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Show Notes
This week on a very special episode of Doctor Who…
Simon and Eugene discuss Can You Hear Me?
Episode Synopsis
The year is 1380, in the Syrian city of Aleppo, and Tahira, a mentally ill woman who gets her kicks by stealing things is returning, hastily to the hospital she is staying in. She asks Maryam, a hospital worker, if she’s prepared for the coming of the things, but, she hasn’t, because they don’t believe her. Big mistake – the monsters come and take them away.
The Doctor returns Yaz for something at a particular date and time. She’s close. She only misses by 77 minutes.
The gang leave the Doctor to spend a single day catching up on their lives. For the Doctor, time weighs heavily on her hands, until (unbeknownst to her) a mysterious man in black appears briefly in the TARDIS, followed by a noise coming from 1380 Allepo, which she decides to check out.
She arrives in the empty hospital and waxes poetic to the audience about how enlightened islamic 14th century mental health care was, as you do.
She encounters Tahira, cowering in fear, and one of the monsters, hereafter referred to as a Chagaska, (Actually, I’m kidding, I’m not going to mention them again) which runs away when Tahira tells it to leave the Doctor alone. There are not many clues to be found, but luckily every last member of the gang calls at this exact moment. They’ve all been reconnecting with their disinteresting lives and something weird has happened.
Ryan’s friend has been having bad dreams and now is seeing the mysterious man in black from his dreams in his room. Yaz had a dream and saw the same man in black in her parents’ flat and Graham had a telepathic call for help from a woman trapped in an orb projected into his brain.
Altogether in the TARDIS, along with Tahira, they plug Graham into the telepathic circuits and off they go to an orbiting space platform, which is monitoring what appears to be the collision of two planets, somehow suspended at the last moment by the very orb Graham saw in his psychic episode.
It’s a prison! Never one to miss the opportunity to rescue someone locked up in a prison without doing any research, the Doctor sets about using the TARDIS to free the woman inside.
The man in black now captures Tahira and the gang and sets them to dreaming their nightmares. He confronts the Doctor, explaining that his name is Zellin, and he is one of the immortals and that playing with the nightmares of humans passes the time for him.
She’s got him thwarted though, she’s released the prisoner he was holding in the orb, because she’s clever.
Except, the Doctor has forgotten, occasionally, prisons are actually to incarcerate naughty people. IN this case, the naughty one is Zellin’s partner in crime, another immortal. Between them they caused untold suffering to the people of the two worlds, until they rose up and imprisoned the worse of the two immortals in the orb. Oops. The Doctor has been played for a fool. Zellin needed someone clever enough to unlock the prison so that his partner could escape.
The Doctor is captured and placed with the others, while the immortals go to Earth and cause tasty nightmares, but the Doctor soon escapes and, with very little effort, imprisons both the immortals back into the orb.
Oh, and Ryan convinces his friend to get mental help, Yaz remembers the time she needed mental help and Graham opens up to the Doctor about his fear of cancer. It is a heart full plea for connection and help, which the Doctor bungles spectacularly.
Our heroes leave to destroy Big Finish’s story, the Company of Friends.