Doctor Who XXXIV(8).4: Listen
I know I've missed Robot of Sherwood - my reactions to that were more complicated and I've not finished writing them up - but Listen extracted a less ambiguous reaction. As I've written elsewhere...
Definitely a touch of the Lungbarrow about 'Listen', but this was very good and saw Steven Moffat playing to his strengths.
...although the percentage of the audience who immediately capitalised 'House' in the barn scene was probably very small. The twelfth Doctor is a slow learner but there is something of the remote scientific enquirer in Capaldi's performance which he carries off better - and oddly perhaps, less brutally - than his immediate predecessors.
It feels like a pendant to 'The Day of the Doctor' that Moffat was compelled to write, which speculated about the Doctor's underlying psychology, used Clara's 'impossible girl' backstory without being glib, and used Moffat's fascination with (especially male) infantilism and incapacity with relations with other people (particularly the opposite sex) while only seeming mildly gratuitous.
Capaldi's near-Dalekesque 'There is danger in this room' was a good touch, as was the episodic structure and the Whistle and I'll Come To You referencing.
Perhaps what validated it as drama was that it made one think about oneself, and one's own fears; we returned to the Doctor's warning to Kazran in A Christmas Carol not to stay in his room making a new kind of screwdriver, and it's Clara here who acts on it.
Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/2014/09/14/doctor-who-xxxiv-84-listen.html.
Definitely a touch of the Lungbarrow about 'Listen', but this was very good and saw Steven Moffat playing to his strengths.
...although the percentage of the audience who immediately capitalised 'House' in the barn scene was probably very small. The twelfth Doctor is a slow learner but there is something of the remote scientific enquirer in Capaldi's performance which he carries off better - and oddly perhaps, less brutally - than his immediate predecessors.
It feels like a pendant to 'The Day of the Doctor' that Moffat was compelled to write, which speculated about the Doctor's underlying psychology, used Clara's 'impossible girl' backstory without being glib, and used Moffat's fascination with (especially male) infantilism and incapacity with relations with other people (particularly the opposite sex) while only seeming mildly gratuitous.
Capaldi's near-Dalekesque 'There is danger in this room' was a good touch, as was the episodic structure and the Whistle and I'll Come To You referencing.
Perhaps what validated it as drama was that it made one think about oneself, and one's own fears; we returned to the Doctor's warning to Kazran in A Christmas Carol not to stay in his room making a new kind of screwdriver, and it's Clara here who acts on it.
Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/2014/09/14/doctor-who-xxxiv-84-listen.html.