Categories: reviewsseason 8

Series 8, episode 4 – Listen

This episode starts with a mystery (why people talk loud even when they are alone?) and with the search of a creature whos ability to hide is… just perfect. Because if there are animals that are perfect predators and there are animals that developed perfect defense, why shouldn’t exist animals the developed perfect cloaking systems? The kind of beings that you only observe (unconsciously!) only when you start to talk alone, even if the senses does not tell you there is someone else near you. On the other hand, there is another thing you must remember before starting to watch this episode, a thing that the Doctor mentioned once: time is a river, time is circular. Sooner or later you return to places from your past or to moments from your life, with friends as companions or with fear in your soul.

Considering all these, do you remember how Clara met Danny Pink? The moment by itself is not very relevant, but the attraction between the two characters is very relevant. In this episode they dated for the first time, having dinner. Finally. But the date is not very successfull, they got each others mad, and Clara storms out of the restaurant, angry. At home the Doctor was expecting her, preocupied with his problem, and he convince her to use the TARDIS in order to locate a nightmare in her past… a kind of dream many people had: they awake in the middle of the night, even they are sleeping and know it’s a dream, and when they get out of the bed a hand is getting their foot. But the trip does not happen as expected, because otherwise it would be no fun: Danny is calling just in the moment Clara is preparing for the trip, she is distracted by his call, her emotions are leaking the TARDIS‘s telepathic interface and the Doctor and his companion are getting to know Rupert Pink, a boy frightened from a children shelter that just had a nightmare. They succeeded in casting out the intruder from Rupert’s room and to relax the boy using the Colonel Danny, the only toy soldier that did not have a gun, that did not need a gun because he was using his intelligence.

Clara need a new chance with Danny Pink, so she returns to dinner just moments after she left, and the Doctors use her imprint in the TARDIS’s telepathic interface to travel further in the future and he reaches to the end of the Universe, on the only surviving planet before it’s collapse. It wouldn’t be the first time he had done the trip “to the end of the Universe”, you may remember the adventure he had on Malcassairo with Martha Jones and captain Jack Harkness when they found the Master (season 3, episode 11 – Utopia). Now he finds Orson Pink, a pioneer time travel, originating from a period that was only about a century later that the current one, but he got to the end of everything because of an error. He also finds the creatures from an empty Universe (what was left of it) that tried to enter. Later Clara gets to know a frightened boy that did not want to be in the army, neither in the Academy.

But you’ll have to discover yourselves the connections between characters and to decide how much the creature accompanying the Doctor is real or not. The episode us much better than the previous one because it makes people curious and and it has some surprises. Writer Steven Moffat, director Douglas Mackinnon. Cast: Peter Capaldi (The Doctor), Jenna Coleman (Clara), Samuel Anderson (Danny Pink), Remi Gooding (Rupert Pink), Robert Goodman (Reg), Kiran Shah (Figure). Producer Peter Bennett. executive producers Brian Minchin and Steven Moffat.

In the next episode, written by Stephen Thompson and Steven Moffat, Time Heist, the Doctor and Clara must rob the bank of Karabraxos, the deadliest bank in the cosmos! The Doctor turns bank robber when he is given a task he cannot refuse: to steal from the most dangerous bank in the cosmos. With the help of a beautiful shape-shifter and cyber-augmented gamer, the Doctor and Clara must fight their way past deadly security and come face to face with the fearsome Teller: a creature of terrifying power that can detect guilt.