The Caretaker marks a special occasion for me. This episode marked the start of The Clara Backdown. I am officially tired of Clara as a character and the show focusing on here, especially since her role as “The Impossible Girl” is now pointless to the plot. The one good thing is that she’s a gateway for Danny to become a companion (however short-lived that may be).

This episode has a promising premise. Clara is run ragged by her double life until her two worlds collide, hi-jinks ensue. There’s some really interesting scenes and some good performances but I can’t say this is a good episode as a whole, mainly because of the focus on Clara again.

The Doctor infiltrates Coal Hill school as a caretaker, hoping to flush out a Skovox Blitzer. This diminutive destroyer of planets is a weird war machine that seems out of place in this universe, especially given it’s similarity to alien races in the Mass Effect series. It’s a simple plot device that gets no development outside of the basic schtick they use for Daleks.

Capaldi is on top form as usual; sassing Clara, Danny, teachers and pupils alike. His dismissive attitude towards Danny’s role as maths teacher could possibly be a call-back to his time as the Fifth Doctor and the Brigadier (who became a maths teacher after retiring from UNIT). His hostility towards Danny as a soldier is one of the highlights of the episode and is the angriest/most offensive we’ve seen the Doctor in a long time.

Clara is Clara. Nuff said.

Danny Pink gets lots of character development this episode! He continues to be a really likeable guy and even shows how he acts in his relationship with Clara (which some have described as abusive because of this episode. Those people are retarded) and even has a big damn hero moment with a sick front flip for style. He takes some abuse from the Doctor but responds in kind. He’s not going to let the Doctor’s attitude slide and that’s refreshing. It’s very Donna Noble and she was the best companion, hands down.

The Promised Land makes a return after a three episode absence but we’re dealing with someone other than Missy, who is “busy”. This suit (who is apparently called Seb) is interviewing the police officer who fell victim to the Blitzer early on, and refers to the realm they’re in as The Nethersphere (his favourite name for the place). Still not sure of the rhyme or reason of these sequences but hopefully we’ll find that out at the end of the season.

Half way through Season 8 and the only outstanding episode in this reviewer’s opinion is Listen. That’s poor form, Who. Poor form. This show needs to up it’s game, especially if it wants to keep getting reviewed. I dropped Miracle Day, I’ll drop Who if it turns to shit and I’ll turn my full attention to Agents of SHIELD and The Flash! Come back next week for the Alien homaging – Kill the Moon (That’s a pretty good title…)

Hot DAMN! That was easily the best episode of the season. After a little stumbling with our new Doctor, Moffat returns on top form with a genuine creepy and atmospheric look at one of our basic fears: the monster under the bed.

Over the course of this franchise’s long history, you’d think this story might have been broached before but I don’t believe it has and if it was, it was never as good as this, I can assure you. The story starts off strong with the Doctor in full mad ramble. He postulates that there’s creatures in the universe who are nigh-invisible who possess “perfect hiding” (camouflage, Google it) and are responsible for your hair standing up on the back of your neck. THUS BEGINS 20 MINUTES OF BUTT-CLENCHING TENSION.

But before that, we get the return of Danny Pink, and his date with Clara and boy, does that go about as well as you’d expect a date between a know-it-all narcissist and a socially awkward PTSD sufferer. They argue intensely and Clara returns home to find the Doctor waiting. He plugs her into the guts of the TARDIS and attempts to travel back to her childhood, inadvertently landing in the children’s home where Danny (then called Rupert) lives. This is where the tension kicks in as the Doctor questions the custodian about things moving and the like (even swiping his coffee just to really rustle his jimmies) while Clara goes all supernanny and reassures a frightened Rupert that there’s no monster under the bed, only her. With both Clara and Rupert under the bed, something compresses the mattress down and I actually applaud the show for it not being the Doctor in a comedic swerve but something genuinely unnerving.

This whole sequence was performed beautifully and the atmosphere was thick with dread as the creature did nothing but sit there and turn its head. It’s pure nightmare fuel at its finest and this 27 year old was sufficiently spooked, not to mention my 8 year old sister. The sequence on the spaceship later (yeah, there’s a spaceship too) is also pretty fucking scary, though I was chuckling as my little sister was steadily clambering over the back of the sofa.

Through temporal shenanigans involving the mental interface of the TARDIS, Clara winds up in an all too familiar barn, in the company of a crying child. Her snooping is interrupted by two people, one reassuring him and the other chastising, claiming he “will never be a Timelord”. If that wasn’t bad enough, when the child stirs and gets out of bed, Clara, hiding under the bed, grabs his ankle and inadvertently becomes the monster under the bed. She calmly urges him to get back in bed and go to sleep and before she slinks off, she thinks better of just leaving after scarring a childlord for life. Her nanny instinct takes over and, in a very touching and clever scene, she puts a lot of ideas into his head that have had payoff. She reiterates the 12th Doctor’s speech to Rupert, now to his younger first incarnation. “Never cruel or cowardly” and “Fear makes companions of us all” are phrases the First and War Doctors have uttered and we find out that this indeed the same barn as the War Doctor retreats to out of sentimentality. It’s a fantastic scene.

Now. The main point of contention for this episode is the “monster”. In the scene with young Rupert and later in the spaceship at the end of existence, people are having a conniption because they don’t know what the monster is. THERE IS NO GOD DAMN MONSTER. It’s a trick on the audience. The Doctor, Rupert, and Clara were all expecting a monster… And so were we… And that’s exactly what we got. But as Clara points out at the end of the episode: What if there was no monster? Sure, there’s little plot holes with that theory like Rupert’s blanket going missing but give me a better answer. Go on, write it in the comments below.

Listen is by far the highlight of this season so far and I truly hope this will be the standard for the series going forward but if not, this episode can join the likes of The Empty Child, Blink and Silence in the Library as a terrific tale of terror at tea time. It has a deliciously thick atmosphere, lots of great character development and a plot twist so twisty, we’ll have to rob a bank next week. That’ll be fun!