scared Doctor who had just woken from a nightmare would have done just fine. Or perhaps having him encounter a scared child who has his exact same dream...

2) What is up with people going back in time and influencing young children who then grow up to fall in love with them? Seriously. That is just creepy, find another storyline to keep reusing.

3) There are no shortcuts for Characterization. You have to actually show us the character growing, show us their loves, their fears, make us invested in the future. Showing us that Clara and Danny Pink end up having a descendant who travels in time just killed my investment in the whole dating/awkward relationship thread you have been shoving in my face since the start of this season and at the same time it added NOTHING to Clara's characterization.

4) What was the point of going to the end of the universe, again? The banging on the locked door was not creepy. We've seen it done - and much better I might add - in the episode Midnight. Maybe if we really had seem a motivating factor for the Doctor we would care about this mystery as much as he does, but we don't, because we don't know why he'd doing this, why he's so adamant.

5) Clara said that thing about fear to the young Doctor because she heard him say it to the young Danny Pink, but the Doctor only said it because he heard Clara say it in that barn when he was a kid. So who came up with those words? It doesn't make sense. All they had to do was write it so that Clara wasn't there when the Doctor said it to the kid. That way, she has no clue that he'll use her words eventually. OR make the thing with the young time-lord happen BEFORE the meeting with young Danny Pink, that way, she made up the words, has no clue they will later be used by the Doctor and then goes on to hear him use her words...

6) I'm not even going to attempt to figure out how Gallifrey became accessible again after the time war, the undoing of the time war, the moment stuff, Gallifrey being time-locked in a bubble universe, and etc. It's like the Daleks, I guess, they just can't help using it and you just have to accept that. What I do care about is that old rule of interfering with his own time-line. It existed for a reason. It's called good world-building. There have to be rules, otherwise you end up with this messy "timey-wimey" nonsense...

That's enough complaining for one night. I just want to say that I'm a little surprised by the people that keep comparing this to Robot of Sherwood. Yes, they both involved Time-Travel, but Robot of Sherwood took the characters to ONE time, ONE location, where they then did some stuff. All the jumping about, the choice of times and places to go, has to be really well done otherwise it feels pointless.

I have to say, again, that I enjoyed the first part of this episode when I thought it was going to be a creepy episode, but doing all this and then revealing that the whole solution is that NOTHING is out there/listening was stupid.