Doctor Who Series 12: Ten Huge Questions After Can You Hear Me?
All the major talking points as Doctor Who confronts gods and monsters from Syria to Sheffield.
There is every chance that in years to come, Can You Hear Me? will be barely remembered. That isn’t meant to be a criticism of what was a wonderfully effective episode. It’s just that behind the fine exploration of the companions’ fears, lies a bare bones story that is all too quickly resolved. The plot about the imprisoned god is perfunctory and the gorgeous animated sequence couldn’t add colour to a backstory that, perhaps befitting the unimaginative gods involved, is fairly rudimentary.
But for Doctor Who to be a success across an entire series, it needs such changes in pace. With an explosive two-part finale just around the corner, and the dramatic events of Fugitive of the Judoon still being talked about, this was a welcome shift of gear.
Can You Hear Me? might not be ground-breaking, but it does have one or two claims to fame. It is the first Doctor Who story to have a question mark in the title, a frivolous observation that might only be of interest to trivia fans. The other is anything but. The BBC deemed it appropriate to advertise a helpline number for anyone affected by the issues in the programme. Often seen as the credits of major soaps roll, this is the first time we have seen such an announcement used in relation to Doctor Who.
The message might have been uncomplicated and the story left behind in the shadows, but as ever, the episode did throw up plenty of discussion points.
10. Were The Aleppo Scenes Really Necessary?
It has taken a while, but the Doctor’s family may just have won over our affections. One of the dangers of Chibnall’s ‘TARDIS fam’ approach is that the characters could end up underdeveloped and underused. This isn’t a soap opera, there’s little time for filler material, or for ‘getting to know you’ scenes.
Refreshingly, by using Graham, Yaz and Ryan’s nightmares as the fuel for a couple of entitled Eternals, Charlene James and Chibnall take us inside their heads in a way that both furthers the plot and reminds us that they are more than simply companions. They have lives, and minds, outside the TARDIS.
The Doctor correctly deduces that the TARDIS fam have been targeted. We soon discover this is because the immortals need her. The Doctor is the only person in the universe who can open the quantum fluctuation lock and set Rakaya free.
With the companions taking centre stage, the Aleppo scenes weren’t strictly necessary. Zellin could have gained the Doctor’s attention without summoning Tahira’s nightmare monsters. True, the gods are feeding off human nightmares as a way of coping with the boredom of eternity and imprisonment, but despite the reference to Islamic mental health care, the choice of setting felt random.
We should applaud the move to include a city from 14th century Syria in the series and to present the region and its people in a positive light, but it also felt like a missed opportunity. Connections were there to be made between Yaz’s faith as a Muslim and Tahira’s, but the two characters barely interact. How the treatment of mental illness differs between cultures and times is also never addressed.