When they sat down to write this episode, Chris Chibnall and Charlene James were well aware that a monster preying on nightmares is a rather dulled cliché at this point, and one that Doctor Who has touched on before. They understood that they’d have to throw some kind of wrench in that premise to make it unique or interesting -this couldn’t just be another Nightmare on Elm Street or It after all. That wrench turned into a compelling idea which itself turned into an elaborate backstory which turned into a convoluted story that never quite lives up to its own ambitions. Even the title, “Can You Hear Me?” is rather poor, coming as it does from a portion of the episode that’s irrelevant by the time the plot really gets in motion.
That doesn’t actually come until late in the episode due to a copious amount of set-up and exposition, neither of which is all that bad but for the way they effect the pacing. Indeed a chunk of that set-up, following each of the companions in Sheffield is quite good, as we get to see Ryan, Yaz, and Graham in a casual environment distinct from the Doctor and each other. The nature of their arrangement with the Doctor is better articulated as she just drops them off in the way a mother would her schoolchildren with the understanding they’ll meet up again the next day. Ryan goes to hang out with his friend Tibo (Buom Tihngang), Yaz with her sister Sonya (Bhavnisha Parmar), and Graham with his poker buddies; and while I’d have preferred the episode honed in more on the impact their travels have had on themselves and their relationships (a theme that is brought up, but not to much consistency), it is nice to ground them in their lives now and again. In spite of Graham’s cover of retirement cruises to his friends, a respite such as this in their own time and place is something of a holiday for the companions. A part of me would’ve liked the episode to focus just on them and their personal lives, or alternatively on the Doctor going off on a quick adventure of her own, as has happened a few times in the series’ history.
But of course there has to be some complication, and it comes in the form of each character experiencing a different yet somehow connected anomaly –even the Doctor from the ruins of a home in medieval Aleppo. They could all be inciting incidents for their own Doctor Who stories: the Doctor running into a monster specifically terrorizing a fourteenth century Syrian woman Tahira (Aruhan Galieva), Yaz envisioning a tattooed bald man in her flat, Ryan spotting one in Tibo’s before abducting his friend, and Graham having a vision of a woman being held prisoner somewhere out in space. With the exception of the Doctors’ (which reads as a mostly formulaic monster story) each of these hooks is enticing. Who is the woman asking for Graham’s help? Why is he experiencing this clairvoyance? What does Yaz’s eerie dream mean? And what the hell is this mysterious figure doing with his fingers? Maybe one of the most weirdly disturbing images in recent Doctor Who is that of Ian Gelder’s digits detaching themselves from his hand and sticking in the ears of unsuspecting victims like a morbid wet willy –adding to the implicit goriness the fact this characters’ pale appearance and the patterns on his head (as well as his exclusive existence within a dark atmosphere) seem vaguely reminiscent of Pinhead.
He’s the figure who unites each thread, a godlike being called Zellin of a race adjacent to the Guardians (in fact he reminds me a lot of the Black Guardian), the Eternals, and even the Celestial Toymaker for classic series fans. Zellin, who creates or amplifies nightmares part for sustenance part for his own amusement, is the best element of the episode. Not only does he feel like a classic Doctor Who villain in his sophisticated candor and campiness alike, but Ian Gelder, who though I’ve only ever seen in ancillary roles such as in Torchwood: Children of Earth and Game of Thrones, always carries an immense and imposing gravitas that gives him an immediate screen presence. Within a minute of confronting the Doctor you want him to be one of her returning foes.
But in interweaving his abductions with a monster and cosmic visions, the episode struggles to tightly wrap these things together in time for the episodes’ twist and main dramatic stakes to form. So much has to be given over to explanations and unbridled plotting that interesting ideas and areas of focus get left by the wayside. Tahira becomes narratively useless until the climax, the companions’ nightmares offer valuable insight into their anxieties but are dropped relatively quickly, and at one point facts are stated outright that had just been expressed through a far more compelling artistic choice just to make sure we got all that. Funnily, this means of pacing in the extremely long first act would actually be fine in service of a longer narrative, a two-parter perhaps. But since the episode is only an hour, forcing the dramatic thrust of the story into almost the last third of its runtime, even the good stuff suffers for this grossly uneven structure.
And it’s awful because that good stuff is some of my favourite stuff of this whole series. The animated sequence for instance, illustrating the backstory of the even more powerful evil god the Doctor has been tricked into freeing (the woman who was psychically calling to Graham), and her and Zellins’ relationship with the two worlds they ruled over, is exquisite. I’ve never seen animation used on Doctor Who as an aesthetic device and it’s terrific. In purpose, it’s Watership Down, in style it’s Lotte Reiniger crossed with Boy in the World and Norman McLaren. And the mythos it tells is more exciting a concept than the episode itself -I’d much rather the Doctor and her friends were brought into that story. Because the idea of two bored omniscient beings already centuries into manipulating a society into chaos through fear has a lot more potential than merely villains feeding off your nightmares. It’s also the kind of story that would’ve fit right into classic Doctor Who.
Instead Zellin and his newly freed companion Rakaya, played by Kee herself from Children of Men, Clare-Hope Ashitey, content themselves with feeding off of the Earth because ...insert Tommy Lee Jones’ speech from Men in Black -once more a thinly-veiled commentary; though there is one great moment to come out of their attempt when Zellin shows up in a childs’ bedroom just after his mother assured him there was no such thing as the Bogeyman to tell him “that’s not true” before attacking. But here’s where the show has to kick things into gear to get to the end on time. Though the Doctor is confronted with her nightmare the same as everyone else (a callback to the ‘Timeless Child’ brought up in “Spyfall” to remind us of that mystery), she escapes it rather quickly and with no explanation, getting out of her bonds by seemingly using the Force to draw her sonic screwdriver, and then freeing everyone else to hatch a plan. Mere minutes after the second act disruption we’re already at the climax somehow as the Doctor turns the gods’ own powers against them by way of Tahira conquering her fear of her monster as symbolic of how human fear is a strength and all that -ultimately trapping both in another dimensional prison (that is pretty much the Phantom Zone now that I think about it). Once more it’s the same theme that characterizes every story about our nightmares coming to life: the way to defeat them is to overcome them, albeit done in a very roundabout way. For a moralistic ending, it’s pretty shallow, beneath Doctor Who and this episodes’ own concepts.
But this isn’t the end of the episode, nearly ten minutes still remaining to form a sort of epilogue for each of the companions that’s not really deserved for how much focus they got after reuniting with the Doctor. Ryan, who perhaps had the most vivid nightmare, rooted in “Orphan 55”, the destruction of the world, and the Dregs, and with a burning Tibo denouncing him for not being there, just parts ways with his friend, now having rescued him, with the assurance that they’ll hang out more. Later on the TARDIS he begins to question when their travels with the Doctor will end and whether it’s irresponsible for them to be neglecting their friends and families. Compared to the rest of this episode, this conversation between Ryan and Yaz is shockingly mature. Likewise is Graham’s confession to the Doctor of his worry about a potential cancer relapse -his great fear illustrated for him by Zellin, with a cameo from Grace (Sharon D. Clarke is always a welcome return) blaming him for what happened to her -again, very compelling stuff raised that doesn’t go much of anywhere this episode.
The biggest of these epilogues belongs to Yaz though, giving context to her nightmare of an open road with a vacant police officer and her sister through a flashback to some years’ earlier when she ran away from home possibly with suicidal intents. Sonya had called the police and this officer successfully broke through to her. While I love the character development and even the follow-up scene of Yaz visiting the same officer in the present, for a pretty major bit of backstory it’s so clumsily shoved in at the end of this episode, especially given both this nightmare and Yaz hadn’t been paid special attention up to this point. Why couldn’t this have come up earlier? Similarly, Tibo had his own narrative that didn’t seem to coalesce with anything else in the episode: an apparent sloppiness in his flat alien to Ryan, a need for multiple locks on his door, and some unspoken issue he was dealing with. At the end of the episode with Ryan’s encouragement, we see him at what appears to be a therapy session loosening up. I couldn’t quite figure out the point of these scenes until the end credits played alongside a referral to a BBC Mental Health Line, and I realized these subplots on at least some conscious level were designed to function as a PSA for viewers suffering from mental health issues. I don’t mind Doctor Who raising awareness, but this method of doing so within the confines of a tenuously related story was an extremely awkward way about it.
“Can You Hear Me?” is both a show of Doctor Who’s originality and its’ propensity for safety, as well as a great example of how not to deliver on interesting ideas. There’s a lot here I’d like to see come back, including its villains and a greater exploration of their history, and the insecurities of the companions and their relationships to the home they keep leaving behind for adventures with the Doctor. It’s not a good episode, but the good that’s in it captures the imagination as well as the story the Doctor and friends are going to encounter next week when the TARDIS visits the Villa Diodati in that fateful summer of 1816.
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