(804) Listen

Listen is a story that I felt in 2014 was the weakest of the series. This could be another example of poor episodes changing and watching it in this marathon would make me appreciate it and think that I was wrong when the episode first aired but I am sad to say that this didn’t happen for todays episode and its one of those rare instances where a story has actually gone down in my previous estimation.

Apparently other people seem to rate it quite highly. They talk about how clever it is and this is the scariest Steven Moffat script and the best episode in years. To be honest, that is all hogwash as I would go so far to say that it’s one of the worst stories of the new series.

I was prepared to give it a try but after about eight minutes I found myself giving up. From this moment on I was just waiting for the end of the episode to come because then it would be over. The pre-title scene is just the Doctor and it’s a very talkie scene which is unusual for most new series stories. That is the most entertaining part of the episode. I think this is the episode where my dislike for Danny Pink starts. Clara and Danny go on a date and it goes wrong quite quickly and to be honest this is all quite boring.

The Doctor and Clara end up in a children’s home in the 1990’s where Clara meets a young Danny and then goes into the future and meets a distance relative of Danny. The young Danny was quite entertaining but sadly that portion of the story didn’t last too long and then we were back to all the less interesting stuff. There are moments which are clearly designed to be the big scary moments but I am so disconnected from this story that they just looked like mildly entertaining scraps of drama.

I honestly thought that things would change watching this episode but nothing has. It might be too clever for me but I found the story to be a bit boring and there is very little chance of me deciding to watch this again outside of a marathon like this one. It’s not a bad story because of Jenna Coleman and Peter Capaldi but it’s the story in general that didn’t connect with me and I can accept that I am not smart enough to appreciate it but that’s just the way it is.