Doctor Who: Listen - 7 Failures Which Destroy The Story

6. Fan-Service Over Substance

When you go back through the episode it's obvious there was a great deal of fan-service and efforts made to appease longtime viewers of the show. The spacesuit so frequently used during David Tennant's tenure is wheeled out again, we learn that the barn seen in The Day of the Doctor was important to his life, and the line €œFear makes companions of us all€ is delivered as a call-back to the first Doctor Who serial. The problem is that these aren't there to really build upon the story so much as distract the audience from failings in the tale, and once you get past them big problems begin to appear. Take the ending again for example. We see that it is supposed to link into the Doctor's history, re-visits him at a young age and potentially sets up his entire future ideology by leaving a toy behind. It's supposed to say to the fans "here, this is how this all started!" but it instead comes across as if the writer's just pulled a Monster A Go-Go. The episode, after even featuring entire scenes with a alien in the same room as the TARDIS crew, suddenly claims that there was never any kind of creature in the episode and tries to put it down to the Doctor's imagination. The episode has just openly wasted the audience's time, even outright lied to them, and it's now trying to get away with it by reminding viewers of better moments from the franchise. Ultimately, when you really dig into the episode, you soon strip away the veneer of cleverness rand find beneath very little which actually works.