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doctor who - Are there beings which have perfected hiding?


At the end of Listen, I got the feeling they wanted to write it off as an illusion of the Doctor, since Clara grabbed his ankle when he was a kid. So because of this there are no beings which perfected hiding, they just do not exist. Is this what they were going for? is it open to our own interpretation? or are there actually beings which have perfected hiding?


It just isn't really clear to me.


To me, those beings do exist since we saw the Doctor placing the chalk on the book where as it wasn't there anymore when he wanted to pick it up and listen was written on the board. We did not see the Doctor do it and the camera was on him the whole time right?


On a side note I was really on edge when I saw LISTEN on the board. A week long I humored my self thinking they might be real.



Answer



It’s deliberately ambiguous.


Every spooky situation in the episode has a rational explanation. For example:




  • The word “LISTEN” on the blackboard is written in the Doctor’s handwriting. He protests that “I couldn't have written it and forgotten, could I?”, but I’m not entirely convinced.

  • I explained the monster in Rupert’s bedroom in another question.

  • The banging on the door of the space station is just the pressure seal, not somebody outside the door.


And so on.


Maybe there are beings that have perfected hiding, but that doesn’t mean the Doctor has just found them, or any evidence for them. By their very nature, such creatures would leave no evidence of their existence, unless they chose to do so.


The only way to prove their existence is to find a situation in which the only explanation is creatures with perfect hiding, and we don’t have any of those. (And indeed, if we can find evidence that they exist, isn’t their ability to hide not quite as perfect as we might think?)


Of course, it is also impossible to disprove their existence. However hard you argue that there isn’t one standing right behind you, I could argue that it’s so good at hiding that you could never notice it standing there, and you have no way of proving me wrong. (If we take “perfect” to the extreme.)


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