·
I actually find "Hell Bent" more
interesting (not necessarily better, but more interesting) than "Heaven
Sent", which I also loved, and was masterfully put together, but worked as
you'd expect a Moffat puzzle box to work (the first time I saw the burnt hand
in the pre credits, I thought "That'll probably turn out to be the
Doctor"). By contrast, I found it much trickier to figure out what this
episode was doing, but once it became clear, I was delighted. Rejecting the
epic for the personal is a Moffat era theme I rather love, and I think it's one
that's done particularly well here, unfolding slowly but methodically over the
course of three acts.
·
For the first act, we get the "Gallifreyan
western" pastiche, that is genuinely fun, but also seems to be setting up
the epic plot where the Doctor becomes the hybrid who stands in Gallifrey's
ruins. However, there are hints that the plot is going in a different direction.
When discussing the portentous prophecy with the Time Lords, the Doctor asks
“What colour is it?”, and when the general cannot answer his question, he says “See,
prophecies, they never tell you anything useful”: in this story, the
stereotypical “Epic” plot, with its vague prophecies and ridiculous stakes, is
something to be deconstructed and poked fun at.
·
The Doctor’s quote about prophecies also
reflects the general attitude towards the deep continuity that forms the
episode’s backdrop, but not its content. Whenever continuity related questions,
big or small, come up: it deliberately resists definition, offering potential
answers but no explicit confirmation. Which of Missy’s statements in “The
Magician’s Apprentice” was a lie? How did the Time Lords escape the bubble universe?
Is the Doctor really half human? Who or what is the Hybrid? The point is that
the the answers to these questions don’t matter: they would be empty signifiers
or continuity points filled in with no real meaning, part of a story designed
to tick boxes without saying anything meaningful.
·
The Second act starts when Clara is taken out of
her Time stream, ostensibly to help with the hybrid. We spend most of it in the
matrix, with the episode's turning point coming midway through the act when
Clara learns that the Doctor was just bluffing about the Hybrid to get a chance
to save Clara. The epic return to Gallifrey/ Hybrid arc was only ever a
Macguffin, the bait in a classic Moffat bait and switch. The real story of the
season was about the Doctor and Clara’s friendship, about its joys and
pitfalls. Which makes sense: the hybrid was just a word that got repeated a
handful of times, but the Doctor’s fear of losing Clara, Clara’s discomfort
with his paternalism, and their love for one another, have been major, plot
driving themes in multiple episodes this season. And here we begin to address
the implications of the Doctor’s actions, in particular Clara’s horror at what
the Doctor went through to save her. The lead up and pay off to Clara realising
how long Twelve was in the confession dial is beautifully done. The way he
tries to evade answering the question, as if he knows Clara's not going to like
what he's done, but also the way he says "What do you think? You", as
if it's the most obvious thing in the world: he really can't contemplate a
world where he wouldn't go through that to save Clara. It's one of the few
scenes in Doctor Who that genuinely has me in tears, every time. The act ends
with the Doctor and Clara stealing a TARDIS and running away, rejecting the
epic plot completely.
·
The final act is set at the end of the universe,
with Me and Clara critiquing the Doctor’s paternalism and inability to face
endings: a critique of his behavior at the end of both Donna and Amy’s stories
(Donna’s ending in particular, which I’m really glad of, because that mind wipe
didn’t do her character justice). And this critique is explored through a
valuable lesson in the importance of consent in interpersonal relationships. –
the Doctor acknowledges the way he’s wiped his companions’ memories before
(telepathically wiping Donna’s mind) isn’t perfect, explicitly saying he’s
tried to find a “painless” way to do this, but fails to recognise, or at least
to openly acknowledge, the real issues inherent in his previous approach. He
tells Me that he is going to let Clara know what he intends to do, but until Me
talks to him, he repeatedly evades Clara’s questions when she asks what the
neural block is for. He’s so certain he knows what’s best for Clara, and that
she doesn’t, that he doesn’t want to ask her what she wants when deep down, he
knows she won’t consent. It requires Clara’s impassioned defence of the
importance of her memories, and her showing him how alike they are, to get him
to recognise his error, so that when
they agree to use the neural block Russian roulette style, it’s as equals, who
have mutually consented to its use. This equal status is reflected in the
dialogue and camera framing, that
mirrors the onscreen positioning of Clara and the Doctor, and has the two characters
echoing each other’s lines. Ultimately, the neural block’s use does not come
from the Doctor’s Paternalism, that assumes his superior judgement over the
people close to him, but from a shared decision made between two equals who
recognise that this approach is best for both of them.
·
The final act also sees the Doctor and Clara
realize that they have to leave one another, and is an effective extension of
Clara’s desire to end her story on her terms in “Face the Raven”. Which leads
to the reasons I don’t think this episode cheapens Clara’s death: firstly,
she’ll still die on Trap Street. Secondly, this episode extends the themes of
that episode, critiquing the Doctor’s flagrant failure to follow Clara’s
request that he doesn’t insult her memory by hurting himself and others, and
with her further insisting that she is allowed to keep her past, her story, in
tact. That’s so very Clara, and I love that this story is so aware of the
importance of her agency in her departure.
·
Clara and the Doctor’s separation is ultimately
rooted in the story’s acknowledgment of the increasingly co-dependent side to
the Doctor and Clara’s friendship. He rejects the codes he lives by, the
identity of the Doctor, and Clara’s request that he won’t try to take revenge,
putting himself through hell to do so, before putting time and space at risk,
in his words “for fear of losing [Clara]”. Rigsy’s painting plays into this
thread of the episode nicely. As he finishes his story, the Doctor says he is
still looking for Clara, but at the end of the episode, he realises he has
found Clara, and told her the story of their time together. In telling this
story, and having Clara comment on it while he does so (“you killed a man. You
don’t seem the type”) the Doctor has had time to reflect on his time with
Clara, and recognise that he needs to move on: knowing that she is having
adventures in her own TARDIS is enough. Once again, art is key to the
resolution of a Moffat era storyline: just as the Doctor saved Gallifrey by freezing
it like the 3D paintings, he is able to move away from Clara by seeing a painting
that enables him to fully understand the nature of his friendship with her.
·
And the episode’s use of the diner scenes as a
framing device is expertly handled: our understanding of what is going on
changes as our understanding of what the episode is doing changes. At first,
Jenna Coleman seems to be playing a Clara echo, who the Doctor is recounting
the tale of his epic return to Gallifrey to. Then, she seems to be playing a
mind-wiped Clara, who the Doctor is visiting because of nostalgia, or to check
she’s safe and well. Then we finally realize that the Doctor is the one who got
his memory wiped, not Clara, and that he is searching for her. And the episode
really is worth rewatching with this knowledge: those scenes work beautifully
when you know what’s really going on. The way Capaldi plays “Stories are where
memories go when they’re forgotten” is particularly notable here: the sadness
with which Peter Capaldi plays the line takes on a whole new meaning when you
watch knowing the Doctor’s fate. And the line brings together the key Moffat
era themes of memories and stories, suggesting that in many ways, they are the
same things: narratives we create to make sense of our lives, and the place of
the people in them.
·
And then, out of all of this, we get the first
outright hopeful and optimistic companion departure from the new series, one
that asserts that Clara can be a Doctor in her own right, and rejects the
notion that she was any less important to the show than the Doctor. This
episode represents the culmination of the show’s portrayal of Clara as a Doctor-like
figure, forming a response to the disappointment that bleeds through Clara’s “why
can’t I be like you?” from “Face the Raven”. Steven Moffat’s answer is that she
can: being a Doctor, as has been carefully shown throughout this season, is an
ideal you fill, and over her time on the show, Clara has shown herself to be
more than capable of living up to that ideal. And just to confirm this, we get
one last set of the Doctor maxims that have been a motif throughout this
season: “Run like hell, because you always need to. Laugh at everything because
it’s always funny. Never be cruel and never be cowardly, and if you are, always
make amends”. Unlike the rules presented in “The Girl Who Died” or “Heaven
Sent”, these are not examples of the ways the Doctor outsmarts his enemies, but
a reminder of the morality that makes him the Doctor. They are the Doctor’s
final reminder to Clara of the rules to follow to live up to the idealistic
hero he sometimes manages to be, so that those moral imperatives form her own
Doctor like story. And so she finds herself with an origin story that very much
resembles the Doctor’s: running away from the Time Lords in a broken TARDIS
with a companion who isn’t quite as human as she seems, ultimately set to
return to “Gallifrey… the long way round”. As it became apparent that Clara was
drifting away from a human life, and becoming more Doctor-like, many fans
formed a line of thinking similar to the Doctor’s in “Under the Lake”: “there’s
only room for one of me” he said, and fandom seemed to think the same way in
the lead up to and throughout series nine. The line of thought was that Clara
was never leaving the Doctor for an ordinary human life, so her desire to be
like the Doctor would have to lead to her death, that there were no other
options. And that, really, would have been the problem with ending Clara’s
story with her death in “Face the Raven”. Not that it would have been a
fridging: Sarah Dollard deftly avoided that, but that there would have been a
lingering sense that her death was a hubristic narrative punishment, that it
would have been confirmation that an intelligent, brave, egotistical, and kind
young woman can never be like the Doctor (certainly that seemed to be the
subconscious implication behind much of fandom’s thinking). There’s both a
tinge of sexism, and a limited attitude to storytelling options, to that line
of thought. The resolution “Hell Bent” employs is, therefore, brilliant. Clara
doesn’t return to her human life, or die, because those were never her only
options. Instead, she leaves the narrative of Doctor Who to begin her own story,
where she can be a mythic figure with equal narrative status to the Doctor,
going on an infinity of adventures in a single heartbeat.
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