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BBC Can You Hear Me? |
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| Story No. | 320 | 
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| Production Code | Series 12, Episode 7 | |
| Dates | February 9, 2020 |
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With Jodie Whittaker, Bradley Walsh, Tosin Cole, Mandip Gill
Written by Charlene James and Chris Chibnall Directed by Emma Sullivan Executive Producers: Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens |
| Synopsis: The Doctor saves the last patient alive in a mental hospital. |
Unfinished Sympathy by Niall Jones 1/12/25
In an article for the Radio Times, published almost a year after the broadcast of Can You Hear Me?, Huw Fullerton reports Chris Chibnall as saying that 'mental health had to be tackled on the show, or risk the Doctor looking dated to a modern audience'.
Doctor Who has been addressing social and political themes more or less since it began, so there is nothing new about tackling a subject like mental health; however, the idea that something 'has to be tackled' rings alarm bells. It suggests that Chibnall and co-writer Charlene James may have chosen to write about mental health not because they had a burning passion to do so or because they had anything specific that they wanted to say about it but because they felt that the topic was too prominent not to write about. There is something slightly cynical about this reasoning, as though mental health has simply been ticked off a list of important topics.
Fortunately, the story itself doesn't feel cynical. The overall message --- that you should talk to someone if you are struggling with your mental health --- is sincere and positive, albeit something that most viewers will likely have heard before. However, while the episode's intentions are good, the way in which it executes its ideas is often poor.
The episode's most notorious moment comes at its end, when Graham seeks to confide in the Doctor about his fears around his cancer returning. In response, she acknowledges that 'I should say a reassuring thing now, shouldn't I?', before adding that 'I'm still quite socially awkward, so I'm just going to subtly walk towards the console and look at something and then, in a minute, I'll think of something that I should have said that might have been helpful.' Poor Graham is left somewhat bemused, laughs awkwardly and adds that 'I'm glad we had this chat, eh?' It's fair to say that this encounter did not go down well.
In response to the numerous complaints they received from viewers, the BBC put out the following statement: 'The intention of the scene was to acknowledge how hard it can be to deal with conversations on this subject matter.' To be fair to them, this makes sense --- not recognising that dealing with mental-health issues can be difficult would have risked looking glib and the line about 'something I should have said' has a certain poignancy, at least on paper --- but the scene nevertheless comes across poorly on-screen. The biggest problem is that it takes place between Graham and the Doctor. The Doctor can be flawed, but she has always been the moral centre of the show; to have her act in such a cold and inconsiderate way towards a friend strikes a sour note and undermines the message that the rest of the story has been emphasising. The Doctor's description of herself as 'socially awkward' also doesn't ring true. In The Woman Who Fell to Earth, she attended the funeral of Grace, a woman she barely knew, while she has had no difficulty squaring up to villains such as the Master. Compounding this issue is the way that the scene is set up. The pauses, the awkward glances, the light music all present the scene as essentially humorous. If it is a joke, however, then it is one without a punchline; the scene may have a comedic structure, but it fails to be even remotely funny. This results in a confused tone that stands in contrast to the rest of the episode.
The flawed ending would be forgivable if it were just one slip up in an otherwise strong story. Unfortunately, it points to a wider problem: that the Doctor is written very badly, coming across as self-obsessed and uncaring. Can You Hear Me? contains multiple scenes in which the Doctor explains something out loud, only to realise that there is no one to hear her. This not only makes the exposition painfully obvious ('Of course, Islamic physicians were known for the enlightened way they dealt with people with mental-health problems'), but also suggests that her interactions with her companions are performances, rather than genuine conversations. She talks at them and, in their absence, will happily talk at empty space. She even spends part of one scene oblivious to the fact that they have just vanished. There's nothing inherently wrong with writing the Doctor as slightly scatterbrained, her own brain working so fast that she misses the obvious; here, though, it poses a major problem. In an episode about the importance of listening, the Doctor is too wrapped up in her own world to pay attention to anyone else.
The situation is not helped by Jodie Whittaker's performance. Although she is generally good as the Doctor, she is rarely good enough to elevate a weak script. Throughout the episode, she plays the Doctor as energetic and perky. The contrast between the upbeat performance and the seriousness of the episode's subject matter is jarring, and it makes the Doctor come across as superficial and dangerously low on self-awareness. Her relentless positivity not only grates but risks making her actively unlikable. A stronger performance by Whittaker, one that potentially played against the script, wouldn't have turned Can You Hear Me? into a good episode, but it would have made it more watchable.
Unlike Whittaker, the actors playing the companions do at least get some interesting material to work with. The story explores the ways in which travelling in the TARDIS has disrupted Graham and Ryan's lives, while also revealing Yaz's history of mental-health problems. All this is good, but it runs into an unusual problem. While the character development is welcome, it comes too late in the series for it to have a real impact.
Central to the Sheffield-set parts of the story are the companions' relationships with their friends and family. On paper, this is an interesting topic to explore, especially as none of the companions actively chose to travel with the Doctor. However, it runs into a problem that is the fault, not of the episode itself, but of Series 12 as a whole. When Russell T Davies brought Doctor Who back in 2005, one of his biggest innovations was to focus on the companions' home lives. Watching characters such as Jackie and Wilf develop over numerous episodes was one of the biggest upsides of Davies' sometimes-derided 'soap opera' approach to the show. In contrast, Chibnall's approach to family (aside from the Ryan-Graham relationship) is much more inconsistent, with friends and family appearing only briefly and haphazardly. When Ryan tells his friend Tibo that 'this ain't you' and Tibo retorts, 'You haven't been around, so how do you know what I am?', it's easy for viewers to sympathise. Aside from a very brief glimpse of him playing basketball at the beginning of Spyfall Part 1, viewers have not met Tibo before, making it difficult to judge the extent to which his behaviour in Can You Hear Me? is out of character. Viewers also have little investment in his relationship with Ryan, diluting the power of this part of the story.
While 21st-century Sheffield is at the heart of the story, only about a third of the episode takes place there, with the rest of the action taking place in medieval Syria and deep space. Setting a single story in multiple far-flung locations is typical of Chibnall's era, acting as a shorthand for scale. In practice, however, such range tends to dilute the impact of individual settings, as there is not enough time to explore each one in detail. This is more of a problem in Can You Hear Me? than in other episodes, such as Spyfall or Praxeus, as the settings are not just geographically different, but belong almost to different stories. While the Sheffield-set parts of the episode begin in a realist mode of storytelling, focused on exploring important issues, the deep-space scenes are science fiction, featuring powerful godlike beings.
These two separate stories could each work well on their own, but the way they combine, with the godlike Zellin feeding nightmares to Tibo, like an evil version of the BFG, ironically highlights the downside of something that Chibnall has described as one of Doctor Who's biggest strengths. For him, Doctor Who's 'status as a high-concept sci-fi show allow[s] for these issues to be tackled in an indirect or metaphorical way'. While there are numerous examples of Doctor Who exploring political and moral issues through metaphor --- from fascism in Genesis of the Daleks to social Darwinism in Survival --- it does have its limits. While the monstrous Chagaskars work as a metaphor for internal fears, there are points in the episode in which using metaphor becomes counterproductive. Ordinarily, Tibo's behaviour --- becoming withdrawn, locking himself in his flat --- would be a sign of mental ill-health, but it is rendered perfectly reasonable in the sci-fi world of Doctor Who. After all, a strange bald man has been breaking into his home and sticking his detached fingers in his ears.
Assigning a sci-fi cause to a real-life condition is at best unnecessary and at worst unhelpful. As a result, the story goes from being about mental health to being about supernaturally powerful beings. Sci-fi problems also have sci-fi solutions (in this case, some random technobabble), but mental health is an everyday issue, often without obvious solutions. Linking the sci-fi and real-life elements of the story together in such a way feels clumsy and risks downplaying the importance of the central theme. Towards the end of the episode, Tibo attends a group-therapy session, in which he talks about his feelings of loneliness, bringing the focus back to mental health. This begs an important question: if Tibo's issues are unrelated to the threat from Zellin, what was the point in him being a victim in the first place? Wouldn't it have made more sense to explore his mental health in a realistic way, without the sci-fi trappings?
For all its flaws, there are some good things about Can You Hear Me? Aside from a bizarre shot in which the Doctor's sonic screwdriver floats upwards from her coat pocket and into her hand, the episode is well-directed, with Emma Sullivan bringing an effectively dreamlike quality to the story's nightmares and flashbacks. There are also some genuinely creepy images, and the animated sequence retelling the myth of the godlike Zellin and Rakaya is a creative and visually striking piece of storytelling.
Despite its visual flair and the positive nature of its message, Can You Hear Me? simply doesn't work. It is poorly written, with an ending that left many viewers with a sour taste in their mouths. It may not be the weakest episode in Series 12, but it illustrates many of its flaws. By pushing metaphor beyond the limits of its utility, it suggests that, sometimes, the best way to address a subject is to address it head-on. Can You Hear Me? might be a better episode than Orphan 55, but the latter might just have had the right approach.