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Doctor Who Series 12 Review Part 7/10: Can You Hear Me?

Air date: 9 February 2020

This was a pretty deep episode if you ask me. Dreams and nightmares have been explored in Doctor Who over the years, but this is the first time that we have gone deeper into them and linked it to mental health. Apparently, this was why a BBC Action Line tag was included in the original UK broadcast of the episode.

My spoiler-free thought for this episode: “Who let Gen Urobuchi touch the script for this episode?”

As the BBC Action Line was mentioned, I guess I have the duty to recommend some support lines before I start the review. This page has a vast collection of mental health hotlines and websites from around the world.

Spoilers continue after the break.

Character development everywhere

This episode managed to develop Graham, Ryan and Yaz’s characters at the same time as we gain an insight into their fears and nightmares. Graham’s fear was his cancer coming back and Grace being disappointed in him (which likely manifested as a result of the guilt of not being able to save her). Ryan’s fear was not being able to see his friend, Tibo, during his lifetime and the Earth turning into what would be Orphan 55 (as shown with the Dregs in his nightmare). Yaz’s fear was a bit confusing for me to decipher, but it seems to be being left alone with no one to help her.

At the end of the episode, it becomes evident that this experience inspires them to do something that furthers their characters. Ryan encourages Tibo to seek support or therapy for his depression. Yaz is inspired to seek the policewoman (Anita Patel, I hate it when they name characters in the credits and they don’t say who they are in the episode) who inspired her three years ago when she ran away from home to answer her bet. Graham confides to the Doctor his worries about his cancer potentially coming back.

At the same time, we also get an insight into the Doctor’s fear (at this point in time), which is evidently that of the Timeless Child and everything she knew being a lie. The Doctor’s previously known fear was back during his eleventh incarnation, namely the cracks in time not being fully resolved as a result of them leaving “scar tissue” in the fabric of the universe.

Overlords or not?

Zellin and Rakaya (the other imprisoned immortal whose name was never spoken in the episode) reminded me of the Overlords of Kamen Rider Agito... until we saw that they were both evil. I was going to put the Doctor into the equation, but then I realised that she is nothing like the Overlord of Light.

Let me clarify. In Agito, the Overlords are twin entities who embodied light and darkness. They created the world, but neither of them could agree on who would reign and so, they fought. After losing to his ‘brother’, the Overlord of Light bestowed his essence on humanity in the form of Agito’s power in the hope that they would evolve beyond his control. The Overlord of Darkness, however, saw to eliminate any who possessed Agito’s power and would have the potential to evolve into him.

Zellin and Rakaya are immortals who entertained themselves with the fears and nightmares of humans, while also destroying planets for their own amusement. The Doctor admires humanity’s potential and encourages them to be the best they can be, giving them as little assistance as possible so they can progress with their own abilities. In a way, they are somewhat like the Overlords, but they are not entirely like them at the same time.

A theory I missed about Ruth

I just realised something about Episode 5 that I forgot to include, namely the theory that Ruth was a pre-Hartnell Doctor. Now, I am of the belief that the First Doctor, as first shown in 1963, is the first of all the Doctor’s incarnations and that any attempt to shoehorn Ruth in at any point in the Doctor’s past (as we know to be) will be proof that the SJW agenda is here to stay.

Apparently, I saw that people were using the Fourth Doctor story The Brain of Morbius as evidence that the Doctor has had incarnations before the First Doctor, as we knew it, and used it as a theory that Ruth could be a pre-Hartnell Doctor. This is shown during the mindbending sequence near the end of the fourth part, where we saw a face apparently belonging to Morbius, then the faces of the Doctor’s previous incarnations, then eight other faces taken from the production team of the time.

Assuming the eight other faces were the Doctor’s previous incarnations and the Doctor can only regenerate twelve times, here’s my theory. Ruth could be a “missing” incarnation in the eight, making the Fourth Doctor the last incarnation in this particular regeneration cycle. The Watcher merging with the Fourth Doctor in his regeneration story, Logopolis, could represent him gaining a new regeneration cycle, but between that and the Eleventh Doctor gaining another regeneration cycle, there are still four incarnations left unaccounted for.

Going by this article on the TARDIS Data Core, some classic-era material seemed to imply that Hartnell’s Doctor wasn’t the first, with even Philip Hinchcliffe, producer of The Brain of Morbius, saying that it was his intention to do so. However, at this point in time, there has been no attempt to confirm this fact, so my belief regarding the Doctor’s incarnations has not deviated from the mainstream view. People can say that those faces were randomly generated or that they originally belonged to Morbius and I’d be inclined to agree with them.

At this point in time, all the episode titles for Series 12 have been revealed. With the final episode of the series aptly being named “The Timeless Children”, I hope the issue of Ruth being the Doctor can be explained, hopefully with the appearance of the Master.

Other general thoughts

The exposition of the two planets was animated in cartoon form. What is this, Homestuck?

Is it just me, or did the Doctor manage to summon her sonic screwdriver into her hand while they were cuffed? I’m sorry, but that is a deus ex machina right there. Someone stated on Twitter that the cuffs were magnetised, but there has been no indication or explanation that that is the case.

According to this Radio Times article, some fans said that the Doctor was apparently dismissive of Graham’s concern regarding his cancer coming back, particularly this fan on Twitter, who lost his grandmother to cancer. Um, the Doctor literally said she was socially awkward and her fam has known her for so long that they should know it, given her alien nature. It’s not the first time the Doctor has struggled with being sensitive towards vulnerable people. If it’s any consolation, she stated that she would eventually think of something that she should have said. If she was actually being dismissive, she’d be more like the Twelfth Doctor during Series 8.

I know I’ve hardly ever mentioned Bowlestrek during the course of these reviews, but I can’t help but say this. I’ve seen some of his reviews of this series, out of curiosity, and while I still agree with his sentiment somewhat, I can’t help but feel that he’s become a shadow of what he was two years ago, during Series 11. Heck, I made rants on a very divisive aspect of anime and video game localisation for five years and it only took three years to make me realise that I’ve become a shadow of myself, and yet I still went on for two more years after that. But I digress; I still think The Oldest Nerd does more level-headed reviews. Tharries sums Bowlestrek up quite well here.

Summary and verdict

This was another thought-provoking episode. If you go on to read the next section, you’ll see how this episode inspired me to talk a little bit about the lowlights of my life.

The characters got decent character development and while we didn’t get any more progress in the Timeless Child arc, it’s good to be reminded that it exists and that it is one of the Doctor’s biggest fears.

Rating: 8/10

Being as personal as possible (without going into too much detail)

Before I go IRL, let me tell you about a fan of mine from years ago. When I first started the Koei Warriors Rant Series, there was a fan who followed me as I presented my research on English dubbing in video game localisation. This person was trans and they had split personalities - a boy one, a girl one, and a third one they claimed was an evil one. They were lucky to be one of the only fans I added on my personal Facebook as I was posting to Koei Tecmo’s page from there before I moved it to the Yeonchi page. Over the years, I saw stories of them writing about their depression and how their family treated them like shit. Near the end, I reported a post where they said they were going to commit suicide by taking a lot of pills - this was their second time if I remember correctly. I still have the screencap of that post. Some months later, they deactivated their Facebook account and I never heard from them again. I presumed they committed suicide given some of their posts, but I never thought about emailing them or anything until I had already started writing the review for this episode. I have no idea if she’ll reply eventually, but if she doesn’t, then I guess my intuition may have been correct all along.

I was going through a random mood before and after I watched this episode. Before I watched it, my mind, for no reason, suddenly triggered my anger towards something I thought I’d forgiven years ago when I lowkey haven’t (which is why I elected to forget it in the hope that it’d be the same). After I watched it, I, for unrelated reasons, was “reminded” of a few people from high school (it’s a harmless habit that usually goes undetected by others that I’m also hoping to reduce) who I didn’t hang out with a lot, but they intrigued me in different ways. Like the Doctor admits, I have been socially awkward and am trying to overcome it little by little as I see old friends wherever I go (which frankly is a rarity for me), so I have different thoughts about them now than I did back then; I probably wouldn’t have been able to understand those current feelings back then.

One person was another socially awkward person like me, but she had managed to make a few friends in her locker area (she was special enough to have a locker with a few other special students in the year level above her instead of everyone else in our year level). Because of how “similar” our situations were, there were one or two times when our friends shipped us together (as a joke) and I was pissed at it because I never felt that way towards her. We did work together on a few pieces of schoolwork though. The real hitter for me regarding her was when I saw her contribution to an autism awareness project where she mentioned that she was homeschooled up until late into primary school and that she was bullied during the two years each in primary and high school. I was largely unaware that she had been bullied at all (though I did hear a story or two) and, for a great deal of the last decade, I was unaware that I had contributed to it indirectly by filming her on a couple of occasions during camp, screaming and crying at things normal people would have deemed harmless.

Another person was this girl I had this huge crush on during my entire time in high school. She was aware of it and she never loved me back, but the thing I hated about it was the fact that she didn’t tell me directly, in person or on Facebook; no, she was enough of a coward to have her cousin do it for her. Admittedly, while I did show a lot of animosity towards her, hatred even, my crush for her never subsided. If we were in an actual relationship, we’d be flip-flopping between being the abuser and the victim. At the time, I denied feeling this way because my anger and addictions to Dynasty Warriors, later tokusatsu, seemingly covered it up (I was very chuunibyou at the time and had fantasies of fighting her, wrong I know), but at this point, years after we graduated high school, I accepted that I did feel jealous of her, not just because she had a lot of friends and hung out with them all the time, but because she also hung out with a few boys and I was paranoid enough to think that they were in a relationship. I remember fictionalising all this as part of my personal project (that has a big connection with Doctor Who) ala Chris-chan with this girl and her friends as the villains. The main character (not the Doctor) of the project has a turbulent relationship with her - them being together represented my delusion of wanting to be with her, while them being apart and killing each other represented how she didn’t love me back and how I saw it as us hating each other. At this point, I’m planning on ending the personal project, so I put them back together and made them average characters just so I didn’t have to end the story with them killing each other.

The final person really pissed me off because of the way she acted towards the end of our friendship; she was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. She was a cold and socially awkward person when we first met, but over time, she warmed up to social interaction and we eventually became friends. At the end of Year 10, she moved to a different school because her dad just up and signed the contract for their new home. We still stayed in contact for the next few years and caught up with each other, even. Our catchup outings were generally pleasant, but there was this one time where it left a sour taste in my mouth. We went out to watch San Andreas with another friend of ours. We parted with our friend after the movie ended (he was also socially awkward like me) and soon after that, she got pissed off at me for no damn reason, other than me being blunt in our Facebook chats (remember, I was socially awkward at the time as well, but I still tried my best to carry a conversation even if I wasn’t good at it). I had no idea why she suddenly decided to be a bitch to me at the time, aside from a suspicion that she was PMSing at the time. We made up after that, but our friendship continued to drift as time passed. We managed to get into the same university, but we weren’t able to catch up as much as we wanted to because we did different courses and had different timetables. By the time that ungrateful slut (and no, I won’t apologise for that, that’s my honest opinion) deleted me from Facebook, she had a boyfriend and was going out to clubs quite a bit; it was like she became the protagonist of 177013, only she didn’t get injected with drugs and become a megaslut.

Sometimes, I imagine how happy I could have been if things had been different. Sadly, I have to live with the consequences of my actions, intentional or not, for the rest of my life. Many people seem to think that depressed women are the only people we should show compassion to, but they also seem to forget that men like myself can get depressed as well. At the moment, I’m doing just fine; I have a goal I want to strive for and I don’t intend on giving up until I get it - or someone gets to it first.

Stay tuned next week as I review the eighth episode, The Haunting of Villa Diodati.

#doctor who #doctor who series 12 #thirteenth doctor #doctor who series 12 review #thirteenth doctor review

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