Can You Hear Me?

In the 1990s, The Outer Limits used to close each of its episodes with a hokey voice-over musing on what the tale had taught us. It was crass and often laughable but also wry and knowing. Doctor Who’s message of the week is not wry and knowing. It’s the third time in seven episodes that the show has given us “food for thought” as we approach the closing titles. And herein is the reason why Can You Hear Me? is not completely successful: it is a victim to the series around it.

Suddenly, it seems a writer other than Chris Chibnall has an unusual interest in the regular cast; the TARDIS team’s story had been all but abandoned since Spyfall. Here, their motivations and anxieties form the basis for four different plot strands. However, it feels like too little too late. Graham had recovered from a cancer scare before Episode 1 of Series 11. Only now, 17 episodes later, does it become something to talk about and then only because this week’s message is: “It’s Good to Talk.” Yaz is, all of a sudden, a character with a past, and one who has managed to painfully endure a walking-talking PC Advert monologue at her in cliché: “I’ve been where you’ve been,” the copper remarks, hoping it might chime with a girl in despair by the side of the road and showing a complete misunderstanding of how teenager minds work. None of this rings true. It doesn’t feel like what little we know about Yaz has been informed by this almost suicidal episode. The police woman's advice does not sound like anything Yaz might heed because it smacks of script. There is nothing real happening here. Like the last two messages (Save the Planet and Plastic Pollution), this one is cack-handedly dealt with. It’s not a little patronising and feels wrong for the Sunday night timeslot. Are children watching this? Or Countryfilers? Do viewers who are about to embrace the subtle mysteries of life and death in Call the Midwife really need this sort of depressing and obvious guff before their more nuanced, more palatable, far better written offerings on a Sunday night? As the weekend comes to a close, I want to avoid thinking about work and lose myself in television. I don’t want to think about something yet more dreary than Monday. I resolutely, definitely don’t want a bloody helpline. If there’s something wholly conspicuous by its absence from Chris Chibnall’s iteration of Doctor Who, it is a sense of fun.

This is such a shame because, despite the above, there is much to applaud elsewhere in the episode. Ian Gelder is magnificently, terrifically creepy as Zellin (although I would have preferred for Charlene James to go full throttle and make him an actual Eternal or the real-deal Toymaker!). There are unsettlingly creepy sequences throughout the episode: the first instance of Zellin’s fingers detaching themselves from his skeletal frame are sure to send children scurrying behind their sofas; the monsters in the pre-titles sequence awaken intrinsic fairy-tale fears of beasts and wolves, and the one on the ceiling is petrifying; Yaz’s disconcerting dream by the country roadside is off-kilter, unreal and definitely the stuff of more adult nightmares. There’s also a true feeling of the epic. We travel from Syria to Sheffield via a different solar system. The most uncanny scenes of all though happen in the suburban streets where Zellin and his recently unleashed comrade pit to steal the dreams of the world. Segun Akinola accompanies these shots with a merciless, oppressive dread, delivering his finest score of the season yet.

Charlene James and Chris Chibnall, despite their almost obligatory mishandling of the message of the week, do deliver a story where the themes reach across all of time and space. Aruhan Galieva’s Tahira is presumably suffering similar mental trauma so as to find herself at the hospital in Aleppo. Ryan’s best friend is mentally ill in the most modern and relatable of ways: locking his doors and a creeping sense of paranoia. Yaz is battling a depressive episode from her past and Graham is worrying that a terrible illness may return in the future. So there’s a definite cohesion of theme across the script making it feel like its own divorced piece of work: an examination of the nightmare. To that end, it can only be deemed successful on its own terms.

However, situated as it is, in a series full of other worthy, patronising sermons, its impact is lessened. There are also some less successful design decisions. The Aleppo hospital set looks like it’s been lifted from the Red Dwarf episode Lemons in which the Dwarfers run around the same obvious Indian marketplace set in circles. The spaceship set looks as if it’s been built without walls, the team literally filming against black drapes and fancy neon lighting. There’s also a fashionable propensity to shoot close-ups with characters’ heads left and right aligned, leaving half an empty screen, as if this makes the shots more interesting. It doesn’t.

What is the most troubling aspect of the whole episode, however, is the performance of leading lady Jodie Whittaker. To be blunt, it’s dreadful. Irritating, unfunny, lacking nuance and with every line delivered at exactly the same pace, she is frankly killing her scenes (and I don’t mean the more colloquial meaning of killing). Watch as she leaves the TARDIS in Syria mistakenly talking to the friends she has left behind. Her delivery is so achingly slow that the gag becomes unbelievable. Why wouldn’t she have noticed that they are not there between her pauses? It has to be said, lots of her dialogue is unforgiveable too. “This place has so many secrets to yield” an example of a prize clunk. You need someone in the role though who can at least deliver this stuff naturally, with an arguable modicum of believability. Whittaker has not managed to get a handle on this material at all and her attempted jokes leave the viewer either shaking their head in bafflement or wanting to smash the telly. I wish, as the first female Doctor, she were storming across the screens with magnificence. Instead, she’s difficult to like, irritating to listen to and in supporting evidence, routinely left in the cold by the guest cast. Ian Gelder leaves her adrift whenever they meet.

There is much to like about Can You Hear Me?: Gelder being outstanding, scenes that genuinely unsettle, a lovely unity of intent. However, the show’s more general attendant problems pervade. We are living through an age with a Doctor who completely lacks charisma and integrity. We are living through an era where the companions are ignored except for when we have an episode like this which only serves to highlight how underwritten they have previously been. We are living through a period in which the show seemingly feels the need to be about something, to highlight social injustice or planetary-wide pollution without offering up any joy to counterbalance the worthy misery. There is an aching feeling that Doctor Who does not know who it is being made for. Trying to please everyone and failing to please anyone feels like a fair assessment of where we’re at. Despite the profound themes and anxieties this episode facilitates, it’s sad that the most exciting moment for this viewer was when Zellin didn’t turn out to be the Toymaker.

4/10

JH