Review: Doctor Who Season 8 Episode 4: Listen

We open with the Doctor meditating cross legged on the TARDIS with his eyes closed. Will they open so he can say something needlessly portentous?

"Listen!"

Survey says yes. Moffat, you fucking hack.

The Doctor muses on why is there no such thing as perfect hiding? I don't know, jackass. Ask the Visians, or the Spiridons.

Jump to Clara and Mister Pink on a date, and it's is awful.Painful. Ugh. On this very special episode of Blossom, Clara learns that soldiers are people too. She couldn't find a taxi, so Clara leaves in a huff. This scene was just so bad. You can take the misogynist out of the sitcom, but you can't take the sitcom writer out of the misogynist.

The Doctor shows up at Clara's place and starts babbling about Russell's teapot, as explained by a third grader. "Clara, what if there if there were an invisible, inaudible, intangible, undetectable companion following everyone around?"

Clara doesn't say, "Well, you belonged to the most advanced civilization in the history of the universe. If such a thing existed, I imagine that your people would have devised a way to detect it."

This is absolutely what I hate most about Moffat's writing. Hey, I had a thought, and I'm going to write it directly into a script without time for introspection or investigation. It's bullshit, footnote to sophomore philosophy, tide goes in, tide goes out you can't explain it, magnets how do they work sophistry. It's like a Michael Bay movie without the explosions.

This worked in a comedy episode like Robot of Sherwood. It doesn't work in episode expected to be taken seriously.

The Doctor belittles Clara's appearance again throughout the episode. This is beyond shitty. We also get this.

How wacky.

Near the end of the episode, Clara says she can do "a thing". More talented writers have tried this phrase, but they only got away with it because they used it in passing, not as the crux on which an episode hinged.

And she winds up in the Doctor's bedroom when he was a Time Tot. Fortunately, the people on Galifrey decorate and talk exactly talk like sitcom parents from the 80s, enabling this misunderstanding.

I can't think of a worse episode of modern Who. This was just atrocious.