**Spoilers** Series 8, Episode 4 - "Listen"

Wibbs

That was the vibe I had as a kid anyway. The time lords were a special cadre, with special training and such. Only they were allowed near tardises(tardi?:)). I seem to remember when Tom Baker's Doc went home there were other people living on the planet outside the lofty domes of the Time lords. Primitive types with bows and arrows and the like. Didn't Leela end up befriending them, cos they were more like her? Actually IIRC(and this is on childhood memory here) didn't she end up staying on Gallifrey with one of them?

Actually I always wondered was it only Time lords who could regenerate? That because they did the whole time travel thing that this affected them so they could live many lifetimes?

I always reckoned and wanted to see as a kid, that it would be cool to examine that backstory. To see the society and how it's made up, the different classes and possible frictions between them(especially if one class were immortal). Now they're gone/trapped in some null zone, that can't be done I suppose. TBH I was a bit miffed when the rejig had as a big part of the narrative that they were dead/gone/extinct. It was a missed story opportunity IMH. Plus again as a kid I did like how they'd interfere with our hero and piss him off to great effect. Pertwee and Baker especially always got "ah FFS lads, will ye leave me alone. You only call me when you're in the shít, otherwise I'm a bloody weirdo pariah with a clapped out car. OK so I did nick it, but it was in a scrappys at the time".

tritium

That was a really good episode. Not perfect, but the best this series so far by some distance. I think its going to take me a while to fully work out what I think of the different elements of it but the time lord stuff was very cool.

Like another poster I am wondering about the whole Gallifrey thing though. Even after gallifrey was hidden instead of timelocked surely this means the doctor can now find it just by checking where the tardis has been last.

Angron

According to this, yup. She stayed after falling in love and giving herself a near impossible name to pronounce.

Wibbs

Lord TSC wrote: »

I actually think it's more "realistic" (as much as it can be in a show about a time traveler). The idea that someone would just drop their lives and run off for months and not see family, friends or whatever just didn't work for me. Much prefer the notion that the Doctor is this figure who drops in and out of their lives, a figure who is not a normal person but someone who lets people tag along for the ride.

Well I reckon they got most previous companion types backstory and reasoning pretty OK. Sarah Jane had no family as such and was hanging around with UNIT so her going on jaunts was no big deal and seemed like she would drop everything and go. Until he dropped her. Leela left some primitive planet and wanted to see the universe and ended up staying with some bloke anyway. In the rejig Rose's gig was relatively realistic in that she was always traipsing back to her ma and keeping contact, yet needed to escape her council flat life. The Donna wan had left behind a marriage/wedding gone wrong and kept in regular contact with her grandad. Martha was looking for something more, but she too kept dropping home(all of this was handy for the budget too ) For me it was like they were "going away to college" for a few years. The latest Clara vibe is just another angle on all that. It's not new either, after all Rory and Amy had their own lives and he dropped in on them from time to time.

Plus maybe they're setting up the narrative that he feels guilty about Clara. She's helped him about the most of any of them in his entire life from (now) his early childhood up until his latest face and has seen all of those faces and now he feels she deserves a life of her own. Hence he "chose" the old face and no hugging so she'd stop thinking he was her boyfriend and live her own life. With a bit of help from him. He's weaning her off him kinda thing. That because he's always gonna be apart he can't ever get too attached and has learned from Rose and even Donna that if he does actually get attached, even fall for them he ruins their lives and this time he wants to leave them better, not abandoned. Not abandoned like Sarah Jane too. If so that could be an interesting avenue to explore from the storytelling point of view.

coffee_cake

So can Clara fly the tardis now. Is that a new thing

Das Kitty

I really enjoyed that! There's no way the four year old is getting to watch it though.

Dad skills. Brilliant.

Wibbs wrote: »

I always reckoned and wanted to see as a kid, that it would be cool to examine that backstory. To see the society and how it's made up, the different classes and possible frictions between them(especially if one class were immortal). Now they're gone/trapped in some null zone, that can't be done I suppose.

Read Lungbarrow for this sort of jazz.

And it has a lot about Leela's life on Gallifrey. She hung on to K-9 in that book.

tommy2bad

bluewolf wrote: »

So can Clara fly the tardis now. Is that a new thing

And by mind control! I wonder if it wasn't Clara being 'the impossible girl' that let them return to Gallifrey. It wasn't the doctor flying the tardis it was more like the tardis going into Clara's time line.

I enjoyed this episode, it raises as many questions as it answers but like a lot of Mofat's writing it ends up too clever for it's own good. Still it's a classic episode and only 4 into Capaldi's run, bodes well for the rest.

FloatingVoter

I thought initially that that might have been a young Master crying in the bed.

Das Kitty

FloatingVoter wrote: »

I thought initially that that might have been a young Master crying in the bed.

I was thinking similar, as I don't know if there's ever been anything about the Doctor's early desire to join the army. Perhaps I'm mistaken on that.

I suppose it's a good way to get away from somewhere.

EDIT - Actually, I totally misheard. It was that he'd have to join the army because there was no way "that boy" was going to the Academy.

Wibbs

Das Kitty wrote: »

I was thinking similar, as I don't know if there's ever been anything about the Doctor's early desire to join the army. Perhaps I'm mistaken on that.

Maybe that's what they're writing up, why he has the whole "army with guns. Not sure about them at all". A rejection of that first childhood thing?

Frank Lee Midere

Far from the companions being picked up occasionally not annoying me it makes total sense. He's got a time machine. You can piss off one night with him for 2 years and go to work the next day. In fact you could take a coffee break and do that, and come back looking older but wiser a mere 5 minutes later.

( Other people might skip the machine of course. If you did that too often).

Mycroft H

Did the cloister bell sound as the doctor was badly injured or that he'd inadvertently crossed his own timeline? Potentially meeting the younger version of himself. Potentially catastrophic, as he'd early explained to clara.

Mycroft H

and ranks up there with Midnight and the Satan Pit. Top, top quality episode. Capaldi perhaps subsuming the role of Tennant as my favourite.

Mr Bloat

Brilliant episode, one that will need to be rewatched carefully a couple of times, I have a feeling the 'listen' theme might have extended to the viewers listening carefully to background sounds in the episode, such as the cloister bell mentioned above (which didn't start ringing until Clara mentally made the decision to pilot the TARDIS herself, so it wasn't ringing because The Doctor was injured).

When Clara went back to the restaurant, Danny had his head on the table. When he lifted his head, was there a clicking and whirring sound like the clockwork people of the restaurant in episode one of this season made?

Why did we hear a glass break the moment Clara called Danny 'Rupert' in the restaurant?

Also Starring LeVar Burton

Well that was the episode we were waiting for... Capaldi really came into his own for me in this episode...

Just a great episode overall.

Doctor DooM

bluewolf wrote: »

So can Clara fly the tardis now. Is that a new thing

Very technically she can steer the tardis towards a point on her time line but I don't think she knows where it's heading from her reaction to maybe gallifrey.


I don't know why but in all my years of watching I've never been as touched by an episode of who. I think in my head the message became "he became the doctor because he was a child scared of monsters, and as long as there are children scared by monsters, there will be a doctor to help them".

coffee_cake

these lads did a list and all

http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2014-09-13/doctor-who-is-the-monster-in-listen-real

Basq

Good God, that was superb!

I don't know anyone can criticize Moffat when he writes episodes as good as that.

The moment with Clara grabbing the Doctor's leg was just sheer brilliance!

Capaldi has been excellent this year, but Jenna Louise Coleman continues to just go from strength to strength!

spektorfive

Thought it was great one, just confused by one thing. They said everything ends in 100 years? Have I picked this up wrong, it really doesn't seem that far away (In time travel sense.)

Angron

spektorfive wrote: »

Thought it was great one, just confused by one thing. They said everything ends in 100 years? Have I picked this up wrong, it really doesn't seem that far away (In time travel sense.)

100 trillion. In one of the previous stories, Utopia, they travelled to the year 100 trillion where everything was ending. I don't think they said 100 years anyway.

coffee_cake

I think they said your man is from 100 years or so in her future but he was also time travelling

Un Croissant

He was from 100 years in the future, was a time traveller and instead of jumping forward 1 week, he travelled to the end of time. That's how I got it anyway.

thatrandomdude

Orson is from 100 years in Clara's future. BUT he is a time traveller and it was said that he was only meant to travel like a week ahead but he ended up getting stuck at the end of the world.

Is Orson Claras Great grandson?

thatrandomdude

[Deleted User] wrote: »

Is Orson Claras Great grandson?

Yes, I think. There were several hints about it.

BuffyBot

Certainly an episode that requires re-watching. I've said that I'm not a fan of the whole dropping companions off/picking them up schtick that keeps being pulled out and it irked me again on that front.

Also, Clara going back into the Doctor's time line again..meh! They keep seeming to "one up" themselves with how important the companion is to the Doctor and it is getting a little tiresome. Yes he needs a companion but at the rate it is going there will be nothing left for them to do having saved the Doctor, redeemed the Doctor, pedicured the Doctor (maybe not that but we can't be far off..). I did like us finding out why the War Doctor chose that barn, which I wondered about since that episode.

However. There was much good here and it shows why the show keeps going. It can jump from the frivolity of last week to something of this nature in two heart beats.

scream

BuffyBot wrote: »

[...]I've said that I'm not a fan of the whole dropping companions off/picking them up schtick that keeps being pulled out and it irked me again on that front[...]

For me, it seems like they're overusing it. It's almost as though someone suddenly caught onto the idea and then just couldn't let it go, and now it's every week(or seems to be). I'd be OK with her being dropped off every now and again if she really must do that, but lets make it a rare thing rather than the norm.

Other posters have said that due to the nature of time travel/the TARDIS etc., she can effectively come and go whenever she pleases and not even be missed, and they'd be right too, but I still say it's very non-committal with regard to the doctor. And let's not forget that it works the other way too in the sense that nobody's ever going to miss her anyway, if that's what she's worried about, since she can indeed just be dropped back into the moment she left. Or is it that zooming through space and time and meeting alien cultures and saving the world just isn't doing it for her enough to commit?

...rant over. I'll get me' coat!

The_Valeyard

BuffyBot wrote: »

Certainly an episode that requires re-watching. I've said that I'm not a fan of the whole dropping companions off/picking them up schtick that keeps being pulled out and it irked me again on that front.

Also, Clara going back into the Doctor's time line again..meh! They keep seeming to "one up" themselves with how important the companion is to the Doctor and it is getting a little tiresome. Yes he needs a companion but at the rate it is going there will be nothing left for them to do having saved the Doctor, redeemed the Doctor, pedicured the Doctor (maybe not that but we can't be far off..). I did like us finding out why the War Doctor chose that barn, which I wondered about since that episode.

However. There was much good here and it shows why the show keeps going. It can jump from the frivolity of last week to something of this nature in two heart beats.

Yeah that was very cool, I believe I may have had a little 'gasp'

BuffyBot

Why did we hear a glass break the moment Clara called Danny 'Rupert' in the restaurant?

I get the funny feeling we might see the restaurant scene again, possibly from another POV. We have the unseen waiter talking about the water. Normally TV shows don't have extras speak..and we never got to see the head. Plus we have the breaking glass (perhaps the jug being dropped!)

Or it could be nothing...

The_Valeyard

BuffyBot wrote: »

I get the funny feeling we might see the restaurant scene again, possibly from another POV. We have the unseen waiter talking about the water. Normally TV shows don't have extras speak..and we never got to see the head. Plus we have the breaking glass (perhaps the jug being dropped!)

Or it could be nothing...

Was thinking something similar, just struck me as 'odd' not to mention everyone else in the restaurant did not appear to pushed with an astronaut around.