Doctor Who: Peter Capaldi’s 12 Best Performances As The Twelfth Doctor
5. Listen
Giving Capaldi an opening soliloquy to this simple yet sublime episode was a masterstroke by Moffat, as it heightened our primal fears - or piqued your curiosity for those brave enough among you - about what might be lurking and hiding in the dark, to which the Doctor is so excitedly eager to decipher.
The soliloquy, more importantly, presented a different and welcome opportunity with which to connect and engage the audience with the relatively new Twelfth Doctor, a Doctor whom we were perhaps still unsure, and given his non-hugging stance, even wary of.
Listen sees Capaldi's Doctor really break in those new Doc Martens of his that establish the foundations of his era.
There's his distinct forthright attitude towards Clara that further illustrates the readjusted relationship dynamic between the pair; the unworldly obtuse observation of things like Clara's three mirrors and of hiding in the bedroom as the best place in case she brought Danny home; the sudden change in giving Rupert Pink (stop laughing) superpower reassurance to telling him "that nobody's safe"; showing the Doctor's manipulative streak by "recharging" the TARDIS overnight in order to discover what's behind the locked doors of Orson's ship; and then there's strolling casually into a restaurant dressed as an astronaut.
Add a dash of sinister mood lighting to the accent and you have yourself one of Capaldi's most iconic episodes.