The theory goes that there are creatures perfectly evolved not to be predators or survivors, but hiders. That they follow people around and listen to them, and that these things are the reason why people sometimes lose things that they only just put down, and why they sometimes talk to themselves when they're alone. He reasons that the proof of this is that most everyone has, at one point in there life at least, had a dream of something being under there bed, specifically of touching their food as they sit up. During his first conversation with Clara in this episode, it is implied that the Doctor's interest in this is because he had this rather common dream, or a variation thereof, himself at some point.
But I'm getting ahead of myself, because before he and Clara can discuss the situation, the Doctor must first retrieve her from her apartment, as she returns home after her date with Danny Pink.
Wait a minute, a plot thread involving a character introduced by Moffat in one of his previous episodes? Does that mean...yes, this is a Stephen Moffat episode. I know that I've given the man a lot of flak lately for over-complicating the series as of late, and there is some of that here too, but believe me when I say that this is a good Moffat episode.
So Clara flubs her date. Badly. She and Danny are both obviously, visibly nervous: Clara because of the second life that she's hiding, and Danny likely due to his troubling history in the military. Clara returns home, and she finds the Doctor and the TARDIS in her apartment, the Doctor sitting at her vanity, puzzling over the existence of wraparound mirrors. Clara doesn't want to go with the Doctor, wanting to instead try immediately to fix things with Danny, but the Doctor insists, and they set out. The Doctor asks her if she has ever had a variation of this dream, and she says that of course she has, and asks if he has. He avoids the question, which if how you know that the answer is yes. If rule one is that the Doctor lies, then rule two must be that the Doctor avoids the truth.
Hoping to find the thing that is the reason for these dreams, which the Doctor reasons are not dreams, the Doctor ties Clara right into the TARDIS psychic interface, which has been linked to the navigation system. He tells her to focus on the moment in her life when she had that dream, so that they can travel there and the Doctor can find the Hider, warning Clara not to get distracted. Clara still wants to go back to Danny, though, so instead of going to that point in her own timeline, she goes back to that point in Danny's timeline, at a point when young Danny was living in a group home. She realizes that young Danny is there and goes up to meet him, and they discover that there is, in fact, something in his room. The Doctor joins them, and they allow the thing to leave unseen, as they don't know what the Hider would be driven to do if it were actually seen. Finally, in an effort to help little Danny overcome his fear, the Doctor gives a speech about how fear is a superpower, how it makes you think faster and fight harder, and Clara accidentally sparks little Danny's desire to become a soldier in the first place.
Clara now insists on going back to see Danny again, just as there date ended, so that she can fix it, but she trips over herself again and now Danny is actively questioning what it is that Clara is hiding. That's the theme of this episode: hiding and seeking, and learning to look beyond the things that might be hidden to find what is actually there. Clara, once again defeated by her own uncertainty, is once again scooped up by the Doctor, and finds that he is not alone on the TARDIS, that he has gone off and picked up a time traveler from one hundred years in the future, when Earth launches their first time ship.
The young man went off course and ended up at the end of time, but more surprisingly the Doctor found the young man by using the psychic trace that Clara left in the TARDIS system, implying that this man is related to Clara somehow, and the man looks almost exactly like Danny, shares his surname, and even carries the same toy soldier that Clara gave Danny to spark his confidence in that group home so many years ago. The man even says that he went into time travel because one of his great grandparents was a time traveler. It is obvious that this young man is a descendant not just of Danny, but of Clara, implying, if not outright stating, that things work out between them.
The Doctor agrees to take the young man, Orson, back to his own time, but first he hopes to make use of this rare opportunity. See, Orson is at the end of the universe. He is the only person left alive anywhere, and yet he is sure that there is someone outside of his ship. The Doctor reasons that this is one of the Hiders, and he sends Clara and Orson into the TARDIS while he opens the doors to meet whatever it is that is waiting out there. Clara remarks that it's too risky, that the air shell around the ship could fail and the Doctor might suffocate. She demands to know why the Doctor is so obsessed with this thing, but just as he refused to answer her question earlier, he refuses to answer again and forces her to go inside where she will be safe. Sure enough, the air shell fails, and Orson must go outside and pull the Doctor in.
The Doctor is out cold, struck by debris pulled past him by the decompressing atmosphere. Panicking, and afraid that the Hider might be able to get inside, Clara tries to use the psychic interface to fly the TARDIS away. However, just as the interface hung onto Clara's psychic imprint after she used it, it held onto the Doctor's after he used it last. She ends up traveling to the point in the Doctor's timeline when he had the dream, and before she realizes it, she goes outside and finds the young Doctor sleeping in his family barn, crying out of fear. She is forced to hide under the Doctor's bed, and then reach out and grab his leg before he can go and investigate the TARDIS, crossing his own timeline and causing a potentially deadly paradox.
Clara tells the Doctor to just lay back down and go back to sleep, to ignore the thing under his bed. He does, and she rises to find him hiding his head under his blanket and crying. She sits down with him and looks around. She realizes that this is the Doctor's place of courage, which is why he sleeps out here, and why he had to return to this barn nine hundred years later, before he could use The Moment to end the Last Great Time War. She tells him that he will always be brave, because fear is a superpower. It makes you think faster and fight harder. It is a companion that stays with you always and keeps you safe. She leaves without being seen, giving the Doctor the same toy soldier, giving him the courage and the inspiration to become the man that she knows in her time. Now she knows why the Doctor was so obsessed: he needed to meet the thing that inspired him to become a hero in order to learn for himself whether or not he really is one.
Clara returns to the TARDIS, begging the Doctor not to go out there. She knows now that there is no Hider, that the thing in little Danny's room was another child tricking him, and that the Hider that the Doctor met was only her. Most of all, though, she knows enough from her time in the Doctor's time stream to understand what might happen if the Doctor meets his childhood self. The Doctor does as Clara asks. Maybe he has figured out what is going on, maybe not. I prefer to think the latter, as it means that he trusts Clara's judgment more than his own in the end. They return Orson to his time, and then the Doctor returns Clara to her's, and she goes to see Danny at his apartment. She is still nervous, but now her nervousness is an ally, and she isn't adversely affected by it. The episode ends on the two of them kissing.
This episode was great, going from creepy to heartwarming so often and so quickly that it threatens to give you whiplash. The final scene prior to Clara's return home, where she gives the Doctor the inspiration to be who she knows he can be is a little convoluted in that supreme Moffat style, but it doesn't matter, since it is also one of the most touching scenes of the entire franchise. This episode certainly had some weak moments. The first date scene was written to be painfully awkward, and it succeeded, almost too much. Also, the fact that the monster turned out to be nothing more than a group home resident and Clara herself was a bit disappointing in the end, even if the barn scene makes up for this greatly. Overall, though, this was an enjoyable episode which proves that Moffat can still write a good standalone episode of the series to which he has devoted so much of his time. I give this episode an above average 7.5 out of 10, and I hope that Moffat keeps up this type of writing, as it suggests good things going into the future of this series' run.
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