What did the end of "Listen" mean?

For part one of my “Listen” analysis click here. This post contains spoilers for the Doctor Who episode “Listen” written by Steven Moffat.

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The first time I saw “Listen”, I didn’t know what to think. After seeing it three times now, I’m still not quite sure how it all worked out. I have read dozens of blogs and reviews about the episode, and each has their own ideas about the meaning of the episode.

This episode’s biggest question was something I have never had to ask myself at the end of any other Doctor Who episode. Was there actually a monster?  I still am not completely sure of the answer, but I’m leaning towards, no. But I’m first going to talk about what still makes me think maybe there was.

The main evidence that makes me think there is a monster, was the thing under the blanket on little Rupert Pink’s bed. For each event attributed to the ‘monster’ there was also given a mundane and rational explanation by the characters. In all of the other examples of the ‘monster’ it’s very possible that the rational explanation the Doctor and Clara gave was actually what the noise or weird event was.

However, the possibilities for the thing under Rupert’s blanket were explained as either the monster, or another child playing a prank. The thing under the blanket moved and behaved unlike any child I have ever seen. It was an extreme form of weird, stalkery, and creepy behavior even with adults in the room. A child wouldn’t have acted as the thing under the blanket did. But, that is the only scene with the ‘monster’ that I actually believe to be something unnatural.

As soon as Clara grabbed the young Doctor’s ankle in the barn, I began believing that Moffat made the episode to not actually have a monster. This was reinforced when Clara went back to the TARDIS and told the Doctor there was never anything there in the dark, and to forget about this quest. However, this brings up more questions about the dream that supposedly everyone has.

Peter Capaldi's Twelfth Doctor. Source.

If Clara was the cause of the Doctor’s nightmare of something being under his bed, why did everyone else in the episode and throughout history have the same nightmare? Obviously Clara wasn’t under everyone’s beds. Some hypothesize that the Doctor somehow spread this fear throughout his travels, as he did to Clara. Other people think that there actually was a monster, and that Clara grabbing the Doctor’s foot just served to make him aware of what was unseeable and unknowable. 

Excluding the blanket scene, I think the point was that you can fear something so much, that even if it’s not there you continually search for it. The Doctor foreshadowed this when he was in Rupert’s bedroom. As the Doctor was flipping through the pages of a book, he kept saying he couldn’t find Wally (or Waldo in America). Rupert told him that it wasn’t a Where’s Wally book and that Wally wasn’t in it. The Doctor tossed the book behind him and said, “Well that’s years of my life I’ll never get back”.

I think this was a precursor of the ending. Through this scene I think Moffat tried to show that you can believe something is there and try to find it, but that doesn’t mean it’s real. I think the Doctor feared these invisible monsters living in the dark so much that he looked for them obsessively, making everyone one else believe too, but in the end there wasn’t anything to find.