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This is my favourite Moffat story, heck, my
favourite episode of all time - it beats out "The Pandorica Opens/ The Big
Bang", "The Empty Child/ The Doctor Dances", and "Heaven
Sent", to name some of the more obvious choices. It's an excellent episode
for Clara and Capaldi's Doctor, explores its themes of fear, childhood,
soldiers, love, and even the scientific method and the intersections of these
themes.
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The episode is structured around four Four
vignettes. Three of these, set at Rupert’s orphanage, Orson’s cabin and the
barn, mark out the three main acts of the story, with Clara and Danny’s date
woven in between them. As a result, I think it’s best to analyse each in order.
The Date
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The first post-credits scene once again sees
Moffat returning to his “Coupling” roots, with a non linear scene intercutting
Clara in her flat, reflecting on her date going wrong, giving a nice parallel
to “Into the Dalek”, which does the same thing, but from Danny’s perspective.
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The first thing worth noting is Clara and
Danny’s first argument, where they clash over Danny’s time serving in the army.
There’s a parallel to Danny’s brief confusion over Clara’s joke in “Into the
Dalek”: once again, Clara makes what she sees as an innocuous joke about Danny
being a soldier, which leads to him visibly flashing back to trauma from his
time in the army, and feeling the need to defend what he did. The difference is
that this time, Danny’s defensive response to an insensitive joke leads to a
fully fledged argument, because of the barrier between civilians and soldiers –
Danny refers to them as “people like you”, which Clara takes offense at. It’s
worth wondering why she takes offense here – is it because she doesn’t like
Danny making generalisations about civilians, or because her TARDIS travels mean
she doesn’t see herself as a naïve civilian? Given her later character
development, it’s worth suggesting it’s something of a combination of the two.
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Then, after Clara makes peace with Danny, they
argue again, this time over Clara’s double life, which she is currently hiding
from Danny, but almost lets slip by revealing that she knows his childhood name
– once again, she accidentally pokes at a source of pain for Danny with a
misjudged joke – this time, a name he admitted to not liking when she met him as
a child. He asks her to “Tell me the truth, because I know when people are
lying to me”, a significant line for the rest of the season, being the main
source of conflict between the two characters. And yet, Clara, never is quite
able to tell Danny the whole truth, which is the lingering source of tension
for their relationship at the end of the episode. Here, it seems to be due to a
fear that Danny will find her TARDIS life “weird”, but, as the overall arc of
the season will suggest, there may be more to it than that.
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So, while it is separate from the main “plot” of
the episode – the Doctor’s search for the hiders – this vignette ties in nicely
with the overall themes of the story, making it a lovely thread to have running
through the episode. For Danny and Clara, fear and love go hand in hand, and
their fear gets in the way of them acknowledging the way they really feel about
each other (although this seems resolved by the end of the episode, it will in
fact be a defining feature of their relationship).
Rupert’s orphanage
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Danny and the Doctor both have childhoods
haunted by the possibility of becoming a soldier, with Clara linking the two by
describing the "Dan the Soldier Man" toy as "a soldier so brave
he doesn't need a weapon": it is particularly notable that the camera
blurs Clara out of focus to bring the Doctor into focus as Clara says this,
highlighting the fact that she gets this idea from the Doctor. Capaldi’s
expression as she says the words is a superb piece of silent acting: the Doctor
does not seem pleased by her comparison, perhaps because he discomfited by
being called a soldier, perhaps because he feels he doesn’t live up to the
ideal Clara suggests, or perhaps because he doesn’t recognise the link Clara is
making. In many ways, the tension between Danny and the Doctor is a product of
their similarities as much as their differences.
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And parallels between the leads abound
throughout the story. Clara mirrors the Doctor here (not for the first time) by
dropping into Danny's childhood to influence his future, just as Eleven did for
Amy.
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There's also this gorgeous bit of foreshadowing
for the conclusion:
CLARA [talking about Rupert's bed]:
Do you know what's under there?
RUPERT: What?
CLARA: Me!
It’s a nice moment that highlights
the way Clara becomes the “monster” of the story, becoming the source of the
Doctor’s fear and obsession.
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And I also want to mention Capaldi's
performance, which is an extra level of astonishing here - his acting in the
"monster under the covers" scene is incredible - first he's cracking
jokes about "Where's Wally?", then he goes full hero, and gives his
"fear is a superpower!" speech, then he moves to pure terror,
desperately urging Rupert and Clara to not look at the thing under the blanket (a
major clue that the episode isn't about the possible monster, but is instead
about the Doctor's fears and obsessions). It's an astonishing range to move
through in minutes of screentime. The scene's on youtube, go watch it now.
The Cabin at the end of the Universe
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The first thing to note about this section is
what it reveals about the episode’s exploration of the Scientific method: the
episode is about the Doctor forming a hypothesis in the pre credits sequence,
his attempts to prove said hypothesis, and the way his own biases get in the
way of his experiment. The Doctor’s obsession becomes apparent here, as he
sends Clara back to the TARDIS, saying “I have to know”: he is working from the
assumption that there is something to see, rather than trying to prove or
disprove his hypothesis, while offering equal opportunity for it to be right or
wrong.
·
Also significant is the Doctor’s offer to check
Danny’s prospects, a line that both provides dramatic irony in the context of
this episode, as the Doctor seems to have shown Clara what her prospects with
Danny are by introducing her to Orson, and a subtle piece of foreshadowing for
the finale, where Danny’s lack of a future sets the plot in motion.
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Clara, meanwhile, is confronted with what seems
to be her future with Danny, after just going into his past, posing the
question of the effect time travel has on Clara and Danny’s free will. She’s finds
out enough to make assumption she has a lasting future with Danny, in spite of
her struggle to make the date work – arguably this knowledge of a possible
future that enables her to move past the fear that acted as a crutch during her
date with Danny, and open up to him at the end of the episode.
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Which leads us to the mystery of Orson: due to
Danny’s death at the end of the season, we’re left wondering who he is, and
what his link to Clara’s timeline is. Moffat has suggested he’s a different
relative of Danny’s, but that doesn’t really line up with the dialogue in the
episode: I prefer an alternative explanation: that Orson is exactly what an
initial look at this episode would suggest – Clara and Danny’s great-grandson.
The Doctor compares him to Robinson Crusoe, and one of the most famous images
from that story can explain Orson’s appearance in this one. It is well
established that time can be rewritten in the Moffat era, and Orson is footprint
on a beach, part of a future that will never happen, washed away by the waves
of time. Either way, it is entirely in keeping with the nature of this story
that it leaves a deliberately unanswered question for the overall arc of season
eight. And furthermore, it suggests that Clara and Danny do have a measure of
free will going forward: this is a potential future for them, but not a
definite one.
The Barn
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“He doesn’t want to join the army” says the
woman who tells the young Doctor he can join the other boys in the orphanage. Unlike
Rupert, who is comforted by the toy soldiers, the army is not a source of
comfort for the Doctor, but of fear, a representation of failure: the unnamed
man suggests it is the only viable alternative to becoming a Time Lord, which
he does not believe the Doctor is capable of.
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Clara continues to mirror the Doctor in this
section, piloting the TARDIS away from the end of the universe, echoing the
Doctor's "Do as you are told" mantra when asking him to fly away from
the barn without looking to see where they've been. She is becoming more and
more Doctor like, not just in her personality and thought processes, but in the
narrative space she occupies.
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The episode concludes with Clara’s speech to the
child Doctor. “Clever people can hear dreams” she tells the young Doctor, a
callback to Clara saying the same words to Rupert. Just as she did in that
scene, Clara chooses to comfort a scared little boy, turning the Doctor’s fear
into the source of his heroism. Helping the child Doctor also enables Clara to
open up to Danny, a fact emphasized by the words “fear can bring us together”
accompanying the image of her and Danny’s first kiss.
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“Listen” is really something special. It's a
beautifully layered, utterly moving script, that gets better on every rewatch
for me. A story where we learn that the bravest hero in the universe was, and
in a way still is, just a little boy who's afraid of the dark. A story that
gives us this line:
"The deep and lovely dark. You wouldn't
see the stars without it."
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