The Crushing Boredom of Eternity (Can You Hear Me?)
It’s February 9th, 2020. The Weeknd is at number one with “Blinding Lights.” Lewis Capaldi, Billie Eilish, and Harry Styles also chart. I’m settling into life back home. My wife recovers from the flu, which we all manage to avoid. Penn and I have sessions on our thigh tattoos, part of a local artist’s project to do a tarot deck in tattoos. He was getting the Sun, me the Devil. My wife had Death and the World. In the background, it becomes clear to anyone who’s watching that this coronavirus situation is going irrevocably out of control as hotspot after hotspot inexorably expands.
The day this airs, I go over to Alex and Meredith’s to run the first and, as it happens, last session of a Changeling the Dreaming game set in Manchester in 1987; Penn plays a gay social worker named Terrence, and the first session cliffhanger is a faerie publicly executing Margaret Thatcher for her failures as a leader. Presumably after we get back I download and watch Can You Hear Me?, about which there simply are not two thousand words worth of things to say.
August 12, 2024 @ 5:11 am
One of the best essays on the Chibnall era. That last paragraph really leaves an impression.
August 12, 2024 @ 5:41 am
The story definitely didn’t leave an impression on me. I only remember fragments and I’m not even sure they belong to this episode.
Mind you, that means it must have been one of the better ones, Orphan 55 and the Battle of Whatever had an awfulness that stuck.
August 12, 2024 @ 12:14 pm
I’ve been waiting years to see you commit to this bit
The ending of this episode, the cancer scene, is the worst thing I’ve ever seen happen live on Doctor Who. And the camera pulling back to reveal Yaz and Ryan were in earshot just off screen is the cherry on top.
August 12, 2024 @ 12:15 pm
Sorry, not sure how it got stuck on here
August 12, 2024 @ 2:08 pm
If you have been adversely affected by any of the issues in this blog post, and would like someone to listen to you, a helpline number is available.
August 12, 2024 @ 2:41 pm
Really? After you’ve seen “Can you hear me?” repeated 499 times, I thought it was rather predictable.
August 12, 2024 @ 5:48 am
What an excellent and unexpectedly in depth read this was.
I particularly love your point about how the “very special episode on mental health” nature interacts with it being the “actually give characters some backstory and characterisation” episode to give the unfortunate impression that the era conflates character depth with neurosis, and how that fatally undermined the whole era due to Chibnall’s opening promise to Whittaker that she wouldn’t need to cry in the role, those things in combination essentially ensuring that the Thirteenth Doctor could not actually have a characterisation.
The segment where you’ve intercut Blake’s Songs of Innocence with a Jungian exposition on the narratology of boundaries and gateways is also a lovely touch. Brava!
August 12, 2024 @ 7:26 am
damn, even the Chibnall Era fell prey to the trauma plot
August 15, 2024 @ 11:52 am
the Timeless Child thing is kinda the ultimate execution of the trauma plot, no?
August 12, 2024 @ 10:45 am
I didn’t really get the Blake stuff but the psychology bits were top-notch. Especially the deep dive into the Freudian implications of Fingers as a villain.
August 12, 2024 @ 11:29 am
Wait, did Chibs really promise that JW would never have to cry in the role? Like, I get wanting to avoid certain stereotypes when writing the first female Doctor, but 10 and 11 had cried, and 15 has cried in almost every episode he’s been in. Saying “never” seems like giving yourself an unnecessary roadblock.
(And it’s also interesting in light of his other approach to writing a female Doctor, which is not to tell any of his writers that the Doctor was going to be a woman.)
August 12, 2024 @ 2:21 pm
https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi/doctor-who-chris-chibnall-big-rt-interview/
“””
In her audition, he recalls, she “brought the Doctor in with her straightaway”. Her idea of the Doctor fused Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown in Back to the Future with Madonna in a trouser suit. Having spent most of Broadchurch sobbing on screen, she pleaded: “Can I please not cry?” Chibnall says, “I promised her she wouldn’t be crying for a long time.”
“””
August 13, 2024 @ 1:35 am
Good on Chibnall for keeping his promise, but… I’m sorry, Doc Brown and… Madonna? I can think of a lot of comparisons for Whittaker’s Doctor, and I sorta see a bit of Doc Brown in early Series 11 if I squint, but MADONNA? Like… The woman who published Sex was apparently an inspiration for the most sexless post-Wilderness Doctor. (Are we sure there isn’t a different, separate Madonna in the UK that Whittaker’s talking about instead? Bc surely she didn’t latch onto the superficial gender-nonconformity and ignore everything else about Madonna. Surely not.)
August 13, 2024 @ 3:35 am
Well, there’s Virgin Mary…
August 14, 2024 @ 2:10 pm
And yet he made her less authoritative than any previous Doctor.
August 16, 2024 @ 10:16 am
I feel like the success of Broadchurch made Chibnall seem much more impressive when he initially took over Doctor Who than he turned out to be. You’re quite insightful that he doesn’t seem to be able to do any kind of characterization other than one that’s based in exploring a character’s trauma and neurosis. That worked really well in Broadchurch because it was an emotionally wrenching murder mystery about a child’s killer, and pretty much every character was traumatized in some way. But a similar approach to figuring out character depth in Torchwood was one of the problems of the show in Chibnall’s season as head showrunner there.
The deftness of good Doctor Who seems to be the ability to fold characterization into a sci-fi adventure plot, so that we learn more about the characters and see them develop by how they act and react to the sci-fi adventure they’re trying to navigate. But Chibnall seems to have very separate tracks for plot and characterization: during the adventure parts of a story, everyone acts very programmatically, fulfilling plot functions; the story has to pause and explore trauma and neurosis to build character. It returns the show to one of the problems of the classic series, especially in the Saward years: programmatic characters whose actions are all plot functions. If the actors aren’t able to inject their own styles into the characters, which the shorter story lengths of the modern era make more difficult than in the languorous pacing of the classic series, their presence reduces to plot.
August 12, 2024 @ 5:52 am
Lol. Sick burn. After watching this episode though, I was inspired to action, which was to spend significant time attempting to find out whether Chibnall ever read any NAs. Which turns out to become an even more important question in a couple eps time. To me this felt like a sort of attempt to pick up on certain trends from those books. But I couldn’t tell whether that was because the crew thought they were cool and wanted to do them on TV, or because they thought they’d never been tried before. Anyway the result, for me, feels like a TV adaptation of one of the NAs that I only half remember, because the bits of that era that stood the test of time were not all the elder Gods stuff. And actually, more than the TV movie, and more than anything else I can think of, If I wanted to know what a Planet of Evil level mid-90s ep of DW would have been if it had just kept going on TV, I think this would be it. Anyway, I never found the answer at the time, but maybe someone on here will know. Has Chibnall ever confirmed one way or another whether he has read any of the books?
August 12, 2024 @ 6:11 am
I believe he has never referred to a single piece of EU media by choice in his entire history of being interviewed for Doctor Who, which is a marked departure from both his immediate predecessors. The closest he gets is when an interviewer asked him if he would go as far as canonising Lungbarrow, and he made a comment to the effect of “I just about know what you’re talking about, a book by Marc Platt who wrote the great Ghost Light, but no I haven’t read it”.
August 12, 2024 @ 7:13 am
If he had read any NAs, he would have wanted to read Lungbarrow. So I’m going to say we have the answer. Thank you. To me, that makes this the story of Chibnall attempting things which Davies and Moffat knew to avoid because they’d already seen them fail. Obviously they’re great writers with good instincts, but Chibnall, being… a different kind of writer than them, would really have benefited from seeing how certain paths led to dead ends. Incidentally, if he had been around in 90s fandom, Chibnall would absolutely have been on the gun side of that debate.
August 14, 2024 @ 3:39 pm
I’d actually be more specific and suggest RTD and Moffat had both read Timewyrm: Revelation, while Chibnall never did. T:R gives the character of the Doctor an interiority and psychology that carries on through all of the post 2005 Doctors, then stalls with 13. But I am fond of glib observations like that.
August 12, 2024 @ 6:08 am
“and to cap it all off, the blatant cop worship that has persistently characterised Chibnall’s writing career rears its ugly head again in the sequences of Yaz’s backstory, which are as underwritten as they are crassly exploitative. As usual, there’s a nugget of an interesting idea here – Yaz having been imprinted upon by an older woman authority figure at a formative age – which in a more coherent writer’s hands could have said something about idealism or idolisation instead of simply isolation. How does she revere the Doctor differently from the way she looks up to PC Anita Patel? Goddess knows. Certainly Chibnall doesn’t. The only thing more viscerally enraging than this hollow simulacrum of drama is the thought that at one stage of the writing process, perhaps during Charlene James’ first draft, there were actual ideas in there — the same ideas that now lie trapped under layers of technobabbly sediment, plaintively crying out for release. But there’s nobody there to hear them”
Brutal, but no word of a lie.
“One of the few people to come out of this reasonably well (to the point that this may not be the most embarrassing thing on her CV) is director Emma Sullivan, who manages to find glimmers of arresting imagery – the Fingers of Nocturnal Insertion are, one imagines, appealingly upsetting for younger kids but even grosser for some adults – and the occasional stylish scene transition by way of blotting ink or rippling water, appropriately enhancing the dreamlike quality”
Good to see her singled out for some praise – she does fairly decent work on Villa Diodati too.
One of your best – thank you.
August 12, 2024 @ 6:44 am
Missed this on the first pass through but I think the Yaz section, in the part just before your quote, is continuing the Blakean allusions most visible in the segment on the Timeless Child vision sequence: the phrasing “cannot go to sleep” is verbatim from the Nurse’s Song.
August 12, 2024 @ 6:57 am
That Changeling the Dreaming game sounds interesting, and also like it went from 0-100 very quickly. its a shame you couldn’t continue it.
August 12, 2024 @ 7:25 am
although there is that little comic called “Britain a Prophecy”…
August 13, 2024 @ 4:52 am
Yeah, that was great, whatever happened to that?
August 12, 2024 @ 7:53 am
Amazing.
August 12, 2024 @ 9:39 am
Honestly, though perhaps fittingly given the previous essay, I quite liked the section engaging with the prestige television landscape’s relationship with mental health. The Sopranos and Mr. Robot were probably the obvious points of connection, but the part that had me truly grinning was the extended engagement with Legion. A problematic show that honestly falls apart during the last season (though, more likely, the last half of the second season finale), but one that Can You Hear Me? was clearly ripping off, especially with its usage of 2D animation. I also quite liked the revisit to Doom Patrol, though for far more searing purposes than one might think. Especially the usage of the Rachel Talalay episode.
That said, the best part of the piece was, of course, the Yaz section. Top notch stuff, probably the best (of the public) writing you’ve done!
August 12, 2024 @ 9:51 am
Have I gone mad because I can’t actually see an essay here?
Or have I fallen for it, yokel that I am?!
August 12, 2024 @ 11:09 am
You’re not a yokel – the rest of us are just doing a very silly bit
August 13, 2024 @ 8:30 am
I thought as much. Tis very well done!
August 13, 2024 @ 6:20 am
You need the Eruditorum pan-temporal browser plugin (the 3.2 release, not the newer 3.4 release which is has a weird qlippothic regression that should be fixed in the next version).
You’ll also need a pair of 3D glasses, the classic sort that David Tennant wears in Army of Ghosts (the pair that comes free with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier — which of course you own —will function perfectly).
August 13, 2024 @ 8:30 am
I thought as much. Tis very well done!
August 12, 2024 @ 10:46 am
And there I thought the Praxeus entry was going to be the formal highlight of the Chibnall era essays.
August 12, 2024 @ 10:47 am
Congratulations on a comprehensive essay handling the Chibnall era and mental health. I think it’s safe to say that this essay put more thought into Yaz and her backstory than Chibnall ever did. Looking forward to more like this.
August 12, 2024 @ 10:54 am
I’m not usually moved to comment (especially as I’ve come to all this rather recently) but after this: well… yes. I’ve spent my life writing about texts and performances; I’ve tried to encourage many, many students to uncover and analyse all of the stories, real and fictional, that surround us, every day. I could boast here, and say I’ve looked at and taught everything from Godot all the way to BTS.
But this one? It’d defeat me too. I think the only difference is that I’d have a harder time admitting it. For the little it’s actually worth, you’ve got my respect.
August 12, 2024 @ 12:11 pm
At long last, the Eruditorum Chekov’s gun paid off in regards to the question “Is there an episode of Doctor Who less interesting than The Android Invasion?”
August 12, 2024 @ 11:24 pm
But is there one individual moment that can top “Man horrified by existence of own eye”?
August 13, 2024 @ 1:19 pm
Terry Nation was just very ahead of his time in predicting the meme phrase “what a terrible day to have eyes”
August 14, 2024 @ 2:15 pm
I remember reading teh eyepatch reveal in the novel aged 11 and thinking it was brilliantly clever. As far as I can tell I was the only person ever to think this , even at that young age.
August 12, 2024 @ 12:11 pm
Darn. I was going to read this week’s Eruditorum to see if I could remember anything at all about the episode. Well, it’s not a review blog. So I looked up the Wikipedia summary. Nope, nothing, except … the CANCER AND BEING SOCIALLY AWKWARD exchange. Which, however well-intentioned it may have been, was just awful. Perhaps forgetting is a mercy.
August 12, 2024 @ 1:15 pm
Very topical, relevant and well-written piece. I must commend you on the length to which you manage to analyse the episode, as always you have excelled yourself in how much you can really break down in a detailed, comprehensive, yet quite readable, fashion what the episode is about.
The digression about Lawrence Miles was very interesting, I thought.
August 12, 2024 @ 1:27 pm
For a second I thought I was reading a spambot comment, well done 😀
August 12, 2024 @ 2:04 pm
I enjoy the thought that the spambots know about Lawrence Miles.
August 13, 2024 @ 1:02 am
That’s what gave the game away, heheh
August 12, 2024 @ 1:37 pm
I recently rewatched the Whittaker era, in order one a day, as a prelude to the new RTD episodes. So theoretically this would be fairly fresh in my mind, but it really does slip loose, doesn’t it? The one thing that struck me on the rewatch, though, was how Chibnall keeps invoking historical eras and/or specific historical persons that highlight violence against women and/or minorities (Rosa, Demons of the Punjab, The Witchfinders, the Noor Khan sequences in Spyfall, and now the 14th century Syrian mental hospital). And then, Chibnall insists on adhering to a “you cannot change history, not one line!” ethos that means the Doctor just witnesses all this historical violence without trying to stop it. It was on my recent rewatch of this, in such tight succession after the preceding ones, where I really noticed this pattern and wondered what was the point of smashing these two ideas together. I know our host’s take is that Chibnall has no point at all, these are unrelated and undeveloped ideas with no purpose. That’s probably right–a vague instinct to front-load the diversity of casting and settings, and a preference for the Doctor as a witness rather than a crusading hero, but sheesh those two ideas mixed together are punishing.
August 12, 2024 @ 6:53 pm
I don’t know what exactly it says about chibnall’s personal politics but it truly is a feat of skill to set part of the story at a hospital in Aleppo when he wrote this & somehow make no allusion to contemporary events whatsoever…
This aired literally the same day as the academy awards at which both for sama and the cave were up for best documentary feature.
August 12, 2024 @ 11:23 pm
Chibnall deserves credit for going ahead and doing a bunch of things that the previous showrunners clearly saw the value in doing, but deferred on the basis that it would be simply awful if they did them and fucked up badly.
Chibnall just went ahead did those things and fucked up badly.
August 13, 2024 @ 12:12 pm
After the initial chuckle the only thing more irritating than you not being able to find the enthusiasm to summarise this episode, let alone critique it, is the way your jolly jape spawned a plethora of ‘hilarious’ cod responses to imagined essays. I suppose said responses’ pinning of your more common tics and obsessions might contain a lesson but that’s small comfort.
Look, I know you owe us nothing and that’s exactly what we got but I feel that says less about the Chibnall era than you seem to think.
Having said that, I have zero recollection of this episode. The photo reminded me of something about disturbing detachable fingers and David Kalat (above) mentions an asylum in Aleppo which, I recall made me groan. So, maybe I’m glad you chose not to detail anything else. Was it really any worse than ‘Space Babies’ though?
August 13, 2024 @ 12:47 pm
In terms of memorability, Space Babies wins because there were some dubious-cgi-face babies in it and monster made of [redacted for spoilers]. And some running up and down corridors with banter.
This one had flying removable fingers or some such and an appallingly clumsy line about reactions to cancer, and I still can’t remember it.
Being memorable isn’t the only metric in play of course, but the only way this could me more forgettable is if the characters were actually the Silence.
August 13, 2024 @ 1:15 pm
You’re right that I owe you nothing. The people to whom I owe something are my Patrons, where this went over well, and where I basically used it to clear time so I could write Queen Shit, which I delivered two weeks later and was 27,000 words. So I don’t really feel much guilt about it. And even from the perspective of a non-paying reader, the average length of Chibnall era essay is still over 2000 words—there’s a long one down the line that, as I crossed the 3800 word mark, I thought “well there, now I’ve made up for Can You Hear Me?” Believe me, I think about this stuff a lot.
In terms of what this does or doesn’t say about the Chibnall era, to return to a familiar refrain, TARDIS Eruditorum is narrative, and there are rhythms that play out on a season and era level. And, without wanting to spoil where I go over the remaining thirteen essays, I wanted the sense of the era bottoming out here, before The Timeless Children and Flux. Yeah, this was a somewhat arbitrary choice of episodes to shank in this particular way, but it works for one that does, in fact, turn out to be shockingly unmemorable. It wasn’t gonna be sorely missed. And frankly, I thought my version of the famous Pitchfork “monkey pissing in own mouth” review was probably going to be a lot more entertaining than whatever I could dredge up to fill the word count about this.
Is it worse than Space Babies? Well, yes, first of all. But I’ll deal with that when I write about the Gatwa era Eruditorum, where I’m sure I’ll make comparisons with the Chibnall era. Indeed, the differences between bad Davies and bad Chibnall would be a pretty good approach to writing about Space Babies. Then again, so would looking at the Rumfitt novelization, so we’ll see. Either way, that’s not what I’m doing right now. Right now I’m writing about what it felt to watch the Chibnall era in the dying days of a pre-pandemic world.
Anyway, I’d have let pretty much all of those complaints go without comment, but I felt I needed to step in and note that my readers organically coming up with a formalist bit and riffing on it with some very delightful ribbing about my stylistic tics was an absolute delight. In an age where the promises of the 20th century Internet seem more remote every year, the fact that I somehow manage to have a successful old school blog with a thriving, creative, and insightful community is one of my biggest prides. If you find it irritating, frankly, that’s a you problem.
August 13, 2024 @ 7:32 pm
Can You Hear Me? as the Chibnall-era nadir, huh… yeah, I can see a case for that. By my own metric I’d put that in the 2022 Specials, simply because it’s the point when the Chibnall era becomes a dead show walking – Chibnall makes no effort in the specials to actually meaningfully address any of the stuff he’d done with the Timeless Child or the Flux or whatnot, he has no ambition beyond making a set amount of Doctor Who before he can leave and go do something else, he has no intention of tidying up the mess he has made. (That RTD was able to tidy up so much of it with a few lines of dialogue in the 14th Doctor specials and early Gatwa episodes makes Chibnall look more pathetic here.)
But at least there’s stuff to talk about coming up, so yeah, from a metric of “Is this Doctor Who which it’s particularly interesting discuss?”, this is it, the crater. At least with the Timeless Child and Flux there’s fun to be had from unpacking just how far Chibnall’s ambitions outstripped his reach. I can’t put hand on heart and claim this episode has such things as “ambitions”; if I squint it might want to say something serious about mental health, but Chibnall botches the subject matter so badly that one could accuse him of actively harming that cause through sheer clumsiness.
August 14, 2024 @ 4:10 am
Okay, thanks for your considered reply Doctor Sandifer.
I get what you were doing of course and I did, as I said, chuckle at the conceit. I’m also glad your patreon subscribers got their enjoyment. I’m sorry that as a struggling creative myself, I can’t afford to contribute at the moment (as I have in the past).
As to my ‘me problem’. Yes, I was in a crabby mood and the disappointment of not getting one of your insightful Doctor Who critiques led me to grouch like an old fanboy, for which I apologise to you and your commenters.
And yes I’m looking forward to reading your Chibnall/RTD comparisons.
August 13, 2024 @ 1:30 pm
Space Babies is fine because it’s fun to watch the Doctor and companion run around and talk in a Davies series, regardless of the underlying details. The line of thought is, it is not inherently fun to watch that as a baseline in a Chibnall series (I haven’t seen Can You Hear Me myself, though).
August 13, 2024 @ 7:07 pm
How would you ever know you’d seen Can You Hear Me, even if you had?
August 19, 2024 @ 2:33 pm
Space Babies is also doing something we occasionally forget Doctor Who is supposed to do, which is “have a fun goofy episode for children.” Children adore that episode and mine are no exception (I think there’s an argument to be made about how certain showrunners – RTD is the best at this – design how children watch the show alongside the experience of adult viewers. You need Space Babies for kids to buy in enough to watch Devil’s Chord, Boom, and 73 Yards – kids need to know this is still a show with a snot monster and a farting spaceship. And you get about three episodes before they need something silly again without real peril for the Doctor or Ruby – but this time you chuck in that harrowing ending – etc.).
Can You Hear Me?, by contrast, is fun for exactly no one.
August 13, 2024 @ 2:13 pm
Space Babies has much to dislike, but it actually tells a story, in the form of things happening for reasons and according to a structure that forms it into a coherent narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. This is a form of writing that Chibnall is not familiar with, prefering for more of a “things happen and then more things happen and then some other things happen and then things stop happening, the end.” (I will soften a bit by saying that Chibnall does like to have all the things which happen be linked together by “vibes” at least. Just not by… Plot. Or logic. Or time sequence. It’s like Pynchon, except bad.
August 13, 2024 @ 12:46 pm
as someone who is also quite socially awkward and wouldnt be sure what to say if a friend confided in me they’re worried about their cancer coming back: i like to think i would try a bit harder than basically going “well THAT happened!!” like the Doctor does here
August 18, 2024 @ 12:01 pm
“Space Babies” is goofy, but it’s also very well structured. It’s also very clear about what it wants to say about how “morality-based” laws can have detrimental consequences, and how – when you pair that with cut-backs and austerity – now you’re stuck with a massive crisis that could have been prevented and it’s all managed by one single over-worked lady in a dark office somewhere.
August 13, 2024 @ 4:05 pm
I stopped watching Chibnall after the battle of Rotund Tamtoes, and in the remaining years of his era, I only watched one episode, which was this one. Its title seemed interesting and the promise of a very special episode with fantasy was interesting.
I more or less reacted the same way you did, but with more visceral disgust. This is bottom of the barrel stuff here. Chibnall’s definition of character writing is including a fun fact about that character and then going “ah that’s enough.” The rest of the page time he spends spewing whatever comes to mind.
August 13, 2024 @ 7:27 pm
I have thoughts on this episode, but I had to look up my own review of the season to remember what they were…
ONE: TAHIRA
Tahira is such a weird botch. Initially it feels like she’s going to be a historical one-off secondary companion, and who knows, maybe in the alternate timeline where Chibnall did second drafts of his scripts she ended up that way. But as it stands, it’s a weird choice to come up with someone from such a specific historical time and place and then just have them talk about psychological health in fundamentally modern terms, using phrases like “mental well-being”.
What is even the point of using historical characters in a story like this if you don’t use that to explore a way of looking at the world informed by that historical context? All of the historical episodes in the previous season broadly understood that – Rosa was facing down a roughly caricatured but still broadly recognisable version of pre-Civil Rights racism, the action of Demons of the Punjab was driven by intercommunal hatreds, King James in The Witchfinders had at least a semblance of a worldview different from that of the modern-day audience. This more or less goes away at this point; any character in any Chibnall historical from Spyfall Part 2 onwards could be substituted with a modern-day character in some appropriately tweaked modern-day context and they’d be near-identical as far as their contributions to the narrative and characterisation went.
TWO: PRESTIGE DRAMA
One thing I noted about the Chibnall era when I watched Series 11 was that he wanted to throw in scenes which felt… “prestige drama”-y. Little moments between companions where they are having a Designated Character Moment and nothing fantastical is happening and the actors can do Serious Acting. It never works very well because of the thin material they are working with, but the overall sense is that Chibnall wants to have a Doctor Who which people can take seriously (remember when he lambasted Pip and Jane for silly plots?) but had a very Writers’ Workshop 101 formulaic approach to writing Serious Television.
This seems to be the episode in the season where he tries to do that the hardest, but it’s also the one where it fails the worst. The cancer scene more or less finishes off any hope that the Thirteenth Doctor will be salvageable (outside of a truly Sixth-level reclamation job at Big Finish, and we can question whether Big Finish are still capable of doing such things); having her be upstaged by Jo Martin was where the mortal wound was inflicted (after the thousand lesser wounds inflicted by the Chibnall era to that point), the cancer scene was the coup de grace which put the character out of her misery.
But there is one thing it does successfully, which is deflect from how poor the other Character Moment Conversations in this episode are. Nobody, but nobody, has anything to work with. They’re trying to deal with genuinely heavy subject matter, but the script just doesn’t give them the tools they need to actually do anything useful with it, and either everyone has checked out and the director has given up on any hope of motivating the actors or they deliberately shot this episode like nobody particularly cares about what’s going on as some manner of misguided gimmick.
THREE. FLUX, EARLY ACCESS EDITION
So this story on the one hand can be seen as a big prelude to what’s coming – you’ve got godlike entities in the mix which seem to be on the sort of tier that several antagonists in Flux exist on, you have the Doctor having what might be a fleeting vision of their arrival in this universe as the Timeless Child, maybe. There seems to be some manner of plan here?
Except the big bads in this episode want the Doctor because they need someone from this realm, specifically, to Do The Thing that they need done. The Timeless Child thing is explicitly all about how the Doctor is emphatically NOT from this realm. Did Chibnall change his mind about the Timeless Child this close to doing that episode? For that matter, is that fleeting vision thing something he had edited into this episode after settling on the Timeless Child thing, but without considering how the Timeless Child makes the “we need someone from this realm like you, Doctor” business not work any more?
August 17, 2024 @ 10:07 am
Great analysis, especially the last point. I never noticed this inconsistency and it’s a big one.
August 13, 2024 @ 10:33 pm
i have no memory of ever watching the cancer scene in an actual episode. it washed right over me. i’ve only ever seen it on twitter. i honestly thought it was in praxeus
August 14, 2024 @ 5:37 am
I find it hard not to be a little disappointed in the last couple of essays. Not that disappointed, this one is very, very funny, and as El has commented above Eruditorum is a narrative, not just story to story criticism and sometimes that narrative has to step on an individual story to make sense of a season or an era.
And yet.
Praxeus and Can You Hear Me? are trying. They’re trying to engage with themes and topics, to have relevancy and aboutness. It just feels like it would be more interesting, more nourishing to look at why the stories that actually try to be something don’t work, rather than the stories, like Ranskoor av Kolos, that aren’t trying to be anything other than generic Sci-Fi Channel genre fodder and are failing to even be that.
Rolo ap Kelloggs is is just shit. Can You Hear Me is trying to use Doctor Who’s tradition of weirdness, of magical, logic breaking god-creatures to say something about mental health. That’s not a bad idea is it? There’s a kind of energy there. So where does it go wrong? Why does it collapse between idea, script and screen? The story logic is incredibly threadbare (why does the monster of the week happen to affect the one person the Doctor’s gone to see on a different continent in a different century and her three friends in Sheffield but not, apparently, anyone else?). But should story logic failing even be a weakness in a story about monstrous creatures with powers that break in-universe logic?
Basically, there’s a version of Can You Hear Me? that isn’t shit, somewhere in the imagination. The fact that we got the shit one allows for an interesting discussion. I’m a bit sad that we didn’t get it.
But I did genuinely laugh at what we did get, and it’s a tough old world, so who am I to complain?
August 14, 2024 @ 6:26 am
Zellin and Rakaya (the Eternals) do actually affect other people: Ryan’s friend Tibo, for one, but also various other members of the public in Sheffield, like the little girl who is told the bogeyman doesn’t exist, or in that sequence where Rakaya drinks the nightmares of a whole street. The other people affected in 14th-century Syria don’t seem to be subjected to the evil fingers but are devoured by the evil sloth beasties summoned from Tahira’s imagination (“the Chagaska”), not quite sure why the distinction there or why her nightmare of the monsters becomes physical reality when eg. Ryan’s, of total environment collapse in his absence, does not.
August 14, 2024 @ 9:20 am
It’s a relatively small point, but perhaps you could finesse it to: why is the problem only where the Doctor or her friends are? The story neither makes a virtue of this nor makes it clear it’s affecting the whole world or universe. The story logic is fragile. A good story about nightmares and mental health problems could make a virtue of a lack of logic. A better plotted story would make it clear the nightmares surround the Doctor to draw her into the problem.
But the specifics aren’t important. The important thing, to me, is that this is a story with ambitions towards theme and relevancy and style that the Chibnall era otherwise overwhelmingly lacks. How it came by them, and how it fails would be, to me, a more interesting essay than how Ranskoor ap Gwilliam fails to execute on not having any themes in the first place.
But, to copper bottom this, this is obviously El Sandifer’s project, her ship to steer, and simply not writing anything about this episode is a clear choice I can understand and appreciate.
August 21, 2024 @ 7:22 pm
Catching up to El’s posting (this helped, I guess), and I want to agree that this episode struck me as having some interesting ideas that it completely wastes.
I think “bad Who” falls into three basic categories:
Category 1: “So bad it’s good.” For me, Time and the Rani is an example. You can’t take it seriously but it’s fun to watch.
Category 2: “Infuriatingly bad.” Underworld is my go-to example here: with this cast and the basic framework, you should end up with something more interesting than what we have. The Chibnall era sometimes rises to this level. Personally, Can you Hear Me falls into that category because you can see the clear shape of a good episode or even a great one under the pile of meaningless drivel we actually get.
Category 3: “Boringly bad.” For me, episodes like The Dominators or Delta and the Bannermen.
I too was infuriated by the cancer scene, but it fit a broader pattern seen in this episode: let’s structure this around character moments, but without any understanding of how to make those moments engaging or meaningful. “Here’s a story about Yaz” on its face should be more interesting, let alone “here’s a story that makes Yaz who she is.” But we’re well into this Doctor’s tenure, Yaz has been around from the beginning, and the show’s almost completely disinterested in Yaz. Why should this episode change that?
August 14, 2024 @ 10:17 am
Alternate title for 73 Yards: “The Battle of Roger ap Gwilliam”.
August 15, 2024 @ 11:01 am
Thing is, there was already a Series 12 episode which tried to be About Stuff, failed really badly, and got a fairly involved writeup from El – Orphan 55.
And sure, that writeup focuses on one dimension of that episode, but we’ve had several About Stuff episodes in Series 11 which also fail and which El has dissected how they fail at being About Stuff.
I don’t see Praxeus or Can You Hear Me? as anything other than an even more haphazard stab at being About Stuff than those predecessors were.
August 14, 2024 @ 1:56 pm
Strangely this one does stick in my head, though not necessarily for good reasons. It felt like the sort of episode that would be accompanied by a helpline if you are affected by the issues raised (in fact I think it was) as we suddenly saw how mental health issues were affecting all three of the “fam”. Laudable, but it felt clunky. The Yaz storyline was very odd because it seemed that the idea was it was about her attempting to commit suicide but they got cold feet and made it about her “running away”. And why would her and her sister be having an annual meal to commemorate the occasion that she either nearly ran away or nearly comitted suicide – an odd way to deal with it either way.
Also , I don’t want to sound like Mary Whitehouse , but having the scary man with detachable fingers suddenly appear in a child’s bedroom just after the parent has tried to reassure them that they were safe and could go to sleep seemed a wrong move for a programme that is supposed to include young children in it’s audience. Seeing as might slightly sensitive son had at the time had nightmares about the Drashigs after watching Carnival of Monsters I was gald at this point that he was showing no interest in Doctor Who.
August 15, 2024 @ 2:24 am
SJA’s The Nightmare Man is so good. Chibnall era has barely any idea of Doctor Who, let alone its spin-offs or EU media, so it’s not likely a cribbed idea… But, it’s strange to see a show with a much bigger budget fail so hard at what the children’s TV version excelled at.
Oh well, at least we get our Doccy Hoo weird imagery quota fulfilled. That’s the best (only) part of this era for me, tuning out and enjoying the aesthetics.
August 16, 2024 @ 6:16 am
The Doctor’s rebuttal of Graham confiding in her at the end of the episode is such an indigestible scene. I don’t hate it as much as other people – it’s more that I feel this massive sense of wasted opportunity. One of the very few things I like about the 13th Doctor is that she can be so cold, emotionally unavailable, and remote, and this scene could have been a perfect example of that aspect of her character.
However, the way the scene plays out, there’s no indication of what the audience is supposed to actually think about her emotional unavailability here; we’re given no clue as to how her so-called ‘social awkwardness’ makes the character interact with other characters, or even how it affects Graham in that moment. And, crucially, prior to this scene, none of her character quirks have ever been put down to social awkwardness.
I would have been so up for a female depiction of the Doctor that played against the ‘nurturing’ stereotype of women, and there were hints of that in 13’s character (eg my favourite moment of her entire run, the ‘sometimes this team structure isn’t flat. It’s mountainous’ moment in the next episode) but like every thread in the Chibnall era, they just existed in isolation and never went anywhere.
August 21, 2024 @ 9:07 pm
Yes, a good point. It feels like it should be a big moment, but it isn’t, in part because unless I’ve forgotten something (forgetting stuff about the Chibnall era is astonishingly easy) it’s never, ever built on in any way.
There’s never a bit where Graham and Ryan have a hushed conversation about how Graham is doing, or whether the Doctor’s non-response has shaken their desire to travel with her because they realise there’s some aspects of the human experience she just doesn’t relate to – something which could have nicely folded into their departure in just a few episodes.
There’s never a bit where the Doctor and Yaz have a heart to heart and the Doctor confesses that she thinks she let Graham down because he laid something very heavy on her and in the moment she wasn’t able to give him the comfort he clearly wanted, and there’s a conversation about emotional availability which foreshadows the Doctor/Yaz ship canonisation.
I’m not saying either of those scenes would have necessarily been stellar Doctor Who, but they’re at least the sort of Serious Interpersonal Drama stuff that Chibnall kept making token gestures towards including in the show. And they’d have built on the previous scene and built towards later stuff. You know, like there’s some sort of story being told.
Instead, the scene’s just there in isolation. Like it’s a throwaway gag in a sitcom.