12.25: Hell Bent

In which their love could destroy the universe.

Broadcast: December 2015

Watched: April 2022

“Isn’t this going a little far?”

*Such* an odd episode, one rug pull after another. Even knowing that, it’s still pretty structurally weird – almost everything I remembered, up to the Doctor telling Clara he had to wipe some of her memory, happens in the first 25 minutes. The whole season is, consciously I think, upside down, with the big action one at the beginning and the companion story at the end?

Anyway, we start with your standard issue Moffat finale rug pull: at the previous cliffhanger we finally made it back to Gallifrey, so the next story starts with the Doctor in... Nevada. Talking to a suspiciously familiar waitress in a suspiciously familiar diner. 

(Out of interest, did any of us even consider Clara was definitely dead and this was some kind of dream or timey-wimey thing? Or did everyone else also obviously assume the Doctor’s going to get her out of it somehow?)

Anyway, all that’s a framing sequence because then we are back on Gallifrey where, 16 minutes in, the Doctor overthrows God. 

The gradual escalation in who greets the Doctor is hilarious. (Is the drawing a line in the dust and daring them to step over it a western thing?) So is the fact he doesn’t speak a single line for over 11 minutes of this sequence. So, come to that, is the fact they got Donald Sumpter to play Rassilon and then kick him off the planet before the episode’s a quarter done. [Moderately big name character actor, who’s played several roles in Who over nearly half a century.]

Because... that’s not what the episode is about. And we only work that out when we get to the incredibly spooky extraction chamber sequence, with the undead Clara, and the Doctor crossing the line from overthrowing a tyrant to shooting an obviously good man, just to get what he wants. 

I’m not sure it quite hangs together? The entire, stated point of the hybrid was that the Doctor was using it as a bargaining chip to get Clara back – but the Time Lords are planning all this *before* Clara dies and before he needs a bargaining chip. (Also, the dialogue – “It will unravel the Web of Time and destroy a billion billion hearts to heal its own” – definitely implies the Doctor. Is this a prophecy of what’ll happen if he doesn’t stop?)

But... The way it turns out to be a story about how the Doctor will go to any length to save his companion (big diss on Adric, btw), and is then finds there are no lengths that can bring the past back – Clara survives, sort of, but the Doctor loses her forever – is great. Williams is actually quite good in this one, even if it took to the end of the universe to do it. 

And the inversion of the Donna story, with the Doctor’s high-handedness finally coming back to bite him rather than his companions, is perfect. Although why Clara agreed to the potluck, rather than just saying “No, f*ck off” isn’t exactly clear. (Also, is “the Doctor ends the season not knowing who his companion is or looks like, only that she exists” a conscious part of the “this series is basically backwards” thing?)

Funny how what Moffat assumed would be his last season finale is a trilogy of stories about the inevitability of death.

Other things:

• “We are so great together that it could BREAK THE UNIVERSE” hmm whatever could it mean.

• In the same way Moffat reframed Daleks and Davros in opener, is this sort of an attempt to do the same with Gallifrey and Matrix, doing away with the “Gallifrey stories are always rubbish” rule? Only then he gets distracted.

• The Foxes song from Orient Express is playing in the diner. Love the Doctor playing Clara’s theme on the guitar.

• Random Gallifrey thoughts... The Capitol is Gallifreyan Dubai, lol. The barn is back – again, we’re assumed to remember Day. The Sisterhood of Karn happily wander into the council chamber, in a “Moffat has accepted the Cartmel Masterplan backstory, possibly without realising it” kind of a way. [Mythology put together by the old show’s final script editor Andrew Cartmel, which features heavily in the ‘90s New Adventures books. Included assumptions that the histories of Karn and Gallifrey were linked.]

• LOVE the sliders: both the design and the films of ghostly screaming faces.

• Ken Bones is so good as the general, playing a decent, reasonable man, dealing both  with Rassilon’s tyranny and the Doctor’s madness. LOVE that the last thing he says before the Doctor kills him is “Good luck”. Also, love the way Moffat casually gives us a regeneration switching race AND gender.

• Is the random woman in the barn meant to be the Doctor’s mother or just a random friend/family member? The way we cut to her feeding him suggests the former.

• There’s a strong implication that Heaven Sent was actually the Confession Dial acting precisely as it’s supposed to, just at the wrong time.

• Some references: the parade of monsters in the cloisters is the underhenge or Trenzalore all over again. The retro TARDIS! Cool. The four knocks on the door at the end of the universe obviously The End of Time, but also reminds me of Listen. Ashildr/Me’s denies responsibility for Clara’s death in exactly the same tone the Doctor denies responsibility in the Zygon story.

• The implication that the diner in Impossible Astronaut is Clara’s TARDIS is extremely weird.