Well, fuck me. This episode sure hit me like a ton of bricks, but I'm glad it did in that very specific way that I'll talk about later. That's the rub, really. It's very much like my relationship with Orphan 55, in that I just want to talk about one part at the end and what it meant to me. Unlike Orphan 55, the episode is marinating in that theme so I do have shit to talk about before we get there. I want to start this one off by saying that there are two things you need to know about me. The first is something you may have already realized, if you keep up with these writeups. I am the kind of media critic who can forgive several overall flaws and weaknesses in a story if it has one massive solid emotionally resonant core that affected me, that I can hold on to and really be impressed by. Orphan 55, again, has that brave desperate speech at the end which I love, and that's so strong to me that I can forgive the rest of it being a mess. Can You Hear Me? has two such moments like this, moments tied into the theme of the episode. I will get to them when we get to the end of the episode, and that is when you will also learn the second thing that you need to know about me. Until we get there, we have to be professional and do more than mark time. Let's talk about Can You Hear Me?.
It's got another Chibnall co-write on it, and domestic companion life drama. Maybe he did those parts, maybe it was all Charlene James, I don't know. It has the same sense of splitting up the plots that the globetrotting episodes like Spyfall or Praxeus did, but on a somewhat smaller scale; basically just between each companion's domestic life stuff, and a monster in 1380 Syria that shouldn't exist. Once weird shit happens to each companion, they call up the Doctor and we can converge it all fairly quickly... but it's important to not gloss over the strange things that are going on. Ryan meeting up with a friend who's clearly in a bad way, and having bad dreams about some creepy guy. Yaz and her sister having a dinner marking some occasion they don't really want to talk about, and Yaz dreaming the same man. Graham getting a telepathic cry for help. All of these are important to the episode, but only two are important to the theme I'm going to be picking at. Setting Graham aside for the moment, let's talk about nightmares. Before Can You Hear Me? plays its hand, it seems obvious what the inspiration here is. Doctor Who riffs on all sorts of stories over its history, and here we seem to have a story where its writers saw some horror movies on the shelf, nodded their heads, and gave it a Doctor Who twist. I mean, a creepy guy who appears in your dreams and does creepy shit in them with his fingers? It's almost a blatant Nightmare On Elm Street riff. What would they do with that, I wonder? (Fun fact: Doctor Who and Elm Street already have a connection; 1991's Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare was directed by Rachel Talalay, who would go on to direct every Capaldi-era finale.) The Elm Street movies each have their own unique subtexts running under the surface of fucked-up knife hand men killing teens in their dreams, but I'm just going to link to this Halloween writeup I did for Elm Street 3. Hmm, now where could I be going with that? Let's find out.
It's when we get the reveal of what the mystery creepy guy is, and what his grand plan was, that another horror movie off the shelf kind of rears its head. But only kind of. Zellin is a literal immortal in the Doctor Who universe, a rare sort of individual. He namechecks a bunch of the others from Doctor Who lore, and I really could have done without a reference to the goddamn fucking Toymaker in the year 2020, Chibnall. Anyway, that other horror movie? Stephen King's It, which just had two big movies in recent years. Like the titular monster, Zellin is an eternal being with limitless form feeding and reacting off of the fears of humanity. Zellin isn't doing it for himself, though, as we soon find the twist of his imprisoned partner who he's been sustaining with humanity's fear. It's here, during Zellin's initial monologue to the Doctor, where we get a bit that genuinely hit me at my core:
"You know the best part of humanity? The thing that truly sets them apart? The cruelty of their own minds directed towards themselves. The doubt. The fear. The endless voices telling themselves they're incapable and unworthy."
Oh fuck, wait, is this episode going to be about what I think it's going to be about? Put a pin in that, because we have some companion nightmares to deal with. Yaz's sister, on a barren highway, telling Yaz she can't rely on her and that Yaz is alone. Ryan's anxious friend, now an old man, surrounded by fire and chastizing Ryan for not being there... as the goddamned Dregs close in on them. Graham, being told by the dear departed Grace that his cancer's back and he's going to die, full of regret for not being able to save her. This is all spectacular interiority, and it's almost a shame that the Doctor's nightmare is just more blurry Timeless Child setup. The last time we explored her darker thoughts and bad dreams, we got the Dream Lord. Now all we get is arc building? Hrmm. Well, the eternal gods who feast on nightmares and fear are going to Earth to have a banquet of eternity on the human race. How in the shit is Doctor Who supposed to stop actual gods of fear?
By conquering that fear, plain and simple. That's our resolution, and the weakness inherent with Zellin's creations of human nightmare. As we learned before, fear is a superpower, and superpowers can be wielded. Zellin created a basic-ass monster out of a Syrian girl's worst dreams as part of his grand scheme to lure the Doctor into this adventure. What happens, then, when that girl conquers her fears and turns the nightmares against them? Here is where I veer away from talking about the episode on its own terms, and start talking about my own interiority. This is the second thing you need to know about me to understand how this episode affected me; I have anxiety. I have my good days, and I have my bad days. Bad thoughts which can overwhelm me, make me think the most terrible things about both myself and how others think about me. For more of that interiority, here's a very old Nintendo Project post about the Little Nemo game where I talked about this shit in a far more pretentious and mystical way. I dug this up on sheer coincidence the other day, but it turns out it was prescient. See... Last weekend was an especially rough time for me and my anxiety, as natural events and other things that happened in my life fed into it, creating a total gloom cloud over me. It's so easy, so simple for your brain to twist the most innocuous thing into a desperate worry that everything's gone horribly wrong. Something as simple as, say, three of your very good friends all doing something together overnight while you're asleep, accidentally leaving you out of the group inclusion. They say they'll make it up to you, and you know they will... but then those dark clouds storm overhead. You start to feel left out. Undesired by those you love and adore. They all have such better chemistry together than you do with them. Maybe they'd be better off if you just left them alone. These thoughts feel so real, but they're fucking lies. Those three friends love and adore you. They enjoy being around you, they'll do their goddamned best to hear your anxieties and help you see that those thoughts are liars. Help you see that they love you and your presence is desired. Imagine, then, that after a weekend of this, you come to your favorite sci-fi show. Imagine hearing this creepy bald fuck say those lines earlier about the cruelty of the human mind, the endless voices telling you you're incapable and unworthy. Undesired and unadored. Imagine, at the climax of the episode where the gods creating fear and nightmares are confronted by the Doctor... and she stares them down and says this:
"You're wrong about humans. They're not pathetic. They're magnificent. They live with their fears, doubts, guilts. They face them down every day and they prevail. That's not weakness. That's strength. That's what humanity is."
Sometimes a piece of media means a lot to you because it says exactly what you need to hear, at exactly the right time. Can You Hear Me? did that for me. An episode about fear and anxiety and self-doubt, where the Doctor says that about us. About my three dear friends who I can't thank enough for being there for me. About me. Some of my favorite stories are about healing, about optimism and hope. This Doctor Who episode, however unintentional, reached out and did its very best to heal me. We can sit here and debate its flaws all day, if we wish to. I'll probably be doing that later today in podcast form, even. Right here, right now... that's not important to me. This episode was here for me when I needed it the most, just like those friends of mine were. Just like you, out there in the Internet reading this, have people who will be there for you when you need them. At my very best, I'll be there for the people who need me. At my very worst, no matter what the Zellins in my head tell me, the people who love me will be there for me too. I have to stop the writeup now before I cry more, but wow. What an episode. I mean, god damn. That's... really all I have right now. I'll see you next week. Well, just one more thing to say.
I'm feeling a lot better now.
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