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I’ll tell you the short story up front: this episode was a huge disappointment to me, and it really doesn’t make any kind of sense. It doesn’t make logical sense; it doesn’t make emotional sense; it doesn’t make psychological sense; it doesn’t make dramatic sense. I haven’t seen a whole lot of Classic Who. But I still feel safe saying that Twelve’s return to Gallifrey must be the biggest anticlimax in this show’s 50+ year history.
All right, life is short and I’m just going to do bullet points. Here is my short list of things that are wrong with “Hell Bent.”
* “Hell Bent” fucks up everything that was good about either “Face the Raven” or “Heaven Sent.”
I now understand why “Face the Raven” felt so lame to me. Everyone making it knew it wasn’t Clara’s real death or Clara and Twelve’s real goodbye. They were saving all the Big Feels for the end of “Hell Bent.” If I were Sarah Dollard, I’d be pissed. Moffat made so much noise about bringing more women into the production side, and here I naively thought that he had given Dollard the important job of sending off the companion and she had inexplicably completely muffed it. In fact, of course, Moffat reserved that bit of prime real estate for himself, and merely entrusted Dollard with the task of coming up with a semi-convincing fake death which could then be SURPRISINGLY and AMAZINGLY UNDONE in the season finale! At least, I hope he told her that. I hope he didn’t just send her an email when the got the gig saying, “By the way, can you make sure that Clara dies without her body actually being harmed? It will be important later, because reasons.”
The one good thing about “Face the Raven”--Clara’s owning her own death, and deciding, against Twelve’s wishes, to follow Danny Pink and “die like I mean it”--is completely ruined by the ‘happy ending’ of “Hell Bent,” in which Clara basically decides that sure, she has to die at some point, but what the hell, she’s got a TARDIS, so there’s no rush. Of course she doesn’t mind dying as long as she knows she can squeeze in a couple thousand years of living on her way to her fixed event. She’s functionally immortal, suspended indefinitely in a conscious but non-living state to which there appear to be no downsides (unlike, for instance, Owen Harper from “Torchwood,” whose death is undone in a very similar way in “Dead Man Walking,” and who deals with a raft of extremely unpleasant physical and emotional consequences in the oddly touching sequel, “Day in the Death”). You know, I don’t begrudge her a little fun with Ascildir in her very own TARDIS. But if what Clara wanted was to be brave and face death, well, she’s not doing that now that she no longer has to, so goodbye to all that.
But what “Hell Bent” does to “Heaven Sent” is even worse. We’re told, in “Heaven Sent,” that the Doctor is fighting his billion-year fight in order to keep the dangerous secret of the hybrid. In “Hell Bent” we find out that none of that was real, and these aeons of grief-stricken diamond-punching were all just about getting Clara back. So Twelve’s existential heroism just turns out to be another manifestation of the Doctor’s pathological grief for a woman who...well, this brings me to the next bullet point:
* “Hell Bent” attributes to Clara a unique importance in the Doctor’s life that neither she nor any other companion can ever truly earn.
I’ve said before that I don’t like Clara, and that I am not convinced by her chemistry with the Doctor. Fine, I’m a curmudgeon. But it strikes me that Moffat is not very secure about their chemistry either, given that in both the farewell episodes Moffat rather baldly avoids actually writing the scene in which they have their final heart to heart. In “Face the Raven” she tells Twelve not to say any of it because she already knows it all. In “Hell Bent” she wants to actually have the conversation, but we don’t hear it. To me, this is a pretty clear admission on Moffat’s part that he actually doesn’t really know how to make their love real. I think this was probably at least partly a result of Capaldi’s insistence that he not be forced to do a romance with an actress less than half his age. RTD, bastard that he was to us in “Journey’s End,” at least knew how to write a male-female friendship that was as intense and as heartbreaking as any m/f romance could be. At any rate, Moffat wildly overcompensates by making Clara the most super-awesome-special-important-one-for-the-ages companion the Doctor’s ever had in all of his time in the universe. He’s supposed to be so attached to and intertwined with Clara that she’s actually become part of him--how else are we to understand this ‘hybrid’ nonsense?--and that he is willing to destroy the whole fucking universe to get her back. Why?
It’s not just that I don’t think Clara is that special. I don’t think Clara *can* be that special; I don’t think any of the Doctor’s other companions could be that special. If the Doctor wasn’t going to break all of time and set Gallifrey on fire and spend four billion years punching a wall of space diamond for Rose, for Martha, for Donna, for Amy, or for River--to say nothing of Sarah Jane or any of the other Classic Who companions--why’s he doing it for Clara? When Rose got torn away from him into another universe, he grieved, and he moved on. When he wiped Donna’s memory and destroyed their partnership forever, he cried in the rain, and then moved on. Eleven is not very grown-up about losing Amy Pond; but at least he didn’t break the known universe trying to get to her. I know she’s supposed to have ‘saved’ the Doctor in all of his incarnations; but frankly, that never meant a fucking thing to me emotionally, and nobody’s really brought that up much since “Name of the Doctor.”
We're supposed to believe that Missy put them together for the express purpose of destroying the universe. OK. Say, where is Missy anyway? Shouldn't she be in this episode, if this was all the fulfilment of her evil plan?
* The neural-block gambit completely destroys Clara’s coherence as a character.
After making her big stand about claiming her past because nobody knows the future, Clara then turns on a dime and decides it will be great fun to play amnesia roulette with the Doctor. What sense does that make? None. It makes no sense. It undermines everything she’s just said about how this is wrong, purely in order to allow Moffat to give her a happy ending by breaking her and Twelve up without killing one of them. All of Clara’s previous choices now become pretty much meaningless.
If, like me, you have Very Strong Feelings about Donna’s exit from series 4, the evacuation of Clara’s “I am entitled to my past” moment is extra-annoying. So many of us would have given so much to see Donna get the chance to say that to Ten. Clara gets the chance to say it to Twelve, which is annoying enough--and THEN, on top of that, Moffat just falsifies everything about that speech three seconds later. Honestly, it’s like he’s trying to piss us off.
* Moffat does almost nothing with the whole drama of the Doctor’s return to a home planet which he (nearly) destroyed once, and whose loss he has been grieving and angsting over for nine fucking years.
Basically, the Doctor has a staring contest with one adversary, then wangles his way to the extraction chamber, then flees as soon as he can do it. Jesus. After all the work Moffat put into undoing the destruction of Gallifrey, he arrives at something that should be a MAJOR fucking change in the show arc...and what we get is some kind of feeble western, followed by a few people in silly outfits discussing a meaningless prophecy. Moffat is not in the least interested in that planet or its people. He should not have brought it back.
* I don’t believe that the Doctor has forgotten Clara. I don’t see how I could. But since it’s Moffat, I also don’t know whether all the evidence I can’t help noticing is supposed to be there or not.
Nothing about the way the Doctor interacts with Clara post-neural-block convinces me that he has really forgotten her. First of all, at the end of season 8, we saw the Doctor and Clara lie to each other, with perfectly straight faces, about why they were going their separate ways. On the basis of the evidence, I would certainly say that the same thing is happening in that diner in Nevada. Twelve appears to remember the whole story, since he’s telling it to her. He claims not to know anything about who she is or what she looks like; but he’s composed a song with her name on it and he wants to play it for her. After watching the diner dematerialize, complete with TARDIS sound effects, he walks back to a TARDIS on which Waitress Clara’s FACE is PAINTED, he thinks nothing of that; nor does he think it odd that there’s a chalkboard in his TARDIS bearing the words “run you clever boy;” nor does he fail to put on the jacket Clara identified as “Doctor-y” right before firing up the TARDIS.
So all this would logically suggest that the Doctor faked the whole amnesia thing to force Clara to leave him. But this is the thing. IT’S MOFFAT’S WORLD. EVIDENCE DOESN’T PROVE ANYTHING. If Moffat decides in Season 10 that the Doctor remembers Clara, then he will, and if he decides that the Doctor’s forgotten her, then he will. Logic guarantees nothing in this place.
I follow Whovianfeminism, and I can tell she loved this episode. She will be able to tell you all about why it’s awesome from the point of view of women in Who. I cannot; I am too cranky. Whee, Clara has her own TARDIS and her own companion! Hooray! Sure...I mean he could have given her a pony, too, but that still wouldn’t help me because everything about this resolution was arbitrary, imposed, and the opposite of organic. I cannot celebrate. I am sad about all the missed opportunities and the evacuated emotions and the undone motivations. I take Moffat’s people and his universe more seriously than he does, evidently, and I can’t help wishing he woudl take better care of them.