Doctor Who Review: This Is The Show At Its Best

[VincentX3]

I'm still unsure about one thing in the episode. What was on Rupert's bed? We only saw a hair of it, but it definitely wasn't human.

This ^

This whole episode felt contradictory after I remembered this and saw the ending.
The whole episode "trys" to tell you that in the end there was truly nothing in the dark.

Yet that one scene when the "monster" uncovers itself for a moment shows there IS something always lurking.
So yea.. confused on how to feel at the moment

i know the feeling.
starts off great and then that whole thing is ignored and dismissed at the end where it lost me. i can see what he was aiming for but it needed another scene or something. them getting into the tardis, leaving and something in the shadows watching

Plus theres the whole "who wrote Listen in the chalkboard?" since it showed the chalkboard being full of writing that the Doctor actually DID write in the beggining, yet poof! chalk falls down and "LISTEN" is written.

This episode was just all over the place.

Well, that's because the answer to this is "we don't know." Unlike the other Moffat "monster" stories, this one is left purposefully ambiguous. Was it a monster or just another kid? Was Capaldi subconsciously doing the unexplained and we cannot take what we see when it is only him on the screen? Was there someone behind the door or just knocking? It's purposefully left up in the air whether a monster exists or not. And in this case, I think it works. It doesn't try to say "it was nothing". It more tries to say "we don't know."

Well.. that's one way of looking at it.
I kinda felt that they started with the intention of "Yes, there's going to be something" and in the last moment they we're like "fuck it nah" towards the end.

What I mean is it felt like they started the episode with a clear goal and in the end sort of just backtracked.

 

[Soulrender95]

I personally felt the last five minutes kind of ruined it, I felt it was being far too heavy handed with the young boy making it explicit that it was the Doctor as a child, it really didn't need to be spelt out like it was,there was enough evidence and implication that it didn't need to be said.

The fact there was a solution to there being something or nothing, along with the implication that it was just dreams, and that it retroactively made the thing in Danny/Ruperts room basically into just another child from the orphanage playing a prank was more annoying than not knowing.

more ambiguity all round would have made this the perfect family friendly horror themed episode.

 

[Shjade]

I'm more or less in the "thought the ending ruined it" column. I'm okay with the concept of whether or not the Doctor's mystery hiding creatures really exist being left ambiguous - they wouldn't be the best-hidden creatures in the universe if you could just decide to find them and then, voila, there they are, right? (This, if nothing else, suggests pretty strongly whatever was in Rupert's room wasn't one of these things, because really, if the whole idea of these creatures is that they hide, why would it deliberately make a show of letting them know it's there? Completely counter to their whole evolution, if we take the Doctor's theory as being accurate.)

For me it was more the Clara in the barn thing that kinda left me feeling meh about the episode. Clara and Pink's awkwardness was okay, if maybe a little overlong. The whole mystery of the creatures, that was fine. But this bit of Clara feeding the Doctor his own speech to buck him up to get over his fears and blah blah...why? Why do this? It's addressing last season's major events which were already thoroughly covered in convincing fashion. Why dive back into that to let us know Clara had even more of a role in shaping those events than we were already told she did?

I like Clara, both the character and the actress. She's fun to watch! I just wish Moffat would stop putting so much effort into making her important to everything already. I get it: she's an important character. I'm on board. You can stop trying so hard to prove it to me and move on now.

 

[elvor0]

I'm still unsure about one thing in the episode. What was on Rupert's bed? We only saw a hair of it, but it definitely wasn't human.

This ^

This whole episode felt contradictory after I remembered this and saw the ending.
The whole episode "trys" to tell you that in the end there was truly nothing in the dark.

Yet that one scene when the "monster" uncovers itself for a moment shows there IS something always lurking.
So yea.. confused on how to feel at the moment

I'm still unsure about one thing in the episode. What was on Rupert's bed? We only saw a hair of it, but it definitely wasn't human.

I dunno, it didn't really look that "alien" to me. It very much looked like a kid in some oversized sunglasses. Which frankly I originally thought it was just a budget cut, but retroactively it works as just /actually/ being a kid in some oversized sunglasses.

Really, it made no sense that these "creatures" would reveal themselves in the way they did in Ruperts room. I know it was under a bedsheet, but still. Why would it reveal the fact that it even exists in such a verbose way if it just wanted to remain hidden?

 

[johnnyLupine]

At first I wasn't sure I liked the ending, if you take it for exactly what it shows you its a bit of a let down. There was no unseen presence and all that build really was just the mind playing tricks. Then again isn't that exactly how people would respond if they'd heard the house creaking or thought they saw something from the corner of their eye? Despite all of the evidence we saw and heard the the show let us rationalise it, there were no monstes under the bed, they dont cause houses (or spacecraft) to creak and moan. The writing on the spacecraft door was probably just the ramblings of a man driven mad by silence and the doctor could have just forgotten that he wrote something on his board, couldn't he?

in the end we were left to make our own assumptions about what happened and the sensible conclusion is to do what we usually do when alone at night.

 

[VectorSlip]

I may be a little late to this topic but I loved the recent episode. A nice self contained shindig about the doctor and what he fears goes bump in the night. Im looking forward to seeing more and hope that everything just gets better from here!