Doctor Who — ‘Can You Hear Me?’ [12x7] ★★☆☆☆
By: Dan Owen
Tags: Doctor Who, Television, Review, Culture, TV

Doctor Who — ‘Can You Hear Me?’ [12x7] ★★☆☆☆

Where to begin with this nonsensical and overcomplicated episode? “Can You Hear Me?” began reasonably well, with The Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) dropping her companions back home and going on a solo adventure to 14th-century Aleppo, Syria. I expected the story to bench Graham (Bradley Walsh), Yaz (Mandip Gill), and Ryan (Tosin Cole) entirely for a week (wishful thinking?), with The Doctor investigating a giant Chagaska monster attacking Syrians like young Tahira (Aruhan Galieva) singlehanded… but then the narrative fractured to follow each companion’s homelives…

Ryan was reacquainted with old mate Tibo (Buom Tihngang) who I don’t recall meeting before but he was briefly in “Spyfall: Part 1”; Yaz caught up with her younger sister Sonya (Bhavnisha Parmar) to celebrate an anniversary (of what?); while Graham played cards with two friends called Fred (Michael Keane) and Andrew (Anthony Taylor). Things got more interesting once Graham started to hallucinate the image of a black woman, Rakaya (Clare-Hope Ashitey), trapped in some kind of orb as two planets collide. And why is Tibo saying a bald man from his dreams has been appearing in his bedroom? Or why, for that matter, is Yaz now dreaming of a lonely country road in the hills surrounding Sheffield, and seeing the same bald man in her room?

For a while, there was such a lot of confusion and competing ideas that it was at least intriguing to see if the mystery would come together. The bald dream maker, Zellin (Ian Gelder), was revealed to have detachable fingers that could levitate and plug into people’s ears to apparently siphon their nightmares. But how is he involved with the giant Chagaska terrorising Aleppo? By the time the story reached the halfway point, I was optimistic “Can You Hear Me?” would pull things together in a smart way. The atmosphere and strangeness were definitely working and kept me interested in seeing where things were heading...

Ultimately, The Doctor and Tahira travelled in the TARDIS back to Sheffield to pick up her frightened companions after they each called her in distress. And after hooking Graham up to the TARDIS psychic circuits, they arrived aboard a space platform in the distant future — where two local planets were colliding and a black woman was trapped between them in a blue orb. Zellin then appeared to explain what’s happening, and the story instantly fell apart into a mess of ridiculousness and malformed ideas being rushed through.

Deep breath…

Zellin and Rakaya are Gods, or Eternals, the latter imprisoned by the civilisations on two worlds that used to worship them before growing to hate them —so built a prison for Rakaya by pinching her between their colliding planets. Zellin has been trying to free her for aeons and has kept her alive on the stolen nightmares of humans.

And then The Doctor’s unwittingly unfastens a corporeal lock keeping Rakaya imprisoned and duly frees her, so the two Eternals can gloat before strolling around modern-day Sheffield with a plan to feed off human nightmares together forever. But despite being tied up back on the space platform in the distant future, The Doctor escapes because her sonic screwdriver defies the laws of gravity to fly up into her hand from her coat pocket — or so it appeared, in a woeful case of the writers painting themselves into a corner. But why not just shake the sonic into The Doctor’s foot and have her kick it up into her hand? It would’ve still been a bit unlikely but it would’ve made physical sense!