[be forewarned: Massive Spoilers await!]

Doctor Who is no stranger to psychological thriller episodes, one of the most well-known being the Tenth Doctor episode “Blink”, which, while mostly Doctor-less, managed to instill a deep seated fear of stone angels that likely lingers even to this day. However, this week’s episode instead focuses on a more primal fear: fear of the unknown. I really hope you weren’t planning on sleeping afterwards, because this is “Listen”.

Get used to hearing that title by the way, because they repeat that one word constantly through a good chunk of the first act. Hell, it’s the first word uttered at the start of the episode, said by The Doctor himself who is meditating on top of the TARDIS while it floats aimlessly through space. In an apparent fit on insomnia, The Doctor is muttering to himself that while nature has perfected the perfect predator as well as the perfect defense, he wonders out loud “What about the perfect hider?” What if there was a creature that had evolved solely to remain hidden? What if we are truly never alone, especially when we’re talking to ourselves? What would such a creature do?

As he ponders this, he sets down his piece of chalk and turns his back on the chalkboard he was using to write all this down. When he turns back around…something has scrawled a single word on his chalkboard: Listen.

Cue Intro!

After that, we open on Clara returning home in a huff after a rather awkwardly fumbled date with a man named Dan Pink. Yes, that is his last name and believe it or not he will become somewhat important for this episode later down the road. The Doctor is already waiting with the TARDIS in her bedroom and despite the fact that she would rather crawl into bed and forget this night ever happened, she reluctantly joins him. After a minute or two of reiterating a majority of what he said in the opening and showing her the chalkboard with “Listen” on it, The Doctor offers this little gem: he believes that, at some point in everyone’s life, they have had the exact same nightmare.

In this nightmare, you wake up in the middle of the night with the feeling that something is wrong. You turn on the light, and prepare to step out of bed. However, the second your feet touch the floor, something reaches out from under your bed and grabs your ankle. What The Doctor wants to know is what that something is.

So, after having Clara stick her fingers in a very gooey part of the TARDIS’ central console, he says he can lock onto her timeline and pinpoint the moment when Clara had such a nightmare. During this process though, Clara is distracted by her phone going off in her pocket and despite The Doctor taking it and throwing it over his shoulder, her mind drifts to her failed date from before. Thus, the TARDIS lands them in the courtyard of an orphanage that Clara has no memory of.

While our resident Timelord goes to get answers, terrifying the man on duty for the orphanage and stealing his coffee in the process, Clara looks up and notices a very familiar looking boy waving at her from his bedroom window, a child who identifies himself as Rupert Pink, though he remarks that he plans on changing his name the first chance he gets. Going up to his room, she learns that he’s scared because he had a nightmare where something grabbed him from under his bed. Trying to cheer him up, she convinces him to crawl under his bed with her to show him that there’s nothing there to get him. This manages to calm him down.

At least until something sits on the bed.

Getting out from out from under the bed, Clara and Rupert are horrified to see that something is sitting upright on the bed, its true form hidden beneath Rupert’s blankets. The Doctor suddenly appears and gives some kind of speech about how fear is good before the three of them turn their back to the creature hiding beneath the blankets. After a truly nail-biting moment in which we see a purposely fuzzy and out-of-focus look at the creature standing behind them, it disappears.

Clearly terrified by the encounter, Clara tries to once more calm Rupert down by finding his collection of army figurines and saying that they’ll protect him. When she asks him what the colonel figure’s name is however, Rupert responds with “Dan”. Growing tired if this, The Doctor puts his finger to the boy’s forehead, apparently scrambling his memory so all this will seem like a dream and knocking him out cold in the process. Because apparently he can do that now!

After we get some needless padding where Clara convinces The Doctor to take her back so she can salvage her date with Dan (only to royally mess it up once more), she encounters a man in an odd spacesuit. Thinking it’s The Doctor, she yells at him only for him to remove his helmet to reveal…Dan?!

Actually, The Doctor explains that it’s not Dan, but a descendant of his from about 100 years in the future named Orson Pink. Because using the same actor and saying he’s a “distant grandson from the future” is just so much cheaper after all. Regardless, The Doctor further explains that using the same method that brought them to the orphanage, he was able to lock onto Orson as he appears in Clara’s time stream.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that this ties into somewhat of a subplot where Clara realizes that she and Dan are fated to get married and this is her great grandson. Not only is it laughably obvious from the get-go, but it offers jack to the episode except more padding so I’m not going to mention anything further on the matter.

Back on topic, The Doctor excitedly exclaims “And you’ll never guess where I found him!” Where did he find him?

At the very edge of time itself.

You see, Orson was set to test one of humanities first forays into time travel where he would be sent in a small ship to about a week in the future. To say they overshot their mark is an understatement of the century, as instead Orson ended up stranded for six months on the last planet after all life in the universe has been wiped out, making him completely alone in the universe.

Or is he?

While Orson is believable excited about finally going home now that he’s found someone with a time machine, The Doctor says that because the TARDIS is usually unable to jump this far ahead (he was only able to by turning off just about every single one of its safeguards), it has to recharge for the night. Orson is horrified at this proposition, because he remarks that “Something’s out there”.

After convincing him to hide away in the safety of the TARDIS, The Doctor and Clara have a little stakeout in the main console area of Orson’s ship. What follows is essentially a re-enactment of what so many experience when they’re home all alone; the structure rattles, pipes creak and ever sound is magnified by the fear that something is out there. What happens next reminds me of a line from the shortest horror story ever written:

“The last man on Earth sat alone in his room. There was a knock on the door…”

And, lo and behold, that’s exactly what happens. When all life has been exterminated in the universe, something knocks on the door. It’s at this point where any sane man would have jumped inside the TARDIS and took off, but remember this is The Doctor we’re talking about here! So, with his trusty Sonic Screwdriver, he activates the electronic lock on the door. As it slowly unlocks, The Doctor orders Clara onto the TARDIS, but when she tries to convince him to dome too, he yells back that he’s come this far and he’s going to see this to the end. Clara utters one final remark of “Idiot”, before entering the TARDIS and slamming the door behind her.

So, it’s come to this moment. Standing by himself, The Doctor looks on as the door slides open, something just barely visible through the widening crack. And then…all footage of the console room goes dead, including the screens in the TARDIS. For a moment, nothing happens before a loud bang is heard. Orson says that the ships’ air-shield has ruptured, leading to explosive decompression of the ship. The cameras finally turn back on to reveal The Doctor holding onto the console for dear life as everything is sucked outside the ship. Orson manages to get to him before pulling him into the TARDIS, where The Doctor falls unconscious onto the floor.

Now, this is where the episode should have ended. It would have needed a brief epilogue regarding what The Doctor saw, but had it ended there then I would have been more than satisfied. Unfortunately, that was not the end and what follows causes the entire episode to quickly collapse in on itself.

Using the same method as before, Clara sticks her hands into the main console of the TARDIS and manages to send them…somewhere. Stepping out, she finds herself in a barn where she can just make out the sound of a young boy crying in bed. Going up to investigate, she is startled by to figures entering the barn. With little time to spare, she quickly hides under the bed as the two converse with the boy. As they’re leaving, one of them utters “If he can’t get over his fears, he’ll never manage to be a Timelord!”

That’s right: Clara is hiding under the bed of none other than The Doctor himself.

It’s at this point that the present Doctor wakes up in the TARDIS and, wondering where Clara has gone, calls out to her. Hearing noises, the past Doctor prepares to crawl out of bed to investigate. Horrified at the prospect of The Doctor meeting himself, Clara does the first thing she can think of: she reaches out from under the bed and grabs The Doctor’s ankles the second his feet touch the ground.

Are you looking for the nearest solid object to bash your head against? I know I was, but oh it gets so much worse from here. After managing to coax the young Timelord back to bed, she steps onto the TARDIS and offers this little tidbit: “Maybe…maybe there was never a monster at all. Maybe all this has just been a way to say that someone is afraid of the dark.”

You can’t hear or see it, but my hand just physically made contact with my face.

Um…news flash Clara: yes, there was a monster! What do you call the thing that was sitting on Rupert’s bed? A collective hallucination? You saw it, I saw it, we all saw it! Right there is irrefutable evidence that such a creature exists, and you’re trying to hand-wave it away by saying the Doctor’s just afraid? Are you mental?!

Arg…the episode closes with some kind of narration I could care less about as Orson is brought back to his time, the Doctor mopes in the TARDIS and Clara returns to Dan so they can furiously make out. Cue credits.

How? How do you manage to write a successful psychological thriller that actually caused me to lose sleep over and then completely {bleep} it up in the final minutes? Just…how?!

Anyway, as I said this episode mostly managed to do what it set out to in terrifying its audience. However, that ending is like crafting a gourmet meal worthy of a fine restaurant before hocking a lougie just as you’re ready to serve it.

Logically, there are only two ways this episode could have ended:

1) The monster was real, but we never see it because the fear of the unknown would make it much more effective. Furthermore, The Doctor would reassure anyone that said being was entirely benign and is such a constant in the lives of all living beings that going without would be even stranger than having the knowledge that you are never truly alone

or…

2) There is no such creature and everything truly was all paranoia and fear of the unknown playing tricks on our minds.

Where this episode fails is that it gets greedy and tries to do both outcomes, despite the fact that the two contradict one another and leads to the massive plot-hole that was “What the hell was the thing sitting on the bed?” If it turns out later down the line that it was a time displaced Clara or something like that, then I will personally hunt Steven Moffat down just so I can kick him where the sun don’t shine. Not only that, but it also fails by messing with The Doctor’s history and trying to squeeze in a retcon that ruins everything before it. Now you could say that everything The Doctor has ever done or ever will do has been because Clara grabbed his ankle in a moment of fear which is akin to spitting in the face of the fifty years of established continuity. One of these days, if this keeps up, Steven Moffat is going to burn Doctor Who to the ground.