Moffat Era Rewatch: Notes on "Hell Bent"

·      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.

Moffat Era Rewatch: Notes on "Heaven Sent"

·      So, obviously, this episode is amazing and an out and out classic. And it rests entirely on the brilliant work of four people, all of whom bring their A game: Murray Gold, who delivers his best soundtrack for the show, Rachel Talalay, who gives Doctor Who the best direction it’s ever had, Peter Capaldi, who gives an astonishing performance, and Steven Moffat, who crafts an utterly perfect script. The only criticism I’ve seen of it comes from El Sandifer (who, to be clear, still rates the episode as a good one), who makes the not unreasonable claim that it unfolds much as you’d expect a one hander starring the Doctor, written by Steven Moffat, to. But while I agree that a story where Moffat tries something new (such as “Listen” or “Hell Bent”) is perhaps more interesting, watching him, and the other three key figures in the episode, do the things they are brilliant at as well as they can, is still an utter joy.

·      And the story is helped by the fact that it is not shy about its status as a puzzle box episode, or its invocation of classic Moffat tropes: the Doctor calls the castle a “killer puzzle box”, and the shot of the Doctor’s hand (not yet revealed to be his hand) vanishing at the start of the episode is, in many ways, a sick joke about the fact that this episode is a one hander with the Doctor. Other visual details, such as Capaldi’s face fading into the skull, and the moment where the Doctor hangs the clothes up by the fire are other moments that make it clear the episode isn’t trying to hide its loop, but steadily unveils the exact nature of the inevitable loop (that ultimately shows the story to be perfectly linear, in a fantastic sleight of hand) in a way that still takes on a great deal of weight. It’s the Sheer brutality of the Doctor’s fate that makes the episode stand out from Moffat’s other puzzle boxes. The Doctor’s description of “burning the old me to make a new one” is, as I remarked in my “Time Heist” notes, basically a disturbing twist on regeneration, and deliberately poses some unsettling questions about the nature of personal identity. Is the Doctor who vanishes at the end of “Face the Raven” the same person as the Doctor Who arrives on Gallifrey at the end of the episode, or even the “7000 years into the future” Doctor at the start of the episode, who would have already been “reset” thousands of times? The Moffat Era has, ultimately, settled on the conclusion that, as far as it matters, he is, over the course of the “who frowned me this face?” arc: the Doctor burns an old him to make a new one all the time, as long as he holds on to the values that make him the Doctor, which, as he made clear in “The Witch’s Familiar”, is a role he performs and aims to live up to. He may augment a new body for himself hundreds of billions of times over a four-billion-year period, but he is still definitely the Doctor. Nonetheless, the question really is posed in as stark and powerful a way as the series has ever managed.

·      The central concern of the story is ultimately its exploration of grief. At the start of the episode, the Doctor claims that, having watched his best friend die in agony, his day can’t get any worse. But at the mid point of the episode, he admits that “the day you lose someone isn't the worst. At least you've got something to do. It's all the days they stay dead.” The endless cycle of grief and manic depression becomes the Doctor’s literal trap in this story. Or, as Steven Moffat so eloquently puts it: “all of us are locked in the castle of grief sometimes”: in the Doctor’s case, it isn’t just a mental state, he is physically trapped in it.

·      As with much of the Capaldi era, “Heaven Sent” is built around a parallel to a classic myth: in this case, the Doctor is paralleled to Sisyphus, most specifically, Sisyphus as interpreted by Albert Camus for his philosophical theory of absurdism. Quoting Wikipedia for a quick description of the theory, according to Camus, the absurd is “man's futile search for meaning, unity, and clarity in the face of an unintelligible world devoid of God and eternal truths or values. Does the realization of the absurd require suicide? Camus answers: "No. It requires revolt." He then outlines several approaches to the absurd life.” One thing that often prompts people to decide that life is meaningless, that the universe is a cruel random, and hostile place, is, of course, the loss of a loved one, and the Doctor has (as far as he can tell for most of the story) just lost Clara, something that fuels his behavior and informs his mindset throughout the story. As a result, his actions place him as an absurd hero, trying to make meaning out of an event that was cruel and pointless, save for the meaning Clara gave it, a meaning the Doctor has failed to fully accept. And the cycle he is trapped in inside the castle, repeatedly going through the same incredible agony again and again, for billions of years, has an obvious parallel to Sisyphus, trapped in an eternal punishment by the Gods (just as the Doctor is interrogated and tortured by the Time Lords), and cursed to push a boulder up a mountain only for the boulder to roll back down the mountain upon reaching the summit, forcing him to start his task again. Of particular interest to Camus is the moment when Sisyphus goes back down from the summit of the mountain to start his task again: "It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. […] This is the truly tragic moment, when the hero becomes conscious of his wretched condition.” The Doctor’s “but you don’t understand, I remember it all, every time” outburst upon reaching the Azbantium wall and remembering the meaning of the word “bird” are his parallel to Sisyphus understanding his fate at the top of the mountain, the moment where the trials subside, just for a second, and he recognises the cruel and brutal nature of his fate, realizing that he has been trapped in the cycle for thousands of years, and will seemingly continue to do so for eternity. “It would be so easy, just tell them what they want” the Doctor desperately reasons, addressing suicide, which Camus describes as the “one truly serious philosophical problem”, as one potential response to this knowledge, as this action is potentially suicide for the Doctor. For all he knows, he is at the mercy of his unseen enemies once he gives them the information he needs. Yet he contemplates doing so, as it would mark a release from his seemingly endless trials. The could also live in ignorance, and seek out endless distraction to avoid noticing the absurdity of his fate, but the Doctor’s distraction involves seeking out knowledge (“Do I have to know everything?” he asks his projection of Clara, and the answer is yes, he does, that’s why she’s still asking the questions), so he will always reach the point at the top of the mountain, where he finally remembers his fate. The other option is to embrace absurdity, to accept the meaningless nature of the universe, and continue to do so, instead creating your own meaning, with Camus listing several ways this meaning is created. The Doctor’s meaning is a form of revolt, a determination to break the cycle he is trapped in, no matter how long it takes, or as Clara puts it: “get up, off your arse, and win”.

·      Which leads us to the episode’s exploration of the incredibly alien nature of the Doctor’s mindset. This is primarily explored through the storm room scenes, and his exchanges with the “Clara” asking him questions from the blackboard. This is revealed through gorgeous bits of writing such as the breakdown of the seemingly innocuous and random things he does to jude the safety of jumping out of a window, and the twisted yet inspired take on interrogation: “you are the only irreplaceable person in the torture chamber. The room is yours, so work it. If they're going to threaten you with death, show them who's boss. Die faster.” As with “The Girl Who Died”, the episode breaks down key aspects of the Doctor’s mindset that enable him to keep on fighting when others would just give up. The “torture chamber” line is particularly telling, linking nicely to Clara’s realisation in “The Witch’s Familiar” that the Doctor assumes there is a way out of any situation. It’s the culmination of the “how are you going to win?” thread of series nine: having seen the Doctor lose for two stories in a row, we believe him when he says “I can’t always…” before he sees the word “win” written on the blackboard, and his desperate cry of “why can’t I just lose?” carries more weight, he wants to be able to not just lose, but to truly accept defeat. The heroism the Doctor shows isn’t rooted in his ability to win out every time, but to always look for a way to win. And this applies to the the episode as a whole, as well as his ill advised jump out of the window: he plays an incredibly long game, on a scale and with suffering that most people simply cannot comprehend, to act out his plan while keeping the information he needs from the Time Lords.

·      And once again, at the heart of the Doctor’s plan is a fairy tale used to bring him home: the brothers Grimm story about the Emperor and the Shepard’s boy. Here, it is worth noting that the original myth of Sisyphus doesn’t portray Sisyphus’s return down the mountain as a moment of heroic acceptance of his fate. That aspect of the myth is something Camus adds to explain the nature of his philosophy. But just as the Sisyphus myth was retooled for the sake of absurdist philosophy, the Doctor escapes the castle by retooling a brothers Grimm fairytale. Instead of making the story about the weight of eternity, he makes it about the little bird, and its grim, unceasing determination. The original intent of the story is, obviously, to suggest the single bird is, in fact, many birds, who eventually, over billions of years, break through the mountain, marking the first second of eternity. And just as many birds break down the mountain, the Doctor has to clone himself many times to break through the Azbantium wall. But in his retelling of the story, the Doctor makes the bird an individual being with a singular purpose: “You might think that’s a hell of a long time. Personally, I think that’s a hell of a bird”. And that is what he becomes here: the bird, slowly chipping his way through the diamond mountain. Linking himself and his purpose to the story enables him to retain his memory and identity over the course of his ordeal. Of further significance is the way the story becomes a measure of his progression: the further he gets, the longer he keeps going, the more of the story he is able to tell. And so, against impossible odds, in defiance of the sheer absurdity of his situation, the Doctor uses the power of a story to get up, off his arse, and win.