Story 246 - Listen

In which the Doctor becomes fascinated with the idea of the ultimate predator - one so successful that it can remain hidden from everyone at all times. Such a creature would surely survive all others and be around at the end of the Universe. A huge implication of this would be that people might never truly have been alone. Is there really something hiding under your bed? Is there really something there when you glimpse something out of the corner of your eye? This predator might have been lurking unseen, always. 

Apparently proving his hypothesis, a piece of chalk he was using is misplaced, and he sees the word "Listen" on his blackboard - a word he had not written.

Clara meanwhile is out on a dinner date with her colleague Danny Pink, which isn't going very well. Both are nervous and keep saying the wrong things - inadvertently offending each other. She ends up walking out of the restaurant and going home.

Here, she finds the TARDIS parked in her bedroom, and the Doctor tells her all about his current hypothesis.

He has been studying dreams as part of his investigations and suspects that everyone has had the same dream at some point in their life - the one about something hiding under their bed. To prove this, he decides to have Clara use the TARDIS telepathic circuits in order that the ship will travel to the point in her life where she had this dream.

She is dwelling on her argument with Danny Pink, however, and the circuits take the TARDIS into his past rather than hers. They have arrived outside a children's home, but the Doctor stubbornly refuses to believe that this is not her history. They see a young boy observing them from an upper window. They go inside, pretending to be inspectors. The young boy is named Rupert, and he is afraid of something under his bed. To allay his fears, she encourages him to look under the bed, and joins him to show that it is safe. Suddenly, the mattress depresses as though someone, or something, is sitting on top of it - though the room is empty.

They emerge to find a strange shape hidden beneath the bedspread.

When the Doctor enters, he tries to dismiss the shape as one of Rupert's friends who had sneaked in and was trying to scare them all.

He tells Rupert that it is okay to be scared - it is like having a super-power as you get a rush of adrenalin and become stronger. The Doctor tells the shape on the bed to leave - promising that no-one will look at it. After it has gone, Clara puts toy soldiers around the bed, like protection for Rupert. She designates one, which she calls "Dan", as the leader. It has no gun, but Clara tells Rupert that brave people don't need guns.

The Doctor then uses hypnotism to send Rupert to sleep, and scrambles his memory so that he will recall toy soldier Dan rather than the shape on the bed.

Back in the TARDIS, Clara denies having any connection to Rupert, and fails to tell the Doctor that she had been thinking about Danny.

She asks the Doctor to take her to the street where the restaurant is located, only seconds after she had left it. This is so that she can go back inside and attempt to salvage the evening.

The meal is going better when she accidentally reveals that she knows his name used to be Rupert. She suddenly sees an astronaut. She follows him and finds the TARDIS. The astronaut removes his helmet and reveals himself to be a man who looks just like Danny.

The Doctor explains that this is Colonel Orson Pink, who in the future will be a pioneer time traveller. His mission went wrong and instead of going a few years into the future, he went to the very end of the Universe. The Doctor found him there, and is puzzled as Clara's telepathic traces were still in play in the TARDIS circuits. He suspects that Orson may be a descendant of Clara's.

They travel to the far future and Orson's crashed ship, as the Doctor had suspected that his hidden predator would still be around in this time. They hear something on the hull of the ship, but Orson dismisses it as just the metal expanding and contracting due to the changes in temperature as the sun sets. However, the Doctor notices that Orson had barricaded himself in. The astronaut gives Clara an old family heirloom - a toy soldier which they call Dan.

The Doctor has Clara and Orson remain in the TARDIS whilst he stays alone in the timeship to confront the creature. The airlock is forced open but the Doctor is knocked out before he can see what might have entered.

The unconscious Doctor is taken into the TARDIS. Clara uses the telepathic circuits to take them to safety. She emerges to find herself in an old barn.

A small boy is sleeping here, and Clara hides under his bed when she hears someone else approach. It is a man and woman, and from their conversation she works out that this is Gallifrey, and the child in the bed is the Doctor. He is a loner who is unlikely to get into the Time Lord Academy. The recovered Doctor calls out for Clara from inside the TARDIS, alerting the boy to their presence. He gets up and Clara instinctively grabs hold of his ankle to stop him spotting her - inadvertently setting up the whole dream hypothesis which the Doctor will have many hundreds of years later. She tells him the same thing which he will later tell Rupert about fear being a super-power. She also passes on to him the toy soldier.

Back in the TARDIS, Clara insists that they leave without the Doctor seeing where they are. They take Orson back to his own time, when he should have arrived back before his mission went awry.

The Doctor then takes Clara to Danny's home where she can finish their date.

Listen was written by Steven Moffat, and was first broadcast on Saturday 13th September 2014.

Once again Moffat builds a story around a common childhood fear - this time the monstrous something that might lurk underneath your bed. Moffat tells us that there is something there after all - the Doctor's ultimate predator that can remain invisible to all, even until the end of time. Or does he? There is just a suggestion that the Doctor misplaced his own piece of chalk, and forgot that he had written "Listen" on the blackboard. We never do get to see what might have been trying to get into Orson's timeship.

Then there is the fact that someone is hiding on top of Rupert's bed. But is it just one of his friends, playing a joke? We do get the briefest of glimpses, but it is really too quick to be certain.

Moffat clearly has a very high regard for Clara. She has played the role of the "Impossible Girl" ever since Asylum of the Daleks, and it transpired that she had seeded herself throughout the Doctor's time stream in order to save him from the Great Intelligence. As well s rescuing him, and reuniting him with his forgotten Time War incarnation, it was she who pushed him towards taking the TARDIS when he left Gallifrey, rather than another more reliable ship. Now we discover that she was involved in his life at an even earlier stage - helping to forge some of his future personality.

Fans had mixed feelings about this at the time, feeling that Clara was becoming responsible for far too many things, lessening the role of the Doctor himself. Everything was seemingly down to Clara, with the Doctor more of a passive agent.

Listen also has a role to play in properly establishing Danny Pink. He had only been seen briefly in the series so far. We knew that he had been a soldier, and that he had something painful in his past which was related to his old profession. He gets to go on a dinner date with Clara here, and we also get to see him as a child, when he was still called Rupert, and we get to meet a future descendant - Colonel Orson Pink. Future events will show that Orson can't ever have existed, so he must come from an alternative time-line.

The problem is, Clara is responsible for all of his life as well. She gave him the idea of becoming a soldier, and even of adopting Danny as his new name. She is threatening to overbalance the whole series.

The only guest artist of note is young Remi Gooding who plays Rupert. We all know how bad child actors can be, but he is very good. The diminutive actor Kiran Shah plays the "bedspread monster". He was a Hobbit body double on the Lord of the Rings movies, and would later play one of the Smile Emojibots. He has also featured in the Star Wars films, the Chronicles of Narnia movies and the recent TV version of Worzel Gummidge.

We get to see John Hurt's War Doctor once more as part of a flashback to identify the barn as the one where he'll later come close to operating the Moment weapon.

Otherwise it is a three hander, with Samuel Anderson playing both Danny and Orson Pink.

There is a lot of humour from Peter Capaldi, in particular the Doctor's constant, rude put-downs of Clara. There are two reasons why the Twelfth Doctor worked, where the Sixth Doctor didn't - Capaldi's performance and Moffat's writing.

Overall, a very spooky story, which has a significant role to play in showing us the early formation of the Doctor's character. Just a pity that it is Clara who is responsible for everything...

Things you might like to know:

• The starting point for this story was the Doctor alone. We would get to see what he got up to when there wasn't a companion around. Moffat wanted to write a small scale chamber piece akin to Midnight, to prove to himself that he could still write. The ironic thing is that it went the opposite way to a Doctor alone story and had the companion taking the lead.
• Another name to add to the list of obscure people who have portrayed the Doctor is Michael Jones. He played the young Doctor in the barn.
• The director had Jones' hair styled to match a photo of a young William Hartnell, even though his head wasn't going to be seen on screen.
• Moffat had previously used the idea of a monster (a Floof) which could lurk at the corner of your eye in a short story back in 2007.
• Orson is wearing a Sanctuary Base Six spacesuit, complete with an identifying badge, despite the fact that the base won't be built for another 2000 years.
• The implication is that Orson is a descendant of both Clara and Danny, but we will later see the latter killed, without he and Clara ever having gotten to the stage where she might be pregnant by him.
• The telepathic circuits now take up a whole section of the console, and you have to physically interact with them. In the past they could operate without contact, though the Third Doctor did have to touch a couple of large buttons on the console at the start of Planet of the Daleks.
• There are a few quotes from earlier stories. On waking after being knocked out the Doctor mentions Sontarans perverting the course of human history - something the confused post-regenerative Fourth Doctor said in Robot; then Clara says that "fear makes companions of us all" - a line by the First Doctor to Barbara in An Unearthly Child. The Third Doctor previously mentioned "not a tick, not a click" when describing the powerless TARDIS in Death to the Daleks.
• The actor who plays Reg, the children's home night worker, is Robert Goodman. He had played many small roles in the series during the 1970's and '80's. These included playing a Mandrel in Nightmare of Eden, and background characters in Full Circle (Starliner citizen), Arc of Infinity (Gallifreyan citizen), Enlightenment (party guest), Frontios (colonist), Resurrection of the Daleks (crewman) and Terror of the Vervoids (ship's officer).