Doctor Who: ‘Listen’ – The Perfect Origin Story?

Series 9 gave us an explanation of the Doctor’s origins, but does an episode from Series 8 offer a better one?

Recently, I expressed my dislike of the Hybrid arc in Series 9 of Doctor Who, particularly how it related to the Doctor’s origins and how it just wasn’t satisfying as an alternative to what ‘The War Games’ already gave us.

The funny thing is that, in my opinion, Moffat already gave us a much, much better reason for the Doctor to run away from Gallifrey, and yet it uses the same elements that I didn’t like about the Hybrid, – Clara and the Time War. In this case, I’m thinking of the scene of Clara and the young Doctor in ‘Listen.’

Now, let’s take a look at that key moment. Clara tells a scared young boy that, while he’s scared now, it’s OK, because there are benefits to being afraid. And then she tells him something else.

"…And one day, you’re going to come back to this barn, and on that day, you’re going to be very afraid indeed."

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We may not know of all the reasons why the Doctor ran away from Gallifrey (perhaps the Hybrid was only one of many), but I like to think that the very beginning of it all was in that barn. He may not have been entirely sure whether the voice he heard was a dream or not, but I can’t help but think that, as much as the rest of Clara’s speech may have inspired him a little, the knowledge that he would one day have to face something terrible when he came back to the barn would probably have scared him even more in the long run. Especially as he didn’t know what he’d be afraid of. And while it’s easy for Clara to say that he’ll do the right thing, would the Doctor have believed that?

Essentially, the Doctor knows that one day he’ll have a decision to make, that he’ll be very, very scared, and that it’s going to happen in that barn. So it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine him making a vow, even subconsciously, of never returning to the barn under any circumstances.

It’s simple, at first. Go to Prydon Academy, graduate and become a Time Lord. He makes friends, starts a family, loses friends, former friends become enemies – the typical Gallifreyan renegade’s life, essentially.

But eventually, just staying away from the barn while being on the same planet isn’t enough. Deep down, he has to stay as far away from that barn as possible. And while he may have had other, more pressing reasons to leave that involved his granddaughter, I’d like to think that running away from the barn, even subconsciously, is a good reason by itself.

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All of this is just pure speculation, of course, which is partly why I love it – it leaves much more room for imagination about the Doctor’s beginnings than the Hybrid arc did. It’s also a theory that allows for ‘The Day of the Doctor’ to genuinely be more than simply bridging the end of the classic era and the start of the new, and features not just the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors facing their past, but the War Doctor finally facing something he had been scared of throughout all of his lives. Yes, ‘Listen’ does include the Time War and Clara, but it does it in such a way that it doesn’t retcon too much of the Doctor’s history. Especially since Clara didn’t mention the War directly.

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Next: When Desire Leads to Rumors

So what do you think? Does ‘Listen’ work better as a form of “origin” story than the Hybrid, or does it still reveal too much? Leave your comments below.