An Hour of Who a Day: July 28: "Hell Bent"

July 28: "Hell Bent"

Stuart Manning's poster for "Hell Bent"
(from Design by Stuart Manning)

It starts in a diner that the Doctor walks into, carrying a guitar and playing Murray Gold's Clara theme on it. The diner is being run by Clara (although I have to admit, my first reaction upon seeing this was, "I wonder if that's one of Clara's splinter selves from 'The Name of the Doctor'?"), and the Doctor doesn't appear to recognize her, as he tells her the story of his final adventure with Clara Oswald. That's the framing narrative that "Hell Bent" takes place in, but after the opening credits we pick up where "Heaven Sent" left off, with only an occasional interjection from the diner into events.

It's a great scene, as the Doctor returns to that old barn from "The Day of the Doctor" and "Listen", while Rassilon (played by Donald Sumpter, who takes from Arthur "The Dominators to 'The Eleventh Hour'" Cox the title of longest time between appearances on Doctor Who, as Sumpter's last appearance was 43 years ago, in The Sea Devils) tries to figure out what it is the Doctor wants. "We could talk to him," says the General (last seen in "The Day of the Doctor"). "Words are his weapons," Rassilon replies, but what's noticeable here is that we don't actually hear the Doctor say a single word until Rassilon appears; this is a Doctor who's so angry that he's gone beyond words, who now wields silence as a weapon. And when Rassilon does personally appear, the Doctor's first words to him are, "Get off my planet" (even though Rassilon is Lord President of the Time Lords), and the Doctor's able to convince the Time Lord troopers to move to his side and lay down their weapons without saying a single word to them. It's an impressive moment, and the way director Rachel Talalay frames it like a Western (right down to a whistled version of that Time Lord theme, à la Ennio Morricone), is an inspired move. This is the Doctor facing off against his opponent and winning without firing a shot or uttering a word. "There was a saying, sir, in the Time War," the trooper, Gastron, tells Rassilon. "The first thing you will notice about the Doctor of War is he's unarmed." And that's proven true here.

But while that's impressive, what's more fascinating is the lengths he will go to to save his best friend Clara. All that time spent in his own confession dial ("We think [he was in there] four-and-a-half billion years," Ohila states), trying to convince the Time Lords he knew all about the Hybrid (whether he actually did or not), was just so he had a bargaining chip that he could use to rescue her. He's willing to get rid of Rassilon and the High Council (although, admittedly, the Time War stuff is also part of the reason -- "The Doctor does not blame Gallifrey for the horrors of the Time War. ... He just blames you," Ohila tells Rassilon), to break the rules and bring Clara back through the use of an extraction chamber (a Time Lord thingy that pulls you out of time right before the moment of your death) just to save her. That's his entire goal.

Gorgeous TARDIS, by the way, with the new stolen TARDIS having the classic Hartnell theme, right down to the plate under the console and the sound effects of the door opening and such. (Although I wonder why they made the walls and doors so much smaller in scale than the original.) And it's a great backdrop for those climactic moments, after the Doctor goes to have a chat with Me, who's apparently the last person in the universe, sitting in the ruins of Gallifrey and watching the universe die. Here Me seems far more accepting of things, and while there's a core of steel present she no longer seems cold or bitter -- indeed, she seems to enjoy challenging the Doctor as to the identity of the Hybrid. "That's very very easy," he tells her, "the Hybrid is you," but Me is having none of it. "By your own reasoning, why couldn't the Hybrid be half-Time Lord, half-human?" she wonders. "Tell me, Doctor, I've always wondered. You're a Time Lord; you're a high-born Gallifreyan. Why is it you spend so much time on Earth?" (One can imagine Steven Moffat giggling to himself, slipping in that reference to the controversial half-human thing introduced in the McGann TVM.) The Doctor pooh-poohs that though: "That's your best theory? I'm the Hybrid? I ran away from Gallifrey because I was afraid of myself? That doesn't make any sense." Ah, but Me has a better theory. "What if the Hybrid wasn't one person, but two?" she says. "... A dangerous combination of a passionate and powerful Time Lord and a young woman so very similar to him. Companions who are willing to push each other to extremes." After all, they were brought together by the Master, "the lover of chaos." "Clara's my friend," the Doctor protests. "I know," Me replies. "And you're willing to risk all of time and space because you miss her. One wonders what the pair of you will get up to next." It's an interesting conversation, even if it ultimately doesn't tell us anything at all about the Hybrid or why we were supposed to care this series.

But you know what? That doesn't really matter. Because the best thing about "Hell Bent" is the resolution of Clara's storyline with the Doctor. The BBC Wales version of Doctor Who has had a tendency of making its companions more and more like him and then not knowing how to say goodbye to them, and so Rose gets shunted off to another universe, while Donna gets her mind wiped, denied all the growth she'd experienced. But when the Doctor tries the same mind-wipe trick with Clara, she's having none of it: "These have been the best years of my life, and they are mine," she tells him. "Tomorrow is promised to no one, Doctor, but I insist upon my past. I am entitled to that. It's mine." And so it's the Doctor who forgets, while Clara gets to essentially graduate. (And although the neural block thing is treated as a toss-up, one does wonder if the Doctor knew that it would wipe his memory, if he decided to sacrifice himself to allow Clara to continue. The dialogue certainly points in that direction, as the Doctor starts talking about the neural block maybe not being reversible after he admits to Clara that she's right, that she does have the right to her past.) Clara gets a TARDIS and a companion and is allowed to go off and have adventures, and while she'll have to go to Gallifrey at some point, to make sure she dies at the right moment, she doesn't have to do that right away. She gets to be the hero of her own story. I have to say, I haven't been the biggest fan of Clara's "increasingly reckless" storyline this past series -- it's sometimes felt like they didn't quite know what to do with her character after the Danny Pink storyline last series -- but this was absolutely the best way to resolve it. There's something wonderful about the idea of another TARDIS out there, exploring the universe and doing the right thing. Fantastic.

So "Hell Bent" provides the cap on a story that's been affecting and astonishing, and even the bittersweetness of the diner scenes, where the Doctor doesn't know he's talking to Clara (although, after the diner dematerializes around him and he (presumably) sees Rigsy's portrait of Clara painted on his TARDIS, he surely must know that was Clara, right?), is tempered by the knowledge that everything worked out in the end. (Well, except for the Rassilon bit -- I wonder if that'll come back to haunt the Doctor...) "Hell Bent" is an excellent end to an excellent story.

And while that's technically the end of series 9 proper as it was broadcast, we still have a Christmas special left -- one that's coming up so soon that there's even a "Next Time" trailer at the end of this episode...