purplecat

I've felt strangely reluctant to write about Can you Hear Me? not because I particularly disliked the episode but parts of its themes seem so big, and the reaction to them online so divided and largely beyond my experience, it feels like walking into a minefield and I don't want to get hurt or, more importantly, given mental health was so central to the episode, to hurt other people.

Some of the episode is easy to talk about. This is one of Doctor Who's slightly off-the-wall episode. Not quite the "sideways" of the show's original vision, but something that refuses to play with the show's default aesthetic or assumptions but is determined to be its own thing, not necessarily in a particularly showy way, but in a way that makes you appreciate that the show is big enough to be this kind of thing sometimes.

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The plot of Can you Hear Me? is almost irrelevant. Certainly sufficiently so that my feeling about it is largely that its good enough for what it needs to do. This was a mood piece about theme and character. I think it may have flubbed that in a couple of places, but mostly it was atmospheric and compelling. This episode isn't ever going to be one of my favourites (though I would take it over much of series 11, I must confess), but it is definitely the kind of story that Doctor Who needs to tackle from time to time, if only to establish and maintain the flexibility of its format.