Discursive Essay: Doctor Who S8.04 - Listen

The Time:            Bedtime.


The Place:           All over the place.

The Situation:    Something under the bed is drooling.

“Question: Why do we talk out loud when we know we’re alone?

Conjecture: Because we know we’re not.”

This episode deals primarily with the idea of fear. The Doctor is always afraid: it is fear that made him run away from Gallifrey, and what keeps him alive each episode to run again.

But is fear itself justified? Panic, anxiety, nervousness – are these things, which govern so much of who we are, legitimate parts to recognise in ourselves? The Doctor descends into paranoia, believing that he has discovered evidence of an “Evolutionary Hider” that has only ever revealed itself to sleepers.

As he deals with his fear of the unknown, Clara and Danny deal with their more horrifying fear of dating (also known as the fear of discovery), and are initially conquered by it. The Doctor picks up Clara and they hurry off to investigate Fear, using the TARDIS’ psychic interface to pinpoint a moment in time when the ‘Hider’ appears. They find themselves at the orphanage where Danny Pink grew up, and help him confront a night terror.

“Let me tell you about ‘scared’; your heart is beating so hard I can feel it through your hands. There’s so much blood and oxygen pumping through your brain, it’s like RrrrROCKET FUEL! Right now, you could run faster and you can fight harder, you can jump higher than ever in your life. And you are so alert it’s like you can slow down time. What’s wrong with ‘scared’? Scared is a superpower. It’s your superpower. There is danger in this room. And guess what? It’s you.”

~The Doctor to Rupert Danny Pink

The Doctor determines that the way to survive the night terror is to give it what it wants; for it to be unknown. To surrender curiosity to the primeval, and walk away without an answer. This is because to him, not knowing is the greatest terror. And to let fear win, he must not know.

The Doctor also respect the rights of living beings (well, mostly), and one of those rights is privacy. As much as he wants an answer to his theories, he would no more get them against the will of a Hider than we would vivisect a human being. He infers that a Hider does not want to be seen, and is respectful of that right. An odd thing, for one so curious. But it helps establish the hierarchy of the Doctor’s moral code. He places the comfort of living beings above scientific curiosity.

Clara returns to confront her own fear with Danny. And messes it up, again. The lesson hasn’t been learned yet, or possibly the wrong lesson has been learned. Connection to a person doesn’t just come from knowing them better, or even admitting your own unknowing. There’s something else elusive still left to realize about Fear.

The Doctor and Clara go to the end of the universe (temporally or directionally unclear, just on the ‘last’ planet) and meet a time traveller. They spend a night listening to the clanking of his timeship, wondering if there is something moving outside in the barrens of the planet, or if they are imagining things.

What’s that in the mirror

Or the corner of your eye?

What’s that footstep following, but never passing by?

Perhaps they’re out there waiting

Perhaps when we’re all dead

Out they’ll come a-slithering

From underneath the bed.

When they leave, The Doctor is out cold and Clara psychically links to his distant past, where a young Doctor is crying in a barn on Gallifrey, afraid of the Time War, alone and terrified of the unknown. Clara hides beneath his bed to avoid being seen, and instinctively reaches out to grab his foot when he gets out of bed. This fulfills the features of the dream that triggered the Doctor’s paranoia in the first place.

But then Clara repeats what the Doctor told a young Danny Pink, and adds:

“Fear doesn’t have to make you cruel or cowardly. Fear can make you kind.

So listen. If you listen to nothing else, listen to this:  You’re always going to be afraid. Even if you learn to hide it. Fear is like… a companion. A constant companion, always there. But that’s okay. Because fear can bring us together. Fear can bring you home.

Fear makes companions of us all.”

~ Clara Oswald

Which is quite beautiful.

Ultimately, there never was an ‘Evolutionary Hider’ existing outside of the conceptual world. The Doctor has been driven by his fear of the unknown to discover the unknown. It has helped him become the Time Lord that terrified him as a young boy.

Clara returns to Danny one last time, and confesses her nerves got the better of her. She faces her fear of discovery, and snogs him.

The ultimate lesson is that fear is entirely legitimate, if you work with it, and confront it, and examine everything it clings to. It’s the best friend you’ll ever have, if you don’t push it away.

The Materialised Id

*

The episode also compounds on the nature of the Doctor-Companion relationship. Not only because it links the companion with the Doctor’s fear, and suggest that he is afraid of loving and keeping something beautiful and temporary with him through danger, but because it is becoming increasingly obvious that the Doctor is engaged in a vital struggle between the part of him that is a soldier and the part that is a Doctor. This exchange is particularly revealing:

“I don’t take orders, Clara.”

“Do as you’re told.”

Clara is, from the moment we meet her and in several incarnations to follow, a Governess, put in charge of other people – frequently naughty children. It is her responsibility to command, officiate, and give orders.

As such she (and many other companions) act as the Doctor’s commanding officer, as someone who he respects being in command. In his war against soldiers, he has identified the true reason he dislikes them: they follow bad orders. Military orders. The doctrine of destruction, over the doctrine of investigation.

So he determines that for the part of him that is a soldier to be a good soldier, it needs a good officer: a companion/commander who negates the doctrine of war he learned under the Time Lords with a directive to be as the rest of him is; a scientist.

His second companion, Fear, is not an executive officer. It gives two orders whenever it appears: Discover, or Shut Your Eyes. Understand, or Destroy. 12/13^th’s of him know the right answer. The part that is a soldier doesn’t, and needs a human companion to enforce the correct directive.

The Psychoanalytical Model:

This episode really lends itself to psychoanalysis, particularly the fundamental Id–Ego–Superego model that plays such a huge role in that framework. The episode uses Time to establish a ‘ladder’ of sorts on which to place these mental personas, in typical fashion with the Super-Ego on the ‘top’ of Time (the future) and the Id at the ‘bottom’ of Time (the childhood past).

At the bottom of the ladder is the Id, the unconscious realm of unexplored desires, anxieties and impulses. This realm is a place of fluctuation and whim, not yet settled into a structure of established rules or contextual understanding. It is seen as being most active in a child, who has not yet gained the experience of reality necessary to grow a healthy skeletal frame to flesh with percepts. In Listen we are told that it is in childhood we are most open to the evolutionary Hider, and that it is from childhood that we dredge up the memory of its hand grasping an ankle. The episode takes us into the lives of two children, Danny and Doctor Who, both plagued by anxiety over this invisible monster. 

The natural assumption is that because fear arises from the Id, the 'monster' must originate from the Id, too. But Clara’s metamorphosis into the monster proves otherwise – a child’s fear is of not knowing, and while fear originates from the Id what it does not know is actually the Super-Ego, the elaborate ‘Governess’ of contextual ideas that resides on the other side of the mental spectrum.

The Materialised Super-Ego

We approach the Super-Ego at the end of the temporal universe, where the ultimate consequences of the framework of material things comes to light. The destination is bleak and fatalistic – there is no life, no apparent governing order or promise of continuity. Just an endless desert, and death. But faced with the demolition of the idea that ‘life succeeds’, The Doctor is not convinced. He still holds to the idea that there is life Hiding, waiting until it has outlasted all others so that it might claim the universe and assert its supremacy. In a way he needs the 'Hider' at the end of time more than anything, because it will justify his own support of life, his hatred of the Daleks, and his immortal explorations, by asserting that there is a universal will and not simply an atheistic disintegration of the universe. He is willing to face his fear to confirm this, needing this hidden companion, his Super-Ego, to justify the actions fear has driven him to. Fear is what makes him seek out the unknown.

The Doctor is knocked out before there is a definite answer to the nature of the Super-Ego and the story returns to the Id so Clara can play her part, filling in for the fact that the Super-Ego is absent. The lesson we learn in the barn is that while the Super-Ego may never be known, the Ego will perpetuate its own hierarchical one-upmanship over the Id, demanding that the response to fear can be courage and investigation. In something of a twist, this asserts the importance of a subjective attitude to objectives. Egos must continue to fight the flux of nightmares and anxieties even should the Super-Ego at least superficially appear to act against them, because in the course of narrative it may come to pass that the actions of the Ego create the Super-Ego.

Clara Super-imposed as the Super-Ego

Following on from the discovery that there is no Super-Ego, Clara attempts to hide it, fulfilling the final requirement for the establishment of a False Doctrine. Clara commands, “Do as you are told”, which can be rephrased as “Have Faith”, hiding the truth about the Evolutionary Hider from The Doctor and creating the schism between transcendence and discovery which resigns him to his place of perpetual Ego. In this sense it becomes a profoundly religious episode, featuring the classic narrative creation of an Ideology:

• The personality of a young boy is forever shaped during a childhood nativity – born in a barn, if you will – when he as an Idiot is visited by a higher power, becoming aware of the Super-Ego and ascending to the Ego median.

• The higher power then commits to a false doctrine in order to ensure the obeisance of its follower. (“Do as you are told.”/ There is a God.)

• The higher power thus establishes a conditional rule which is unachievable, and must be broken in order to experience subjective freedoms (to exist).

• A moment comes when it is impossible to identify the existence or validity of the higher power and, forsaken by God, the character of the narrative must either turn to blind faith or become an atheist.

Accepting or denying the Higher Power at the end of the narrative is a crucial point in the story. In the case of subjugation to faith, a religious doctrine is formed. In the case of atheistic denial, a personal doctrine is formed around the idea that there is nothing provably greater than the Ego. The Doctor does as he is told and can be seen therefore to be accepting subjugation – but it is important to stress this is only subjugation in 1/13^th of his personality, the part he knows to be a soldier. The rest of him has its own God Complex, asserting itself as a righteous universal dictator (It has a dominant Ego). In short he believes in ‘God’, or in his companion, who he elevates to the level of a ‘God’ by marking them out as his equal.

Harkening back to the part about The Soldier needing a good Officer, this means The Doctor is only willing to follow a good religious doctrine. But he also has his personal Doctrine, which might be viewed as equally important. In terms of the psychoanalytic model this means the episode concludes on middle ground, speaking out both for the benefits of Ideology and for the liberation of the Ego, and suggests they are not mutually exclusive.

Fear as the Companion

It is interesting that Clara is the one who inspires this ideology, and then compares the fear to a companion and by extension to herself*.

*I do sometimes wonder if the companions see The Doctor as their companion. That they never mention it seems to accept that The Doctor is the central figure of the story, which is a decidedly unhuman thing to do – we generally see ourselves as the central character in our own lives.

What do Fear and other Companions have in common?

They exist as an undeniable Other. The Doctor continually puts his Companions in positions of power, over the TARDIS, and sometimes over himself. They are there as a sort of sentinel against purely selfish action, because he puts someone different to himself on the same level as him. Having a friend like this forces him to admit there are opinions that matter other than his own. Rephrased, he acknowledges he is not the only one in the world. Both Fear and Companions are reminders that there are things he doesn’t understand and must always fight to be aware of.

Another implication is that fear is relatively constant, rather than a fleeting emotion that only exists for the extent of a situation. Placed in these terms it is something that can have a relationship built with it, even be understood, predicted, and directed. It becomes less of a liability and more of an asset when viewed in this way, as it gains narrative continuity. It can be seen as a relationship that gains strength and complexity over time. This is a particularly interesting quality because it allows Fear to gain a kind of personality, but forces us to recognize that the personality is purely based on our responses to its presence, not to its actual nature. Fear becomes a Hider because we hide it. Fear becomes a monster because we feel inferior to it. Fear can thus become a companion because we choose to accept and trust it.

How often do we really make up a person’s personality based on our reactions to their mere presence? We see people as brave because we ourselves are timid. We see them as vain, and enforce that belief by refusing to learn more about something that appears to reveal all of its qualities immediately. We see people as flirtatious because we ourselves desire them, and want their actions to have deeper, romantic meanings. In the end that’s all us, broadcast onto others to make them something we can more readily comprehend.

This is something particularly evident over the course of Clara and Pink’s date. They keep clashing because of the assumptions they have made in order to deal with the fact that they are strangers. Clara immediately boots up Pink in her assumptions about soldiers. Pink in return coats her in his assumptions about civilians. Both Clara & Pink cloak the date itself with the ‘personality’ of dating, and what it’s ‘supposed’ to be. They struggle with the idea of secrets and honesty, when the time comes to probe those false personalities. Clara makes the fatal assumption that Danny will not be able to understand the complex truth of her time-travelling double life. It is only at the very end, when they choose to combat their own assumptions and accept that they are strangers that they stand any chance of becoming each other’s companions.

Fear is a lot like that. You have to abandon denial and delusion and fear intensely before there can be any hope in understanding it.

The Psychic Interface

Aside from being a convenient plot device, the TARDIS’ Psychic Interface is a metaphoric symbol for the slightly yucky task of delving into the Id. Oddly foamy, presumably slimy and squelchy, the interface is immediately identified in the mind as something disgusting that could be dangerous to touch, like the body of a jelloid sea-creature washed up on a beach. This is an important association often made with the Id, something usually suppressed, ‘pushed down’ or flushed away on account of it holding those associations with the uncivilized and unclean. Clara has to touch the Id in order to find the answers the Doctor is looking for. The interface then proves its danger by latching on to Clara’s unconscious desires and bringing them out in the open. As is often the case when delving into the Id, there is no control and usually embarrassment or shame attached to that lack of control.

The deep and lovely Dark. We’d never see the stars without it.