Doctor Who: Listen - 7 Failures Which Destroy The Story

3. Stale Ideas From Better Stories

To be completely blunt with this one a staggering amount of the story, from the ideas to the villains, are completely recycled from old tales. It doesn't take much to start picking out when and where so many old ideas have been copied and pasted from elsewhere, then cobbled together to make this shambling Frankenstein monster of a script. Just for starters we have a monster which hides in plain sight, has influence over you and your surroundings but is hidden away where you can't see it. It's the Silence by any other name. Monsters which are primordial fears and are the subconscious cause for so much fear within sentient races? A good idea we've seen done far better with the Weeping Angels and the Vashta Nerada. Monsters under the bed? It's The Girl In The Fireplace all over again. The end of the universe angle? Both featured extensively in Utopia and Hide, and were core to each story seen there. A thing lurking on a nightmare world dominated by one colour, hammering rhythmically against an exterior door and trying to get in? Hello there Midnight! A companion going back in time to completely alter those she knows and the Doctor himself? Take your pick, there's been more of them in the past few years than in several decades of serials. It wasn't too long ago that, for any of its failings, Doctor Who could always be praised for its willingness to try new things. Writers would brazenly throw themselves at brilliant new concepts, and no matter how they failed, the continuity problems or even the logical fallacies you could always at least appreciate that determination. It's what gave us the Weeping Angels, it's what gave us Midnight, it's what gave us some of the Eleventh Doctor's most memorable tales, but this one seems to be just resting upon its laurels, giving the audience more of what it's seen before with few to no alterations. A few fans were already voicing their concerns over this sort of thing when the Silence were introduced after the Vashta Nerada, but if this sort of story starts becoming a trend the franchise could be in for some serious trouble.