Archive of Our Own

I found “Deep Breath” disappointing, so I stopped watching Season 8 after that. But Netflix let me know that it’s now available for no extra charge, and I thought, well, I have heard good things about this, let’s see whether Steven Moffat is capable of learning from experience.

And the answer so far appears to be: yes and no.

There have been some genuine attempts to address the criticism of seasons 5-7. Exhibit A would be Clara, who is finally getting the same kind of character development that RTD gave Rose, Martha, and Donna. At last, Clara has a real environment, she has people in her life that matter to her, and she is given opportunities to actually earn the cleverness that Eleven always insisted on attributing to her, in the absence of very much evidence. I like her better now.

I also like Twelve. Despite the major differences, I can sort of see how Eleven might turn into Twelve, and the extra snark and world-weariness makes things interesting.

The odd thing is, I don’t really like them together. 

I don’t think it’s just the age difference. I’ve seen people complain, also, about Twelve’s constantly making cutting remarks about Clara’s appearance, but this doesn’t really bother me; it’s a shame they couldn’t find any other way of letting us know that Twelve doesn’t have a crush on her, but it’s a huge relief to me that he doesn’t, so I guess I’ll take it. This Clara seems a bit older and wiser, too–maybe it’s just the fact that Jenna Coleman no longer looks twelve to me–and she is certainly trading on that in her dynamic with the Doctor, which so far has involved a lot of her schooling him and bossing him around. Rose, Martha, Donna, and Amy all did that to some extent; but perhaps because this is so often presented as part of her identity as a teacher, it seems more didactic and annoying to me when she does it. (It is probably not an accident that for the first time the TARDIS now has a chalkboard.) It also seems to me, I guess, like overcompensation. I was particularly annoyed by the jail scene in “Robots of Sherwood,” where Moffat makes both the men act like two-year-olds in order to present Clara as the adult in the room. Could you not give Clara some agency and authority *without* turning all the men around her into blithering idiots? Twelve also seems to cherish this desire to impress Clara which is a holdover from Eleven’s characterization but which seems oddly out of keeping with most of Twelve’s. 

And then there’s “Listen.”

I was looking forward to “Listen,” because I love “Blink.” No matter what else Moffat does to shows I love, I will always love “Blink.” And I am also a fan of “Silence in the Library” and “Girl in the Fireplace.” And atmospherically, “Listen” is perfect. Very suspenseful, very scary. I also really like its development of Clara and Danny’s constantly interrupted courtship. I foresee that I’m going to be frustrated by what Moffat uses Danny to say about pacifism and violence, but why borrow trouble; he’s a good character and I like the actor who plays him, and it’s nice to have someone in the companion’s-boyfriend role who isn’t treated primarily as comic relief.

So here I am, watching Twelve give his monologue about why we talk to ourselves and thinking, ah, yes, good stuff, I wish Moffat wouldn’t keep putting the characters outside the TARDIS when it’s in space, I know he thinks it’s a cool effect but it bugs me that he’s undermining the distinction between the shelter of the TARDIS and the danger of outer space, but whatever…and then he gives his little monologue about how there are perfect predators and perfect defenders so why are there no perfect hiders?

Which is great until you realize that Moffat’s already introduced three species that are perfect hiders: the weeping angels, the vashta nerada, and the Silence. And that Ten and Eleven dealt extensively with all of them. So Twelve should bloody well know that evolution frequently HAS produced perfect hiders.

It’s not just the old problem of Moffat going back to the same idea bag too often. “Listen’s” treatment of this idea is genuinely different from “Blink’s” or “Silence in the Library’s” in that it is strongly implied (the big lump of bedspread on Rupert’s bed remains unexplained) that the sinister thing lurking in the dark does not in fact exist and the whole quest to find it is driven by the Doctor’s own troubled psyche. My problem is that the episode appears to have completely forgotten that the Doctor’s fear of the dark is actually quite well-founded. I mean the fucking vashta nerada live in there, and also the dark is when the weeping angels are at liberty to sneak up on you. Given that the VN skeletonized several people in “Silence in the Library” and the weeping angels led quite a murderous romp through Series 5, we can’t now turn around and say it was all in the Doctor’s mind. But in this episode we’re told that the Doctor’s conviction that something’s hiding there in the dark derives from childhood fears and from Clara’s self-insertion into his timeline, where she provides the tactile experience that makes his nightmares about things under the bed scarringly real. 

So in that way, “Listen” reminds me less of “Blink” or “Silence” than it reminds me of “The Beast Below,” another early-series episode featuring scary nursery rhymes and gaps in the memory and all kinds of menace, right up to the point where it turns into a puddle of sap as Amy explains to the Doctor that the star whale, like himself, is so old and kind that he will happily bear the ship forward without being tortured or lobotomied. “Listen” undergoes a similar conversion, as Clara comforts the child-Doctor and tells him all the things about fear that he will then pass on in his pep talk to young Rupert. It turns out the whole point of this episode was to get Clara back to the childhoods of both the men in her life so that she could tell them that it’s all going to be OK. This, to me, is vastly disappointing.

And it's also squirmy in the same way that the whole River Song arc was squirmy. After all the time they’ve spent trying to get her out of the governess role, “Listen” puts Clara in this weirdly maternal relationship to both her boyfriend and the Doctor. It’s an extension of the “saving the doctor” purpose established for her in “Name of the Doctor,” and I find it creepy. Hasn’t the Doctor EVER been able to save himself? Why does he need the same cosmic pixie dreamgirl to do it for him at every pivotal moment in his life? 

So, as I said, it’s a mixed bag. Some things have changed for the better; some things have not. But at least it’s more interesting than the series premiere led me to believe it would be.