| Episode: | 825 | | | Serial: | 262 | | | Writer: | Steven Moffat | | | Air Date: | 05-Dec-2015 |
This week on Sci-Fi Adventures it's Hell Bent, the epic season finale of Doctor Who series 9! I mean I'm just guessing that it's going to be epic, but they usually are. The Earth, the galaxy, or all of time and space tends to be at stake and only the Doctor...'s companion is special enough to save the day!
It's also epic in runtime as well. The episodes this series have generally been around 45 minutes long, but that's been creeping higher these last few episodes and now it's up to a full hour. If the runtime inflation continues at this rate they'll finally be ready for Peter Jackson to come in and direct an episode by series... 12.
Under this paragraph you'll find a few dozen spoilery screencaps surrounded by SPOILERS for this episode and the ones leading up to it. I won't spoil anything that aired after it though, not that there's much left to spoil. The series took 2016 off, so at the time I'm writing this there's just one Christmas special left (though there'll be two soon).
He was beamed away to a mysterious prison, where he died over and over again for a few billion years, and that pissed him off even more. But he eventually managed to punch his way straight through a wall of super-diamond with his bare hands and escaped, to learn that the target of his wrath is... his own people. He's finally found his home planet of Gallifrey!
There's a Buckaroo Banzai reference on the sign by the way, which is apparently the favourite movie of all sci-fi set decorators as there's references to it all over the Star Trek spin-offs too. I feel like I should probably watch it myself someday.
I was expecting Not-Clara to sound American, but she's got regular Clara's accent, and she's surprisingly okay with the fact that he's penniless and wants to play guitar to earn his dinner. He then uses the sonic sunglasses to turn the radio into a guitar amp, which is kind of rude as she was listening to that cover of 'Don't Stop Me Now' from Mummy on the Orient Express (the episode where Clara finally grew to understand the Twelfth Doctor). Still it's nice to see the things do something at least a little bit sonic for once.
He then starts playing Doctor Who's 'Clara's theme' on the guitar and actually identifies it as being called 'Clara'! Not-Clara wants to know about her. Cut to credits!
OPENING CREDITS (WITH JENNA COLEMAN'S NAME BACK IN THEM).
Now we're back where the last episode left off, with the Doctor hiking across his homeworld of Gallifrey. Why his confession dial prison was placed out here in a wasteland unguarded is a mystery, but it does give the Doctor a bit of time before his jailers react to his escape.
It's soon revealed that he's walking to the barn from Day of the Doctor where he slept as a child!
The Lord President feels that they are facing great danger but they don't know from what. All they know is that the alarms started when the Doctor broke out.
It would've been nice if she'd mentioned that she knew where Gallifrey was back then, seeing how it's been his mission to find his homeworld for two entire series now. Then again maybe she didn't know at the time; she's an immortal so this could be next week or centuries later for her.
One thing I wish was a little less vague is how long it's been for the other people on Gallifrey since they saw him last, seeing as he's been trapped for a not insignificant amount of time at both Trenzalore and in his confession dial during his absence. That general from Day of the Doctor was in a scene earlier not looking a day older, so at most it's probably only been a few hundred years for him since then, but it'd be nice to know for sure.
I'm a Firefly fan so seeing the Gallifreyans dressed in Wild West outfits didn't immediately stand out as being strange, but it kind of is isn't it? I get that not everyone gets to wear the poncy sci-fi hats, but don't these people have their own culture? Still, this explains why the Doctor likes Earth so much: it's just like home, except not entirely crap.
He doesn't actually get to eat though, as a gunship flies in to demand that he lay down his weapons and accompany them to the capital. Though it can't exactly open fire while he's surrounded by civilians (including children) and the civilians ain't budging.
The Doctor drops his weapon (a spoon) and walks towards the gunship, forcing them to back up to keep their guns on him, then draws a line in the sand with his boot and walks back to finish his soup the applause of his audience.
So the Lord President tries plan B, sending the commander of the armed forces out to the barn to chat with him. The Doctor steps outside, sees who it is, then goes back in.
So the Lord President tries plan C, sending the entire High Council out to greet him. He returns to the barn without a word, and the President realises that he won't talk to anyone but him.
There's an interesting exchange here where the President asks "Who does he think he is?" and the general replies "The man who won the Time War." Sounds like another way of saying 'Time Lord Victorious', and when the Doctor gets into that mindset it generally doesn't end well. It's a bad sign.
The President tries to reason with him, explaining that he could've walked out of his prison at any time if he'd just told them what they wanted to know about the Hybrid, but the Doctor reiterates that he wants him off his planet.
So the man resorts to plan E: shoot the Doctor dead with a firing squad. He orders his men to step forward, take aim... and fire!
And they do.
He's not being all that precise about the details though, as he tells her that his tale takes place in Space Glasgow and that the Lord President is a gang boss. Plus I've noticed that there isn't a great deal of Clara in his story about Clara so far, on account of her being dead for a billion years from his perspective, but I'm sure he'll get around to mentioning her eventually.
Even more astounding is that their futuristic Gallifreyan weapons barely scorched his wooden barn when they did their firing squad fake out earlier. No wonder the Daleks were kicking their asses.
The Lord President protests this alarming chain of events by stating that he's Rassilon the Redeemer, which... wait, hang on, this guy's Rassilon? Timothy Dalton regenerated into this guy? It's a real shame they couldn't get Pierce Brosnan to succeed him, or someone who could equal Dalton's intensity at least. This incarnation of Rassilon isn't really a match for Peter Capaldi, so their confrontation feels kind of one sided.
We learn that Gallifrey is currently positioned at the extreme end of the time continuum for its own protection, which explains why the Time War hasn't kicked off again and why he hasn't been able to find it. It's not exactly a long term solution though really, for obvious reasons, but right now they're all more concerned about the prophesied Hybrid coming to destroy them.
But that's not good! His name is a promise to specifically not be either of those things! It's another bad sign.
Though he did say that the Hybrid was "Me" at the end of the last episode after he got out of the prison now that I think about it. I guess they weren't monitoring him at the time.
The general explains that they've theorised that the Hybrid may be half Dalek and half Time Lord, but they don't really know. They've been working off 'prophecies', like Dalton's Rassilon was doing way back in The End of Time, which are actually simulations generated by their Matrix computer system (invented by Doctor Who in 1976, borrowed by the Wachowski's in 1999). These prophecies all concur that the Hybrid will one day stand in the ruins of Gallifrey, unravel the web of time and destroy a billion billion hearts to heal its own. But the prophecies can't tell them what the Hybrid looks like so they're pretty rubbish.
The Doctor decides he'll need help to figure this out, from an old friend.
He arranges for a Gallifreyan extraction chamber to open a door to London in the year 2015 and stop time so they can grab her at the moment before her death by quantum raven (with an chromatic aberration effect that makes me think that I should dig out my old 3D glasses).
Clara should be frozen like everyone else, and mostly is, but clever Time Lord technology is allowing her mind, muscles and senses to function regardless. She's temporarily spared from all those tedious biological processes like converting food to energy and moving blood around her body, and that's good because by her next heartbeat she'll be choking on a smoky raven.
They sure do take their sweet time explaining this to her though, as she's understandably a bit freaked out by it all and the Doctor doesn't want to break the news that he's only bought her a few more minutes of life. Though that's mostly because he intends her to live a lot longer than that.
Everything he's done since escaping prison, like deposing Rassilon and helping the Time Lord stop the Hybrid, has all been part of a cunning plan to rescue her from death. And now he's waving a gun around, which is the latest in a series of bad signs.
The general's not impressed by this as Clara's death is an established historical event and changing it could fracture time itself. Or cause paradox monsters to appear and eat people (I haven't seen series 1's Father's Day yet but I believe that's the gist of what happens in it). But the Doctor's not accepting any outcome which doesn't lead to Clara's survival, so he shoots the general dead to give them both time to run. The 'man who never would' just went and did, and that's kind of a shock, seeing as the general's a sympathetic and decent guy who's been on his side pretty much this whole time!
The general regenerates here from a pale looking guy to a dark skinned woman and immediately picks up where she left off, and I've got a couple of big problems with that. First, where did the eyeliner come from? Second, the Doctor always takes an episode or two to recover from regeneration, so how does she get over it so quickly? Am I supposed to believe that the Gallifreyans have developed some medicine or technology to bypass the 'going nuts' part of the process when they're on their homeworld? Oh... actually that would make a lot of sense. Never mind.
The Doctor explains that when Time Lords die their minds are uploaded to this Matrix, kind of like what happened to Danny Pink in the end of last series (and River Song a while back). Basically it's a big computer made of ghosts, guarded by more ghosts... because what this series needed is more ghosts. He claims that he's looking for a secret way out but I'm starting to get the feeling his scheme to save Clara might actually involve saving her to a hard drive.
He tells a story of a student who got trapped here once and found the secret way out. Unfortunately he went a bit mad after that, and stole the moon and the President's wife, or so they say.
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| Doctor Who 9-01: The Magician's Apprentice |
It turns out that she was wrong about the President's wife bit too, as it was actually the President's daughter he ran off with. So that must be his granddaughter Susan then! Or maybe Susan's grandmother! Or it could be someone else we've never heard of. Really these revelations reveal very little of anything, which suits me just fine.
Clara's noticed by now that the Doctor's acting a bit weird, and demands that they tell her how long he was locked inside their prison. They think it was 4.5 billion years, which seems to confirm that the events in there didn't occur in real time, or else they'd know for sure. Funny thing is, the Doctor doesn't actually know much about the Hybrid and if he'd just admitted that he would've been let out. But he needed them to think he knew something to have the leverage to save Clara.
He held on in there for her just like Rory guarded Amy for thousands of years a few seasons back, except more so! The longest con in the entirety of existence. The music insists that this moment is very emotional for everyone and I have to agree. Composer Murray Gold's been doing as good a job as anyone this episode.
The Doctor and Clara share a secret conversation, which even us viewers don't get to hear, and then she goes to rant at the Time Lords to tell them that they're hated by everyone.
Replaying the events that got him off Gallifrey in the first place is a way better outcome than sticking her brain into a computer, I'm liking this.
The Doctor's sure that breaking free of Gallifrey's time zone should be enough to get Clara's pulse going again... but it isn't. She's still stuck between heartbeats, frozen in time. Not good. Well he doesn't think it's good anyway, personally I think she looks pretty healthy and if it keeps the quantum raven off her back then that's not so bad.
He's getting a bit shouty and desperate at this point, as he takes them to the very end of time where they can lose the Time Lords and get well clear of their influence over Clara. But that doesn't work either, there's still no pulse! But there is a knock on the door. Four of them in fact.
And sometimes it's Ashildr the immortal Viking! Or Me, as she's still calling herself. She's stuck with that name for 100 trillion years or so now, it's ridiculous.
So those Mire from The Girl Who Died, the ones with the immortality tablets in their medical kits, they never actually tried using them to heal any of their own troops did they? Because I'm seeing very few Mire around at the end of the universe (and no restaurant either sadly, proving Douglas Adams' predictions wrong). I'm not seeing Jack Harkness around either, so I guess he really could've become the Face of Boe and died all those series ago.
She on the other hand believes that he's a half human hybrid, as he sure does spend a lot of time around Earth. Oh shit, that lunatic Steven Moffat has gone and brought back the idea that the Doctor's half human on his mother's side from the 1996 TV movie! Though that would mean that he originally ran away from Gallifrey because he was scared of himself.
Of course there's a third theory: the Hybrid is a pair of time travellers brought together by the Master, who drive each other to universe-threatening extremes. If that's true though then it won't be a concern much longer as he's going to wipe Clara's memory of him and put her on Earth to live a long, happy, Doctor-free life, like he did with Donna Noble. Except this time he's using a Time Lord device he grabbed along the way instead of his telepathy, because... no reason.
She doesn't want to be safe and she's very keen to keep her memories. But the Doctor knows that he has to do something to end their destructive friendship so he decides they'll use the device together. If she successfully reversed it he'll lose his memory of her, if she didn't then she'll lose his memory of him. It's a very clever gadget really, the way it how it knows exactly who to edit out.
They trigger the device, it beeps, and... nothing happens.
But it turns out that the effect just takes a while to work, long enough for the victim to say a long farewell speech before their lose their memory. So the Doctor tells Clara to never be cruel and never be cowardly, which is the promise he made when he took the name 'Doctor'. He admits that he had become the Hybrid with his actions to save her, and then passes out on the floor.
Does that actually check out though? According to the prophecy, the Hybrid:
- Is cross-bred from two warrior races. - He might well be half-human.
- Is unstoppable. - Heaven Sent proved that he never ever stops.
- Will one day stand in the ruins of Gallifrey. - Just did that.
- Will unravel the web of time. - Well he certainly pulled out one of the threads.
- Will destroy a billion billion hearts to heal its own. - He burned himself up every few days for 4.5 billion years to save Clara.
So Clara managed to pilot a TARDIS from the end of the universe back home on her own with the Doctor unconscious? Well she did the exact same thing back in Listen so it's not unprecedented. Sure she accidentally brought them to the Doctor's home that time, the barn featured in this episode in fact, but she's had a lot more practice since then.
Back in the framing story at the diner, the Doctor reveals to Not-Clara that he remembers the adventures he and Clara had but he doesn't remember her. How she looked, how she talked, how she laughed, any of it. He also reveals that he returned to London to look for his TARDIS and then came back here again when he couldn't find it. So I guess he actually intended to get a lift to the place he'd woken up and then decided to stop at the diner he found nearby....
I just hope Clara kept that other outfit she was wearing safe somewhere as she'll need to put it back on before dying on Raven Day, else she'll cause a sweater paradox and fracture time.
Back in Face the Raven she asked the Doctor why she couldn't take risks like he does, why she can't be the Doctor as well, and he explained that it's simply because she's much more fragile than he is (missing out the 'because I'm a genius with an innate understanding of what events can and can't be changed' part). Well now she's become frozen in time which pretty much makes her immortal and physically immune to basically everything, so there's nothing stopping her from travelling through time and being the Doctor, with Me as an equal partner! Just as soon as they figure out what all the buttons do.
In Clara's first scene with the Twelfth Doctor two series ago the TARDIS was crashing and he had post-regeneration memory loss, so he asked her if she could fly the thing (she couldn't). And now in her final scene she's flying off in a TARDIS of her own after her own regeneration. That's a character arc I can live with.
They really need to work on getting the chameleon circuit to work again, as you can fit a police box almost anywhere, but that disguise is going to cause problems (especially when people notice it's deeper on the inside and the windows only work one way).
Also what happened to the gas pumps? And where will people driving through Jackson, Nevada stop for snacks and gas now?
But he gave up his TARDIS key to Mayor Me back in Face the Raven! It's fine though as he doesn't even need to unlock it, he just pushes the door open with his hands. Both doors in fact, which is unusual.
He enters his TARDIS again for the first time in 4.5 billion years, and the lights all come on to reveal a message on a chalkboard saying "RUN YOU CLEVER BOY AND BE A DOCTOR", with a Doctory red velvet coat next to it to replace his dour black Gallifreyan jacket. Clara always did like leaving notes around.
But that's not all, as he looks down at his console and sees a new sonic screwdriver materialise and then fire up into the air.
Anyway the TARDIS de-materialises, leaving Rigsy's mural behind to crumble into paint dust. Cue the end credits and the terrible-looking next time trailer showing that River Song's coming back for Christmas!
CONCLUSION
If nothing else, Hell Bent is a damn fine looking episode of television. Sure it's also dramatic, interesting and emotional, but those visuals are better than a series with this budget has any right to have. In fact I was worried for half a second that the producer loved the look of that retro TARDIS so much that the Doctor would never get his old one back. Though next time he's President of Gallifrey he should really think ahead and get the old one fixed before going on the run again.
I get the feeling that the Gallifrey story would've probably been a huge disappointment to me if I cared at all about the planet or Rassilon, seeing as the Doctor's spent eight series mourning his homeworld and the last two trying to get back there... then when he finally gets back he's silent for first 10 minutes, spends five more getting rid of one of his greatest adversaries, then runs off in another TARDIS first chance he gets. But I don't care that much and neither does the Doctor really in the end. He found his homeworld, discovered it was safe, kicked out their evil leadership and then sorted out their Hybrid problem. Works for me!
Clara's final exit from the series on the other hand was just as satisfying as all her other final exits so far, perhaps even more so! Her recklessness and addiction to time travelling set up throughout the series could've only ever ended with her dying or being stranded in an unsatisfying ordinary life, and they've done both of them already, so it was nice to see them give her an origin story this time instead. The series also spent a whole episode setting up that having two immortals in one box was such a bad idea that the Doctor was willing to let a desperate Ashildr live through the worst of the last millennium rather than risk giving her a left... but I'm sure she and Clara will do great!
This seems like the point in the conclusion where I typically rant about the incredibly dumb bit that completely wrecked my suspension of disbelief, but I can't really think of anything right now. I suppose a person who's able to think and move despite being frozen in time's a little dodgy, especially as she can apparently carry on doing it indefinitely without ever needing to eat, but it didn't take me out of the episode for even a moment so I'm giving it a pass.
It's funny though that even in an episode about the Doctor going too far, he picked about the least disruptive way of trying to save her. If he really wanted to wreck time he could've pulled a Marty McFly and given her past self a note saying she should let Rigsy keep his raven death countdown tattoo. In fact the Time Lords were the ones trying to go against prophecy without realising it was self-fulfilling, by putting an unstoppable man in an almost inescapable prison and letting it focus him like a laser beam pointed at their own heads.
Actually now that I think about it, the way things played out reminds me of the series 9 finale, Death in Heaven, where Clara lost a loved one, went off the rails, then had to deal with the fact that they'd been technologically reanimated and ultimately had to die again to save the world. I guess that's the point though: Clara and the Doctor are dangerously similar. Though things worked out much happier for everyone this time! No crying at the console.
So that's the Gallifrey and Time War situation more or less resolved, the Impossible Girl's been written out, the Twelfth Doctor knows exactly what kind of man he is, and even the Zygons are playing nice. More or less everything's been wrapped up and the status quo is back how it was a decade ago before the 2005 revival. Now the Doctor can have a fresh start next series... right after he meets up with River Song again in the Christmas special.
That's it for series 9 of Doctor Who, it's over now. But next on Sci-Fi Adventures I'll be sharing my Doctor Who Series 9 Review!
Comments are generally appreciated!
Not a classic Doctor Who novel though, those always looked rubbish!
ReplyDeleteSplutter! What? Some of them were astounding! I went to a gallery of them in London earlier this year and there were some excellent works of art on display.
Okay, some were a bit naff too.
The console itself should be perfect though as it's a replica of the original prop built for the Doctor Who Experience repainted white (and then re-repainted green when they gave it back).
And used in the docudrama An Adventure in Space and Time, which is lovely and well worth watching.
I don't mind that there wasn't more done with Gallifrey because the series isn't about the planet, but they did enough to bring it back so future writers can use it if they want.
Clara's exit was handled well, I thought. They had been teasing it for ages so it was always going to be difficult to make it satisfying, but the irony is that not killing her off was the most satisfying way of killing her off! Well played, Moffat, well played.
Hey, there really was a Target Book cover exhibition! I've been looking through photos from it, getting ideas for my 'Top 30 Worst Doctor Who covers' article. Which I'm not really doing, because some of them are actually very good. Even when they feature the Doctor's floating head, it tends to be a very recognisable floating head.
DeleteAs if I would lie to Ray Hardgrit!
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